The Jetta (Part One)

I would like to consider myself a hard worker. This is a particular point of pride for me, because so many of the people I see and know are beyond lazy, and strangely, seem to take as much pride in their sloth. They celebrate being capable of going weeks without taking the trash out, of their ability to subsist off of pizza and fast food, their genius of using paper plates and plastic flatware for everything so they will never have to wash anything. More vexing to me, however (and I have seen this to be particularly true to my Millennial generation), is their seeming inability to do, or learn to do, anything that can simply be "hired out" to someone else. Why learn how to unclog a drain when you can just pay a plumber $100 an hour to do it for you? Why learn the best way to paint a room when you can just hire painters to do it for you? Why learn to change your own oil when you can just take your car to the mechanic and write them a blank check to just "fix whatever." The excuse is the same: "Oh, I don't know how to do that stuff." And that's it. That answer is okay for people. And perhaps it's a particular quirk of mine, but I cannot just look at something I would like to do, or something that needs to be done, and live with the conclusion that "Oh, I don't know how to do that." Or worse still, "I can't do that." Call it the way I was raised, but in my family, any iteration of "can't" was answered with "learn."

It's the people that are okay with not knowing how to do something that I envy.

I have encountered only two vehicles in my lifetime that, in spite of the vast banks of knowledge the Information Age has to offer and my own wealth of experience, utterly disgraced me as a mechanic. One was a 1991 Mazda Miata that, after replacing a head gasket and doing what little repair I could with what little money I had (which meant no valve job, no head resurfacing, no new gaskets or hardware), simply refused to ever start back up again. The other would turn out to be the most maddening piece of machinery I have ever had the displeasure of trying to fix: a 1994 Volkswagen Jetta.

I was fresh out of college, bitterly single, living at my mother's house, and stuck working a dead end job in the middle of a recession, scraping by on less than $100 a month after the bills were paid. My home crumbled around me, and while my mother struggled to keep the mortgage paid with her part-time job at a local retailer, I struggled to keep our home maintained. Old appliances broke on a regular basis, the sink in the bathroom barely worked, the central air conditioning/heating unit was over ten years old and did previous little actual air conditioning or heating, and pieces of the lawnmower popped off with every use. My mother's Miata sat lonely and dejected in the yard, its engine turning over on a nearly dead battery, no fuel, no spark. I had long run out of shop manuals, forum post suggestions, "real" mechanics paid in beer, YouTube videos, and ideas in general. With no money to buy the astronomically-priced parts that may or may not get the car running again, I was defeated. Together, my mother and I shared the last running vehicle we had: the Jetta.

We had reached the time of year in late February/early March when all of the cars started to break down. The "catastrophic car breakdown season" came early this year, as in addition to the broken Miata, the purple 1990 Chevrolet Cavalier I bought for $600 had blown a freeze plug during one of the worst winters Alabama had seen in a hundred years. Fortunately, the Jetta ran beautifully, and it took us from point A to point B. In fact, the only part I had had to replace up to this point was a squealing water pump. The air conditioner worked (a true luxury given the last several vehicles I'd owned), the interior was in good shape, the paint wasn't terrible, and it was the first "normal" working car any of us had driven in many years.

Nice as it was, though, the Jetta had just one blemish: it leaked oil. A lot of oil. Up to half a quart of oil per day, in fact. The cause was easy enough to find. The valve cover gasket had done as most valve cover gaskets do and deteriorated over time, which had caused oil to start oozing from the small cracks in the rubber. So with the catastrophic car breakdown season nearly upon us, I set out one evening to to get ahead of it, to do some preventative maintenance and replace that darn valve cover gasket and make this the best car we had ever owned. It was a simple repair I had performed on several cars already, and after some research, I knew exactly what to do and how to do it on a Jetta.

And oh, how I would come to wish that I didn't know how to do any of that stuff after all.

Mustang Aflame

I remember a story my dad once told me about his old Mustang. He told me of how, once, riding down a lonesome stretch of highway with my mother, smoke suddenly started pouring out from under the hood. Little did he know, but he had become victim of a flaw that is well-known to us today: early Mustangs had a short piece of rubber hose between the hard fuel line to the fuel filter on the carburetor. And as rubber is prone to do, it had rotted with time, ruptured, spilled gasoline onto a hot intake manifold, and promptly caught fire.

Dad pulled the car over, got out, helped my mother get out, opened the car hood, and seeing the flames, did as any man who spent a large portion of his time watching 80's action movies would: he panicked and assumed that the Mustang was now a bomb capable of leveling a city block. A passerby stopped, and at his advice, the two of them began to throw dirt on the engine in an effort to put out the flames, which succeeded in nothing. Several minutes passed, the fire department stopped, put out the fire, and left my parents at the mercy of the tow truck driver.

But it was what happened next that I always found the most fascinating.

"So that was when you had to get a new car, right?"

"Why, hell no. We couldn't afford to just 'go out and get a new car.' That's what idiot yuppie rich people do. No, we got the thing home, I changed that damn hose, put new plugs and plug wires on it, and drove it to the grocery store ten minutes later."

How any car could withstand such catastrophe, I could not fathom. Dumbfounded, I could think only to ask, "But what about the dirt?"

"What about the dirt? God made dirt; dirt don't hurt."

It was the same explanation I got when I skinned my knees playing in the yard, one I didn't understand at all because I had at that point acquired indisputable evidence that, while God had most certainly made the dirt, it did, in fact, hurt very much. Yet it didn't hurt that Mustang's engine. Meanwhile, I would watch my Dad work outside for hours on our Ford Taurus that didn't run because of what would turn out to be a "piece-of-shit dirty 'mass airflow sensor.'" That Mustang engine had caught fire, but Dad was able to drive it that same day after a simple, routine repair. Meanwhile, the newer Ford Thunderbird we had blew a head gasket because it "ran too hot for more than thirty fucking seconds."

Within my own mind, the legend continued to grow. A legend that would later be solidified and prayed for when I encountered the most notorious car I have ever been cursed to work on: a 1995 Volkswagen Jetta.