Last Saturday I ran in to a gentleman I used to work with before I retired from Highlands in 1999.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Shifting the emphasis, I answered his question with another, “What are you doing here?” But before anyone gets the idea my ex-colleague and I came across each other in a brothel or an adults-only video parlor, let me explain.
I didn’t need to come up with the excuse that “Well, I’m conducting research on bordellos and that’s why I’m here.” No, it was nothing like that. We met at Pino’s Quick Lube Center, where we went to have our cars lubed and jubed.
The embarrassed questions were understandable. Why it wasn’t more than seven years ago, around the time I retired, that I would have saved 30 bucks by putting the oil in myself. Usually the last Saturday of the third month was the time for me, with the help of sons Stan, Diego or Ben, to buy oil and filters, drive the car up the portable ramps, locate the proper wrench, drain the offending fluids and “save a bundle.” An hour and a half later, we were done. And look how much money we saved.
For a while last Saturday, I saw why there was the element of surprise. My colleague and I both surmised the other person shouldn’t have to rely on a commercial establishment in lieub of doing the work himself.
I wonder whether retirement itself told my biological clock it was time to turn over matters like oiling a car to the experts. How much is our time worth? Paying someone to get oil and grease on his own uniform is preferable to soiling my store-bought JC Penney clothes while on my back in the driveway. Or was it the familial camaraderie of two, three or four machos taming our cars, daring to perform such a complex operation?
Did we used to change our own oil — a form of male bonding — in the same way that every barbecue ever performed has been done by a man? Do men ever even cook inside the house? No, not real men.
Then why do we men unhesitatingly scrape off last summer’s petrified barbecue bits from our grill, don a cook’s hat, squirt gallons of fluid on the charcoal to provide barbecue fit for the gods? Well, it’s because in this age in which everything is done for us, we have to be masters of something. Recent columns have lamented the fact that high technology has reduced us men to impotent key-turners, as nothing under the hood is serviceable, except for replacing windshield washer fluid.
But Arnold and Patrick at the Quick Lube Center took care of that too, making me feel even less utile.
So why do men barbecue? Well, it’s simply because shortly after the invention/discovery of fire and the realization that partially burned mastodon tastes great and is less filling, men took control of things in nature. So today’s macho, flipping ribs on an electronic-ignition-equipped grill is no different from his prehistoric grandfathers who kept their brood fed, and in so doing maintained mastery over the beasts.
But back to mechanical tasks:
Before retirement, I dreamed of operating a bicycle repair business out of my home. My sons appeared to like the idea and proposed we all learn the ropes, er, spokes.
We acquired a short-lived reputation as the Camp Luna bike repair shop, often working on three or four bikes when time permitted. But that encouraged too many neighborhood kids, who often left a twisted wheel on our porch with a request that we build a bicycle around it.
Once, for training purposes, we spent an entire Saturday driving our pickup through streets of West Las Vegas, looking for spare parts. Wherever we spotted a dead or dying bike, we’d stop. “Hey, Bro. How about if we take that bike off your hands? No charge.” In no case did we request a complete bike; rather, we inquired only when the bike was clearly non-functional. We returned home with a seven spoke-less rims, six splintered sprockets, five soiled rings, four coaster brakes, three wrenched threads, two curdled gloves and a cartridge in a bare tree.
It’s amazing how many bike owners wanted compensation — we previously agreed we’d pay no more than $10 for the bike or parts, even if it had been owned by Lance Armstrong. And an equally large number of bike owners wouldn’t part with their bikes. “I’m gonna fix it up one of these days. All it needs is spokes, pedals, handlebars and a frame.”
Yeah, right. “He’s gonna fix it up in the same way people who have a car that won’t run buy another one just like it, ‘for parts,’” and the result is two clunkers in the front yard.
Others appreciated our enterprising spirit, thanked us for spiffing up their property, and wished us luck.
It didn’t take long to realize that every bike we put together was really a foreign bicycle, in that every part was foreign to every other part. We collected lots of brands: Schwinn, Huffy, Wards, Sears and K-Mart.
And trying to assemble a coaster brake with parts from 20 different models proved daunting. It became obvious that many of the parts were broken, defective or of inferior quality to begin with.
I could easily understand the conversation between a doctor and an auto mechanic, who went to the same party.
The physician was miffed because the mechanic charged him more for a minor auto repair than the doctor charged for an office visit. The mechanic’s justification: “Well, I have to learn hundreds of makes and models of cars; you, on the other hand, have only two models to work with.”
And I recalled a time, some 20 years ago, when I needed a single spoke for my bike and asked the late John Korte, of Korte’s Furniture and Bicycle Sales for “a spoke for a 27-inch bike.” Well, that wasn’t good enough for Johnny Korte. “There are many kinds of spokes, my friend,” he said.
He was right. To be quite sure, I needed to bring the entire bike into the shop. The shop owner did the installation himself. And that’s about the time I realized the world of bicycle repair can function quite well without me. The only trouble is that I have a huge stash of assorted used bicycle parts.
Anyone want to make an offer?