Not all the time, but sometimes, early in the morning, dawn just breaking, my car goes bling-blong and the passenger airbag indicator glows on the dashboard.
This often happens on my way to work, as I ease my car onto the turnpike, passing the Statue of Liberty.
The car thinks my lunch bag is a small child, but it’s not that, it’s just some canned tuna, a book I’m reading, some baked chicken, my tape measure.
I don’t have any children. But then the seat-belt indicator begins to chime, and I reach over to the passenger seat and buckle up my lunch.
I began putting the bag in the back instead, and then later (as the problem never magically goes away on its own) the trunk—but bling-blong anyway.
Oh well.
I’m not a tinkerer like some guys I know.
A tinkerer would rip the seat out and take a look, under and inside. A tinkerer would pull the dash out in a heartbeat. Not me, I leave that nest of plastic color and heat alone. Besides, I’m always driving by myself and the warning system hasn’t said anything about the driver’s side.
When my wife comes along for a weekend drive she sits in the back seat and we role-play that I’m a 42-year-old taxi driver who’s been doing “this shit” for years, who’s seen it all, but in all his days driving a cab, he’s never driven such a “knockout.” Wow.
We haven’t been going anywhere anyway.
I just use the car for commuting to a petrochemical plant where I’m something of a mechanic for dinosaur-sized machinery. When you work on dinosaur-sized machinery, the nuts and bolts are dinosaur-sized and any fool can diagnose the massive problem.
I could even do dinosaur-sized heart surgery, I’m saying.
But for this smaller, more intricate problem, what I need is a scanner that I can hook up to my car’s engine control unit, then I’ll get some error code and can begin researching my problem (and its solution) before I take it into the shop. Of course, if the fix is easy enough, I can do it myself, but inevitably, by design, it won’t be easy enough. To begin with, I won’t have the specialty tools.
Plus, I don’t have a driveway. I live in an orange apartment on JFK Boulevard. My coat closet is my garage. My attic is under my bed.
I pull my car into the plant’s gravel lot and begin the long walk toward the security guards leaning on the turnstiles. The sun is never up. Halfway there, I turn back, realizing I forgot my lunch again, in the trunk of the car.
●
My father, a true tinkerer if there ever was one, began to take things apart in his crib (mostly rattles and bottles). By the time he was two, he had figured out how to put them back together again. At four, he began to disassemble and then reassemble small block engines, grandfather clocks, rifles, pistols and vacuum tube stereos. Or something like that. By six he intrinsically understood how everything in the universe worked.
His first job was in a junkyard, a perfect fit. Oh sweet heaven he couldn’t believe someone was willing to pay him to take things apart and discover how they worked.
I have never felt the impulse to take anything apart and see what the guts of it look like.
When it came time for me to get my first job, I rode my bike down to the farm stand that sold corn and flowers and peppers and tomatoes and they said I could water the flowers and they said I could carry the watermelons. That was fine. But really, I wanted a job at the place behind the farm stand. A place owned by a man named Rick Weiner who had nothing to do with flowers and watermelons, who built ponds in people’s yards, who built waterfalls into their swimming pools. What I really wanted, and what I didn’t yet understand, was that I needed to do something creative with my life. For the first time, it seemed there were jobs for that too.
A year later, I got that job, building waterfalls, and found out I was right—if I wanted a happy life, a fulfilled life, I had to find a way to make art at least part of my moneymaking. Otherwise, working felt like too big a waste of my life.
By then I had a reliable car my father had found through an old friend at the junkyard. I bought it with the money I’d made helping Rick dig holes, and passing him shovelfuls of cement, and slate, and carrying boulders.
To congratulate me on my life as a new driver, and now person responsible for maintaining a vehicle (a sacred duty), my dad gave me the Chilton Guide for my ’88 Mercury Cougar. Two thousand pages of schematics and instructions to fix anything on the car, which I was to study and understand above all other obligations I had on this earth.
Not two weeks later, the Cougar’s engine blew.
My father said, “Well, did you read the Chilton Guide?”
“No.”
My dad was a garbage-truck repairman then, so we went to the township garage that weekend and I passed him the wrong wrenches while he cursed and took the engine apart, and then out, and put the “new” engine in. And the old engine was kept for parts, for many years, and perhaps it’s still there, under some tarp somewhere in his garage.
