The Memory Hole

oil change.

The first proper high school era post.  It had to happen sometime.  I had even less adventures that involved other people in high school than the few I did in college, so expect these to be relevant to nobody but me.  Anyway, here goes.

May of 2004.  Senior year.  Things were getting closed to being wrapped up.  By now, colleges had been chosen and life plans were finally starting to fall into order.  High school was at the very brink of tipping off into the past for us.  Just a few weeks.

But for nerds like me, the studying never could stop.  No, especially not now, because even though we had already done our SATs, our SAT IIs, and everything else, we still had our AP exams.

I guess I can’t knock those AP exams.  Ultimately I got to skip a bunch of core classes at UH since I actually did get credit for them, so perhaps all that work paid off.  While suckers wasted time in English 100 or whatever, I got that shit out of the way in high school.  And the AP classes were actually some of the only decent courses offered at my high school, so I actually “got” something out of my public school education, as cheesy as that sounds.

Anyone remember Tokita always telling us about stating our “plan of attack” right after our thesis?  No?  Okay, well I’ll carry on, then.

Anyway, this isn’t directly about AP exams.  But that is when it happened.  Well, actually it was the day before the exam.  I think the exam was on a Tuesday, and it was Monday afternoon.  The cool thing about AP exams were that we got the day off from school, so the next day was “free,” although it wasn’t really since we had to take these big fat tests.

But I felt like I had a little free time that day, because at least I didn’t have any homework.  I suppose I could have studied, but with most of the subjects, well, wait, was it English Literature that year? Or Composition? Pretty sure it was English Literature, US History, and Calculus senior year, but I could be wrong since we did some junior year as well.  But anyway, I didn’t feel like there was a lot to study.  For English and History, it was all about writing essays for the most part, you could memorize “facts” for some things but in the end I never was one to cram like that.

My car needed an oil change.  I always tried to keep up with that.  Hey, I was a teenager in high school and I had a car.  As surprising as it may seem, I really appreciated that fact.  Since I never really had a job in high school, and I always spent what little money I came across on stupid stuff, I probably would have never saved up for a car on my own.  It had been given to me by my grandma, and so I tried to take care of it.

I didn’t know jack shit about cars, and in fact I still don’t.  But somehow the importance of changing your oil got into my head and I tried to be really diligent about it.  I don’t know why I never paid the $30 or whatever it was to get Jiffy Lube to do it, but I did it by myself.

Again, I know nothing about cars and I’m not very good with machines in general.  I’m clumsy and I’ve broken more things than I’ve fixed.  So why did I ever even start changing my own oil?  But hey, you know what, I actually had done it two or three times by myself just fine.  It was kind of cool in a manly way, even though I think it was my mom who actually taught me how to do it.  She was always breaking down those gender barriers.

It was cool to buy the Fram oil filter in its little orange box, and the oil I would need the day before.  To get under the car, drain out the old oil (and make a mess of everything in the process), and then change the filter.  Actually, the filter was always the hardest part, I had a special oil filter tool to help me with it just because it was in such an impossible spot on my car.

So since I had no homework, and I guess I wanted to get my mind off of the exams the next day—which did make me quite nervous—I decided to change my oil.  Even having done it before, I always consulted the manual before doing it.  Drain the old oil.  Remove old filter, install new filter.  Put in new oil.

Okay, so I did that.  Got under, put the drip plan, undid the little bolt and the black oil started coming out.  After it stopped, I got to work on that dumb filter, finally got it off, then managed to get the new one one, and finally I put some new oil in.

Everything seemed to go fine, just as it had before.  I decided to go for a quick drive just to make sure everything was okay.  I start the engine up, everything is purring fine.  The oil pressure thing seemed to be a bit higher than I was expecting, but nothing outside of safe ranges.  I just let it idle for a few minutes, no problems.  Seemed okay to go for a little drive.

I got to the top of the little hill outside my house, and at first everything seemed hunky dory.  I decided to take a cruise around the Koloa bypass road, and that’s where things started to get weird.  The engine was revving really high, and then it seemed like I was losing power.  I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. 

