For the Sake of Art

It wasn’t until I approached the age of sixty and happened to be studying the etymology of certain words that I discovered the root meaning of art was found in the ability to skillfully join or fit things together. That epiphany held no real surprise for me, however, because I instantly thought of Joe Whitehouse and the smells of spilled motor oil soaked in sawdust, along with carburetor jets dipped in grease-cutting solvent rising around me as I dribbled a new official Wilson leather basketball.

I recently had celebrated my eleventh birthday and confessed to my father that, when I grew up, I wanted to work as an automobile mechanic. My father, who knew me very well, realized I had a brain given to abstract problem solving and daydreaming, while my abilities with practical matters and hand-held tools lay somewhere beyond my ability to fly. “You could tear up a fucking anvil with a wrench,” he claimed on his gin-drinking days. Consequently, he hung a basketball goal from the rafters in the huge shop area of his successful Dodge dealership. In these back bays, mechanics labored over warranty claims and oil changes while I shot free throws.

My father’s plan performed brilliantly, and I was distracted enough through the early nineteen-sixties to make the high school basketball team and go on to college rather than toil away with a closet full of grease-stained clothes and fingernails that never came clean. But it wasn’t so much the idea that sports trumped auto mechanics as it was the realization that I could never do what Joe Whitehouse did the way he did it. This is the lesson I learned on the particular Saturday in January when I received my new basketball and dribbled it while Joe prepared to tune up a Dodge Coronet with a 318 cubic inch engine.

First, he poured a mound of Velvet tobacco onto a small white paper as thin as a new blister. He licked the glued paper and lit the cigarette with a wooden match, striking it against the concrete floor as he knelt to contemplate the morass of sick metal before him. I quit dribbling, tucked the ball under my arm and approached the car.

 “Hand me that wrench, boy,” Joe said and stood, uncoiling his six-foot-four-inch frame until he towered above me. At first, I thought of my mother’s favorite fable, Jack in the Beanstalk, granting Joe giant status. But as I look back on the scene now, I realize he more closely resembled the stalk with a huge flat head flowering from his calyx of a neck. Blue smoke spiraled from the cigarette between his lips. “Goddamnit, where’s my wrench?”

I looked at the open drawer of his red Snap-On tool box only to find a cluster of various sized, shiny wrenches. I had no idea which one he wanted, and I was afraid to ask.

 “You deaf, boy?” he roared. “Which one, Joe?”

“Huh. Good question.” His voice softened as he removed the cigarette from his mouth and flicked a long ash onto the floor. “Let’s start with a 9/16^th.

Having no idea what the numbers meant, I tore through the drawer, rattling and clanging wrenches till I saw the magic numbers on one. Placing the cold metal in his palm, I watched in awe as it, and the other tools he used over the course of that morning, came alive. The engine, trembling beneath his soft touch, spread itself open and exposed the mystic properties of its internal combustion soul. I had never witnessed a thing this remarkable. I had seen puppies born, rain fall with the sun shining, movies appear in a square wooden box my father brought home from the appliance store, but never a whole engine come undone into so many seemingly unrelated pieces, and so quickly. Joe seemed to know what tool he needed and what it was needed for by instinct alone. He never faltered, never hesitated, and never quit till, like a jigsaw puzzle shaken and poured from a box, bolts, nuts, plugs, gaskets, bearings, plates, relays, and wires lay strewn across the metal tabletop behind him in no particular order. How could anyone return it to its original majesty? More than that, how could it become greater than the sum of these insignificant parts and work right again?

“Was our dad a real Indian, Joe?”

 “Cherokee. I ain’t as lucky as you.”

 “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he gave me a love for expensive cars and cheap whiskey, and that’s all he ever done for me. Your dad does a lot more for you. Hell, I ain’t never had a basketball.”

“My dad can’t fix a car.”

“No, he can’t. He don’t know the first thing about fixing cars, but he sure can sell ‘em.” Joe set the wrench on the fender and leaned back against the metal table to roll another smoke.         

“See, every man can do at least one thing real good with his mind, and every man can do at least one thing good with his hands. But if that one thing is the same thing, and he puts his whole heart into it, then he maybe gets to be an artist at it. For me, it was fixing these hunks of metal. For your dad, it was baseball. Problem is, after he come home from the war, he didn’t have his heart in sports no more. But that don’t mean you get to disrespect him ‘cause he put his heart into making a living for his family and raising you kids right.”

I’d like to say that Joe’s words elevated my admiration for my dad and I carried that respect through adolescence. However, truth be told, I had begun to enter that phase of life where sons recognize the flaws of their fathers. Our relationship over the next decade can be described as turbulent at best.

At noon, my father barked over the intercom and ordered me out of the shop area and into his office at the back of the showroom floor. It was lunch time. Joe kept cleaning parts and lubricating various fittings while dad and I drove two blocks up Prince Street to Dick Clark’s Drive-In and bought a bag full of DC burgers and chocolate shakes. I ate mine as we drove back to the dealership. I wanted another but didn’t ask because I knew they were for Joe and the rest of the crew.

While the mechanics ate their burgers, Dad and I spoke briefly about how to focus on shooting free throws. I sat in his office, and he spoke across the huge desk as if I were a customer buying a new Dodge.

“When you’re in the middle of a game, any game, you can’t let the crowd distract you. You can’t let the other players distract you. You have to shut out everything but the task at hand. You can’t hear the noise or see the cheerleaders. Put a letter or a number in your mind. When I pitched, I always used the number 8. I put it right in the middle of the catcher’s mitt. You need to put it right over the rim of the basket and then hit it with the ball. Except for the number 8, your mind should be totally blank.”

