Knuckles are split open. Cracks in the skin so savage they seem to need stitching. Yet bloodless, cauterized by work. Their handshakes are puffy; calluses rasp you. On walls, on bills, as seasoning on a bolted sausage hero, greasy fingerprints leave a spoor that gives away their presence. At below zero horny flesh works stiff car hoods up, metal so cold it scalds. Brutal damn way to earn a living and they must please, as coy women do: grin their chapped lips, come again some time. Military sounds of a lug tightener; hydraulic, pneumatic flatulences. The highway outside insisting that they wish, wish, wish. Inside, yawned-up hoods say aaah, surgical cloths spread over their fenders. Summertime there is a sweetness to the impregnated concrete, like old drawers packed with strong male sachet. I’m crazy: I love the smell of gas. It’s a solvent for my congestions. And I admire them. What they do astonishes both my understanding and my poor dexterity.
The service station has been a tworoom school house. Vocations are learned there. I watch one twelve-yearold boy hold a smoking brake shoe. His father teaches: The hand is blackened already, but agile with pleasure. The internal combustion engine has been a way of life. Close acquaintance with it affords dignity, economic freedom and screw the high-school diploma. Automotive mechanics is just about the one manual trade not debased by sneering elitists. Speed, horsepower exhilarate: become love. I kid WFB Jr. when he re-angles a sail on Cyrano: Yachts get souped up differently, but they get souped nonetheless. Hot-rod fever of another sort, gracefully wind-silent. And I suppose my paragraphs have their points filed down, ideally blasting mufflerless across the page. Those pillboxes, the triple totems in front, are adjuncts of a secular priesthood: Their filth anoints. And we are losing them.
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