Over Retarded

In the space of approximately the last eight months, my Check Engine Light (CEL) has come on six times.

That's too many times.

Some people, when their CEL comes to visit, ignore it for as long as they can. "The only sign that it's time to take the car into the shop is smoke pouring out from under the hood," these folks might reason. I don't subscribe to that particular theory. I'm a mechanic's wet dream. As soon as that light comes on, I'm on the phone with Soly, my sixty-nine-year-old Israeli mechanic. I've been taking cars to him since I was sixteen years old. Eleven different cars. Everything from a 1989 Volvo 240-DL to a 2001 Volkswagen New Beetle done up as Herbie the Love Bug. I'll never forget the first day I drove into his shop behind the wheel of Herbie. He stared at it, suspiciously eyeballing the 53 on the hood and he looked at me.

"I don't understand it," he said, shrugging indifferently.

Now I drive a 2002 Volvo S-40, and the Check Engine Light just keeps coming back-- like a dog to its own vomit, or... herpes. It's pugnacious, and I admire it in a way. Every time Soly runs the diagnostic to see what the fault code is, it's always the same:


That's just a portion of what the fault code says. The whole thing reads "CAMSHAFT POSITION TIMING OVER RETARDED BANK ONE".

I didn't know something could be over-retarded. I thought that was the whole point of being retarded, that that particular situation is more under... than over.

But what do I know? I don't even know what a camshaft is, nor do I care what its position is. It was pointed out to me by Jack, Soly's Chinese assistant, that I have twin camshafts in my car, just like I have twin babies downstairs in my pack'n'play, but, more than that, I don't understand.

Soly has been saying, "The next time this happens, we'll replace the position sensor," for the last four times I was at his garage. Each time, he turns off the Check Engine Light, tells me not to worry about it, and sends me away without any money changing hands. This time, yesterday, he told me the same thing, and I said, "Look, I'm tired of this, can we just replace the fucking sensor already?"

"Sure," he said. He walked away to get a pen so he could write down my car's VIN number so he can order the part, and my phone rang. It was my father. He said the hospice nurses just told him that my sister's husband probably won't make it through the night. My parents went to see him the day before-- wasting away to nothing-- you can see tumors all over his body, through his skin. It's a horror movie, it's a nightmare. It's Hell.

"Fuck," I said, "okay. I love you."

"I love you, too, Mummy," he said, and hung up.

We say, "hang up" still, but these phones we use these days don't have receivers and cradles anymore. Funny.

Just as I was about to leave Soly's garage-- the part will be in in a few days-- he chanced to ask me how my brother-in-law was doing. I told Soly what my father told me on the phone and Soly clenched his jaw and looked away.

"Goddamnit-- he.... you know, it is-- this world-- I don't know. You call it luck or whatever-- it's. It's not luck, it's... it's shit."

I looked at this man-- this man who was educated by nuns in Egypt, who ran through the desert to fight for Israel in the sixties, the same time that my father did the same thing, this man I've seen scream and curse at customers who have accused him of ripping them off, and I watched in astonishment as his nose started to run, and two tears got lost in the depths of his thick, gray and black bristled goatee. He wiped his nose with an immaculate white handkerchief that emerged somehow pristine from his grease-covered work pants.

"Tell your sister from me that I am sorry for her, and that she has to be strong-- to take care of her son. She has to."

We stood there in his garage bay and looked at each other for what seemed like forever. Neither of us knew what to say. I don't know if I was embarrassed or awed or in love or depressed or what-- probably ashamed, though, that I had not been able to shed any tears for this man who married my sister and fathered my nephew-- this man I barely knew, and, frankly, never really wanted to know. But I expect my tears will come a plenty in time, when the shock of the moment has worn off, and the reality of what this man's untimely passing has done to our family and our lives has cruelly set in.

"I'll call you when the part comes in," Soly said. And I got into my car, turned the key, and the Check Engine Light was gone, but my camshaft is still over-retarded, and the world is still upside down. This morning, I texted my sister-- my brother-in-law made it through the night. How many more-- who knows? Who knows anything anymore.