After that, sometimes we would need to go somewhere and my dad would want me to drive, and he would sit in the passenger seat, and he would concentrate very hard, telling me to shhh, turning the radio off, but I didn’t like that very much, because he could hear whatever was wrong with the car. It would turn into five hundred dollars’ worth of parts I’d have to buy, and I wasn’t making very much money shoveling dirt and stacking stones with Rick Weiner.
●
When it was time to go to college I didn’t go. There was only one person in my family who had gone to college, an uncle who my mother and father called “College Boy.” My parents have a dog now, a little white dog named Valentine, and they put a little sweater on Valentine like he is in a dog fraternity and the sweater says WOOF U and they call him “College Boy.”
So I didn’t get a degree.
Like so many before me, I became a do-it-yourselfer. Whatever that means. DIY. A classist term, which really means you can’t afford to hire anyone competent, so you better figure it out yourself. Or if you can’t, better know some people who can explain it.
A wise man named Jack the Whip once said to me he didn’t need to have all the information memorized, it wasn’t important to have it all in his head, but he did have to know where to find it.
I’ve known a lot of people who ask a lot of questions and who have gotten pretty far in life just by “picking people’s brains.” Take for instance my coworker, Troy, who somewhere in his early forties, close as I can remember, around the year 2010, asked me, “Hey Bud, do you know how to write an email?”
We were dinosaur-sized mechanics at that time, and though I had never had a desk job in my life, and neither had Troy (of course), I assumed he wanted some advice on grammar and how to sound professional, but Troy meant that he had never had to send an email and he needed my help.
I asked Troy if he had ever been on the internet and he had—he’d gone on to look at porn, but almost just as much, he’d started to go on YouTube to figure out how to fix things.
But it had never occurred to Troy that he could learn how to use the internet on the internet. But since he asked, I explained how he could set up an email account and how email addresses worked and so on, and Troy lived happily ever after. But once, on a rainy day I remember so well, Troy sliced a bagel in our break trailer, buttered it, and then put the buttered bagel vertically in our toaster, and then the toaster began to smoke, and then flame.
You can’t go to school for things like that.
●
My father became a do-it-yourself jack-of-all-trades type (and great at all of it) once he finally got the money together to buy us a house. He learned how to run electrical and sweat copper pipe and hang drywall and lay tile, and on and on. He did this with the help of manuals he bought at the hardware store.
He was never shy about reading instruction manuals (this one about the stuff in his home, much like the Chilton Guides had been for his many cars).
He’d never done any construction work before, but he took to it right away. His heart was in it. Which is the problem with most people doing anything poorly, their heart isn’t in it.
There’s not much to residential construction, just like there’s nothing much to the heavy construction I do. Most of the time the biggest questions are easy ones: Is this plumb? Put a framing square to it. Is this level? Put a level on it and look at the bubble. Will this fall over and crush someone? Put another nail or two in it. Wait and see what happens.
For years, my father would sit on the couch in that living room and study textbooks. There were certifications that would make his labor worth more an hour to his employer. If he passed the test he would be known as a master technician.
Who is a master technician?
It’s somebody who would never think in a million years to let anyone else work on their car, truck, boat, anything, because everyone else in the entire world is a fucking idiot.
Not long after YouTube came out my dad got himself a new hobby—fixing computers. For years the garbage men he worked with had brought him interesting mechanical items to tinker with and oftentimes repair. But now they were bringing him laptops and PC towers and iPods found in the trash. He could just open the thing up, look at the mess of wire and components inside—see broken soldering connections or other cooked components—and not only search the internet for what those parts were called but also where to buy them. And just like Troy, he could watch a YouTube clip to learn how to fix the computer.
●
Me? I’m certified in shielded arc welding, and TIG, and MIG, and I’m certified to rig and signal a crane, and certified to use fresh-air breathing equipment, and other things too, of course. I went to school for this, but they don’t call it school. They call it training when it is for stuff like this. I got this training in the Boilermakers labor union. An apprenticeship program. Four years’ worth. This new trade of mine. Classes were held in an old movie theater that’d been converted to a union hall for meetings and training exercises, and that had a narrow machine shop with six welding booths, and a room with a whiteboard where Jack the Whip talked out of the side of his mouth and scared the shit out of everyone.
My boss at the plant is on vacation, and this week I’ve got the least creative job I’ve ever had. I’m filling in as general foreman. I’m in his office and thinking about laying myself off. I have no clue how to use Excel. I’m trying to put my coworker’s time into the spreadsheet, but I’ve done something wrong to the template I was provided, and I have two options—go get a blank timesheet from the secretaries and reveal to them what a moron I am, or look this shit up on YouTube.
