The Spark and the Drive (2 page)

And then there was Nick Campbell, who prophesied the rebirth of American muscle cars. He thought that on-board computers would revolutionize horsepower technology, and in my eagerness he saw a certain capacity for imagination, which was enough for me to feel anointed, to covet his life and believe that I could one day receive it as my own.

So when Nick’s jobs started coming back for warranty work a year later, in the summer of 1986, I couldn’t help feeling lost and forsaken.

The first few rechecks were only mildly incriminating. A cracked spark plug that might or might not have been factory defective, a missing screw that might or might not have been tightened. I convinced high-paying customers that they were normal breaking-in glitches, rather than shoddy work. But as word of Nick’s unreliability began to spread, some of our formerly docile customers turned difficult. One morning a Ram Air Firebird, whose 400 engine Nick had beefed up with racing pistons, pulled right into the bays without a ticket. The owner was a fat, ruddy Italian named Mimo. In a black turtleneck and paperboy cap, he tried to promote a rumor that one of his relatives was connected, though instead of a cold-blooded mobster Mimo looked more like Dom DeLuise.

Nick, Ray, and I left our cars and approached the Firebird from different angles. Ray stopped to stretch with a fist in his spine, Nick lit a cigarette, and I tried to exude the same lack of urgency while Mimo got out and felt around in the grille for the hood latch. He stirred into the petroleum smell a sweet cologne that you couldn’t get off all day if he shook your hand. “Something’s leaking,” he said. “I got oil drips all over my garage.”

Instead of putting the Firebird up on the lift, Ray kicked over a creeper and rolled under the front end with a droplight. At this point we could still think that Nick’s work wasn’t to blame, that maybe it was condensation from the air conditioner and Mimo couldn’t tell oil from water. We still had options. But when Ray pushed out from under the bumper he looked stricken, flat on his back and gaping at the chain-hung fluorescent light.

“What?” Nick said.

Ray sat forward and considered the blackened steel toes of his Wolverines. “Drain plug,” he said, softly. Nick looked at him with such puzzlement that Ray began to repeat himself, but Nick interrupted, “I heard what you said.” He smoked his cigarette and sort of glazed over until, after a moment, even I hardly recognized him as the man who believed that cars could be great again one day.

“What’s wrong with the drain plug?” Mimo said. “He didn’t cross-thread it, did he?”

Ray bucked off the creeper on his way to the toolbox that Mimo had the misfortune to be standing next to. When I saw the chrome flash of a wrench I thought for a panicked moment that Ray might use it to crack open Mimo’s head. “Hey Mimo,” he said. “You got any naked pictures of your wife?”

“What?” Mimo said.
“What?”
His jowls flushed and he wadded his fat hands down in his pockets. “No, I don’t. Jesus.”

“You want to buy some?”

Mimo dropped his head and glared for a long second at a slick of tranny fluid in the next bay. “What is your problem, man?”

“My problem is a guy who pulls in here like he owns the place. A guy always coming in for more cam, more carb, more this, more that, thinking it’s gonna make his dick bigger, and then don’t want to pay.”

“What’s wrong with the drain plug?” Nick said.

Ray rubbed his oil-wet fingertips. “It’s loose a little bit,” he said, and as quick as I’d ever seen him do anything, he went back under the car with the wrench. Nick neglecting something so basic was inconceivable. Imagine leaving the house without putting on your right shoe.

Nick collapsed into a steel chair as Mary Ann approached with a bookkeeping binder pressed to her slender waist. By this point she and Nick had been on the rocks for six months, and I expected her to trudge past in her usual sad distraction, but the eerie quiet coming from three mechanics in the same bay woke her from her trance. She stopped short of the lobby door and turned. “What’s wrong?”

Nick didn’t answer, and I watched her helplessly, a look of rejection, or maybe resignation, in her eyes that I felt in my own stomach. Just as she was walking away, Nick said, “Do me a favor. Take Mimo out front and give him his money back.”

“Whoa,” Mimo said, a flattered, guilt-ridden knot of emotion now. “Hey, that’s twelve hundred bucks. I’m happy with a discount.”

“I don’t give a damn what you’re happy with,” Nick said. He got up and threw his cigarette in the trash can, where any number of things could have gone up in flames.

2.

I first met Nick in the summer of 1985 through an internship program with Northwest Vo/Ag High School. My shop teacher, Mr. Harper, wasn’t happy to find that I was the only one who applied. He wanted to send Nick one of the engine wizards of Northwest, but those guys either didn’t have the academic grades or they were constrained to family farms in the summers, and I was it.

One evening at home, there was a knock on the door as I was sitting down to dinner with Mom and April. Mr. Harper had come by with a blown Ford 302 in the back of his truck and a bucket of tools. I was supposed to tear the engine down and reassemble it as many times as I could before June.

That winter and spring, swaddled in thermals and knit hats, I rebuilt the engine twice in our garage. I didn’t have the money for a gasket and bearing kit to actually get it running, but when I spun the flywheel around, the lifters rode the camshaft lobes, the crankshaft pushed the pistons, everything sliding and rocking exactly as it should. I still didn’t fully understand the engine, but I was gratified by the deep and complicated way it operated—imagining the unfathomable timing of spark and valves, the constant grip of vacuum, all of it contained in a seven-hundred-pound box whose sole function was to convert fuel and air into speed. I fell in love with the math of physical mechanics, the order, the predictability—always this effect to that cause—that was lacking from my everyday life.

My work on the 302 gave me a pretty good idea of all I didn’t know about engines, so around the shop I told anyone who’d listen that I was just an intern. It mattered, especially with guys we called “the gearheads”—mechanics from other shops who hung around Out of the Hole on their lunch breaks. They came to pay homage to the cars they dreamed about when they were up to their elbows in skipping Omnis and dieseling Escorts. I was paranoid that they’d ask me something I didn’t know just to prove how incompetent I was. Mostly they ignored me and sat in folding chairs talking about Nick as if he were dead and unforgettable. I’d overheard conversations like this:

“That time Marbles was going, ‘They’re going to kill me now. I’m dead meat.’”

“Yeah?” said the second one, wiping his mustache after wolfing a meatball grinder.

“He owed money, don’t ask me to who. But he gets a race lined up behind the Oxford airport. Four grand. And then what does he do, the dumb fuck? Smokes the tires at a light and turns a bearing. Engine’s toast. He pulls in here right at closing. ‘I need that four grand,’ he says. I mean, white as a marshmallow. And so then Nicky pulls in his Camino, yanks the three twenty-seven, and drops it in Marbles’s Impala. The whole job in like three hours. I told him, call up Guinness. See what the record is.”

“He win?”

“Fucking ’course he won. Nick’s got that motor cherry. Four, four and a quarter horse. A lot better than Marbles had in his three fifty. Good second or two, I heard.”

I couldn’t help myself. “His name is Marbles?”

The first gearhead turned to me and looked annoyed. “Because of how he talks. He went through a windshield one time.” Then he stood, belched, said to the other guy, “All right, I’m a good hour late now,” and left.

The second gearhead was the less friendly of the two, so I wandered over to a restored Duster that Ray was working on. “What I miss is how they used to dress,” he said to me, in his habit of greeting you in the middle of a conversation. He torqued a head bolt and ash fell from the cigarette on his lip. “Not the slut outfits you got today. I feel sorry for anybody who never pushed his face up under a poodle skirt. Get your teeth into a pair of them French knickers.”

“Sounds like good, clean fun.”

“Bet your sweet ass it was.” He looked past me and straightened from the car, rubbing a shop rag between his hands as Mary Ann came over.

“I can’t read this word,” she said, holding in one hand a work order and in the other, napping over her shoulder, her baby son. It made me nervous to see Joey out here around scorching manifolds and poisonous vapors. I’d helped enough with my kid sister to know what a fragile thing a baby was.

Ray went to his toolbox and came back with reading glasses on the end of his nose.

“Actually, either of these words,” Mary Ann said.

“Those words there? Those words, I believe, are ‘carbon tracking.’”

“Where’s the ‘b’? Or ‘k’?”

“They’re in there, trust me.”

She set the clipboard down on the Duster’s fender and without waking Joey made the corrections. “Joey’s going to have better handwriting when he’s two,” she said.

“Then he can take my dictation.”

She stared at him candidly, and after a moment she shook her head as if clearing her thoughts. She caught my eye and winked. “Ray’s what happens when you drop out of school.”

“Be a doctor, kid,” Ray said. “They got impeccable handwriting.”

