I did not know it at the time, but the breakdown of my vehicle was one of those events that exploded in slow motion regarding how it affects other things in your life. Through the grapevine, I had heard that a person I knew on the island had a 73 Dodge pickup for sale for $75. I bought it promptly.
I had never bought a vehicle before. The couple of days leading up to picking it up were full of imagining how awesome it was going to be. My $75 purchase to me was a $2000 purchase of what I was expecting. As Dad and I sat at the kitchen table in the evenings, I talked about what I was going to do. Dad mentioned that since the transmission only had 2nd and 3rd gear, we could pull it out, bring it to Tom's Auto and he could weld the shift fork inside the transmission. That is what Cliff suspected the issue was. No 1st and reverse was not really a big deal to him. Port Aransas was a small island that was also flat. He never saw a reason to deal with it. I wish I had felt the same way.
"What is the first thing you will do when you get the truck, Mike?" Dad asked me as though he was interrogating me. "Put a stereo in." He smacked the palm of his hand on the table, "No! You are going to check those universal joints!" I felt stupid for not thinking of that. He was right. My not taking the importance of these things seriously cost me a lot. At this point, I had no idea how much.
I picked up the truck on Thursday. Dad told me to make sure of some basic things. At one point, he noticed a poor connection issue like a loose terminal or corrosion. He wisely told me that I needed to go over the secondary ignition system, battery, starter, relay, and cables and make sure all connections were clean and tight.
Friday night, we took the truck out and went out for a beer at the Gaff. Having only 2nd and 3rd gear and this being my first standard, I stalled it, a lot. When the truck would not start multiple times because the connections were so loose and dirty that the battery was not getting a charge from the alternator, and my Dad had to get out to push the truck each time to have me pop the clutch to get it started, by the third time he was so angry, it was a good thing he had never been exposed to an excess of gamma radiation.
There are some things you do as a kid in which your parent's reaction "fixes" you for the rest of your life. Here at 19 years old, this was one of those times. He was so mad that he told me to clean the connections and here he was having to push the truck on the flat ground repeatedly because I did not listen and because I could not drive a standard. I was maybe 120 pounds, he could push the truck better than I could. For lessons sake, he did have me push it a time or two. Needless to say, he drove the point home about cleaning and tightening electrical connections. It was one of those moments like learning from your father when he simply asks you to hold a flashlight when he is trying to do something.
That weekend, I removed the driveshaft and pulled the transmission, with Dad's help, and brought it over to Tom's shop. A couple days later we stopped in for a beer and Tom had the transmission in a hundred pieces on the bench. It was not the shift forks, there were broken parts throughout and the transmission needed a full rebuild. It would be better to just get another from a junkyard.
The day we had waited for came in which Brooke arrived at the airport and she began her life with us in Port Aransas. We were so excited to have her come home, we had her room all set and she started school right off. She instantly made friends with so many people and just as was evident last month when she visited with Grandma, Brooke was perfect for Port Aransas.
The quest for a transmission for the truck began to get weird. It turns out, back in the '70s, Mopar had contracted parts for their trucks out to smaller manufacturers and there were actually many different 3-speed transmissions out there. Because of that, different size driveshafts, cross members, and splines were involved. I bought a transmission for $15 from someone, but it was twice as long as the one in the truck. What I should have done was bring my driveshaft to Corpus Christi Driveshaft and had one altered to make it work, but this type of problem was above my abilities at the time. I am sure I drove my father nuts by just talking about options all of the time.
There were so many junk yards in Corpus back in those days. I went from one muddy junkyard to another. It seemed like it took a month of searching. 11 years later that seems like 30 years gone by, and I will be here again, and for much more serious and devastating reasons. I finally found a transmission that was the exact same as the one that came out of the truck, it was painted safety orange and cost $150. We were all along expecting to pay about $50. That was met by a "you paid what?" moment with my father when I returned home with it. There were three of us in the house now and he was expecting me to help out at least a little with expenses as I had promised I would way back last summer when I convinced him that we needed to move out of the little cottage.
As the years have gone by, I have worked on vehicles, every aspect of them, engine, driveline, electronic, body, interior, you name it. Back here in 85, I was in my automotive repair infancy. I had a great consultant, but my confidence was null. I did not understand that when you work on mechanical things like this, it is a test of wills and that the only way to succeed, is to win that test. Not understanding this, anything I did with this truck took many times longer than it should have. In fact, I spent more time talking about what I was doing than actually doing it.
Once the transmission was in and a floor shifter was installed, I took it to work only to realize this thing leaked a great deal of oil. I set my sights on doing the oil pan gasket. I fought and fought with it, cut myself, whined, and complained. Finally, my Dad having heard this constant complaining, told me to follow him. He was calm. He went outside, slid under the truck, took the motor mount nut off, put a hydraulic jack and block of wood under the crank pully, lifted the engine 2 inches, and slid the oil pan out. He counted the connecting rod bolts (I had found one in the oil pan and was spinning out because of it). Everything was where it should be. He told me, that installation was the reverse of the removal and went back into the house.
I learned so much more than just the mechanical part of this. He let me complain and then just showed me how to take action and how simple that was imprinted in my brain a starting point that would help me from this point on. To this day, I don't know how he tolerated my complaining and overreaction, but he did and did it so well.
The truck always seemed to have some reason why it could not be my commuting vehicle. The long daily drives with the Chrysler with the big block 440 in it continued, meanwhile, spring break ravaged the island.
Brooke meshed into life at Port Aransas High School in a way that said still yet again, she was meant to be here. She made friends with people in her class immediately and at the time, became best friends with a girl named Sandy whom I met at the Gaff on that night we celebrated my father's birthday back in December. The night her stepfather was threatening to physically harm me if I did not get up from the table.
Brooke just fell into our "modified" routine with ease. I say modified because I was pretty much the same, but Dad on the other hand, had shifted even more into the responsible, calm, and focussed father, now that he had a 15-year-old daughter to look out for. It was remarkable. I was beginning to understand why everyone had pulled me aside last year and told me how incredibly my father had changed because I was also now seeing it happen even more so. Do not misunderstand, he was still Joe, but the calmer side in him cooked off a lot longer now and he was certainly above so much of the drama that he would not have ignored in the past.
I arrived in Port Aransas last year at the end of June. The months that followed were acclimation and getting to know my Dad and him getting to know me. Once 1985 came, the theme changed. 85 was the year I was fire-tested, in every way possible. I had missed a bunch of lessons growing up because my father was not with us. This year, I entered a crash course to make up for lost time. Work, auto-mechanics, and life, the reckoning was coming and there was nothing I could do about it except go through it all. It was only just beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment