By 1978, I had been in schools for 20 of my 25 years on the planet. All that education and my recent separation from my first serious girlfriend of the last five years gave me a garden-variety nervous breakdown so rather than do intellectual work, I found a job as a car mechanic. I had been fixing cars for spare cash in Providence while at Brown but I needed something full-time in San Francisco.

My employer for car repair in Providence had been one Ed Schernau, of Polish descent. No jokes about Polish car repair, please, but I admit we tended to fix a lot of stuff with a hammer. He had his own terms to describe the customers, like fool injection for a particularly difficult Jaguar owner. I asked him to write me a letter of recommendation for repair shops in San Francisco, and I was very clear. “Look Ed, it’s no good to write a humble letter like yeah the guy’s fine. You have to make it glowing and terrific or else they won’t believe it.”

Ed made good and indeed I took his envelope to San Francisco where, in an amazing stroke of good luck for me, the union had called a strike of mechanics three weeks before. I went to a shop on Market Street near Octavia called Volvo Centrum. The owner was Swedish, as were most of the mechanics, and they all seemed to be in very good humor. They made their living fixing and restoring those indestructible round tops of early sixties vintage and the dependable square station wagons of the seventies.

I stood before the boss’ desk while he read Ed’s letter slowly and, out of curiosity, I glanced at my copy from the same envelope. To my horror, I read:

 

To Whom It May Concern:

My father started this business in 1944. In the three weeks that Michael Simon has been passed out in front of our shop, we have had to go into receivership. When this man is low on cheap rotgut or brown shoe polish, you must watch your back, your girlfriend, and your bank account. …

 

Frightened out of my wits, I looked up but Jan was reading quietly and when he had finished, he said, “Well, this is a very nice letter. Let’s try you out and see what you can do.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and asked to see the letter. He handed it to me:

 

To Whom It May Concern:

My father started this business in 1944. In the three years that Michael Simon has worked for us, we have been proud to know him. He has been a great example to the other guys, and is honest, fast, and unfailingly polite. …

 

And so on. I started to laugh but didn’t show the bad letter to Jan for a month or so.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that I wasn’t much of a real mechanic but they liked me so they undertook to train me. Chief Mechanic Lars Jansson would show me an operation and then I would get the next five cars that needed that sort of work. This process was too slow for Jan so he put me out in the shed.

Jan and Lars would buy old Volvos that were too sick to repair, peel any good parts out of them, and put the used parts in a shed in the parking lot. They would sell the used parts to customers who had cars so old that finding them parts was a problem. They had just bought one such car and they told me to take it apart. Completely. I ran an air hose out to the shed and set my wrench to Unscrew. I took every part off the engine, then pulled the drive shaft, the clutch, the transmission, the crankcase, and the rear end. I pulled the seats, the steering wheel, the radio, the heater cables, the dashboard. I pulled all the lights, the antenna, the windows and door handles, and even the rhino skins in the trunk. I filed all these parts in boxes or areas in the shed. I really learned a lot that way but since old cars are covered with a mingy, oily residue, I got black from head to toe, to the point where the other mechanics wouldn’t touch me. I became the Shed Rat for a couple of months. At the end of it, though, I knew every part in the cars that we specialized in fixing, and how it attached to the whole.

Finally, I graduated to the spot next to Lars’ and started low, on brakes, universal joints, and all the stuff under the cars. Jan the tune-up master taught me how to tune the pesky twin SU carburetors that Volvos had in those days. The guys introduced me to Snap-On tools, solvent, pro hand cleaner, and off-label parts. I read the manuals that we had in English but most of them were in Swedish so I just looked at the illustrations.

Volvo Centrum was all Swedes except another American guitar player named Bill and an office manager who was more absent than at the job. Wanting to be anyone else but me, I wore clogs and even adopted a fake Swedish accent at times, the world’s first Jewish Swede. Tag sa micket, thank you very much. Of course, I started a small side business in payday lending. While not particularly ethnic, I am that much Jewish and have to keep up appearances. My interest rate was low, $1 fee for any amount borrowed.

