Minneapolis Technical College
In 1996 I quit my job and went to auto mechanic school at Minneapolis Technical College.
I sat next to a retarded kid named Kenny who was trying for the third time to pass his first year of classes. Several vietnamese students were near when Kenny launched into a monologue about the apartment building he had to clean at his night job. "I opened the closet door and man, you never seen so many bugs. That building is full of cockroaches. Its the Vietnamese that attracts 'em with all their Russian food." At this point, Dat, the funniest vietnamese guy I ever met, slowly turns his head with his big Peter Fonda sunglasses to look at Kenny and says " Maaaaaan... What the Fuck you talking about?"
One day, the instructor was leaning over an open trunk lecturing us about batteries and Dat dangled a watch in front of the man's face, trying to tell him it was time for lunch. The instructor says "What the shit?" and pulls his sleeve back to look at his own watch, an exact duplicate of Dat's watch and then says , "Oh. I thought you stole my damn watch! " and then continued with the lecture. There was no smoking in the school, but the instructor always had a cigarette going and kept looking over his shoulder to see if any school officials were around.
When my brother got broadsided in his Jetta and it stopped steering right, I volunteered to bring it in to the school and "see what we could do". It drove like there was a big spinning ball under the car and the car was wobbling around on top of the ball and every so often a wheel of the car would touch the ground and give me enough control to straighten it out. I drove it this way on I-94 through downtown Minneapolis nearly to my death, getting the most horrified of looks and horns from the other cars.
When we put it on the lift and took the wheel off, the instructor, cigarette in mouth, became more animated than I had ever seen him and stepped back from the car in alarm and did a quick check over his shoulder for school officials. The bent-in back wheel had worn a hole in the plastic gas tank and gas poured everywhere. I abandoned the Jetta in the garage at the school. For all I know, it is still there. There were tons of cars there, picked over for parts by the enterprising students on their lunch breaks.
Goodyear
I worked at the Lake Street Goodyear in South Minneapolis during automotive school. What a polluted hell-hole. All the guys there had been to the emergency room due to workplace accidents. Steve sported a big battery acid burn on his neck. Al had his forearm ripped open by an exploding steel belted tire. I humped tires for a living. I repaired punctured tires, changed oil, batteries, spark plugs and radiator fluid. I put lead weights on the tires to balance them after spinning them in the spinner. One of my first lessons was not to use my bare hands to stop tires that were in the spinner. An invisible piece of metal imbedded in a tire took a small chunk out of my hand. When I started working there, the harsh chlorine based tire cleaner made my throat close up and my lungs wilt. After a few months, I didn't even notice it any more. I became aware of this change when customers gagged and left the building when a bunch of it spilled. I just stood there in the fumes going, "what?" I hate to think of all the shit I was exposed to there. Lead, used motor oil, asbestos from the brake pads, battery acid, whitewall cleaner, car exhaust. I would go home and shower and still Kate would declare, "Its coming out of your pores!". To this day, I get facial twiches if I even smell used motor oil. For this chemical experimentation I earned $6.00 per hour. The top mechanic there got 12.00 per hour.
I installed lots of super expensive rims, "mags" they call them, worth like $500 each onto cars that were barely worth that much. I found guns in cars when I changed the oil.
Once we got a big job for engine work on two delivery trucks for a nearby company. Our two top mechanics completed the work and then put the wrong oil filters on. The trucks died on the road, their engines ruined. This kind of destroyed the joyful togetherness of the team. One guy started drinking again and disappeared. The other guy concentrated on building his stock racing car in the shop because we had absolutely no business that spring.
11:05:34 PM 
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