7160. BELOW THE WATERLINE (pt.4)

BELOW THE WATERLINE
(pt. 4)

I may have been dreaming yes, but because I couldn't

tell, I knew it was real. In those days, the ones I'm

talking about, there were different ways of thinking  -

my father's old car, for instance, the one he'd switched 

engines by himself in, at the top of the driveway at home, 

with a self-constructed engine hoist he'd made from

steel tubing, set up with three-legs of steel, and an

overlapping chain-pull he ran with a lever. I was

awed, just watching that loosened engine, freed of its

motor-mountings and loose of the transmission, all that

work done by him too, slowly being lifted out, straight

up, out of the engine compartment and right up past

the car and above, hanging their like a Thanksgiving 

frozen turkey or something. That big, old car, sitting

there now, emptied of its guts, looked unlike anything

else I'd ever seen. My father swung the old engine out

of the way somehow, and by two days later, going back 

the reverse fashion of how the other one had come out,

the new engine he'd bought and chained up on the ground,

was also lifted, swung into its place, and slowly, lever pull

by lever pull and click by click, was dropped into its new 

place as, by another week's end, the connections and tightenings 

were all made, and the transmission too bolted into its properly

torques place at the rear of the engine housing. I didn't say

much, but I watched. All up and down my block, I now knew

that entire Inman Avenue crowd, all those guys coming and

going each day, fathers just like mine, they all drove the same

sort of rigged contraption  -  a car that, like anything else, if

broken down to its most minute components one step at a

time, could be deconstructed, altered, fixed, parts replaced, and

all the rest. The entire 'one-unit' mystique of automobile  -  and,

for that matter  -  everything else, was gone. Universe, machines,

buildings, trains, the entire concept of the world I lived in, I sensed,

was a creation, at one level, of man  -  tinker-point by tinker-point, 

the infinitesimal meeting of hard object and fixed object, piece 

by structured piece, was an almost clockwork-like amalgam of world 

and time. It could all be done, and re-done, worked over and changed. 

A seven-year-old street brat like me takes note : everything is up 

for grabs. This life could never be the same.