In the Waiting Room

After the service technician asked me if I wanted them to go ahead and change my windshield wiper blades, I knew I had made a mistake. He was just leaving the little cinderblock waiting room when I started to question his sincerity about “helping me out,” a phrase he’d used more times than I’d glanced at my watch while waiting for the auto maintenance experts to change my oil, which was all I’d come for in the first place. Now, as I leaned back against the uncomfortable plastic chair, small enough it might have been borrowed straight out of a kindergarten classroom, I felt as much the chump these people saw me as. Facing me, built into the wall, was a large glass window where I was supposed to be able to keep an eye on the mechanics, and as I watched gruff and intimidating men with names like Terry and Charlie and Reggie — anything, really, with a hard e sound at the end — lean under the open hood and slide beneath the car’s undercarriage, the window really did seem like a stupid idea.

It didn’t make sense to me that I was supposed to check up on the men servicing my car like nurses, gruffer perhaps, and with a better arsenal of dirty jokes, fluttering around hospital beds. If I knew anything about what they were doing, I reasoned, then I wouldn’t be here. I’d simply unscrew the whatchamacallit and drain the lightish-darkish, thickish-runnyish goop from the doomahicky myself, at home, where I did not have to sit in a chair designed for bodies a third of my height.

At the end of the room stood a TV cart, and strapped to its top was a thick gray box of a television. I watched it after perusing the only grabbing articles in magazines that ran the gamut from Maxim to Hot Rods, the latter having piqued my interest until I realized that it was about automobiles. On the television screen, Maury Povich talked to a young black woman who held a young infant to her chest. The child was kept from suckling directly from its mother on national television by what was supposed to be a tank top but really just amounted to a sheet of fabric stretched to cover her stomach and breasts. As she pulled it up repeatedly with her free hand, she spoke about how she knew nothing of who the real father might be, but that if he thought she wasn’t getting child support, he —

I was expecting to mother to say something like “He’s mistaken” or “He’s got another thing coming.” Instead, when the woman went to finish, her audio was replaced by a more publicly pleasing but decidedly less interesting buzzing sound. At first I thought she would just call the father a choice word or two, but as the noise went on and I watched her free hand start to move in sharp swaying motions in front of her face, I realized she had harsher words for the man, who was then paraded out on stage for some ensuing drama.

Whenever I watch television shows I try to judge each one on its own merits, as I can usually find something enjoyable in whatever is on. This, however, left a poor taste in my mouth, and I couldn’t help but think how stupid this was.

I felt so not from someplace above the woman and her until-now fatherless baby, but rather from my own experience feeling stupid. I never would have pegged myself as mentally challenged, as my stupidity came from both a lack of common sense and the fact that I’m prone to daydreams when I could be learning how to do something.

Ask anyone with whom I’ve been to a major city and they’ll tell you that I’m pretty much useless. When we’re trying to find our way around, it’s bad enough that I can’t figure out how to read a map for the city’s metro trains, but worse still is how while my companion is quickly deciphering where we are located on something so complex as a straight line labeled with street names, I’m standing off to the side thinking about how interesting it might be to meet someone famous or imagining what we’ll be having for dinner later that day.

“If you’d just pay attention,” my companion might say, “you could figure out how to read this so I wouldn’t have to be the one to figure out where we are all the time.”

Any number of people have told me this, and every time I fell slightly guilty. But when I try to make sense of things like maps or directions, I invariably end up giving myself a headache, resorting after a few long, drawn-out minutes to guessing where we’re at and going from there.

Through the window, two men in solid blue-gray jumpsuits laughed at something, and although they didn’t look over in my direction, I was sure they were talking about me.

“So, Terry,” Larry might be saying, “I just got the kid to agree to a new set of wiper blades.”

“That’s how many today, Jerry? Six? Eight? You’re on a roll.”

And then there was the knee-slapping laughter and the extra sixty dollars I’d see on my bill.

What bothered me about the whole thing was their lack of consideration. I was in my early twenties, and so it didn’t seem fair to assume that I might have extra cash to blow on new wiper blades when the ones I had worked. Mostly. Sure, my attire didn’t exactly peg me as poor, but I thought that a true gentleman would have at least warned me about the ridiculous cost. Besides, didn’t he know that I need to buy myself lunch and a new video game? Later, I would learn that, had I opted out of their suggestive selling, I could’ve walked into a department store a little more than a block away and purchased three sets of blades for about the same amount. And this was after the “special deal” Harry would manage to work out with his boss.

A commercial for Chevrolet trucks came on the television screen, and it made me think of my father, who drove a Chevy and had been blessed by the auto gods with a gift of knowledge about anything car-related. As I watched rugged, hairy men drive like maniacs over rocks, through streams, and in fields, I wished for the ability to take care of the things these men surely knew how to do. Replacing brake pads, changing oil, removing and reattaching a tire: these were all things those men could do and I could not. But then, as the seconds ticked away and a dusty, mud-caked pickup drove into a blood-orange sunset, I wished again: this time for my father to simply take care of these types of things for me.

The more I thought about how great it would be to tell my father about an issue — “the air conditioner isn’t blowing cold air” or “the dashboard is getting pretty dusty” — and have it magically rectified the next day, the more I realized it really would make me look quite inept. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have cared. Throughout high school, I had never pretended to know much about anything aside from maybe television shows or Stephen King novels, and even in my couple years of college I was more prone to sit back and let other people show off their smarts rather than risk embarrassing myself with an ill-supported answer or a response so far out of left field it might’ve come from the next town’s baseball diamond. This, however, was different.

Back in the auto shop, I watched as Harry crossed in front of the window and opened the door to the waiting room.

“Well,” he said, “everything’s ready.” And he grinned.

I arose from my little chair, feeling once again like an oversized man-child. Harry’s gaze reminded me somewhat of the look my father sometimes gave me, the one that said: I love you, but it hurts me how much you are retarded.

This was the same look he would give me when I did do something admittedly stupid. Like the time when I was ten and blended birthday cake, soda, and ice cream together to make the ultimate birthday float. Or the time I was eight or nine and, while playing in my bedroom, I fell off a chair and knocked the wind out of myself.

In the end, though, when Harry offered me his hand, I shook it. I went and paid my bill at the receptionist’s desk, and as I was leaving, keys jangling in my hand, I wondered how hard it might be to, say, change my car’s oil myself. It might be dirty, sure, but it would save me the displeasures of having to a) make appointments here and also b) be taken advantage of.

I knew it probably wouldn’t work when, stepping into the brightly lit showroom, I realized I was lost. I stood in the middle of the showroom with two doors on either side of me, and as I tried to figure out which one would take me out to my car, I stumbled around the floor, pretending to look at cars.

After almost five minutes and two car salesmen asking me if I had any questions, I picked a door and walked through it. I felt like a chump, vulnerable and childish. Changing my own oil would never work if I couldn’t even figure out how to get to my car. Stepping outside into the harsh light of day, I spotted it sitting next to a couple other cars with little numbered tags hanging from the rearview mirror. Luck had worked this time, but there was no guessing that I was — and am — pretty much helpless.