How complicated could it be? Not very.
YouTube has all the right answers and all the wrong answers. All you have to do is scroll down and look for the worst one. The one with the worst sound and video quality has the best answer most of the time because that person didn’t have any need to get the aesthetics right. Why bother? They’ve got the truth and they know it. We’re lucky they choose to share it with us.
●
Maybe in the end you always need other people. How did you get to where you are sitting right now in physical space? Did you have to machete a path through literal virgin jungle, or were the roads you got here on already paved generations before you, the sidewalks laid down smooth for your footsteps?
We used to have a guy who worked here with us who’d always be heating up great-smelling food in the microwave. Standard practice in the break trailer is to never ask someone what they’re eating. Annoyingly this person subverted that by telling us, every day, what he had brought in for his lunch. “Made this beef stew from scratch!”
He’d cooked it for dinner at home in his kitchen, and here he was at a petrochemical plant reheating the leftovers in a Tupperware container and we had to hear about it as if he was conducting a symphony orchestra, but even better, he had also written the symphony, built all the instruments from scratch and made each orchestra member from scratch.
But there really is no such thing as from scratch.
I recall the argument in the break trailer the third time he claimed to have made something from scratch. He was standing there with arms at his hips, looking down at his steaming Tupperware, so proud of himself.
“Made this chicken parmigiana from scratch!”
“Oh, did you now?”
“I sure did.”
“So what’s in it? What’re the ingredients?”
“Not much. An egg, breadcrumbs, chicken breast, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese and linguine. Anybody can make it.”
“Okay, so you raise your own chickens? What, do you have a little coop in the back of your house? How many eggs do your hens lay a day? Or no, you bought the eggs from the store. How about the breadcrumbs? You live in the suburbs, right? You have a field of wheat crammed somewhere between your shed and your neighbor’s pool? You harvest it all by yourself? Scythes or motorized threshers, or what? You have a mill on your land to crush up those wheat kernels into flour, then what? Oh easy, you bake the bread. Then you what? You crumble up your homemade bread. Wait, I hope you’re not about to say it was bread bought at the grocery store? You’re killing me. Did you at least go and buy the bread yourself? Oh no, don’t say it was a box of store-bought breadcrumbs, you’re breaking my heart. And the chickens you raise for the eggs, you just slit their throats and then pluck all the feathers and debone them and cook them in the brick oven you built from clay harvested by your own hands? Should I go on?”
This outburst, while a bit needlessly cruel, did solve the “from scratch” problem. That never came up again at work. You need other people, a whole earth jammed with people, to do anything alone—even something as simple as opening a jar of mass-produced marinara and pouring it into a pot.
●
John, our best welder, isn’t a tinkerer either. But he’s inspired me to try. Just last month he averted financial crisis by diagnosing his own car problem. There was a terrible knocking coming from the engine of his Subaru. The mechanic said it was a thrown rod. Hearing all this, the rest of us dinosaur-sized mechanics agreed: yes, it seemed certain John had thrown a rod.
But John had a baby that was about to come and didn’t have the money for a new engine. He had a few choices. As advised by his mechanic, he could pay four thousand dollars for a used motor. There were no new motors on the market yet for his Subaru because the car was too new. The new motors wouldn’t be on the market for at least a year. But a used motor had no guarantee. The mechanic also said that because the car was only two years old, John might want to pour Lucas oil into the block to try and disguise the engine knock, drive it back to the dealership and attempt to trade it in.
But as much as he disliked the people at the car dealership, John didn’t like to deceive anyone. He wouldn’t do that. Next he spoke to a person he had even less love for, his insurance agent, who explained that no! A thrown engine rod was not the same as a totaled car, and though he was fully covered, this was not covered.
At coffee break one of the guys said, Well, John could crash the car into a brick wall and be done with it.
But that was no good, John said, because he had called the insurance company and gotten into a screaming match about all this, and they record those calls. The next idea the guys had was to involve Mother Nature. Two guys on our crew were hunters and it was deer season and the days had gotten shorter and crisper and one of them was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with orange lettering that read, “I’m into Fitness… Fitness Deer in My Freezer.”
“You need to hit a deer. They can’t deny a deer.”
