Music and the Art of Car Repair

by David W. Berner

The one-car garage in my boyhood home has pockets of grease on the concrete floor. There’s a small spot, black with a translucent purple film around the edges on the ground where petroleum has dripped from the oil pan of my father’sPontiac. On the shelf against the rear wall are two toolboxes, one of them once belonged to my grandfather and other is Dad’s, and each overflow with myriad of tools, so many neither of the lids can be closed. And underneath the car, lying on a rectangular piece of plywood to protect him from the grimy floor is my father, holding a Craftsman wrench in his greasy hand. 

“Pass me the pliers on the ground there,” Dad says from beneath the front end of the car. I hear him, but I see only his dark brown work boots sticking out from the automobile’s shadow cast on the concrete. It reminds me of that scene from the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the East is smashed under Dorothy’s tornado-twisted house, only the witch’s feet protruding. 

I hand him the pliers. “How much longer, Dad?” 

There’s no answer to the question. Instead there’s another request. “On the shelf, near the toolboxes, is another set of pliers. They have silver handles. Get me those.” 

I push myself up from the floor, roll my eyes, huff, and slump my way to the shelving. 

“David,” Dad says, sensing my sour mood, his voice echoing slightly from deep below the open hood of his 1969 Fury, “Don’t you want to learn something about cars?” 

“Well…not really,” I say from the other side of the garage, picking up the tool he’s asked me to retrieve. It doesn’t feel like I’m really learning anything anyway. I’m just fetching tools. What’s there to learn? 

I reach under the car, handing him what he needs.  

“It’s okay,” he says, stretching an arm out to grab the pliers, still on his back, his eyes on his work, “You don’t have to be out here.” 

An hour ago he asked me to join him, wanting me there to help him make some repair to the fuel line, or the brake drums, or the pistons, or the radiator. I didn’t have any idea what he was trying to fix, didn’t bother to ask. From the moment he drafted me to help, I ached to be somewhere else, away from the garage’s odorous cocktail of gasoline and grease, wanting to be on the other side of the door to the basement, inside seated at the big upright grand piano. 

“You sure, Dad?” 

“Go,” he says, still buried under the car. 

The piano in the basement is a deep brown with a hint of what appears to be cherry wood. It has real ivory keys, yellowed by age. Of the three floor pedals, only two operate correctly, and the piano is perpetually out of tune, just enough off key that most anyone with a reasonably developed ear would notice. Dad bought the piano from an elderly woman who was a client of his when he worked in the insurance business. He gave her $35 for it, and it was up to Dad to get it out of her house. Not an easy job. But Dad had a plan. 

“Meet me at my office around 1 o’clock on Thursday afternoon,” he said to two of his buddies, refusing to enlighten them any more than that. They were good enough friends not to ask, showing up without questions. “Gentlemen,” he said when they arrived, “You’re going to help me move a piano.” 

Dad rented a pickup truck. And for nearly an entire afternoon the three of them pushed, pulled, and heaved the piano out of the lady’s home, lugging it only a few feet at a time, resting and then lugging it again. They somehow lifted it into the truck bed, probably with some sort of ramp device, drove the truck several miles and up the steep driveway of our house. My father had to remove the basement’s door jam in order to squeeze the massive instrument through the door and maneuver it against the just-long-enough basement wall directly adjacent to the outside door. Dad and his friends, foreheads glistening from perspiration and shirts discolored from the stain of sweat, sat on the floor and drank bottles of Miller beer, silently staring at the hulking upright, knowing it was the reason for the aching muscles they would have to endure the next morning. 

I sit on the round stool that matches the piano and play a C-chord, then thumb a C-note an octave below the piano’s middle, letting the sound ring out. I know Dad can hear the music, albeit muffled by a nearly closed basement door. Simultaneously, I hear the muted sounds of metal on metal, tools on steel, the notes of a counter melody coming from the other side of the door to the garage, I shape my fingers into a simple G-chord and again thumb a G-note one octave lower, allowing the clanging from the garage to fill in the harmonic spaces. 

Months before this, when I told my parents I was interested in playing the piano, they never hesitated to set up lessons, drive me every Tuesday night to Spratt’s Music - nearly seve