I should qualify that – I’m an expert on my lug-nuts. Well, I don’t actually know what size they are or how many I have on my car or anything, but I do know what they look like and where they are and that’s the important thing.
You see, I’m not a car guy. In fact, I’m a bit of a mutant; I’m missing my car gene. Where other men have a gene (presumable on the Y-chromosome) that tells them important car stuff, I have nothing. It takes me ten minutes to open the hood of my car. I don’t understand that truck commercial where the guys make jokes about each other’s hemis. I don’t know what an octane is.
This mutation has been a problem for me as long as I can remember. I accidentally ruined the first car I ever owned - a blue one (sorry I can’t be more specific) – by letting it run out of oil. Nobody had ever explained to me that you had to keep adding oil to an engine. I thought it was a one-time deal. As a result, the engine eventually seized up with a scream that still haunts me fifteen years later. To be fair, nobody should ever have had to explain this; it should have been incredibly obvious – to anyone, that is, with a car gene.
My disability has been especially painful in auto part stores and in dealing with mechanics. The same gene that allows other men to watch NASCAR racing invariably alerts them to the fact I am not one of them. They don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, but I am vaguely threatening to them and they know that they need to sneer at me, hard, before I infect them in some way. This has been pretty uncomfortable for me over the years, particularly when the clerk at the auto-parts store is actually a woman. There’s nothing guaranteed to make a guy feel less like a man than have to confess to a girl that he doesn’t know how many cylinders he has. Whatever that means.
To combat this feeling of helplessness, I’ve developed a strategy to make me appear a little less like an idiot. I decided to learn one part of my car and learn enough vocabulary about it to be able to work it into conversation. I chose “lug nut”, basically because it is the only part on my car that can locate without a map. I couldn’t find my alternator if my life depended it, but by God, I can find my lug nuts!
I also like the sound of the phrase – it’s got a manly, grunting, slightly technical-sounding quality to it.
“Lug nut.”
“Luuuuuug Nut”
“Lugnutlugnutlugnutlugnut”
“I’m having trouble getting my tire off.” “Hmmm… your car is European; are your lug nuts counter-threaded?” (This is my dream conversation, by the way. As soon as I have it, I can die happy.)
Please bear in mind that this defense is only useful as long as there’s not actually anything wrong with my car. Then, unless I’m actually missing a lug nut, I’m at a bit of a loss – which seems to be the case at the moment.
My car has been acting oddly. I runs fine the first time I drive it during the day, but if I stop the engine, pick up my dry cleaning and get back in, it starts acting like a moody five-year-old. The engine will make a bizarre, surging, ruUUm-ruUUm sound and when I step on the gas, nothing will happen until I give it a lot of gas. Then my car races down the street shouting Whee! Yippee!”, while I am flattened against my seat by the G-forces of my sudden acceleration.
Needless to say, I am concerned by this. I’ve been living with the problem by only making one trip a day, but it’s only a matter of time before I run over a cop or something, so I’ve taken my car to my mechanic. Several times.
(The phrase “my mechanic” is a bit misleading. The fact that mechanics spend their entire lives surrounded by cars means that they have particularly vigorous car genes and are forced to despise me, so I tend to move around a lot. My hope is to one day find a shop that I can stay with for a long time. So, when I say, “my mechanic” I mean “my current mechanic”.)
I’ve driven into my mechanic’s parking lot at least four times, the car bucking and squealing, parked it, run it and dragged the poor man out to see the problem, only – and you saw this coming, didn’t you? – to have my car run perfectly for him.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said after the last time this happened. “The car seems fine to me. I’ve checked your transmission, your fuel line – everything.”
“Did you check the lug nuts?” I asked in a small, sad voice.
He looked me in the eye for a moment, then lied with incredible sincerity, “Yes. Yes, I did.”
My car still doesn’t work, but I think I’ve finally found a permanent mechanic.