The trick, it was said, would be to hit a deer at sixty miles an hour, crush the front end, damage the engine. Then a (friendly) body shop could just write it up as a thrown rod caused by the jolt of impact.
Sure, hitting a deer would probably solve his problem, and Lord knows deer were always dashing out in front of his car, but now that John wanted to hit a deer, the universe would never send him a deer, no matter how fast he drove through dark forested roads at twilight.
The next plan John was loath to accept. It involved standing the carcass of an already dead buck upright, tied to two trees on both sides of the road. This would be set up at two in the morning—no, even better, ten o’clock at night. It would look suspicious if he was driving around at two in the morning on a work night. But John didn’t like this idea, especially the part about the ropes. Somebody would drive by and hit the ropes, some innocent clown on a motorcycle. Feeling good one second—then oh. Feeling bad. No head.
We agreed to help him that night after work. But the rain didn’t stop all the rest of the day and the woods were surely too wet and deer wouldn’t leave their beds in a rainstorm like that.
That night, I looked out the window at the rain and wondered what would happen if we did follow through with it. John’s airbags would deploy, and at the very least John would take one to the face, a broken nose, eyes burning from the chem powder. What if he panicked at the last second and locked up the brakes? What if the car flipped and exploded? Wait, this was real life, not a movie. Cars don’t explode, they slowly burn.
I had a vision of John waking up in the hospital many months later, Easter time, with a big beard, his shattered bones set in casts, nearly healed. His wife, his boy (now three years old) and his newborn son there looking at him from the chairs beside the bed. “What happened?” John would say.
And his wife would say, “Honey, you don’t remember? You hit a deer.”
And his son would say, “Daddy, you missed my birthday.”
And his wife holding up the newborn would say, “Darling, I would like to introduce you to Tertius.”
“You named him what?”
The bill for the hospital stay far exceeding the payout on the totaled car.
What was a do-it-yourselfer to do?
But it never came to any of that.
●
John refused to accept four thousand dollars’ worth of defeat, so he went on YouTube. On YouTube he found a video pointing out a known problem with his engine: there was some doodad called a PCV valve you were supposed to change every fifty thousand miles. His mileage was almost double that, and his service manual had said nothing of the valve.
Reading YouTube comments and then scouring Reddit, he learned what was going wrong with the PCV valve. The valve was to relieve pressure between two horizontal heads of his Boxer engine. If the valve was worn out, air could get trapped, and the resulting trapped air could sound exactly like the knocking an engine made when it had a thrown rod.
John picked up the phone and called his mechanic on speakerphone and we all heard the mechanic adamantly denying John’s solution.
“There’s just no way. No way. No way. Nope.”
The mechanic wouldn’t accept the idea. He’d been working on cars his whole life and whatever kooky answer John had found on the internet was just that, reading that garbage was the same thing as reading about your symptoms for a stubbed toe and deciding you had blood cancer. Leave it to the professionals, please.
We figured then that John would have to break into the mechanic’s shop after hours and change the valve himself. But John somehow convinced the mechanic to give the valve swap a shot—and it actually worked.
The job had only taken half an hour, and when the mechanic turned the key, the engine sounded like it’d just rolled off the assembly line. The knock was gone, the engine purring smooth and steady.
The mechanic was amazed.
“I’ve never seen anything like this happen in all my days.” He told John to go straight to the dealership, run all the red lights, trade it in and never look back. This is a miracle, he said. There’s angels in the glove box. A second chance like this never happens to anybody.
●
What I should do is drive down to the suburbs to visit my mom and dad. Then, after a cup of coffee or two, I should ask my dad if he feels like taking a ride to the store with me. And during the ride, inevitably, my car will go bling-blong and he’ll look at the indicator light on the dashboard and then there will be no way of anything interfering with that master tinkerer’s thought process until he has solved the puzzle.
Inevitably, he will, by any means necessary, diagnose the problem, and though he is retired, we will find ourselves back in a garage somewhere together, my car ripped apart again and him cursing and sweating but secretly happy as a pig in shit, and me handing him the wrong wrenches, still, all these years later.
That’s one option.
But instead I look up from my boss’s incomprehensible Excel sheet and I call John into my office. I want him to help me find the golden video on YouTube, the golden thread on Reddit, the one that will solve my problem. I know he can do it. I know he has the touch.
