The Apollo was never the same after the long drive to Trinity. Its frame and body had been built for work on a farm, not interstellar travel. The metal was old and tired, and rust had been working on it for over 20 years. The clutch went out just before school started, and Marty had to spend his Labor Day weekend finding someone who could fix it. Julie didn’t want to try it, but she recommended a mechanic who used to work on race cars. Dale was a nice guy, and liked Marty’s ride so much he gave him a discount so he could spend a few hours seeing how they put a Corvette engine in a ’55 Chevy truck. He did a thorough diagnostic, and said the differential was low on fluid (whatever that was), and he found a little water in the oil, but wasn’t sure where it came from. He told Marty if he had any problems to give him a call right away.
A few weeks later, the Apollo started misfiring, and cutting out at a low idle. It restarted fine, but was running a little ragged. By now Marty was attuned to the vibrations emanating from the powerful motor. He called Dale and was told to bring it by after school. He worried about it all day because it didn’t feel right, and by now he was understandably paranoid about mechanical failure. He drove straight to Dale’s shop after school, and his fears were confirmed: there was more water in the oil! The tattooed mechanic with long hair poked around under the hood for a while, then emerged with that sad doctor-giving-bad-news look on his face, and announced: “I’m afraid it’s not running on all its cylinders,” he sucked through his teeth sympathetically and drew in a breath. “I’ll have to take the head off to find out, but there could be a crack in the block.”
“A crack?” Marty swallowed hard, “Hey, my VW bus had a crack in its engine, too! Do all cars get cracks in their engines?” He looked suspiciously at the other cars in the shop.
“No, it’s pretty rare,” Dale assured him, “I can’t be sure it’s a crack yet, but that would explain the water in the oil.”
“How much is this gonna cost?” Marty cried, mentally calculating how many guinea pig cages he’d have to clean to keep his rocket ship on the road. He’d quit selling doobies at school… it just wasn’t worth the risk.
“Well, if you can leave the truck with me for at least a week, I could work on it in between other jobs and charge you a lot less.”
“A w-week?” Marty stuttered, as he speculated privately: how will I get to work? He’d grown accustomed to driving wherever he wanted, and hadn’t hitchhiked in a long time.
“Two weeks is even better,” Dale nodded. Marty hesitated, so he added, “Tell you what, it’s almost closing time. I live in Fairfax, so I’ll drive you home. It’s best if you don’t drive it and make it any worse. You can think about what you want to do, and call me tomorrow, okay?” That was nice of him, and Marty agreed.
On the drive home, he confided that Julie called him a ‘car virus,’ and Dale laughed with genuine empathy. “Well, you’ve got an old truck there, but that’s a sweet engine, and worth saving.” He’s probably sizing me up to see how much money I’m willing to spend, Marty considered cynically, as the financial impact of another major repair began to gnaw on his wallet. Dale drove his new best customer all the way down the dirt road to his house, with a Jeep wagon that handled the ruts and potholes quite well. Marty hopped out and thanked him, saying he’d talk it over with his sister and call him the next day.
Julie agreed with Dale’s assessment and plan. “With water in the oil, there could be a crack in the engine block but it could mean other things too,” she offered. “I’d let him take a look, at least. Maybe it’s just the water pump.”
“Water pump?” Marty questioned, “It’s a truck, not a fountain!” It always astonished him how many parts there were in a car, and how they all had strange names. Imagine how many pieces it took to build a real rocket! Or how much wire! At least the parts of a car had American-sounding names, instead of the pretentious Latin names for human anatomy he was forced to learn in Biology. It was easier to understand the nature of a water pump than an esophagus. The esophagus was such a gross part of the body, when you really thought about it… reminds me of a snake eating a rat… “What?” Julie had been speaking to him the whole time. Marty’s mind had more twists and turns than a python.
“I said, Dale can get a discount on parts.” Her face was growing red with mild impatience. Julie didn’t start many conversations, but she liked to end them with a definitive word. Marty told her he’d already decided to let Dale work on it, and that he was quoting a good price. She asked him how much and he told her. She nodded, “Yup, that’s good. He sounds honest, and has a good reputation.”
When Marty called the next day, Dale had to give him the worst news of all. It wasn’t something minor! He had checked the water pump, and all the easy things, and found nothing. The cylinder head had to come off to learn more. For Marty, that would mean the full two weeks without his truck! What can I do, he puzzled. I can’t sell it now, because nobody will buy a car that could possibly have a cracked block. He’d have to find out what it was and either sell it at a loss or fix it. Marty had quite an emotional investment in the Apollo by now, and identified with it as a badge of honor. As always, when his brain was backed into a corner, he tried to think his way out. He knew he could get a ride with Mike to school, but would have to take the bus to San Rafael, in order to get to work at the pet store (he couldn’t miss any available hours, now). He could bring food from home and save on lunches, too. Getting back to Lagunitas would be the only problem on days when Marge wasn’t working. Sigh. There was always his right thumb.
So, Marty’s junior year of high school started with more bad luck, his classes sucked, and he had to take the bus like a dweeb. Not a great way to boost the ol’ teenage morale. He was hoping to gain some traction on the slippery social slopes of school that semester, but his transportation situation wasn’t going to help. Instead, he had tons of new textbooks to lug around in his briefcase. He intended to broaden his horizons that year, and possibly hook up with a new group of friends who shared his interests. Especially female ones. He searched everywhere in the halls of Drake for a friendly face, but nearly every girl looked away when he tried to catch her eye. He began to feel hideous, like Quasimodo wandering the streets of Paris.
Marty was extremely self-conscious about his appearance – especially the ubiquitous acne. He morbidly obsessed over his zits in the mirror every night, gooping on lots of Clearasil and hydrogen peroxide, but nothing worked. When he felt like trying sandpaper or paint remover, he figured it was time to take a break from remodeling his face. He simply had oily skin, which erupted constantly on his face, like volcanoes on the surface of a young planet.
He called Dale every day after school for a progress report. The news got worse and worse. It seemed his truck’s fancy 327 Corvette engine had a “casting flaw” in it. Dale explained that when pouring the molten steel into the mold for the block, an air bubble must have been trapped as it cooled. “This bubble was right between two of the cylinders,” he used his hands to illustrate the design of an internal combustion engine. “This is like having a hole in one of your heart’s valves.” Marty thought he was joking or playing charades, until the seriousness of the diagnosis smacked him upside the head like a piston. All night, he wondered if his truck needed a heart transplant, and Julie wasn’t home to ask for advice. By the next morning he was glum and crestfallen, and he trudged glumly from class to class, head down. Mike drove him to the repair shop after school.
“Look on the bright side, man,” Mike intimated by way of advice, “Now you can ask chicks for rides in their cars!” Marty’s love life was marooned in space, and everyone was making jokes.
He must have looked pretty despondent by the time they got to the shop. “Hey, don’t look so defeated, man!” Dale tried to cheer him up, “I have an idea!” He explained how he could bore out the two cylinders and make them wider, and insert two sleeves (like sections of hardened steel tubing), effectively making a new cylinder wall to house the pistons.
As this arcane speculation filtered through his mind’s carburetor, Marty’s mood shifted from inconsolable to incredulous. “That’s amazing, will that work?” There was hope! He felt like cheering, but that would be a poor negotiating tactic. “How much is this gonna cost?” he muttered, with the best tone of doubtful frugality he could muster. He knew he was letting his emotions get the better of his wallet. He should take that old truck and its faulty engine behind the barn and put it out of its misery. There were plenty of cars in the world. But he loved the Apollo, and everything it stood for, and would foolishly spend any sum to keep it intact. How often do you find a ’55 Chevy truck with a Corvette engine in it? It was his own American Graffiti, NASA icon, and phallic symbol, all rolled into one!
“If I can’t get this thing back on the road, you don’t have to pay me,” Dale promised, and that was good enough for Marty. The long-haired mechanic exuded a pirate biker vibe with his muscles and tattoos, but was extremely forthright, and had an air of trustworthiness that was comforting. Later, when Marty explained the situation to Julie, she got pretty excited about his plan, and he could tell she loved to work on cars as much as Dale. She was still a “journeyman” mechanic – meaning at the learning stage – but she could appreciate an intricate problem that demanded a creative solution. The auto industry was going to need some new terms to describe its workforce soon, because Julie was a journeywoman on a mission to someday open her own auto repair shop.
One downside of the plan was that Marty would be without his truck for another couple of weeks, to let Dale work on it when he had spare time (so Marty could still get the discount rate). This presented an opportunity to stay longer at school and study hard to bring his grades back up to where he knew they could be, but some of his teachers were so distasteful that he refused to put in the effort to get a good grade. For example, his chemistry teacher. She had a last name like a bad Scrabble tray, so everyone just called her Mrs. T. She hated drugs and rock & roll – a fact she made acidly clear on the very first day, while glaring basely at Marty and Dave: the only bleacher creatures to qualify for her class.