I had never been a drinker until I met the Swedes. Every afternoon at 5 PM, Jan the boss would shout for the youngest employee, “Putte!” This turned out to be a nickname for “Christian.” He handed the kid a $20 bill. “Go out and buy me a fifth of Chivas!” Next, our groupies would arrive and we would all take plastic cups and trade stories with Jan, who was a terrific storyteller. He was married with kids in Marin but his girlfriend was a tall athletic blonde, a sex therapist by trade. The house rule, by the way, was that you could drink and then fix cars but you couldn’t fix brakes after 5. Ever. Any other part but not the brakes.

Jan loved to kid around. One day he told us that he could speak Finnish. I was amazed, “Finnish? Wow, that’s really difficult! It’s not even in the same language family as European languages.”

“No, really, I can speak Finnish,” he said smiling.

I took the bait. “OK, let’s hear some Finnish,” I demanded.

Jan banged his wooden clog on his desk and shouted, “Vodka! Vodka!”

Another Jan story had to do with a time when he went to a hospital with a deep cut. A nun with a clipboard came up to him and explained that she was noting the religions of the patients. What was his religion?

“Religion? I don’t got a religion.”

“Really?” the nun insisted. “Not Christian?”

Jan shook his head, “No.”

The nun read from her list, “Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem?”

“No, none of those.”

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from Sweden.”

“Don’t you have any gods from there? Like uh, Thor and Odin?”

Jan burst out laughing, “Ja, that’s good! You put down that I believe in Tor and Odin!” Apparently, these gods gave him some comfort because he said he laughed about this for a whole week and he loved to tell that story.

A gentle and affable fellow, Jan had a terrific way with customers. One afternoon, a tow truck pulled in with a green 244 on the hook. The car had been hit from behind so hard that the taillights had been pushed in all the way to the back window. While Volvos are designed to collapse to provide a cushion for the passenger compartment, the damage was impressive. A woman staggered out of the tow truck’s passenger seat and burst into tears.

Jan came out of the office, clocked the scene, and boomed, “Nice work! Your car is totally fucked up! And we’re going to fix it!”

Everyone within earshot started to laugh. Through her tears, the woman started laughing, startled by his daring approach. Soon, we were all laughing together.

Jan got a bit fatherly, “Nobody was hurt, right? Don’t worry about the car.”

The lady sniffled and started smiling. Everything was going to be all right.

Business got slow so I took a long vacation. When I came back, Jan had no job for me so I did a short stint at Pacifica Honda-Yamaha, mostly fixing dirt bikes that kids would use to ride the sand dunes in that beach town. Having fixed Volvos, I found motorcycle repair very technical. Since the engines were made of aluminum, it was much too easy to strip screws by tightening them too hard. I had other problems, among which I was not the only Michael in the shop. Of fifteen employees including me, we had six Mikes. I didn’t turn around unless they said “Mikie” or “Simon.” I was relieved when Jan told me I could come back to Volvo Centrum.

 

About six months later, another independent Volvo repair shop closed and we were doing more and more business. It got so busy that Jan hired a new mechanic named Rolf. He had previously worked in a BMW dealership and was stinking proud of it. What he did to the rest of us was more annoying than teasing and when one day he was particularly obnoxious to me, I startled everyone by picking him up and shaking him, warning him to stay the fuck away from me. Jan took me aside and told me to keep away from him, and I said, “That will be easier if you keep him away from me.”

Lars’ reaction to Rolf’s yammering wasn’t nearly so polite. One morning when Rolf was apparently feeling his oats and confident enough to tease, Lars seized a 4-pound sledgehammer and hurled it at Rolf, who luckily ducked in time. The hammer flew through the thin bathroom door leaving a hole that reminded me of Thor again, out the window beyond, and into the side street below. I strolled around the corner to see if it had done any damage out there. The Italian guys with the small fixit shop downstairs handed it back to me with raised eyebrows. “Sorry,” I said, “an internal matter.”

At lunchtime, Jan started going out somewhere with a guy in a tie and jacket. He turned out to be a real estate broker and Lars told me that we would be moving to a bigger shop.