Art credit: Annson Conaway, Little Red Corolla, 2023. 71 x 51 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Not all the time, but sometimes, early in the morning, dawn just breaking, my car goes bling-blong and the passenger airbag indicator glows on the dashboard.
This often happens on my way to work, as I ease my car onto the turnpike, passing the Statue of Liberty.
The car thinks my lunch bag is a small child, but it’s not that, it’s just some canned tuna, a book I’m reading, some baked chicken, my tape measure.
I don’t have any children. But then the seat-belt indicator begins to chime, and I reach over to the passenger seat and buckle up my lunch.
I began putting the bag in the back instead, and then later (as the problem never magically goes away on its own) the trunk—but bling-blong anyway.
Oh well.
I’m not a tinkerer like some guys I know.
A tinkerer would rip the seat out and take a look, under and inside. A tinkerer would pull the dash out in a heartbeat. Not me, I leave that nest of plastic color and heat alone. Besides, I’m always driving by myself and the warning system hasn’t said anything about the driver’s side.
When my wife comes along for a weekend drive she sits in the back seat and we role-play that I’m a 42-year-old taxi driver who’s been doing “this shit” for years, who’s seen it all, but in all his days driving a cab, he’s never driven such a “knockout.” Wow.
We haven’t been going anywhere anyway.
I just use the car for commuting to a petrochemical plant where I’m something of a mechanic for dinosaur-sized machinery. When you work on dinosaur-sized machinery, the nuts and bolts are dinosaur-sized and any fool can diagnose the massive problem.
I could even do dinosaur-sized heart surgery, I’m saying.
But for this smaller, more intricate problem, what I need is a scanner that I can hook up to my car’s engine control unit, then I’ll get some error code and can begin researching my problem (and its solution) before I take it into the shop. Of course, if the fix is easy enough, I can do it myself, but inevitably, by design, it won’t be easy enough. To begin with, I won’t have the specialty tools.
Plus, I don’t have a driveway. I live in an orange apartment on JFK Boulevard. My coat closet is my garage. My attic is under my bed.
I pull my car into the plant’s gravel lot and begin the long walk toward the security guards leaning on the turnstiles. The sun is never up. Halfway there, I turn back, realizing I forgot my lunch again, in the trunk of the car.
●
My father, a true tinkerer if there ever was one, began to take things apart in his crib (mostly rattles and bottles). By the time he was two, he had figured out how to put them back together again. At four, he began to disassemble and then reassemble small block engines, grandfather clocks, rifles, pistols and vacuum tube stereos. Or something like that. By six he intrinsically understood how everything in the universe worked.
His first job was in a junkyard, a perfect fit. Oh sweet heaven he couldn’t believe someone was willing to pay him to take things apart and discover how they worked.
I have never felt the impulse to take anything apart and see what the guts of it look like.
When it came time for me to get my first job, I rode my bike down to the farm stand that sold corn and flowers and peppers and tomatoes and they said I could water the flowers and they said I could carry the watermelons. That was fine. But really, I wanted a job at the place behind the farm stand. A place owned by a man named Rick Weiner who had nothing to do with flowers and watermelons, who built ponds in people’s yards, who built waterfalls into their swimming pools. What I really wanted, and what I didn’t yet understand, was that I needed to do something creative with my life. For the first time, it seemed there were jobs for that too.
A year later, I got that job, building waterfalls, and found out I was right—if I wanted a happy life, a fulfilled life, I had to find a way to make art at least part of my moneymaking. Otherwise, working felt like too big a waste of my life.
By then I had a reliable car my father had found through an old friend at the junkyard. I bought it with the money I’d made helping Rick dig holes, and passing him shovelfuls of cement, and slate, and carrying boulders.
To congratulate me on my life as a new driver, and now person responsible for maintaining a vehicle (a sacred duty), my dad gave me the Chilton Guide for my ’88 Mercury Cougar. Two thousand pages of schematics and instructions to fix anything on the car, which I was to study and understand above all other obligations I had on this earth.
Not two weeks later, the Cougar’s engine blew.
My father said, “Well, did you read the Chilton Guide?”
“No.”
My dad was a garbage-truck repairman then, so we went to the township garage that weekend and I passed him the wrong wrenches while he cursed and took the engine apart, and then out, and put the “new” engine in. And the old engine was kept for parts, for many years, and perhaps it’s still there, under some tarp somewhere in his garage.