“Anyone who comes to my class stoned (she tweaked her fingers in derisive air quotes) will be marched off to the principal’s office immediately. I can smell it!” She actually stamped her foot for emphasis, put her hands on her hips, and glowered at Marty and Dave. They exchanged nonplussed glances, as if they just heard their grandmother fart at the dinner table. It was true they had boasted radical bong hits right before class, but they totally felt they could handle it. Hell, they experimented in chemistry all the time! Still, they couldn’t help feeling like the Scarecrow and Tin Man, trembling before the Wicked Witch of the East.
“What’s her problem, dude?” Dave asked after class. He was sniffing the collar of his jacket to check if he reeked.
“She’s been around chemicals too long, man,” Marty postulated, smelling the ends of his hair, “I think she lost a few brain molecules along the way.”
Marty visited Dale again after school, and his stomach fell into his pants when he saw his truck’s engine in a thousand pieces, and a big chest cavity under the hood where its Corvette heart used to be. Dale said he was making good progress, but it sure didn’t look like it. Marty just had to wait, but was about as patient as a chicken in a popcorn factory.
Another class he didn’t like was advanced history – even though he loved learning about the past. It could have been an interesting experience, because the teacher was the only one in the district – perhaps the entire state – who was allowed to smoke pot at school! Mr. Kim had glaucoma, and petitioned the district for the right to smoke medical marijuana, which was proven to alleviate his condition. The students spoke of this in psychic awe, as if he had traveled to another dimension, or come back from the dead. The only problem with his legendary status was that he was a complete asshole. Wickedly sarcastic and demeaning to his students, he ridiculed anyone who spoke out loud in his classes. His goal was total domination, as if to compensate for some profound feeling of alienation. He basically ranted nonstop about history for 50 minutes, daring anyone to resist his tirade. Students were expected to be silent, take notes, and write a paper twice a week according to the official guidelines. For Marty, that just plain rubbed his chaps the wrong way.
“Mr. Kim, may I go to the bathroom?” He began to ask this every day when he got a hankering to trip his teacher’s trigger; usually just after the filibuster started. That particular question was the only allowable interjection in Mr. Kim’s class, but he resented the timing, which he knew was intentional. Oh, he did not like it one little bit, Marty could tell with satisfaction. The autocratic instructor resented even more that it was a request he could not deny.
One day, Mr. Kim commanded hotly, “Mr. White, you will learn to use the bathroom before class!”
“Oh is that what we’re supposed to learn here? I thought it was history.” Everyone laughed except Mr. Kim, who glared bloodily through his red eyes until it got uncomfortably quiet in the room.
Soon after that, in Mr. McIntosh’s office, the exasperated dean rolled his eyes and exclaimed, “You again?” He lectured Marty briefly on being respectful of the teachers, and then abruptly changed course. “C’mon, Marty, you’re one of the smartest kids in school!” He waved expansively at his file. “I’ve seen you get terrific grades before. Don’t you want to go to college?” His eyes flashed with concern and incomprehension, as if Marty was refusing a seat in a lifeboat.
He promised Mr. McIntosh he would stop harassing Mr. Kim. The former was a nice guy and the latter was an asshole, but the world needed assholes, or else it would be full of shit all the time. Anyway, he dealt with enough of that at the pet store. When it came to dealing with shit, he was a professional! Predictably, a scorned Mr. Kim treated Marty quite coldly after the thwarted bathroom rebellion. By the end of the quarter, many students took the opportunity to transfer to another teacher’s class, but they still had to write a final paper to get their grade. Since Marty usually spent the entire time in his class reading MAD magazine behind his textbook, he couldn’t care less about what his crazy teacher had been trying to cram down their throats for 2 months. So, he got really stoned at home, and made up an incredible yarn about the manifest destiny of the U.S. after the Louisiana Purchase, concluding that Lewis & Clark were abducted by the same aliens who kidnapped Pocahontas, and they all started a colony on Mars. Mr. Kim handed back his paper with a triumphant grin – the first time Marty had ever seen him smile. “I understand you,” he said, wagging his finger. On the top of his paper, in bold red ink, he had written, “You have a vivid imagination,” next to a huge F. That particular turd would stink up Marty’s transcript for life.
Mr. Kim’s opinion didn’t matter to Marty one bit, and grades were just another way to keep score in a game he didn’t want to play. All he cared about at that time was getting his truck back on the road so he could have a life again. He was tired of being a bottom feeder in an ocean of love, and he needed that particular truck to attract a girlfriend – or so he had convinced himself. He surely wasn’t going to attract anyone on his own, he brooded morosely, while obsessing over his zits in the mirror. He didn’t need any zonked-out teacher to drag him down… he was already an expert at that!