Philip Dick: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

No, he won’t make a big scene, he thought. Maybe one of those glances, out of the corner of his glasses. And grin while he puffs on his cigarette. And he won’t say anything; I’ll have to do all the talking. He’ll get me to talk more than I want to.

“You heard about me,” he said when Betty came past him once more. “Selling the garage,” he said. “Because of my health.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “When did that happen?” Her old wrinkled mouth fell open. “You mean your heart? I thought that was under control. You told me that doctor had it under control.”

“Sure it’s under control,” he said, “if I didn’t kill myself working on those cars, under there flat on my back lifting up an entire transmission. Those things weigh two hundred pounds. You ever try lifting one while lying flat on your back? Lifting it over your head?”

She said, “What are you going to do instead?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll get a well-earned rest. I certainly deserve that.”

“I should say so,” she said. “But I think—you could have tried that rice diet, couldn’t you? Did you ever try that?”

“Rice doesn’t help what I’ve got,” he said, angry at her, at the crazy health food store with its vegetables and herbs. “That stuff is for neurotic middle-aged women.”

She wanted to lecture him on diet. But he picked up his cup of coffee, nodded and murmured something, and went on outside, onto the sidewalk, carrying the cup back to the garage.

A lot of sympathy from her, he thought. Advice instead; who wants that from nuts?

God, he saw the old green Plymouth parked in the lot, beside the other old cars that Al had patched up to sell. By the little house with its banner. An engine, somewhere on the lot, ran loudly, raced. He’s back there, he realized. Working. Holding the cup ahead of him he passed on into the gloomy damp garage. Out of the sunlight. His steps made echoing sounds.

There stood Al.

“I sold the garage,” Jim said.

“You did?” Al said. He held a crescent wrench. He still had on his cloth jacket.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Jim said. “I was looking for you. I was amazed that the guy finally met my price; I had it way up there, as I probably told you. I think I said I was asking around thirty thousand for it, when we were discussing it a month or so ago. My broker called me at home last night.”

Opening and closing the wrench with his thumb, Al stared at him. He did not look as if it meant too much to him, but the old man was not fooled. The black brows remained the same. So did the mans mouth. It did not come up, the feeling. Behind the glasses the eyes shone, kept fixed on him. He seemed to be smiling.

“You want me to croak under some car?” Jim said.

“No,” Al said, after a time. He still played with the wrench.

“This doesn’t affect your lot,” Jim said. “You have a lease. I think that runs until April.” He knew it ran until April. Five months. “Why the hell wouldn’t he renew? He’ll probably renew.”

Al said, “Maybe he wants it.”

“When he came by,” Jim said, “he showed no interest in it.”

“He’s not going to turn the garage into anything else?”

“What can you turn a garage into?” But he did not know; he had not wanted to find out because he did not care to think about anyone else running the garage—it did not matter to him what Epstein did with it: burned it down or paved it with gold or made a drive-in out of it. And then he thought, Maybe he will make a drive-in out of it. He can use the lot for parking. So there goes Al’s Motor Sales, as soon as the lease expires. But he can drive his cars somewhere else. Any vacant lot will do, anywhere in Oakland. As long as it’s on a business street.

Later on he sat in his office, at the desk. Through the dusty window sunlight entered, warming and lighting up the office, the one dry spot in the garage, here with the piles of invoices, repair manuals, the calendars with nude girls advertising Test-High Bearings and Sheet Metal of Emeryville, California. He pretended to consult a chart of lubrication points for a Volkswagen.

I’ve got thirty-five thousand dollars, he thought, and I’m spending my time worrying because some guy who leases a lot that’s part of this place is maybe going to suffer through no fault of mine. That’s what people can do to you, make you feel bad when you ought to be feeling good. That God damn Al, he thought.

They all envy a man who’s successful, he thought. What does he have to show for possibly ten years of work? I already owned this place when I was his age. He’s just a tenant. And always will be.

I can’t let it worry me, he decided, because I have plenty of worries anyhow; I have to worry about myself, my physical condition.

That comes first.

What a waste it had all been. All the work. Devotion to fixing people’s cars. At any time he could have sold out and got the same amount of money. Possibly more, because now he could not wait. And he had not managed to keep it quiet, the reason for his selling. He should have kept it under his hat. But instead he had gone around trying to justify himself because he knew that certain persons would do their best to make him feel guilty. And so they had. Look at just now.

All those years, he thought. And before, trying different things. Had he learned anything? His father had wanted him to be a pharmacist. His father had owned a drugstore in Wichita, Kansas. After school he had helped his father, at first opening cartons in the stockroom, then later on waiting on customers. But he had not gotten along with his father, and he had quit and gone to work as a busboy at a restaurant. And later he was a waiter. After that he had left Kansas.

In California he and another man had operated a gas station. Running the gas pumps had been too much like working in his father’s drugstore; it meant he had to talk cheerfully to people, sell them things. So he had let his partner do that; he had taken on the greasing and repairing part, in the back, out of sight. He had been good enough so that when he opened his own garage his customers had come with him. Some of them still came now, almost twenty-five years later.

It’s fine for them, he said to himself. I kept their cars going. They can call me any time, day or night; they know I’ll always come and tow them in or fix them where they are, broken down at the side of the road. They don’t have to belong to A.A.A. even, because they have me. And I never cheated them or did work that didn’t need to be done. So naturally, he thought, they’ll be unhappy to hear I’m quitting. They know they’ll have to go to one of those new garages where everything’s clean, no grease anywhere, and some punk comes out in a white suit with a clipboard and fountain pen, smiling. And they tell him what’s wrong and he writes it down. And some union mechanic shows up later in the day with one finger stuck up his ass and leisurely works on their car. And every minute they’re paying. That slip goes into that machine, and it keeps count. They’re paying while he’s on the crapper or drinking a cup of coffee or talking on the phone or to some other customer. It’ll cost them three or four times as much.

Thinking that, he felt anger at them, for being willing to pay all that to some lazy union mechanic they never saw and didn’t know. If they can pay all that, why can’t they pay it to me? he asked himself. I never charged no seven dollars an hour. Somebody else’ll get it.

And yet he had made money. He always had more work than he could do, especially in the last few years. And he made money renting the lot next to the garage to Al Miller for a used-car lot. He gave Al advice on his old wrecks, and sometimes Al gave him a hand on heavy jobs which he could not manage alone. They had gotten along pretty well.