After that, sometimes we would need to go somewhere and my dad would want me to drive, and he would sit in the passenger seat, and he would concentrate very hard, telling me to shhh, turning the radio off, but I didn’t like that very much, because he could hear whatever was wrong with the car. It would turn into five hundred dollars’ worth of parts I’d have to buy, and I wasn’t making very much money shoveling dirt and stacking stones with Rick Weiner.
●
When it was time to go to college I didn’t go. There was only one person in my family who had gone to college, an uncle who my mother and father called “College Boy.” My parents have a dog now, a little white dog named Valentine, and they put a little sweater on Valentine like he is in a dog fraternity and the sweater says WOOF U and they call him “College Boy.”
So I didn’t get a degree.
Like so many before me, I became a do-it-yourselfer. Whatever that means. DIY. A classist term, which really means you can’t afford to hire anyone competent, so you better figure it out yourself. Or if you can’t, better know some people who can explain it.
A wise man named Jack the Whip once said to me he didn’t need to have all the information memorized, it wasn’t important to have it all in his head, but he did have to know where to find it.
I’ve known a lot of people who ask a lot of questions and who have gotten pretty far in life just by “picking people’s brains.” Take for instance my coworker, Troy, who somewhere in his early forties, close as I can remember, around the year 2010, asked me, “Hey Bud, do you know how to write an email?”
We were dinosaur-sized mechanics at that time, and though I had never had a desk job in my life, and neither had Troy (of course), I assumed he wanted some advice on grammar and how to sound professional, but Troy meant that he had never had to send an email and he needed my help.
I asked Troy if he had ever been on the internet and he had—he’d gone on to look at porn, but almost just as much, he’d started to go on YouTube to figure out how to fix things.
But it had never occurred to Troy that he could learn how to use the internet on the internet. But since he asked, I explained how he could set up an email account and how email addresses worked and so on, and Troy lived happily ever after. But once, on a rainy day I remember so well, Troy sliced a bagel in our break trailer, buttered it, and then put the buttered bagel vertically in our toaster, and then the toaster began to smoke, and then flame.
You can’t go to school for things like that.
●
My father became a do-it-yourself jack-of-all-trades type (and great at all of it) once he finally got the money together to buy us a house. He learned how to run electrical and sweat copper pipe and hang drywall and lay tile, and on and on. He did this with the help of manuals he bought at the hardware store.
He was never shy about reading instruction manuals (this one about the stuff in his home, much like the Chilton Guides had been for his many cars).
He’d never done any construction work before, but he took to it right away. His heart was in it. Which is the problem with most people doing anything poorly, their heart isn’t in it.
There’s not much to residential construction, just like there’s nothing much to the heavy construction I do. Most of the time the biggest questions are easy ones: Is this plumb? Put a framing square to it. Is this level? Put a level on it and look at the bubble. Will this fall over and crush someone? Put another nail or two in it. Wait and see what happens.
For years, my father would sit on the couch in that living room and study textbooks. There were certifications that would make his labor worth more an hour to his employer. If he passed the test he would be known as a master technician.
Who is a master technician?
It’s somebody who would never think in a million years to let anyone else work on their car, truck, boat, anything, because everyone else in the entire world is a fucking idiot.
Not long after YouTube came out my dad got himself a new hobby—fixing computers. For years the garbage men he worked with had brought him interesting mechanical items to tinker with and oftentimes repair. But now they were bringing him laptops and PC towers and iPods found in the trash. He could just open the thing up, look at the mess of wire and components inside—see broken soldering connections or other cooked components—and not only search the internet for what those parts were called but also where to buy them. And just like Troy, he could watch a YouTube clip to learn how to fix the computer.
●
Me? I’m certified in shielded arc welding, and TIG, and MIG, and I’m certified to rig and signal a crane, and certified to use fresh-air breathing equipment, and other things too, of course. I went to school for this, but they don’t call it school. They call it training when it is for stuff like this. I got this training in the Boilermakers labor union. An apprenticeship program. Four years’ worth. This new trade of mine. Classes were held in an old movie theater that’d been converted to a union hall for meetings and training exercises, and that had a narrow machine shop with six welding booths, and a room with a whiteboard where Jack the Whip talked out of the side of his mouth and scared the shit out of everyone.
My boss at the plant is on vacation, and this week I’ve got the least creative job I’ve ever had. I’m filling in as general foreman. I’m in his office and thinking about laying myself off. I have no clue how to use Excel. I’m trying to put my coworker’s time into the spreadsheet, but I’ve done something wrong to the template I was provided, and I have two options—go get a blank timesheet from the secretaries and reveal to them what a moron I am, or look this shit up on YouTube.
