“Dammit, Chad, get out here!” My father, leaning through the garage door, yelled to me as I sat watching television in the living room. He wasn’t upset; this was just how he talked when he was feeling feisty. But since Dad’s version of feisty could best be described as a bemusing brand of amicable sadism, this wasn’t exactly a relief. Grumbling in that way defiant teenagers do, I lumbered out to see just what the hell he wanted.
In the garage, the hood was up on his 1981 Plymouth Champ. The Champ—or “Chump,” as it was better known—was a two-door hatchback, as small as a Mini but with charm and good looks of a late-70s Gremlin, and a paint job that through the years had faded from blue, to baby blue, to barely blue. Its crumpled front fender—evidence of at least one accident the car miraculously endured—had been hastily repaired with a drill, leaving the passenger side of the car riddled with what looked like bullet holes. In fact, a shooting range was probably where it belonged. For more than a decade, this travesty of transportation had been passed around the family like a cursed heirloom.
Dad flashed a toothy grin from across the garage. “Come out here, son. I’ve got something for you.” I was old enough to know that “something for you” usually meant “something for you to do,” and that “something” was nothing I was going to enjoy. But at 15, my only means of protest was a bad attitude, so as I dragged my feet across the concrete floor, I made sure to roll my eyes as hard as I could. “Oh, cheer up, you grumpy bastard,” my father chided gleefully. The way he beamed was making me uncomfortable.
On the workbench laid a plastic baggie full of things—rubber rings, thick paper cutouts that I would later discover were gaskets, and more doohickeys I would soon learn to call by their proper names. Beside it was a grease-stained, light blue book—the same color as our beloved Chump—titled Haynes Automotive Repair Manual: Plymouth Champ and Dodge Colt, 1978 thru 1987. “Here,” my father motioned to the blue beast, “this is your new car. The carburetor needs to be rebuilt.” He turned the doodads and whatzits lying on the bench, “Here’s a rebuild kit, and the manual has instructions. All the tools you need are in my toolbox.” Then his tone became stern, “Put everything back in its place, and don’t lose anything.”
This part was important. My dad loved his tools. At Christmastime growing up, as my brother and I earmarked every page of the Sears catalog’s toy section, he paged longingly through the Craftsman hardware supplement, gazing at expansive, shiny sets of ratchets, sockets, torque wrenches, screwdrivers, drill bits, punches, mallets, and cutters—all beautifully laid out before matching toolboxes. But these sets were expensive, so instead, my father collected tools like a kid collects baseball cards, scouring the local pawn shops for anything worth buying. After years of labored scavenging, my father had filled the garage with an impressive assortment of equipment. Now that he had invited me into his world, he wasn’t about to allow his hard-earned collection to fall into disarray.
With this warning about taking proper care of his tools, my father turned and walked back into the house. “Come let me know when you’re done,” he said, the door slamming shut behind him.
I hadn’t spent much time in the garage (that is to say, no time at all), but I knew my father’s mechanical prowess had been indispensable to our family over the years. With both my parents working full-time jobs but unable to afford two reliable vehicles, my father had a long history of driving lousy cars—from a smoking, boat-like Oldsmobile known as “The Fumigator,” to the rusted green Chevy he liked to call “Snot on Wheels”—and managed to keep them all running well beyond their natural life spans. He understood the value of knowing how to work on a car, and come hell or high water, he meant to instill these skills in his first-born. Automobile maintenance was a rite of passage, a step on the bridge to manhood. Manhood sounded great, but I really wished it could have waited until MTV’s Real World marathon was over.
What happened next, as my father would say, was a total clusterfuck. For the novice mechanic, the Haynes Manual’s simple instructions might as well have been in Esperanto, and the accompanying schematic looked like plans for sending a rocket to the moon. For two hours, I loosened nuts, twisted screws, unclamped hoses—and got nowhere. I was covered in grease, high on gasoline fumes, and my hands stung from several clumsy motions resulting in bloodshed. Still, the carburetor refused to budge.
As if sensing my defeat from inside the house, it was at this moment that my father chose to check in, still grinning in that way that I found especially irritating in times of frustration. “Haven’t heard from you in awhile—just making sure you’re still alive out here.” he snickered. Unfortunately, I was still alive—and it was time to admit that I needed some fatherly advice.
“Do you think you could give me a hand?” I asked, my words dripping with petulance.
Unfazed by my attitude, he sauntered into the garage, peered over the engine, and pointed to a couple of painfully conspicuous bolts. “Why don’t you try taking those out?” he asked, his tone much more consoling than before. I felt stupid for not having seen them myself, but he didn’t rub it in. “Let me know when you get the carb out of there, and I’ll help you tear it apart.”
With this advice, and a little more struggling, I finally managed to remove the damn thing. Then, with my father’s help, I even rebuilt it. With the final twist of the wrench, he threw me the keys, and told me to start it up. It took a few tries, but then, with a cough and a sputter, the engine came to life. “Rev it a little!” he yelled to me. I revved, and revved some more, elated by my accomplishment. Its “purr” might have sounded like an asthmatic kitten, but to me, the Champ—my new car—ran, well, like a champ. And it felt great.
So my maiden voyage into the world of automobile maintenance did not end in disaster. In fact, I would say that overall, it was a pretty good day. Not only did I learn how to read a schematic and replace gaskets, after repeatedly slicing my greasy hands on sharp edges, I learned why mechanics are known for their generous and inventive use of expletives. But most importantly, all that hapless struggling—and all the hapless struggling I would do as the car required more repairs—taught me not to be afraid to dive in and learn about the new and unfamiliar.
Fifteen years later, things are different. Not having owned a car in a decade, I don’t often have cause to use the mechanical skills I learned as a teenager. The choices I’ve made in my adult life—college at a fancy university and a series of cushy (if low-paying) office jobs—stand in sharp contrast to my father’s solidly blue-collar resume. And with 2,000 miles separating us, my visits home are shorter and less frequent than I’m sure he would like. But as much as our paths have diverged, I hold on to my memories of those days in the garage. I remember my father’s feisty moods and wry humor. I remember how he’d tinker for the sake of tinkering, or the way he used to take things apart just to see how they worked. I remember the time he took to show me the way around an engine, and the proud look on his face when I’d fix something without his help. I think of my father in that garage, and I look at myself today. It’s then that I forget everything that separates us, and remember all the ways we are alike.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
