When I angled my car into a spot at the town park on that sparkling Thursday morning and heard something that I imagined sounded similar to a steel bank vault being crushed by a pissed-off hydraulic press, I knew it was time. Shit, my three-year-old son knew it was time.
“What was that noise, Daddy?”
“My brakes.”
“Did your brakes break?”
“Yes they did.”
“Are you going to get them fixed?”
“I guess I am now.”
That afternoon, I drove the wooded back road I meander when I need to think or when I’m depressed. The grating, crashing noise continued even when my foot was not on the brake pedal, but I tuned it out. Firs and cedars tower over that strip of asphalt, and the constant winter rain and summer overgrowth can convince you that disappearing for a while in this magical green maze and not being bothered or thought of for a while might not be such a bad thing.
There’s a town about ten miles away. It’s got a main drag of bright, colored signs, and I was sure one of those would front a nondescript garage that would be neither crowded nor abandoned. I could walk the strip mall across the thoroughfare, perusing the book section of the Goodwill shop, buying cat food, maybe treating myself to some Dairy Queen.
I never got to the cat food.
I almost powered right by the faded sandwich board poking out from the tall crabgrass on the shoulder. I saw a checkered flag and made out the words, “Pit Stop Auto Repair,” and ten feet later, as if sucked into the forest, I turned onto a pebbly driveway through trees that opened into a square lot where the garage stood.
Cars were laid out in perfect symmetry. The garage was no architectural wonder, just a newer, prefabricated utilitarian shed, but the floor was spotless. The oil cans and air filters and fan belts were stacked and organized in the corner. Two repairmen were busy — one was pulling wires from the front hood of a glowing yellow convertible Karmann Ghia as delicately as if he were prying the guts from an alligator to find the Rolex on the dead golfer’s wrist. The other ripped a tire off a dually as if for fun, it seemed.
I left my car in the open space in the garage and knocked on the door marked, “Office.” A balding man with a white mustache and beard, jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather vest waved me in and shook my hand.
“Jack Chesterfield,” he said. “Welcome to my shop. What can I do you for?”
Ten minutes later, we stood under my car and Jack showed me the scar from the metal-on-metal rotor contact that had been causing those vile noises. He told me the car probably could stand new calipers, but instead of having me spend the two hundred and fifty bucks required for that job, he thought he’d recommend that his boys just lubricate the pins, which should improve performance.
“This whole deal won’t cost you more than three hundred twenty-five, maybe three hundred forty bucks,” he said.
I thanked him for his honesty. I told him that my lack of basic automotive knowledge always put me in a weird position when something went wrong. I had to trust my money to a stranger and hope for the best. It always made me uneasy.
“I’m sixty-five years old,” he said, straight-faced, in an accent that he identified as “Georgia redneck.”
“I’m retired and I do this because I enjoy it. I enjoy the people. I don’t have to do it, and some day I won’t anymore. I’m not going to try to sell you something you don’t need, fix something that ain’t broken, or lie to you. I’m too old for that shit.”
I laughed and looked at the wall behind the desk where he sat. A lone poster hung by the window. It read:
God, grant me the Eyes of an Eagle
The Judgment of an Owl
The Quickness of a Hummingbird
The Reflexes of a Cat
The Radar of a Cave Bat
The Heart of a Bull
And …
The Balls of an Army Helicopter Pilot.
I chuckled and he knew why.
“There’s a lot of truth to that thing,” he said, launching into a well-rehearsed run-through of the last forty-three years of his life, from entering the Marine Corps to serving in Vietnam to staying in Southeast Asia for the next eighteen years, running recon, flying helicopters, learning “five languages I don’t speak very well,” making a living and meeting his wife. They lived in the house behind the garage and were caring for her ninety-year-old mother.
“My wife’s mean as cat shit,” he said with a wink, “but she cooks good, so I keep her around.”
I laughed.
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m telling you,” he said. “She’s gotta be a hell of a lady to put up with my crap. There’s a lot of it.”
He asked me what I do, which led to me rehearsing my run-through of the last two stunning weeks of my life — the confident, celebratory submission of a book proposal I’d been working on for almost three years, the “strong initial interest,” from seventeen of the nation’s best publishers, and the perplexing realization that all of them had said no.
He looked me right in the eye.
“You know what?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Life’s a journey,” he said, nodding. “Life is one big fucking journey.”
I paid him. Three hundred and seven dollars. He handed me a cold bottle of water, “for the road.“
“I hope I never have to see you again,” I said, smiling.
“Oh, don’t say that,” he said. “Come on by any time.”
He walked me to my car, which had landed safely after a forty-eight-minute flight. He handed me my keys.
“Take it easy, sir,” he said, shaking my hand once again. “You’re all fixed.”
***
Tom says, ‘Get your timing belt replaced right here’ …
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Good people exist everywhere. Sometimes you just have to go through shit to find them.