Starting at Zero : There Are Lessons to Be Learned When You Hurt the Car You Love Too Much
AS I WAS SHELLING out $2,600 to a stranger the other day for a little engine work on my new Chevy Blazer, I struggled to put things in a rosier perspective. I was paying to make up for the violence I’d inflicted upon the Blazer myself.
What could the payoff in this be? While I stood in a puddle of oil at a car hospital on Santa Monica Boulevard, would some movie producer stop by for that Lamborghini, ask me to do his next screenplay and turn the situation around? What was the lesson? Why would a man, having finally treated himself to a classy and comfortable driving machine--one that precisely expressed his desire to come across as stylish yet dangerously off-road (and that had a terrific sound system, too)--then proceed to savage and destroy its very heart?
The boss mechanic added up the heroic parts bill--short block, camshaft, valves, lifters, plugs, oil pump, clutch.
“It’s worth it,” he assured me. “You have a nice vehicle here.”
“Or is that the problem?”
“You’ve got a new engine now. You’ll be starting at zero.”
“I never spent this much for a whole car,” I pointed out.
He just kept promising, the mechanic as prophet: “You’ll be happy.”
THE SCENE IS A circus tent on the grounds of the Sheraton Universal Hotel in North Hollywood. Hundreds of devotees of auto eroticism have crowded in on a rainy Saturday morning for an auction of classic cars--and the auctioneer is scolding them for not loving dearly enough.
“This car should sell for more!” he screams into the mike when the bidding on a ’57 Mercedes starts pooping out at $3,200. “If you wanted the grill alone , it would cost you $750!”
His floor men prowl the aisles in their tuxedos and tacky shoes, like caged animals, their tough eyes darting around for clues, shakedown artists reveling in their power to excite.
“Only two of these known to exist!” the barker implores as a Bentley rolls onto center stage. “It’s been in the same family since day one!” The parade continues: Ferraris, Silver Shadows, Jags, Corvettes, ’55 T-Birds, a dream of a ’41 Caddy convertible, Packard touring sedans for that gangster look--all restored to showroom brilliance. A ’60 Caddy hearse is perfect down to the pink casket in the rear. A cherry-red ’57 Bel Air comes onto the block, and men crowd around to look under the hood, as if they’re peering into a bassinet.
“Dual quads,” one of them murmurs. “Isn’t that nice?”
But the lovers really get worked up when a ’55 Buick Riviera appears, blue and white with that gleaming late-Deco grill, and the auctioneer cries: “Would you believe it? This beauty has only 170 . . . original miles . . . on the odometer!” Men creep forward to inspect--to remember--the details of another age: the way the jack rests unviolated in the trunk, the innocent lettering on the cardboard tag (“The original tag!” the auctioneer bellows) hanging from the ashtray knob. Across the back seat, there is a careful arrangement of newspapers and magazines from 1955.
“It’s like a piece of artwork,” a collector says. “You wouldn’t want to take a car like that out on the road. It’s for putting in your living room.”
Mere abstinence has elevated this car, barely 30 years old, to sainthood. In fact, it is exactly like the Buick my father proudly drove back then. That is the weakness the auctioneers are preying on, our relentless drift toward nostalgia.
My father--surely like many of the men there--had a difficult relationship with the motorcar. Every three years, to the month, he traded in the family four-door, which was still in its prime, for a new one. A modest and unprepossessing man in every other way, he doted over those Buicks and Pontiacs and Olds 98s--his only intimations of how he wished to be seen. Not as a salesman of machine tools, but as a “GM man.”
But the part I remember is this: As soon as he brought a new car home, he’d start listening for knocks, little gremlins rapping on the door to his peace of mind. And he’d hear them. Driving for him was at once matchless pleasure and excruciating penitence.
What’s that shimmy in the rear end? No one else could feel it.
What’s that rattle under the dash? That ping at low compression? He spent the most beautiful Saturdays of his short life, it sometimes seemed, arguing with the service managers at GM dealerships all over northwest Detroit, insisting that they right what was wrong, live up to the warranty, make healthy and whole again an honest workingman’s one and only luxury.