Sports seemed to be the only topic he was willing to cover. Whether he thought it was the only thing I needed to know at eleven years old or whether it was the only subject he felt safe talking about, I never figured out until I spent a year in Vietnam and learned about the fear of intimacy and the other strange emotions that burden combat survivors for the rest of their lives. I just listened and returned to the shop area to practice his advice. At one point during the afternoon as Joe reassembled the engine, I hit thirty-seven consecutive free throws. I might have gone on infinitely, but then Joe started the engine he had been overhauling. The starter whirred just as the ball left my fingers. I missed, distracted by the odd sound, and hung my head in shame. I had lost my focus. Had my father been there to see it happen, he would have shaken his head and granted me failure status. The remarkable thirty-seven free throws I had hit beforehand would simply have been what he expected from his son.

“Missed one, did ya boy?” said Joe.

“The noise…,”

“Yeah, the starter solenoid’s got a burr on it. It’ll go out one of these days, but not today. My work order here says fix the engine, and that’s what I did.”

“I made over thirty shots before I missed one.”

“What would your dad say?” Joe smiled, baring a wide row of caramel colored teeth, and rolling another cigarette.

“He’d say ‘If you were half as good as you thought you were, you’d be twice as good as you are,’ and then he’d tell me to remember what I did wrong when I missed.”

“That’s ‘cause we learn from our mistakes.”

“That’s because he wants me to be perfect.”

“No, he don’t want you to be perfect. He just knows the world’s a tough place and he wants you to be better than him so it don’t weigh you down so much.”

All the time we were talking, Joe leaned over the car fender and cocked his head in toward the engine, which idled so smoothly it seemed to be turned off.

“Here that?”

I confessed to hearing nothing. Joe told me to close my eyes, and then he walked me into the car, lifting me and setting me like a bag of groceries on the fender.

“Now what do you hear?”

Putting the number 8 in my mind as if I were on the free throw line, I focused on the smooth hum of the cylinders, the rods, the lifters, and the bearings. They all worked in perfect unison so that the engine sound seemed part of the natural world, indistinct from everything around it.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Keep your eyes closed and just listen to the engine, nothing else.”

Somewhere deep within the bowels of its metal body, a slight ticking sound clicked against the even hum of everything else.

“I hear it, Joe. It sounds like a cricket.”

He laughed and reached behind him into the red toolbox. Taking a long screwdriver from a drawer, Joe leaned into the engine and adjusted a tiny screw somewhere underneath the carburetor. The tick disappeared, and I witnessed the creation of something perfect, something that had grown as a whole to have a life of its own way beyond the simple re-ordering of its parts.

Not long after that day, on another Saturday afternoon when the shop had been shut down for the weekend, Dad gathered all the salesmen, bookkeepers, mechanics, and me together for a good-bye party in Joe’s honor. The tall Cherokee had taken the job as chief mechanic in the local coal mine fixing the big draglines and motors that mined the coal. The pay scale and retirement were way beyond my father’s means. Even though Joe’s first love was automobiles, he needed the job for his family’s sake. It was the right thing for him to do. Joe knew it, and my father accepted it gracefully. I remember the party well because it was the last time I saw Joe. Within a few short years, his heart exploded. The whiskey he drank and the cigarettes he constantly smoked got all the blame, but I never accepted that diagnosis.

At the party, Joe sipped my father’s Canadian Club from a paper cup and told me about a newspaper article he had read that very morning. It concerned a man in Louisville, Kentucky, who went to sleep one night and awoke the next morning speaking French, a language he had never heard. The story said there were only twelve cases of this phenomenon ever reported in the world. But Joe focused on the man’s words rather than the miracle of the man’s new language: “Je suis perdu et seul,” which translated means “I am lost and alone.”

“This is what happens when people have to live in one life while they belong in another,” Joe said. Then he told me of a vision he’d had once as a young boy. His father had taken him to an old-fashioned sweat lodge on a reservation out West someplace and during the ritual of cleansing Joe went through, a dream came to him. In the dream, he painted winter wheat as it roiled and bubbled, trees at the moment they became forests, dawn as it drained starlight from lakes, and autumn as it spun leaves into kaleidoscopes of color.

“I put that dream into my life with a set of tools instead of brushes,” Joe said. “My canvas has always been an engine block, and I’ve always been happy. Now I’m gonna work on huge monster machines, chunks of metal with no feeling and no finesse just to make more money. I hope I don’t end up like the guy from Louisville who can’t remember who he is or where he’s from.”

“Why do it, then?”

“The same reason your dad sells cars, so my son might get the chance to grow up and paint those pictures I always dreamed about painting but never got to. You promise me you’ll always respect your dad for trying to make your life better than his. There’s a real art to that sacrifice.”

I kept my promise to Joe. Over the next forty years, until my father died in 1998, we fought a lot, misunderstood each other’s intentions, weathered my excesses with drugs and women, and finally got past his stubborn insistence that his way was the only way for me to become a good man. But no matter how tenuous the bonds of our relationship, I never doubted and always respected the sacrifices he made to be the best father he could be. During our last decade together, he realized his prominence as a successful artist in his own right. I’m sure of it. I could see it in his smile as his grandkids grew into happy, healthy adults.

Today, I thought of Joe and my dad as I stood in an auto repair shop watching a boy named Bob tune up my Dodge. He plugged sensors, diodes, lasers, pulsars, and several colored wires into batteries, relays, resisters, and injection ports. Computer screens blipped blue lights, bells rang, and buzzers buzzed ominously.

“You got a bad problem here,” said Bob.

“Can you fix it?”

“I think so, but I’m no artist.”