It’s Time to Take the Shields Down — Then Quit Putting Them Up in the First Place

I’m at the car dealership. Waiting to be taken for a ride.

My dad told me not to trust mechanics. “They’re all crooks,” he would always huff and puff.

Not true. When I was in college, I met a local mechanic named Titus who ran his own little shop and once made a simple $40 hose repair to stave off a threatened $900 engine overhaul at the nearby Chrysler dealership.

“They were just trying to rip you off,” Titus said in his nasally voice, his back to me and his head still under the hood. And his butt crack actually showing in one of those he-really-isn’t-wearing-underwear-(or-a-belt) type of moments. Not that I was looking.

Maybe I was being conned. I imagine that sort of thing does happen at car repair places, especially at the big dealerships, where they have to keep all those neon lights on. And keep all those automated toilet paper dispensers dispensing. And keep funding the salaries of all those people in colorful polar-fleece jackets emblazoned with the dealership logo, who walk around doing … well, I don’t know what they do, exactly. I’m surrounded by them here this morning, and it appears that their only job is to carry around cups of flavored coffee, bid me “good morning,” repeatedly, as the customer service training apparently mandates, and retrieve hunks of paper to carry from one end of the showroom to the other. Maybe they’re salespeople — although it seems like it would be easier to sell things if there were some customers in their midst.

They look trustworthy enough. So does Roy, the guy who is helping me today. He didn’t look untrustworthy, at any rate, as he got me checked in. He had pictures of his kids on his cubicle wall, for God’s sake. Sure, he isn’t the friendliest soul on earth, and he may not bring me the hourly updates I crave here in the waiting room. But did he really get up this morning in hopes of ripping me, and a bunch of other customers, off? Seems unlikely.

There is someone I don’t trust here, though.

Me.

As a human in lifelong possession of a Y chromosome and as the son of a man who could fix anything and everything he laid his eyes on, I am somehow embarrassed, albeit irrationally, to say: I don’t know a thing about cars or how they work. It feels like I’m supposed to, but I don’t. I’m the type of person who could easily though maybe not cheerfully go along with a mechanic’s command, er, recommendation to replace the car’s blinker fluid or adjust its muffler bearings or tighten its critical piston return springs. (Note: I looked up all of these fictional auto parts on Google just now in an attempt to be hip and wink-nudge funny here. In real life I might well have thought they were legit. For all I know they are legit.)

Does this sentence need a comma? I’m your guy for that. (The sentence does not need a comma, by the way. Only the question mark.) I can help you solve the Sunday crossword puzzle in The New York Times, and I’m able to listen compassionately and empathetically to your personal struggles and try to help; I have a caring ear, and heart.

But what’s causing that vibration in the front grill area of your 2008 Honda Odyssey? No idea. This time of year it’s probably a bad leprechaun. That’ll be $475 please — $350 for labor and $125 for the new leprechaun.

Like I said: No idea.

So whenever I’m having work done on my car, my defense shields go up. Way up. Even my defense shields have defense shields. But it’s not necessarily because I fear being ripped off, per se. What I’m really bothered by — what’s got me so anxious as I sit here now, awaiting news on the patient’s diagnosis and prognosis — is a convoluted, self-inflicted form of shame: a completely illegitimate but still very real to me at times thought of letting people down. People like my wife and my dad and my kids and my siblings. People who, in my mixed up mind, will somehow think less of me for knowing more about comma splices than catalytic converters. Even though they won’t. Because they don’t think about me and my mechanical (in)abilities at all. I’m obsessed enough for all of us.

My defense shields are, in fact, self-defense shields. Ones I don’t even need but keep deploying anyway.

What a waste.

It’s time to stop this nonsense. Now and forever. I’m trying, especially through my writing (which is its own leap of faith). But alas, it is difficult. Seemingly impossible.

Like getting at the bolts of the hypertension headlight valve.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.