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By Root 227 0

off to a rumble. I rolled down the window to better hear the motor’s music. We pulled out of the shop and accelerated hard down the street. Lance suddenly seemed very much in his element. We’re screaming now, still accelerating in third gear, and we’re coming up on the cross section with San Pablo Avenue, a busy thor oughfare. We’re getting really close, and we’re still going really fast. I realize Lance simply isn’t going to stop. Incredulous, my right foot starts stabbing at the air involuntarily, searching for a brake pedal. About fifteen yards before the crosswalk, Lance hits the brakes. The car just squats down on all fours and stops, as though a giant hand had reached out and pressed us into the pavement right . . . here. I never imagined there could be brakes like that.

From the Powell Street entrance we got on the freeway, Interstate 80. There was lots of late-afternoon traffic, and Lance was having his way with it, darting in and out, leaving inches between cars. Initially I was scandalized that he was doing this with a customer’s car, but his confidence was absolute, and apparently just, so I started to relax. This was the first time I had ridden with someone with racetrack experience, and it was exhilarating. (The shop campaigned a Porsche 930 as well as a 356 at Laguna Seca, the road racing course down in Monterey.)

There were two mechanics in addition to Lance: a Mexican guy and a white guy. One day the white guy was doing a brake job on a 911 that was up on the lift, and Lance told him to teach me something. So the white guy showed me how to pack a wheel bearing: you get a big dollop of grease on the heel of your hand, then press the bearing into it. The grease comes oozing up through the ball bearings, between the inner and outer races. Then you rotate the bearing a little and repeat, working your way around the circumference. Once you’ve gone all the way around, you turn the bearing over and force the grease in from the opposite side. It’s an important job; a wheel bearing that isn’t adequately packed with grease will wear quickly, overheat, and eventually fail by either seizing or coming apart, either of which could cause a wreck. But beyond this simple lesson I didn’t learn much, and mostly did menial work. Lance didn’t have much interest in being a mentor. With or without a mentor, however, my mechanical education could no longer be put off, since my own car, a 1963 VW Bug, needed constant attention.

String Theory

Working on my car without guidance, I felt constantly thwarted. Corroded nuts and bolts routinely broke or would round off; I came to be surprised when they simply loosened. Intermittent electrical gremlins eluded diagnosis. How much of this was due to the rat’s nest of decaying, somehow organic-looking wiring behind the dash? From what I’d read, some “drivability” problems (sputtering, flat spots, hesitation) pointed to carburetor issues but could just as well be attributed to the ignition system. A lot seemed to depend on the weather. The car mocked my efforts to get a handle on it, as though it obeyed some evil genius rather than rational principles.

Meanwhile, I was getting reacquainted with my father, living with him after six years away in the commune and another year living with my mother. A physicist, he would sometimes proffer some bit of scientific knowledge that was meant to be helpful as I sat on the ground in front of my lifeless engine. These nuggets rarely seemed to pan out. One day as I came into the house filthy, frustrated, and reeking of gasoline, my dad looked up from his chair and said to me, out of the blue, “Did you know you can always untie a shoelace just by pulling on one end, even if it’s in a double knot?” I didn’t really know what to do with this information. It seemed to be coming from a different universe than the one I was grappling with.

Thinking about that posited shoelace now, it occurs to me maybe you can and maybe you can’t untie it at a stroke—it depends. If the shoelace is rough and spongy, and the knot is tight, it will be a lot harder to undo