You might think he created his own misfortune, even brought on the mechanical failures himself, like a hypochondriac invites disease. In any case, I swore the same plague wouldn’t strike me. Over the years I owned a succession of cheap, secondhand pickups and treated them shabbily. An oil change every 10,000 miles or whenever I got around to it, whichever came last. Yet somehow these hulks performed almost flawlessly. Certainly, there were knocks and shudders. But I recall being stranded by the side of the road on only one occasion. I gloated that I had reliable transportation at an annual cost of what other men spent in a month.
Until, that is, the ‘80s came along, and my friends started buying cars that were clean, smooth, quiet. Sexy. Expensive.
I held out as long as I could. Then I fell for that shapely young Blazer. My wife protested, “It looks so yuppie!” I brought it home--and then started to fuss over it.
THE AUCTIONEER’S VOICE chatters in the distance like automatic-weapons fire as a man in a handsome gray sweater buffs his ’61 Bentley coupe with a sheepskin mitt. “An impulse car,” the man calls it--it has a passing gear that kicks in at 80.
“The truth be known,” he says, “nobody needs one of these.” The minimum bid he’ll accept today is 55 grand.
Many of the collectors here, he explains, “have no intention of selling their cars.” They’ve paid $200 to register for the auction but have set their minimums unrealistically high. “They just get their kicks out of seeing their cars up on the block,” he says.
An investor from Hidden Hills, this man has 15 automobiles. “Every car I’ve ever owned,” he says, “I’ve kept, back to the early ‘60s. I’ve got them in a garage.”
Out of curiosity, I ask him, “How often
do you change the oil in this Bentley?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replies quickly, almost contemptuously. “I never touch it. I have a guy who takes care of all that.”
WE WERE VISITING our friends Jack and Linda in Borrego Springs when I realized it was time to change the Blazer’s oil. Every 3,000 miles, change the oil and filter-- th how a responsible car owner behaves.
The routine was deadeningly familiar. I wriggled under the Blazer with the wrench, positioned the pan to catch the oil and unscrewed the plug. As the oil was draining, I went topside, popped the hood, reached in, removed the old filter (a delicate job with these fancy new power plants) and worked the new filter into place.
I went back underneath, screwed the plug into the drain hole and came out into the desert sunshine again. Voila! What did that take--15 minutes? A small price to pay for clear conscience.
I started the engine to let it idle for a few minutes, then retreated to Jack’s garage to wash my hands. Jack and I talked for a few minutes. But I could see something was troubling the old engineer. He was staring out the garage door, toward the Blazer, furrows across his forehead slowly deepening. Finally he ventured, “That engine of yours sounds like it’s running a bit rough, doesn’t it?”
I cocked an ear. Jack was right. Then I noticed, still standing next to the vehicle, the unopened paper sack from K mart.
“I forgot to put the new oil in!”
One of the trickiest parts of being a man in the 1980s is that we’ve discovered anew the joy of owning frivolous playthings, but we’re not nearly so keen about having to take responsibility for them. Those of us who tried other dodges in the ‘60s and ‘70s can’t forget that wicked sense of liberation that came from not having so much junk to look after. We know there are far better ways to spend a Saturday morning than rotating the Michelins.
It’s true, we’re collecting toys as never before. But our ambivalence reaches extraordinary heights when those gizmos rear up to let us know that we’ve loved them too strenuously, and to remind us of how much, ultimately, they’ve cost us.
The Goodwrench guru of Santa Monica Boulevard had predicted, “You’ll be happy.” The concept at the core of his teachings is a seductive one: starting at zero. It was balm enough for my dad. But I don’t trust it. The only real solution, it seems, is to hold title, like the man with the Bentley, to one final extravagance--”a guy who takes care of all that”--some wizard, some troll, some auto maker’s elf, who will bed down in a corner of the garage so we born-again materialists can bicycle off to the tennis courts after a good night’s sleep.