At this, Mary Ann had to smile. “You’re just on fire today, aren’t you?”

*   *   *

I tried never to bring my home life in to work with me, with one notable exception that happened not long after the night we painted the shop. Seated behind the old desk in the parts room, I called a girl named Kim Weatherall. She worked at a feed store in Levi, where I lived, and answered the phone, “Agway,” in a tone of restless boredom, though after I said who it was, she perked right up. “Come on, man. What are you calling me at work for?”

I didn’t feel like I had a choice. She hadn’t called me, or been at home when I called her, for two weeks. I’d wanted there to be spark plug cases and carburetor rebuild kits around me when I talked to her. A mechanic in uniform was the right version of myself. In the splashed mirror over the tub sink, I saw not the unpopular kid who was sometimes afraid to get out of bed, but a man in control of things, my Dickies work shirt bearing the name of the most revered automotive shop in Waterbury. I’d hoped to be full of the confidence I knew I wouldn’t have when I got home.

We weren’t exactly dating, Kim and I. We trout fished together and rode her quad around her grandparents’ property. In my Nova we imitated Eddie Murphy imitating Ralph Kramden. We’d had sex twice in a haymow. It was my first sex but not hers, and the hay gave me a rash on my knees; it was not romantic (though I’d brought candles) but stiff and determined, at times unfriendly. “Don’t move,” she’d said, pinning my legs down with her heels. “Already?” she’d said when I came. She wore her hair back with a ponytail hanging over the plastic adjuster of her red Agway cap, but I’d imagine how she would look in makeup and designer jeans. In any meaningful sense I barely knew Kim at all, but still it depressed me to imagine my life without her.

The call was short and toxic. I wanted to hear her break up with me and not mean it, and then in a tearful voice say she wanted me back. All fantasy. I couldn’t keep us together any more than I could keep my parents together, any more than I could get the bearded farm kids at Northwest Vo/Ag, guys I admired and feared, to like me. Kim was another part of my life I had no control over.

“Cunt,” I said, and kicked the bottom desk drawer in such a way that the knob handle punched into the top of my foot. “Cunt cunt cunt!”

Then I swung around in the metal chair and saw Mary Ann. She hadn’t just come in. Her back was toward the lane between spark plugs and PCV valves, where from behind the center shelf she must’ve heard the entire phone call. Now she didn’t turn and leave or speak. She was just frozen there with a big mystified look.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean you.”

“No, I didn’t think you did.”

“That’s not even something I ever say. That word.” I slumped forward. “I’m sorry. You were back there the whole time?”

She held up her inventory clipboard. “I should have cleared my throat or something.”

“God.” When I dropped my face into my hands my cap popped off and wobbled upside-down on the concrete floor. I was too drained to even get it. Kim had been my only hope that someone could eventually fall in love with me.

Mary Ann bent for the cap and then set it lightly on my head. She wore a powder blue polo shirt open to the last button, and from her tan throat came the faint aroma of jasmine. “She must’ve made you happy sometimes,” Mary Ann said. “You might not see it right now. I wouldn’t be able to, either.”

I smiled, and somehow it brought me closer than I’d been yet to tears. I couldn’t tell which emotions I should trust.

“There was a guy I dated in college,” she said. “I thought it was pretty serious, but right before finals he dumped me. I was a mess. He didn’t have a record player in his dorm, so I sold back all my books early and got him one. And then I bought every Bay City Rollers album I could find.” She shook her head, grinning, and sat on the edge of the desk and said that he wouldn’t take them. But instead of returning the records and getting her books back to pass her exams, she smashed them in the parking lot. It was a generous, sympathizing story. Eventually he tried to get back together with her (this part was intended to give me hope, I thought), but by then Nick had cruised into her life and college was no longer in the scheme of things.

“He was into the Bay City Rollers,” she said. “You’d think that would’ve told me something.”

And I laughed because she laughed, though by then I was considering something else. A marriage like theirs, which had seemed to me to be ordained by the highest fate, and Nick wasn’t even her first choice?

You didn’t see a lot of beautiful women traipsing around with auto mechanics. The gearheads were sometimes tracked down by big broad-faced gals with wiry mullets and loose, manly laughs. I’d never seen Bobby’s girlfriend, though I’d heard her yell at him over the phone, and it seemed impossible that any magnitude of hotness could offset her impulsive rage.