Anger Management

It's not the anger, we tell they who must be told, that's problematic-- anger is, of course, a normal human emotion-- it's what you do about the anger you feel that can be problematic. Like, for instance, engaging in self-injurious behavior, i.e., placing your fist through some drywall or abruptly and forcefully introducing a loved one's head to an item from your toolbox. Maybe you're angry at your boss for some passive-aggressive slight or other and you stifle it all day or all week only to, on an otherwise languid Sunday afternoon, explode at your spouse, or your cat, or your window air-conditioning unit.

Poor, poor Emerson Quiet-Kool. We hardly knew ye.

This is probably going to come out sounding (unintentionally) funny, but I'm not particularly good at getting angry. Of course, you're reading that going, "What the fuck does that mean?" and I suppose I'd have to come right back at you and say, "I don't really know." I suppose I say that because I am under the impression that one ought to be "good" at getting angry, as if there is some sort of skill to it. And I think there probably is. Believe me, I know how to swear and rage when one of my vamp-teeth pierces my lower lip while eating a Granny Smith apple, and I certainly know how to unleash a stream of delightful epithets when a Toyota Camry stops in front of me, for no reason other than the fact that the driver is probably having a T.I.A.

So... I can do that. I'm not all that deficient.

But, when it really counts, when it gets emotional, well, that's sometimes where I run into a mite of trouble. Because, see, emotions-- um... I'm not particularly good at emotions either. I'm fine with talking about how I'm feeling, it's just that I launch so enthusiastically and skillfully into the talking that I rarely find that I get to the feeling. Maybe I'm flattering myself a bit here, but I think that I can sit with someone for, oh, I don't know, say 50 minutes, and pretend that I've just talked about my feelings the whole time when, really, truly, I haven't said anything.

I'm kind of awesome that way.

Oftentimes, when I get very angry, I get very quiet. Why? I guess it's because I feel like I need that time to sort through what I'm feeling, because, even if the emotion is one that should be relatively easy to pinpoint, most of the time, the road to arriving at that particular emotion is, well, foggy. And I don't use my foglights very often, so I need that time to find the switch on the stalk. Or is it a button on the dash?

See what I mean?

Maybe, I think, I sometimes trick myself into believing that I don't have a right to be angry. Or maybe it's that I'm scared of what other people will do or think if they see me get angry. Maybe I'm scared of what I'll do, or think, or say. My mouth is scary, and not just because my teeth are fucked up and English-looking. Scary things emanate from my mouth. My cakehole. My venom-pocket. It's a cruel place. It's supposed to help, and heal and, for roughly eight hours a day, it succeeds, to varying degrees, but I'm afraid of what happens when the time-clock swipes out.

I'm afraid.

And fear will keep you from doing lots of things, I suppose. It'll keep you from taking risks. It'll keep you from confronting realities about the world in which you live, and your job, and yourself. It will keep you from climbing rock walls, or at least it'll keep you from enjoying it. It'll even keep you from getting angry.

Yesterday afternoon, three big, angry black guys were this close from beating the shit out of my 67-year-old Israeli mechanic. They had pulled into his garage in a beat-up Pontiac Grand-Prix with two shredded front tires. My mechanic had the nerve to ask them where their spare was. They didn't have one.

"Driving without a spare is asking for trouble," the mechanic said.

"MOTHAFUCKA! JUST FIX THIS SHIT!" one of the men screamed.

A mouth-match ensued, and my approaching-elderly Sabra mechanic, who has shot Arab soldiers dead in the desert many years ago, was winning. But I knew, at any second, it could go the other way, and I was scared. I work in a place where simmering violence lies just below the surface, like a camouflaged snake ready to pounce. And here I had survived another day, only to probably be killed in the cross-fire in my mechanic's garage. Fortunately, the driver of the car exited the vehicle, got between the parties, and apologized to my mechanic for his friends, and reason had prevailed. Anger was, sort of, managed. The temperature outside was 92 degrees, but it had cooled down considerably in the garage, and, as I went into Soly's office to settle the bill for my new car battery, he remarked that he hadn't seen my wife in quite some time.

"I know-- that's what happens when people buy Hondas, you never see them anymore," I said. His gaze shifted from the credit card machine to meet my eye and he said, with a mischevious glint,

"Maybe I should get one for my wife!"

And we both laughed, more out of relief that we could than anything else.