Hans and I got the job of fixing up the new place. It was built around 1850 as a Wells Fargo stagecoach stable and was absolutely a wreck. Hans built an office, a parts storeroom, the bathroom, and some other rooms. He was amazing at drywall. He could eyeball an irregular hole in the wall, cut a piece of drywall with a knife, and poot! the piece would fit in the hole perfectly.

I was tasked with electric service and compressed air lines. I had no electrician license so we paid some lucky licensee an insult fee to inspect and approve my work after it was all done. I installed drop lights, plugs everywhere, the air compressor and PVC lines all over the shop. Because the old building had 20-foot ceilings, I spent a lot of time on ladders, which I hate. You can survive accidents with power tools but when you fall off a ladder on to a concrete floor, you can do serious damage. Fortunately, I didn’t fall.

 

Because the level of my permanent grime, my darkened hands, awful fingernails, and plain dress were unimpressive to women, I spent most evenings playing chess in a café. I soon tired of this life and when one customer, a large-sized blonde woman with a young kid named Dylan in tow, took a shine to me, I followed her home one night. It made us both happy for a while but I didn’t belong with her and we both knew it. She was older than I and needed more stability than my carefree self. It ended nicely for such an affair and we were both refreshed by it.

One afternoon when the admin was absent, I was sitting in the office checking out cars when a petite woman about my age came in. I gave her the paperwork and took her money, which oddly enough was in cash. She narrowed her eyes at me, “You know, you don’t look very Swedish.”

“Uh, actually, I’m not,” I said in my natural Jersey accent and offered some proof of authenticity, “I’m really a Jewish New Yorker. I even went to Columbia.”

“That’s funny,” she said, “I went to Barnard and I’m a refrigeration mechanic.”

She invited me to a party in the Mission that night. It was my first meeting with San Francisco’s intelligentsia. There were luminaries like one of the founders, or rather restorers, of the Roxie Theater on 16^th Street, who had converted the old porn establishment to a repertory that showed different classics every night. There were poets and dancers and a notable lack of car mechanics except me. Natalie and I stood on the roof looking out at the moon and stars and smoking some really scary sinsemilla. I didn’t know yet but she sold it for a living. But that’s another story.

 

Sadly, I had a bad relationship with the truth when I was young. Years of living in the repressive regime laid out for me by religious school and then very aged parents had accustomed me to lying as a matter of normal practice. The less my parents knew about my movements, the easier my life became. Their advice, grounded in the world of horse carts and large families, was never relevant to my efforts so why bother them with the details of my life? That only brought criticism.

This turned out to be a really bad habit as I got older. These days I reflexively tell the truth. First of all, I can never remember what I said and it’s too easy to get tripped up if you lie. Next, I don’t really want to draw any lines between what is worth lying about and what isn’t, since that takes work and again, I’d forget what I decided. Third, I don’t want to get on any slippery moral slope about anything. Fourth, since I don’t really care anymore what others think, always preferring to decide everything for myself, I don’t see anything worth lying about in the first place. And last, lying deprives one of any feedback from others about a decision because you’ve deprived others key information by lying so they can’t tell you anything useful. All in all, a terrible impulse.

Sermon over. The youth I was lied to Jan about crunching a customer’s fender by accident. I denied any responsibility and Jan told the customer that since I denied it, there was nothing to be done and they and not we would have to pay for the repair. I regretted it instantly and still regret it but my young self didn’t ever back down. How ugly.

 

The other interesting coda to this piece of motor music involved a then girlfriend and the concept of luck in my personal life, of which she said I had tons. We visited the shop when we happened to be in town, and she was with me when I asked Lars how he had been all these years. He told me that he had had a brain tumor, which was successfully removed, and he even showed me the hollow in his skull where the surgeon had removed some bone in order to access the tumor. As we walked away, the woman told me, “This is what I meant about luck in your personal life. You got rich after you left the shop and Lars got a tumor.

Even I got the idea when laid out so plainly. Never mind that my affair with her was incredibly unlucky. Her reasoning was undeniable.