“Oh shit, I fucked up my car.”  It was all I could think.

I barely made it home, it would stop, sputter, jitter, and do all kinds of weird things.  I slowly nursed the car home at like five miles an hour.  I tried to drive it up the hill again, I don’t know why, and this time it wouldn’t even go up.

I was already stressed because of the impending exams, but now, shit, I had fucked up the single largest and most valuable possession I had ever been responsible for.  I was freaking out.  I think I called my mom crying that I had broken my car.

Eventually, it got worked out, I think I borrowed the Intrepid (was it my Grandpa’s by that point?) for the exam the next day, since I needed some way to drive myself to the KCC campus to take the exam.

I was still freaking out, thinking that I had probably destroyed my car’s engine and that I no longer had a car, and it was going to cost thousands of dollars to fix.  I had looked up my problems online, and I figured it was a problem with the oil and the pistons had blown or something and it was all really fucked up.

Fortunately my grandpa let me use his car to go to school and stuff too, since by that point I was way too cool to be seen on a schoolbus.  I had basically no money, so my mom paid to have the car towed to some repair shop the day after the exam. I remember they came and put it on the back of like a flatbed truck and I remember thinking I didn’t even have the money to pay for the tow, forget about the repair itself.

I think a lot of it was handled by Tony actually, and for that I’m super thankful.  Either way, it was later that day, when they called me up.  It was about my car.

“Did they find out what the problem was?” I asked.  I can’t remember if I was talking to Tony or my mom, but I think it was Tony, actually.  He said, “Yeah, well, they took a look and they actually got it fixed up.”  ”What was wrong?”

“Well, they discovered that the car had about two times the amount of engine oil it should have, and absolutely zero transmission fluid.  So actually the cost of the repair was just the price of an oil change and a few bottles of transmission fluid.  The car’s good to go.”

There was a bit of laughter just barely bubbling under the words as he said them, because it was a funny situation.  I had been freaking out the whole time about thousands of dollars and a whole new engine, and in reality it was about $30, I think.  The tow did actually cost more than the repair, as I recall.

So that was it.  I had been racking my brain trying to figure out what I had done wrong, thinking maybe I put in too much oil or that the filter wasn’t on properly or what.  As it turns out, I had undone the wrong valve underneath the car, and had drained the transmission fluid out instead.  Then I just added new oil to the still-present old engine oil.  Like I said, I was stressed out due to the exams, and I guess my mind was just in other places at the time.

To Toyota’s credit, even after driving around a few miles on zero transmission fluid, after everything was sorted out, the car ran perfectly again.  I was able to use my car for the last few weeks of school, and thank god for that.

From that point on, I always paid for an oil change.  Forget about being a man, forget about the satisfaction of doing something yourself, I never wanted to be stressed out like that again about my car.

I always felt really stupid about it, though.

That’s a lot of words for what I basically could have said as “in high school I accidentally drained my car’s transmission fluid instead of the engine oil when doing an oil change and I thought my car was destroyed” but I’m in a rambling mood, I guess.

death of a bird.

When I was a teenager, I engaged in a vast amount of stupid activities involving motor vehicles that were dangerous, reckless, and could have ended in the deaths of myself, my friends, and innocent bystanders.  But I don’t think that I am too unique in this regard, at least when it comes to those of us who grew up in America.

I think about that now.  Here in Taiwan, kids don’t get their licenses until they’re 18, and even then, they all just usually drive mopeds.  It’s probably for the best, but still, those years in high school, where my friends drove first, and then I finally drove.  I didn’t even particularly love it, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have a big impact on growing up.

Anyway, that’s not what I intend to write about.  This story does take place in high school though, probably senior year but we could have been juniors, too.  I was driving by then, and I couldn’t get my license until my birthday in junior year, so it was definitely after that.  I had my 4Runner, Big Blue, although at the time she wasn’t called that.

After I started driving, sometimes, when I’d spend the night at my dad’s house during the week, I’d wake up early, and go get breakfast at Camp House Grill at 6:30 or whenever they opened.  I’d eat and then head off to school.  It would still be early then.  I don’t know why I would always try to go to school so early.

