Life of Hardin Vol. IV, No. 2

Popular Mechanics


The surest thing to get a man out of the dumps is to give him a car to work on. There is something about tinkering with the machinery, getting his hands dirty, figuring out just exactly what the problem is that lets a man know he is a man. The first thing to lift his spirits is the frustration that smacks him in the face when he opens the hood to take the engine apart and discovers that his model car is the only one of its kind that placed the water pump in a position unreachable without first removing the engine. With this sort of thing to deal with, all other thoughts save the desire to fix the car with a sledgehammer and then wring the neck of the designer are eradicated. This is actually an extremely satisfying frame of mind.

The second thing is a euphoric state of accomplishment when the engine runs again after the hoses are replaced, the power steering pump removed, a new radiator has been put in, the carburetor rebuilt, the transmission flushed, the leaky clutch master cylinder repaired, the oil changed, the new and highly specialized tool purchased, the power steering pump bolted back on, and the brand new head gasket is nestled snugly in place, all undertaken simply because it was discovered during a routine spark plug change that every peripheral system was on the blink.

In Paraguay, all these joys of car work have been taken away. No house, and especially no apartment building, has a place for a guy to work on his car or even change his own oil. There is no store where a man can wander the rows and gaze at the gleaming racks of lug wrenches, crescent wrenches, socket sets (metric and standard), torque wrenches, two-ton jacks, precision screwdrivers, pliers, impact wrenches, or that stuff that magically removes the grease from your hands without water. Every little burp or knock calls for a full blown trip to the car dealer.

The simplest thing such as changing a flat tire is a job for professionals. They are the only ones with tools or the place to work on a car. Take my own case.

My brother had a flat tire on his car. It was parked on a cobblestone road with a slight incline, so it couldn’t be jacked up there. We had no air tank to fill the tire enough to drive on it. So I pulled it around the corner as slowly as possible onto his narrow carport that bakes every day in the hot sun.

The car in place, we opened the back to get out the jack. The jack was not in the proper place. The jack was not in the improper place. There was no jack in the car. There was no lug wrench in the car. The Paraguayan government requires that each car has a fire extinguisher and a set of orange hazard triangles, but it does not require that each car carry a jack. At least, when your car has a flat, you can put out your hazard triangles so that no one will slam into you while waiting for a tow truck.

My brother had a jack in another car. He had a lug wrench. We got out the wrench and tried it, only to find it was too small. We couldn’t even remove the spare tire from the back of the car. So we drove in my car to a service station. They had a four dollar lug wrench with an interchangeable tip. So we bought it and drove back.

I lay down on the ground and jumped immediately back up, thereby avoiding third degree burns on my rear quarters. I put a towel down and laid on it, then slid the jack under the car. Then my brother and I took turns cranking the jack. The jack had a knob, like a large screw, that had to be turned so that it could be raised and lowered. It took about one thousand turns to raise the jack to its full extension, but only about five hundred or so to get it back down. One would think this would make the jack taller each time it raised a car, but it didn’t. No matter how many times we raised the car, it never got high enough to lift the tire. The jack was simply too short.

There are no cinder blocks in Paraguay with which to block up a car. There are no jack stands. We walked across the street to borrow some ceramic bricks. First we piled some of them under the jack. Still too short. Then we stacked several of them up to hold the car while we put more bricks under the jack. The moment the car frame touched the stack of bricks, the bricks looked at me and cried, “We will explode in a million tiny pieces in your face if you do this thing!” So I did not do it.

My brother and I got back in the car. We drove back to the service station. They just happened to have a two ton jack, the pump kind, which we immediately purchased. This, we thought, is the answer. This is the miracle drug. I lay down on my towel. I slid the new jack under the car. I raised it up.

It was exactly as tall as the other jack. Obviously these are the jacks sold to idiots who want to do their own car repair. The real jacks are reserved only for professional mechanics. It ensures their job security.

We left the car on the second jack and stacked up more bricks. We put the first jack on the bricks. We raised the car again. Still no good. So we took the second jack and used it to jack up the suspension arm on the flat tire. At last it was tall enough. “Quick!” I said. “We may have taken three-and-a-half hours to change one tire up until now, but from here on out we make record time, before the jack breaks, or the spare goes flat, or the engine spontaneously combusts, or the earth opens and swallows us whole!”

The old tire came off. The spare went on in a flash. And then, as I was in the middle of raising one jack so I could lower the other, with my head and shoulders beneath the side of the car to remove the bricks, a boy walks up from the street. He comes right over to the patio gate, sticks an arm through it, looks right at me and says, “Do you have any money?” He held his hand up, his fingers circled like a coin.

“What?” I said, though I heard him perfectly.

“Money.” He flattened his hand, palm up.

I said, “Are you kidding? I’ve got a car sitting on my chest, and you’re asking me for money? You don’t even have the gumption to pick my pocket when I’m trapped and couldn’t stop you if I wanted, and you want me to hand it over? Run along and terrorize someone with four good tires.”

He needs to work on his timing. Had he only been there an hour earlier, he could have made a quick ten dollars as a jack stand.