The Auto Repair Shop Waiting Room, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Mechanic
The original paperwork is long gone, but a lot of people who claim to know what they are talking about are saying that God got the idea for Purgatory from an auto repair shop waiting room.
He expanded on the idea of course, but the fundamental elements are there.
In that room we all sit, looking off into the distance, or sitting with our eyes closed, perhaps contemplating our sins, or watching daytime TV, an especially diabolical touch, but never ever letting our eyes meet our neighbors.
There is a reason for this and a word for the reason: it is ‘shame.’
No one should let their automobile get into the kind of condition that lands you here in this waiting room.
What were you thinking of?
The inmates here all have the same look of ‘hoo, boy,’ and can’t quit believe that our little string of errors have spiraled so far out of control.
Well, this is the way of things, just ask those fellows in the Greek tragedies, it’s always the little things that trip you up and get you slaughtered somehow in the last act. The big stuff, people just look the other way! But make a few small mistakes in the early going, and man, the plot is gonna get you.
We all know deep down in our hearts that if only we had attended to maintenance and changed the oil and swapped out the switch plugs or perhaps switched out the swap plugs or rotated the tires at every third full moon or either filled or emptied those little cavities that used to be in batteries and scraped the battery cable of corrosion and drove a hundred miles in reverse to even out the transmission or simply put oil on our face like war paint and stood in the driveway chanting, we wouldn’t be here.
There are things you are supposed to do with this car on a regular basis, it says right there in The Owner’s Manual, a religious document of sorts, containing all manner of commandments and rules of deportment, none of which you have attended to or for that matter even know how to look up in the index at the back.
There’s no telling what you should have been doing with this car, but you are fairly certain you haven’t been doing it because you have done nothing at all with this car.
The only time you are motivated to take action is:
a) When the volume control on the radio no longer goes high enough to drown out the clacking, thumping, grinding, squalling, or shrieking noises coming from the engine or on occasion from under the seat you are sitting on.
b) When the car no longer moves at all
c) When the car only moves but cannot stop
d) When actual engine parts you have seen – very rarely, but you have seen them – in the auto parts store windows as you fly by, actually extruding from the engine.
e) When you can see the white lines on the highway flash by under your feet through the hole in the floorboard.
Everything else that this car has thrown at you can be classified under the category of “Miscellaneous,” or “To Be Determined Later.”
It has made noises like some of devilish calliope, but you have shrugged to yourself and said, “well, who’s to say? Perhaps this car finds that music soothing. There is room for all types in the world.”
The undercarriage has made noises that you otherwise haven’t heard except in submarine movies when the captain decides to take her down far below a depth that she has ever been before and all the crew are deathly quiet and the engineer is especially all tensed up for some reason as the metal groans and moans and gives a kind of series of pre-buckling noises. Again, the radio turned up to full volume is an important maintenance tool here.
You have driven this car down the road as it issues a kind of fog of burning oil, a very small microclimate if you will, and thought nothing of it. It gets you where you want to go and that is all you ask of it.
If the driver’s door is jammed shut, you will enter through the passenger door. If that is also jammed you will enter through one of the back doors. Failing that you consider the back windshield and of course the trunk. Race car drivers endure far worse every time they squeeze themselves into those fast little cars and you’re no better than a race car driver, my friend, I think we can agree.
But these careful maintenance steps can only take you so far before your sins catch up with you I mean before it is time to get the damned thing into the dealership so that you can make each of the people there and the people they love, rich beyond their wildest dreams.
In that room – I’m back to this auto repair waiting room at the dealership – you are given plenty of time to dwell upon your personal failings.
You may say in the beginning, let us call this a period of about seven hours, that you were only living life to the fullest and grabbing for all the gusto you could. The attributes that landed you here in this room of medium tempo despair aren’t character flaws so much as they are lovable little nicks and abrasions that give your soul character.
At the end of the seven hours begins the second period of time, where you shake your fist at the sky and shout, “yes, I may have sinned, but my, how I have lived! Yes, lived, I tell you!”
That mood or frame of mind doesn’t last too long either, and at the end of it you are a sobbing heap, crying out that you didn’t know any better. It doesn’t help in in your misery you hear a voice from the clouds which say, “didn’t know any better? Didn’t know any better? Did I not give you an Owner’s Manual to live your life by?”
Right about this time, the sobbing heap period that I speak of, an oil-stained angel or devil enters the room, I mean mechanic enters the room, and all of you, all of you sinners who have been hanging their heads in shame, look up hopefully.
Maybe it is your luck to be escorted out of here and up into heaven proper, or at least be sent on your way with a total bill lower than the gross national product of at least a few small countries.
That is not the way it works in this room however. The man edges over to you – yes, directly to you, my friend – carrying a clipboard with any number of blank lines, all of which are checkmarked. It is part of the particular cruelty of this step that you think fleetingly that all those checkmarks mean that each of these components and systems have passed some sort of test with flying colors. You think you are home free!
Foolish mortal.
No one is home free. No one gets out of this room for under a grand and if you complain they’ll simply go out and find something else wrong with the car. Struts are always good, as in, “oh, I forgot to tell you that you need new struts, too, that’ll take you up to an even million dollars. Easy number to remember at least.”
In the dim recesses of your mind you recall a particularly hard-hitting sermon from your studies in early American literature, where this one preacher fellow made a point, an absolute point, of comparing you to a spider or other loathsome insect being held over a fire of some sort, ready to be dropped in at the slightest sign of poor comportment.
This mechanic fellow has a bit of that look, the look of the guy holding the spider I mean, and who’s to say there isn’t something to the notion?
No, all in all it is a religious as well as a mechanical and bankruptcy experience, one that you are likely never to forget. The memory of it improves your character substantially, and at those times in the future when you are tempted to forego rotating the tires, sparkplugs, car doors, or engine block, you can think back on this moment and choose the right path. – lsm 11.30.17
