The Weekly Screed (#771)

The roar of the grease stain,
the smell under the hood
by David Benjamin

“Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”
                                                                                   — E. B. White

MADISON, Wis. — The presumptuous Republican presidential candidate styles himself as a man of the people, the buddy of the working class. But how can a guy call himself a populist if he’s never been an engine listener.

You know what I’m talkin’ about.

The first engine I had to seriously listen to, after I got my license, was Mom’s ’57 Plymouth. By then, it was eight years old and we called it “The Heap.” It creaked at every joint, burned oil lustily and whined in an off-key falsetto whenever it shifted gears. It died in a pothole so deep you could’ve filled it up and made a swimming pool.

The Heap was my mentor in engine-listening. Like every car I’ve ever driven, it was untrustworthy. Something could go haywire any second, and I wouldn’t know what was wrong or how to fix it. But most cars, if you cock an ear and pay them heed, will warn you a little while before they self-destruct. The phrase I’ve uttered most often while driving is: “What’s that sound?”

When it was “right,” The Heap’s engine had a certain sclerotic rhythm, rather like an emphysema victim hawking up a six-ounce loogie. Disgusting? Yes, but this was normal for The Heap and you knew you were probably going to make it to the store and back. But if the usual cacophony was suddenly augmented by a deathly rattle, a weird tweet or an ominous knocking, you broke into a cold sweat, offered up your angst to Jesus and just hoped you could finish the trip before the explosion.

And when I got home: “Mom, there’s a funny sound under the hood.”

“Oh my God!” Then, a wave of wracking financial sobs.

Smells also matter. Every old car stinks, but each one stinks in its own way. As long as the stench is familiar, this POS is gonna get there. New smells, however, spell new trouble.

My most spectacular concert of sound and odor occurred in Rosemary, the ’66 Ford Econoline van I drove in college. Rosemary’s engine was right inside the cab, under a steel hood between driver and passenger. Engine-listening in an Econoline was a course in automotive music appreciation. Every note and nuance played intimately into my right ear.

I knew well beforehand that Rosie’s radiator was riddled with cancer. I could hear its distress. I could smell the scorched metal in its overstrained coils. I could feel its stinging corrosion like an outbreak of prickly heat. But I couldn’t afford a new radiator. So I bought sealant and nursed Rosemary.

You know what I mean.

I sealed and nursed for months, until, well…

When she blew, it wasn’t loud. She just went, “Foom,” and the cab all around me was enveloped in a cloud of lime-green, eye-stinging, Prestone-flavored mist. It fogged my windshield within seconds, blinding me to the road, other cars, pedestrians. I could barely see the steering wheel. So, of course, I turned on my windshield wipers.

Peering intently, I could see— there they were — my wipers, whapping away pointlessly on the clean outside of the windshield. Eventually, I turned them off, stuck my head out the window and guided Rosemary to the curb, without killing anyone.

All this comes to mind because I’m looking for a new — I mean, used — car. My current heap is an ’01 Nissan Sentra named “Kek,” after the first letters in an old license plate. Kek still putters along, but her heater stinks, her AC is uncool and the CD player goes periodically into a pixillated frenzy before sinking into sullen silence. There’s also a three-year-old noise “underneath” that no car guy has ever figured out, and I recently had to hunt down the source of a violent clattering that emanated from my left-front wheel-well.

I mean, Kek runs. But I’m all the time listening and sniffing. She’s a teenager now and I don’t trust her. Well, I never did. No one should trust a car.

It’s not like getting a new (used) car is any sort of solution. My next car will be crammed with ticking time-bombs called ECUs, full of software that’s full of bugs that no one can see or predict — like fanged bacteria crawling around in every car’s retarded brain. But we need a car, so we’ll end up picking one.

We just won’t trust it.

Which brings me back around to the GOP nominee, who in his whole silver-spoon life has never listened to an engine. He doesn’t even know there’s anything to listen for. The only smells he can possibly associate with a car are the fine tang of rich Corinthian leather, the ambience of spilled champagne and the scent of (a lot of) women. He has no idea how it hits your nose when a loose tuft of insulation makes contact with a heating coil.

I do. You do.

He doesn’t. He’s spent his life sealed inside a sound-proof climate-controlled mobile boudoir. He lets his chauffeur do the engine-listening, but doesn’t know he’s doing it. His pink, baby-soft, manicured hands have never unscrewed a drain plug, popped a distributor cap, jiggled a battery terminal, loosened a lug nut, wired up a dying muffler or used a crescent wrench to close a circuit in the engine block when the starter’s on the fritz.

I have. You have.

Nor has he ever been in a car that’s thrown a rod at 75 on the Interstate. Never looked into the rearview mirror to behold a vast rooster-tail of mysterious smoke, stained red by the taillights. Never walked six miles down the shoulder of a dark backroad looking for an open gas station. Never looked down to see the blacktop going by through the holes in the floorboards.

I have, you have. We all have.

But not him. Ever.

Do you really think you can trust a guy who trusts his car?