How complicated could it be? Not very.
YouTube has all the right answers and all the wrong answers. All you have to do is scroll down and look for the worst one. The one with the worst sound and video quality has the best answer most of the time because that person didn’t have any need to get the aesthetics right. Why bother? They’ve got the truth and they know it. We’re lucky they choose to share it with us.
●
Maybe in the end you always need other people. How did you get to where you are sitting right now in physical space? Did you have to machete a path through literal virgin jungle, or were the roads you got here on already paved generations before you, the sidewalks laid down smooth for your footsteps?
We used to have a guy who worked here with us who’d always be heating up great-smelling food in the microwave. Standard practice in the break trailer is to never ask someone what they’re eating. Annoyingly this person subverted that by telling us, every day, what he had brought in for his lunch. “Made this beef stew from scratch!”
He’d cooked it for dinner at home in his kitchen, and here he was at a petrochemical plant reheating the leftovers in a Tupperware container and we had to hear about it as if he was conducting a symphony orchestra, but even better, he had also written the symphony, built all the instruments from scratch and made each orchestra member from scratch.
But there really is no such thing as from scratch.
I recall the argument in the break trailer the third time he claimed to have made something from scratch. He was standing there with arms at his hips, looking down at his steaming Tupperware, so proud of himself.
“Made this chicken parmigiana from scratch!”
“Oh, did you now?”
“I sure did.”
“So what’s in it? What’re the ingredients?”
“Not much. An egg, breadcrumbs, chicken breast, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese and linguine. Anybody can make it.”
“Okay, so you raise your own chickens? What, do you have a little coop in the back of your house? How many eggs do your hens lay a day? Or no, you bought the eggs from the store. How about the breadcrumbs? You live in the suburbs, right? You have a field of wheat crammed somewhere between your shed and your neighbor’s pool? You harvest it all by yourself? Scythes or motorized threshers, or what? You have a mill on your land to crush up those wheat kernels into flour, then what? Oh easy, you bake the bread. Then you what? You crumble up your homemade bread. Wait, I hope you’re not about to say it was bread bought at the grocery store? You’re killing me. Did you at least go and buy the bread yourself? Oh no, don’t say it was a box of store-bought breadcrumbs, you’re breaking my heart. And the chickens you raise for the eggs, you just slit their throats and then pluck all the feathers and debone them and cook them in the brick oven you built from clay harvested by your own hands? Should I go on?”
This outburst, while a bit needlessly cruel, did solve the “from scratch” problem. That never came up again at work. You need other people, a whole earth jammed with people, to do anything alone—even something as simple as opening a jar of mass-produced marinara and pouring it into a pot.
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John, our best welder, isn’t a tinkerer either. But he’s inspired me to try. Just last month he averted financial crisis by diagnosing his own car problem. There was a terrible knocking coming from the engine of his Subaru. The mechanic said it was a thrown rod. Hearing all this, the rest of us dinosaur-sized mechanics agreed: yes, it seemed certain John had thrown a rod.
But John had a baby that was about to come and didn’t have the money for a new engine. He had a few choices. As advised by his mechanic, he could pay four thousand dollars for a used motor. There were no new motors on the market yet for his Subaru because the car was too new. The new motors wouldn’t be on the market for at least a year. But a used motor had no guarantee. The mechanic also said that because the car was only two years old, John might want to pour Lucas oil into the block to try and disguise the engine knock, drive it back to the dealership and attempt to trade it in.
But as much as he disliked the people at the car dealership, John didn’t like to deceive anyone. He wouldn’t do that. Next he spoke to a person he had even less love for, his insurance agent, who explained that no! A thrown engine rod was not the same as a totaled car, and though he was fully covered, this was not covered.
At coffee break one of the guys said, Well, John could crash the car into a brick wall and be done with it.
But that was no good, John said, because he had called the insurance company and gotten into a screaming match about all this, and they record those calls. The next idea the guys had was to involve Mother Nature. Two guys on our crew were hunters and it was deer season and the days had gotten shorter and crisper and one of them was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with orange lettering that read, “I’m into Fitness… Fitness Deer in My Freezer.”
“You need to hit a deer. They can’t deny a deer.”
