Back at the end of 1969 I was a senior in high school. I worked in Docktor Pet Center at the mall, after school, cleaning poop out of bird cages and dog and cat cages. And stocking shelves. And wiping snot off animal faces and poop off their butts so that they didn’t look sick, and people would buy them. Not my brightest hour. And I made a whopping $1.25 per hour.

That gave me about $29 per week after taxes, to fritter away on whatever tickled my fancy. At that time, my fancy was a beater 1961 Simca, a French car, and I spent my money repairing it and putting gas in the tank so that I would be mobile, and could go to work.

One night I was in the garage working on my car, replacing the clutch slave cylinder, which was hidden behind the frame and the body panel, with a small gap big enough to be able to get my hand and wrist back there. And a wrench. I was working by feel, and had managed to get the old slave cylinder loose and out of there, and the new cylinder hooked up to the hydraulic lines and stuck back in place where it went, and had gotten all but the last bolt back on. I had the car up on a jack, the rear wheel removed, and was sitting hunched over in the wheel well, tightening the final bolt with the wrench held in my fingertips. As I was giving it the last push to seat the bolt, the wrench slipped, and I banged my hand against the frame and knocked my car off the jack that was holding it up. The car dropped onto my leg.

Fortunately, the Simca was a small light car, and though it was pinning my leg to the floor, it had not crushed me. I tried everything to lift the car up so I could slide my leg out from under, but I just could not get any leverage, and it wouldn’t budge. So I sat there pinned down for about 2 hours. I hollered but evidently nobody inside the house could hear me.

About 9 o’clock my dad came out the back door to throw the kitchen trash into the can, and when I heard him, I started hollering again. He came into the garage and saw me pinned under the car. To my complete amazement, he walked over to the wall where our garden tools were hung, and took down a shovel, and cussing at the top of his lungs about the mother%^#@*& French piece of shit car, began to whale away at the drivers door just to my left. He put some huge dents in the door, and broke off my rear view mirror with the shovel, while I sat there screaming “No, dad, don’t kill my car! Get it off my leg!” He finally came to his senses, and threw the shovel down, and grabbed the car by the wheel well and lifted it enough so that I could slide my leg out from under.

While I sat there on the floor holding my leg, he yelled at me for being a stupid a-hole for working on a car on a jack. Then he went inside and went to bed. He never even picked up the shovel. I slid my pant leg up, and though my leg was scraped up pretty bad, and bruised, it was ok. So I got the jack back in place, and put my wheel back on.

Tough love.

The new cylinder worked fine, and even though my door was seriously dented up, and I had no mirror, it ran fine. Which was good, because 4 months later I found my first girlfriend, and was glad to have it.

Do you think that kind of madness is genetic?