Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [33]
The Mentor
The ex-boyfriend of an older housemate, Chas was a machinist by training. Currently he worked the parts counter at Donsco, the oldest VW speed shop in the Bay Area, in Belmont. He also built race motors for them and pitted for their off-road racing campaigns. Once a classical guitar-playing Buddhist vegetarian, he was now a gun freak and brilliant misanthropist. He still had long hair, but it was rarely released from the bun under his tweed cap.
His orange bus, with wheel wells cut away to accommodate large off-road tires in the back, was a chaotic treasure trove of superb American handguns, Snap-on tools, and VW parts. The darkness behind the cab carried a sharp note of Berryman’s B-12 Chemtool on top of a more subtle smell that is generic to mechanics—a mixed-up aroma of various petroleum distillates that had been oxidized by combustion, thickened with road grime, and ripened on a substrate of shop rags to the point of acquiring substance. He kept a large tank of CO2 in his bus for running an air impact wrench, indispensable for swapping out the transaxle on a race car in the desert. This bus was his only personal space, and at this time cell phones were something you saw only in the movies. Outside Donsco business hours, you reached Chas by calling the Lyons restaurant in San Mateo, where he manned a certain stool at one end of the coffee counter.
Oppressed in my seventeen-year-old way by the liberal pieties of Berkeley, I had recently taken to wearing combat boots and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. But Chas was something different, the first genuine reactionary I ever met. Deeply cynical and witty, he loosened these angry tendencies of mine with his corrosive humor. He also initiated me into a certain positive possibility opened up by alienation from all things respectable: the pleasures of metal.
Of course, wood is great. But to this young man it seemed that wood was for hippies, and hippies in various guises ruled the world. The wood whisperer with his hand planes, his curly maple, and his workshop on Walden Pond is a stock alter ego of gentlefolk everywhere, and I wanted none of it. A grade 10.9 nylock nut, on the other hand, is appreciated only after a certain initiation, one that tends away from the mysticism of the official counterculture. It is a strictly utilitarian mentality bred in the crucible of motor sports, where every component is stressed up to and beyond its limit. The failure of metal parts had always seemed to me a mere hypothetical possibility, an abstract preoccupation of engineers, but for Chas it was a daily reality. Two bolts, for example, that looked identical to me represented for him the difference between glory and catastrophe. There is a glyphlike code of markings on fasteners that indicates their country of origin, as well as their grading. Categorically, the best steel is American steel (at least, it was in 1983). So the motor-sport mentality fits easily with a certain nativism. This is based not on racial animosity, but on such considerations as tensile strength and resistance to torque shear. (The cosmopolitan tends to live remote from such considerations.)
For real gearheads, the grade of metal in this utilitarian sense gets imbued with an aesthetic charge as well, perhaps because the end served by the component is at bottom not utilitarian at all, but rather spiritual: the need for speed. Far from practical, this is the kind of need that bankrupts those who heed the noble call.
You can quadruple the amount of horsepower a VW engine makes, or even more, if you need it to last only for a single race and are willing to spend absurd amounts of time and money building it. I was reminded of this by Chas when we first discussed what was to be done about my engine situation. Scrawled above the dingy parts counter at Donsco was a slogan: “Speed costs. How fast do you want to spend?” It represented a kind of anti-salesmanship. If the usual method of the salesman is to insinuate himself into your favor, play on your hopes, and