The trick, it was said, would be to hit a deer at sixty miles an hour, crush the front end, damage the engine. Then a (friendly) body shop could just write it up as a thrown rod caused by the jolt of impact.
Sure, hitting a deer would probably solve his problem, and Lord knows deer were always dashing out in front of his car, but now that John wanted to hit a deer, the universe would never send him a deer, no matter how fast he drove through dark forested roads at twilight.
The next plan John was loath to accept. It involved standing the carcass of an already dead buck upright, tied to two trees on both sides of the road. This would be set up at two in the morning—no, even better, ten o’clock at night. It would look suspicious if he was driving around at two in the morning on a work night. But John didn’t like this idea, especially the part about the ropes. Somebody would drive by and hit the ropes, some innocent clown on a motorcycle. Feeling good one second—then oh. Feeling bad. No head.
We agreed to help him that night after work. But the rain didn’t stop all the rest of the day and the woods were surely too wet and deer wouldn’t leave their beds in a rainstorm like that.
That night, I looked out the window at the rain and wondered what would happen if we did follow through with it. John’s airbags would deploy, and at the very least John would take one to the face, a broken nose, eyes burning from the chem powder. What if he panicked at the last second and locked up the brakes? What if the car flipped and exploded? Wait, this was real life, not a movie. Cars don’t explode, they slowly burn.
I had a vision of John waking up in the hospital many months later, Easter time, with a big beard, his shattered bones set in casts, nearly healed. His wife, his boy (now three years old) and his newborn son there looking at him from the chairs beside the bed. “What happened?” John would say.
And his wife would say, “Honey, you don’t remember? You hit a deer.”
And his son would say, “Daddy, you missed my birthday.”
And his wife holding up the newborn would say, “Darling, I would like to introduce you to Tertius.”
“You named him what?”
The bill for the hospital stay far exceeding the payout on the totaled car.
What was a do-it-yourselfer to do?
But it never came to any of that.
●
John refused to accept four thousand dollars’ worth of defeat, so he went on YouTube. On YouTube he found a video pointing out a known problem with his engine: there was some doodad called a PCV valve you were supposed to change every fifty thousand miles. His mileage was almost double that, and his service manual had said nothing of the valve.
Reading YouTube comments and then scouring Reddit, he learned what was going wrong with the PCV valve. The valve was to relieve pressure between two horizontal heads of his Boxer engine. If the valve was worn out, air could get trapped, and the resulting trapped air could sound exactly like the knocking an engine made when it had a thrown rod.
John picked up the phone and called his mechanic on speakerphone and we all heard the mechanic adamantly denying John’s solution.
“There’s just no way. No way. No way. Nope.”
The mechanic wouldn’t accept the idea. He’d been working on cars his whole life and whatever kooky answer John had found on the internet was just that, reading that garbage was the same thing as reading about your symptoms for a stubbed toe and deciding you had blood cancer. Leave it to the professionals, please.
We figured then that John would have to break into the mechanic’s shop after hours and change the valve himself. But John somehow convinced the mechanic to give the valve swap a shot—and it actually worked.
The job had only taken half an hour, and when the mechanic turned the key, the engine sounded like it’d just rolled off the assembly line. The knock was gone, the engine purring smooth and steady.
The mechanic was amazed.
“I’ve never seen anything like this happen in all my days.” He told John to go straight to the dealership, run all the red lights, trade it in and never look back. This is a miracle, he said. There’s angels in the glove box. A second chance like this never happens to anybody.
●
What I should do is drive down to the suburbs to visit my mom and dad. Then, after a cup of coffee or two, I should ask my dad if he feels like taking a ride to the store with me. And during the ride, inevitably, my car will go bling-blong and he’ll look at the indicator light on the dashboard and then there will be no way of anything interfering with that master tinkerer’s thought process until he has solved the puzzle.
Inevitably, he will, by any means necessary, diagnose the problem, and though he is retired, we will find ourselves back in a garage somewhere together, my car ripped apart again and him cursing and sweating but secretly happy as a pig in shit, and me handing him the wrong wrenches, still, all these years later.
That’s one option.
But instead I look up from my boss’s incomprehensible Excel sheet and I call John into my office. I want him to help me find the golden video on YouTube, the golden thread on Reddit, the one that will solve my problem. I know he can do it. I know he has the touch.
Art credit: Annson Conaway, Little Red Corolla, 2023. 71 x 51 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.