I’ve been working in the school mechanic’s shop since October. It’s been the most reliably good thing in my life for months, and next week I’m getting booted. My junior assistant will succeed me and the cycle will continue. I will no longer don my greasy blue coveralls and walk up to the shop every afternoon at 1:15. I will no longer have the best teacher and boss a girl could ask for when learning about cars. So I’m feeling a little rudderless and in need of some reflection, some chronicling, some storing up for the cold, carless months ahead.
I started not knowing what basic tools were, let alone how to use them. In my first week I apologized to my boss, Paul, for being so inept. My German wouldn’t help me here, nor my penchant for parsing sentences. “I would’ve been fired many times over by now in a normal mechanic’s shop!” I said. He replied, with warmth and not an ounce of condescension, “Ruby, you wouldn’t have been hired.”
By day two, my pocket notebook reads, I was changing oil filters on trucks and tractors. I learned to drive stick (falteringly), to weld (sort of). Now I can follow instruction manuals like a boss. I even drew my own for some projects. I learned to change tires, sparkplugs, filters, starters, fuel injectors, batteries, cables, fluids of all kinds. Today we fixed the parking brakes on a massive pickup. We put a new starter in a low-riding red VW, my favorite of the continually-breaking cars on campus—and it ran.
I am only too lucky to have been in that shop with him, and his four tiny kids, tottering and stumbling around the shop floor, bumping their heads on trailer couplers and precociously telling me how to use a jack. I’ll miss Paul’s Virginian cadence, his insistence on playing only new country music, the way he calls hammers “persuaders,” his anecdotes about accidentally injuring his brothers, and his always reminding me to not put small parts in my pockets (“Don’t put the washers in the washer!”).
Leaving is looking pretty bleak. There’s some hope, though. Paul has agreed to let me come in on weekends and work on an old, doorless, mouse dropping-laden white Jeep that has been parked in the desert for at least five years. (I found a photo of this beauty from the eighties when it was being used to hunt jackrabbits.) It’s a viable project, he says, and I’ve got big plans—an ambulance for the lightly wounded, perhaps, or a mobile bed for stargazing.
But more than any one skill, I feel like I learned from Paul that I could learn to do something to car if I wanted to. My recent Google search history is populated by entries like “Adam and Eve midrash” and “how to bench test a starter.” A wise former mechanic’s assistant once told me that all you need is YouTube and Blaster. That’s almost right. You need YouTube, Blaster, and Paul.
