Adventuring on the Printed Page

The New York Times- June 2, 2013

An excerpt from Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic
Chapter 36: Alpha Male Behavior Among Car Guys.
Click here to read the New York Times book review.

So. You're a car guy. Now you need to establish your dominance in the pack. How do you do it? The classic thing to do is to procure some American iron. A muscle car. Something big, nasty, and brutish, with fat tires, a loud exhaust, and lots of swagger. Maybe a '69 Camaro with glass packs. Vin Diesel on wheels. Or you could go expensive and metrosexual, maybe a late-model Porsche. Forget the image of Porsche guys with gold chains and slicked-back hair; it's the money that does the talking, baby, and nothing says money like dropping "the Porsche" into a sentence. Especially when it's mispronounced using the popular but incorrect single-syllabic form, rhyming it with "porch" (it's actually pronounced "Por-sha," and don't get it wrong if you wish to be taken seriously in the car world).

(The alert reader will notice that, before the end of this book, I, in fact, will have dropped the P-bomb multiple times, but the Porsche that I own is an '82 911SC, worth less than ten grand, and I pronounce it correctly, so we're good.)

We've all seen those commercials featuring people and their dogs that look alike, or at least have some superficial personality traits. You know: big strong guys with Dobermans; overly coiffed women with little frou-frou poodles. There often appears to be some similar sort of correspondence between people, particularly men, and their cars. Big, strong, wave-the-flag-beer-drinking guys with classic American muscle cars; gay men with VW Beetles ("Not that there's anything wrong with that," to quote Jerry Seinfeld).

Oddly enough, even the Metro provided me with car guy interactions. I expected it would engender about as much respect from hard-core car guys as one would garner ordering a glass of warm milk in a biker bar. But to my stunned surprise the car actually generated grudging admiration from folks who knew what it was. For example, when I went to a junkyard in Lawrence, Massachusetts to buy a wheel for the snow tires I planned to put on the car, the guy behind the counter-who was sporting slicked-back hair, a backwards ball cap, and gold chains-saw the Metro through the window, and said, "Is that one of them three-cylinda jobs?" "Yup," I said, "all 55 horsepower of it." "Wow," he said, "what kinda mileage ya get?" When I told him, I instantly had street cred. "I never seen one of these. Can I look under the hood? Hey, Jimmie, get out here. Ya gotta check this out! Oh man that engine is so tiny I could pull it outa there with my hands!"

Gas mileage as the new horsepower. You gotta love it.

One way to show where you are in the pecking order is to simply drop the number and kinds of cars you own into every casual conversation, just in case another car guy is within hearing range. I, however, never do that. You'd never know that I own eight cars, including an '82 Porsche, a '73 2002, a '73 3.0CSi, a '99 Z3 M Coupe, and a '99 528iT with a stick and the sport package. You don't own eight cars including an '82 Porsche, a '73 2002, a '73 3.0CSi, a '99 Z3 M Coupe, and a '99 528iT with a stick and the sport package, do you? Just asking.

Or you can talk about your projects with random people you meet at social events-how you disassembled your baby and took three years of nights and weekends to put her back together. Nothing says car guy like a frame-off restoration. I suppose these things are the car guy equivalent of "let me tell you about my grandchildren." Maire Anne will tell you that when I'm deep into the throes of a project, it's all I want to talk about; I might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "let me tell you about my subframe bushings."

Chest beating can also be part of establishing pack dominance. On the online forums, there's always some [expletive] who seems intent on wanting you to know that he knows more than you do. Stand up to the [expletive]. Rock his world. Show him that he's wrong.

But even with people you know and like, subtle one-upsmanship can creep in during the natural trading of war stories. One night we were having dinner with my wife's business partner, Andrea, and her husband, Mark. I knew Mark was a car guy, but we'd never rolled and gotten the scent on each other before. I was outlining some of the BMWs I'd gone through. Mark said he'd been into TVRs (an obscure but very cool British car) and had owned three of them, but recently had had several Subaru WRXs. I said I'd owned over two dozen BMW 2002s. He mentioned a suspension modification he recently did. I described installing air-conditioning in one of my cars. He countered with the story of putting a 500 hp engine into his Subaru. I let it drop that I had retrofitted fuel injection into my '73 3.0CSi, thereby subtly countering his thrust of raw horsepower with my parry of complexity and ingenuity, performed on a classic car that is actually worth something.

And then he lunged in for the kill. The sucker punch started two towns over, approached me in slow motion, then gathered speed as it approached my face, like in a classic Popeye cartoon. I did not see it coming. The twin-punch of the air-conditioning and the fuel injection retrofit usually shuts most of 'em down. "Of course," he said, with a wonderful air of nonchalance, "that probably wasn't as involved as building the plane."

"You ... built...a plane?"

"Yeah, one of those kit planes, two-cycle snowmobile engine, fully acrobatic. Pretty cool. And not as hard as it sounds. You do have to be kind of careful attaching the wings to make sure that the bolts are torqued right, though; wouldn't want to get that wrong."

Checkmate.

Article from and courtesy of http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/automobiles/excerpt-hack-mechanic-rob-siegel.html?ref=automobiles