I suppose part of it is that I am just a nerd.  School was comfortable for me.  I also just definitely have anxiety about being places on time.  It’s why I prefer to be an hour and a half early to places, even now, rather than chance even being one minute late.  I don’t like the feeling of rushing, I guess.  And I hated the rush hour traffic heading into town that came with going to school later.  Going early meant I could beat all that, get a good parking space, and just chill out and study or goof off at school.

Getting back to the main story, John would also sometimes join me for a Camp House breakfast at the time.  I’m not sure why he would be up and headed to school so early too, but he was.  I don’t think the things I just described in the previous paragraph were true of him, at all.  I want to guess that it had something to do with his girlfriend at the time, something like that she was there early too and they could hang out more easily in those school mornings since her parents were strict, but I could be completely wrong on that.

So yeah, this wasn’t a very regular occurrence, since at most I was at my Dad’s house in Kalaheo once a week, and John wasn’t there every time I went.  But we did the Camp House breakfast every so often.  Then afterward, we would both drive to school, each in our respective vehicles.

I don’t know why, but we would sometimes try to “race” each other.  I use the danger quotes because really neither of us were going anywhere fast.  My V6 SUV couldn’t get anywhere fast and John’s V4 Civic wasn’t necessarily a speed demon, either.  Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty sure both of us loved our respective vehicles, but they weren’t tricked-out, souped-up race cars.  But we had a habit of doing these stupid little fake drag race-esque things, usually wherever there was a truck bypass lane or something, since most of Kauai’s roads are just one lane.

It was stupid, and it was probably unsafe, too.  But especially in these early mornings, where the roads were clear, we couldn’t help ourselves.

And I remember one such time, we left from Kalaheo and headed down into Lawai valley.  Right after the intersection with Koloa Road, when you headed back up the hill on the other side of the valley, there was that truck bypass lane.  I started out ahead, staying in the left lane.  John ducked out on the right hand side, into the slow lane and pounded it.  His car was light, and pretty quick at accelerating up the hill.  On the other hand, my heavy beast of a vehicle was doing its best to pull itself up, but there was no doubt I was falling behind.

It was a nice, crisp Thursday morning, and despite the fact that I was losing, there wasn’t much wrong in the air as I watched the green hatchback pull away from me in the right hand lane.  It was just good fun.  Then, suddenly, there was something in the air.

No really, it was a bunch of birds, taking flight.  They must have been resting on the side of the road or something, and were startled by the sudden approach of two cars with their engines roaring.  Like I said, the roads were quite empty at those times.  So they all were taking off.  I was further behind, so I wasn’t too close to them, but I also got to watch the whole thing unfold.

John’s Civic was passing through the flock, and for a moment it looked like everything would be fine—that all the birds would make it through clearly.  But we were going pretty fast.  And I guess he was going too fast for one of the birds to make it.

All I saw from my car was a sudden plume of feathers erupt from John’s car.

“Holy shit!” I yelled to myself as I witnessed it.

I remember we pulled off into the parking lot of K-Mart when we finally made it to town, and inspected the surprisingly little remains of the bird that had been splattered on his windshield.  He told me it sounded like a rock when he hit it, and he had thought the windshield itself might break.

Fortunately for him though, the vaporizing body of a bird that size apparently does not carry enough mass or force to shatter a windshield.  I think we tried to clean it off as best as we could in that parking lot, although that mostly consisted of pulling away stray feathers and whatnot.

It wasn’t a major thing.  It was just some pigeon or a bird like that, tens of thousands probably get run over every day by cars.  It wasn’t like either of our lives were in danger or anything, either.  So I don’t know why it stuck with me so much.

I admit I always have had a soft spot for birds, but I don’t think that was really why, either.  I felt bad for the bird, surely, and it was a death of an animal as a result of our stupid driving behavior.  But it didn’t hang heavy on my soul or anything like that.

Yet I always remember it.  I still think about it.  The memory of the feathers just erupting in a cloud around his car, when both of us had our pedals to the metal, I don’t know, it stuck with me.

So here it is.