motorhead

how to blow a gasket

Photo by Kevin Dowling on Unsplash

It was a simple task: get dressed, fill a water bottle, stretch my painful Achilles tendons and calves, drive the car twelve minutes–not the eight I always imagine it might be if we lived in a different decade with different traffic patterns–and meet my friends to play a friendly game of tennis at a local park. But like usual, I was five minutes behind and thus stressed about making it on time. Showing up for friends merits care and attention, but this wasn’t like I was trying to make a life-saving surgery or a filing deadline or a boarding door about to close. Nonetheless, I gripped my wheel and drove like I was headed for the last boat back to civilization.

Just ahead of me, a red truck rolled along without a care in the world. Like it was not about to arrive five-to-ten-minutes late yet again, sealing a well-deserved reputation for tardiness. I seethed at the truck and its New York license plate and the Punisher sticker on its back window.

What did that sticker even mean? That the owner was into Marvel and kind of hates due process? I briefly thought about the car at my kid's preschool covered in stickers about being a feral vegan and radical sobriety and something about cats. That bothered me, too. And then that sticker of the character that pees on things. Same for the one that’s a depiction of the family inside the car. I’d recently passed a truck with the Statue of Liberty holding an AK-47 instead of a torch. How ridiculous it all was.

Leaning over the wheel now, I decided we needed to dispense with bumper stickers. The original Facebook. We should all talk less. And if we absolutely must share our thoughts, write a pamphlet like Thomas Paine or some theses like Martin Luther, for crying out loud. Keep our half-baked thoughts on cats and sparsely examined soft spots for vigilantism to ourselves like in the old days!

I swerved from behind the Ferdinand-the-Bull of red trucks into the open right lane. But just as I could feel the thrill of acceleration upon me, the car slowed, and I saw only white-ish smoke through my rear-view mirror. It was disorienting. Why couldn’t I see out the back of the car? A panic set in as I wondered whether I was hallucinating.

I whipped my head to the left to see the driver of the red truck–the same vehicle I’d just attempted to pass with great gusto–frantically pointing and mouthing, “pull over!”

Oh dear.

I parked next to the curb of the four-lane road, and the truck parked just ahead of me. Out of the car in my tennis skirt, I felt particularly vulnerable as I imagined the thoughts of drivers flying by us: woman destroys car in effort to get somewhere obviously not that important.

“Did it die on you?” The driver asked. He was a million feet tall and resembled Brad Garrett, the actor who played the older brother in Everybody Loves Raymond.

“No, no. I just turned it off.”

“Okay,” he said, wringing his hands, rattling off something about black smoke, blue smoke and white smoke. “White smoke, I hate to tell you, could mean you blew a gasket. Right when you, eh, started to accelerate. That’s gonna be an expensive one.”

Blew a gasket. The irony of red-truck-man telling me I blew a gasket–something I only understood as a euphemism for getting so worked up or angry about something that you effectively explode–was almost too much. Back in the car, I pulled ahead of the truck, and he followed me to an apartment complex parking lot where I’d wait for the tow.

“Do you have someone who can help you?”

“I do. Thank you. You really didn’t have to stop. But I appreciate it.”

“We’ve got to look out for each other in this fucked up world,” he said.

With that, the Brad-Garrett-Look-Alike hopped back into his truck, and I sat under a tree sweating with what had just transpired. Good thing I’d dressed for the occasion.

A head gasket, I later learned, is the seal between the engine block and the cylinder head that prevents various gases and liquids from mingling. When that seal is compromised, oil and coolant can leak causing all sorts of issues, including engine failure. And one of the signs that you’ve blown a head gasket is white smoke coming from the tail pipe.

A week later, the service center called me with an update, and I braced for the big reveal–a blown head gasket–and the price to fix it–likely in the several thousands of dollars.

“Ma’am, have you changed your oil recently?” the mechanic asked.

My stomach slalomed as I recalled how I’d filled my car with oil after the low-oil symbol came on the dash the week prior. And how I’d done that at least two other times before then.

“Because we don’t have you on record for a change since 2023. And the head gasket looks fine. But the oil was overfilled and spilled all over the engine, which caused the smoke.”

“Hmmm, odd,” I said, dancing out of a confession of my absolute incompetence.

With the car situation under control, I saw the signs I was at risk of blowing a gasket in that most metaphorical of senses: the repeated tardiness; the avoidance of preventative car maintenance; and playing tennis on painful Achilles tendons that at minimum required rest and possibly medical attention. But my cynicism about unhurried drivers and their bumper stickers may be the white smoke. I still reserve the right to hate on bumper stickers–honestly, they can be so stupid, but I’ll be more careful about letting that hate leak into my judgment about the people sporting them. Red-truck-guy may have been wrong about the blown head gasket, but he was right about this: we need to look out for each other in this world.

[books]

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Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff