The Mechanic

My father never showed off his humanity. He kept it locked away somewhere, so no one could see it. My mother probably saw it for a while, after all, she fell in love with him... As far as I know... But the pops I knew, showed nothing in the genre of human emotion. A stoic man that went to work, came home and ate and talked to almost no one. And rarely smiled.

I imagine he suffered from an inner torment that made it impossible to show anything. A torment that was only compounded by his need to keep it inside. Always inside. Never to feel the warmth of the sun. Or the love of his family.

Pops and I had a connection. I think he thought me, his. Not just in the sense that I was his son, but in the sense that I was most like him. He might’ve sensed it from the beginning.

My mother told me that early on, he’d often sit me on his lap during dinner. An honor only reserved for me; my older brother had no such place. That may have been why he hated me so much. Especially at that time, according to stories I’ve heard.

I think he saw in me an angry independence that he once had, but lost.

I was also told that at a very early age, I refused to allow my mother to dress me. Once I got the hang of it (I thought), I didn’t need her to button my pants, or even tie my shoes. I would angrily force my mother away, in an effort to wrest from her the freedom she was not nearly ready to give me. There are a few moments wherein I remember her trying to get me to let her help, but I, in my infinite childish wisdom, would force her away, my dad angrily saying, Deja lo!

Leave him alone! He wants to do it himself, he will, I’m sure he’d think. No matter how stupid I looked.

Mexicans are cowboys. At least the ones from Mexico are, and pops was from Mexico, and a cowboy. A bit less than my uncle Juan, for whom I’m named after, a tall man with an impossibly thick mustache and a big white hat. Always the big white hat. No. My pops was more of the grease monkey cowboy. Oh, he had boots that he wore once in a while, but mostly, he was in blue. Blue mechanic’s pants. Blue mechanic’s shirt.

I wanted to emulate the men in my life. Pops and tio. There are pictures of me wearing a felt cowboy hat and boots, that I would never show anyone, but wore these things I did, as if it was Halloween every day. But to me, I wasn’t dressing up, this is whom I was. I was a cowboy. I came from cowboys, and I am a cowboy.

Here’s the thing about boots... If you’re five, they’re a little more challenging than one might think. It’s difficult to a child’s eye to tell which is left and which is right, they both almost seem to point straight ahead.

One Sunday, after spending hours with pops, at an older man’s house simply known to me as “Salvador,” we came home. I never much understood what we were doing there. I only knew pops would be drinking and his scent went from axle grease to axle grease and Budweiser. I remember being bored. No kids around to play with. Just a tree to climb.

When we got home, my mother instantly looked down at my boots and was horrified. They were on the wrong feet! I wondered why my feet hurt all day. Climbing that tree was hard enough with cowboy boots on, imagine what it must’ve been like with them on wrong.

She quickly took them off, to my extreme relief, and chastised my father as to why he didn’t fix this, as she rubbed my feet, telling him that my feet must have hurt all day.

In Spanish, he growled, How else is going to learn?!

Fair point, pops. Fair point...

He came from the old world, and in me, he wanted to instill his values from that world, I think.

I was his.

I’m not much of a mechanic. Oh, I like to think I am, and I have worked on my cars a bit. Even rebuilt an entire engine once with my friends. But I am... Not good. I’m constantly dropping wrenches and nuts, then having to crawl around under the car to find these pieces. I have no finesse. Affinity, I got. Finesse, I lack. But this love of cars, this want to be a mechanic, that’s from pops. Pops who always smelled like grease. Sometimes grease and Budweiser.

It’s cliche to say that fathers want their sons to follow in their footsteps. Maybe it isn’t as true as it once was, but pops was from the old world. He wasn’t a third or fourth generation Mexican, with barely any ties to Mexico, he was Mexico. He brought it with him when he crossed over. Yes, illegally.

His father had a very small ranch in Mexicali, and I’m sure he wanted my father to be a rancher like him. But he burned his own path and became a truck driver and a mechanic. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion. To rebel against the frightening tyrant that was my grandfather. I’m sure that tyrant felt a twinge of heartbreak every time one of his sons walked away from him. From that life. They all did. All nine of them.

But my father’s son. His son. Juan Manuel, the son who proudly wore his angry rebellion the same way he himself once did, surely he would follow in the path he burned.

At about eleven or twelve, I wanted a new bike. A good one. A GT.

That cursed paper route was never going to make me enough money to ever buy that bike, so I sought elsewhere. I was about done with that fucking job anyway. I had one route that was a hundred houses big, I remember. A hundred! In paperboy terms, that’s half the state. That same fucking route had a pack of stray dogs that would chase me. A pack! They were vicious. They’d chase me for blocks, and somehow I still had to make the deliveries. I remember coming around a corner, and trying to be as quiet as possible, looking down the darkened 5AM street. Looking everywhere, hoping they’d be on a another street. Behind me, half a block away, I’d see them, but wouldn’t panic. I’d keep going, slowly quietly. Of course dogs have exceptional hearing and instincts. I’d look behind me once more, and see them down the street, paused. All looking my way. Their ears perked up. Then... In unison, they’d come after me. I had to pedal that cheap swap-meet bicycle, loaded with an extra seventy five pounds of folded up newspapers and try my best to deliver and race away. I always had an extra one to beat the fastest one away.

I have no idea how I did that without suffering a horrible, mauling death.

For that terror, I netted maybe forty bucks a month, I think. A lot of deadbeats on that route. They’d pay later, they’d say. Or just ignore me when it came time to collect. Oh yeah. It was our responsibility to collect. No wonder newsprint died out. Fucking monsters.

I’d never make enough money to get the things I want with that job. A lament that would sting me the rest of my life as it turns out...

Pops worked six, sometimes seven days a week, depending on the amount of work he may have at the shop. Or the amount drinking he wanted to do with his friends there. So it dawned on me that perhaps I could go with him on some Saturdays and help out. And get paid, of course. I really wanted that bike.

I dropped a hint to my mom, not really expecting anything, just an idea I created in my child-mind. Maybe pops could take me to the shop once in a while and I could work with him. It had to pay more than that accursed paper route.

While my father was an emotionless monolith of a man, he did have a few cracks wherein some humanity could peek through. Alcohol made those cracks open wider. Slightly. I remember once, pops coming home with a six pack and a Cheech and Chong movie. A sly smirk on his face, his idea of a smile. The smile that I also adopted from him. That was a great night. One that my older brother and me silently enjoyed, one of the few times we got along well. We laughed and laughed. But we did not acknowledge the oddity of the sudden burst of emotion from pops, perhaps afraid that if we did, that veil would fall, and the old pops would be back. For him, this was the height of human emotion. If we talked about it, we’d fall off that tightrope. So, we just watched the movie and laughed along with pops.

Alcohol did that. Alcohol gave me one of my favorite memory of him.

It’s late, past my bedtime on a Sunday night. Got school tomorrow. I can hear pops come home. From where, I have no idea. My mother angrily confronting him about his absence that day, as well as his obviously drunken state. She does all the talking. Some I hear, some I cannot. He utters not a sound.

Until.. He does.

YA!

He wants to hear no more. He’s done being admonished by this woman.

Silence.

My mother again starts talking, more quietly this time. I don’t understand. The darkness in my room does not enhance my hearing enough.

Silence again. This time a long one. I lay in the darkness. What could possibly be happening? Three minutes turn into five minutes turn into eight minutes...

Our bedroom door opens, letting in the yellow glare of the kitchen lights. A silhouette. Male. It’s him. My eyes instinctively close. To shield me from the blinding light. To fool my father into thinking I couldn’t hear any of the argument that had just ensued. But I’m sure the light hit me faster than my eyes could have closed.

Pops sat on my bed. Grease. He always smelled of grease, as if it was no longer just a part of him, but it was within him. The smell of Budweiser stung my nostrils, it was more potent than usual.

Flaco.

This was my nickname. I was the thinnest of all my brothers, and he started calling me that before I was able to understand words.

Flaco. This time he shook me a little. I knew I couldn’t pretend anymore. My eyes opened to a squint.

As my eyes got accustomed to the light, the rarest of sightings: Jose Ernesto Vargas was smiling. Not a smirk. A welcoming grin. It was alien to me. It was a face I didn’t recognize. Behind that emotion that must have been happiness laced with beer, was the father I knew. This mask he wore was at once amazing and frightening.

In Spanish, he said to me, You want to come work with your dad?

I wasn’t used to hearing sentences from him, let alone a question. About me. I remember I panicked. My mind raced. How do I answer? The light from the kitchen was like a spotlight. My father was like the entire world, waiting to hear a response.

I blurted out the most honest response:

Well yeah... How much am I gonna get paid?

The words took a few seconds to get through the alcohol in his system. But when they did, his smile disappeared. His gaze shifted away from my eyes. He looked at the wall above me. A frown replaced the smile.

Pops then got up and walked back into the yellow light, leaving only darkness as the bedroom door closed softly.

I didn’t hear anything else that night. Even at that young age, I knew I had broken his heart. I was his no more. I was not going to follow the path he burned for me.

I don’t think I ever remember seeing those cracks open up again, allowing those scant emotions out. That night, those cracks may have been sealed. By me. I was the son he once felt was his own. The son he thought most like himself. To me, for a moment, he showed off his humanity. From me, he received a harsh blow.

I think now that that may have been the last time he showed any of us, perhaps anyone, that humanity. It stayed locked inside of him. Away from view. Hidden from us all.

That’s where his humanity stayed until the day he died.

Movies

Years ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing a film that everyone touted as “genius” and “brilliant.” He and I seemed to be the only ones we knew that saw through the bullshit and noted it for the work of stunning mediocrity it was. As I lamented as to how so many people could love this movie, he uttered, Well, a lot of people like Big Macs.

You deserve better movies.

Truly, I believe that.

The current state of movies are not worthy of your attention. Not worthy of your dime. They are made cynically for the expressed purpose of making more money than any one human could spend in twenty lifetimes. To pay the stars in them that walk blindly through the excessive CGI and mouth words with lukewarm passion “written” by “writers” that have never read anything more challenging than a self help book on how to network themselves into high paying gigs.

They don’t deserve your time.

And yet, you flock. You turn up in days long lines like a starving child in some war ravaged third world country for a morsel of sustenance.




When I was a boy, I remember thinking that indeed, all movies were “kinda” good. And yes, even at a young age, I used the word “indeed,”much to the dismay of my Mexican brethren. (A theme that would follow me my whole life).

I remember watching any movie, and remarking that there was a lot of work involved in making it, therefore, it must garner some respect for all of that work. It wasn’t easy to make up a story and then make it into a movie, I thought. All movies are somewhat entertaining, right?

Well, I was a kid. A stupid stupid kid. I was dead wrong.

My parents tried their hardest to give us those middle class amenities that so many other kids had in the 80s, even if we could never be middle class royalty. We’d relish in these luxuries. At least, temporarily, until they just couldn’t afford them anymore. One of those luxuries was ON TV. No, not something that was on TV. It was a box. A box with a single, round toggle switch. “Off” and ON. Of course “ON” had a slick 80s font. You would turn your TV dial (yes, a dial, ask your parents) to channel 3, you only had 13 choices, half of them were snow (again, ask your parents), and then turn the fake wood paneled box to ON.

Of course, it was only one damn channel. Think of it as cable, if cable was only HBO. That was ON TV.

It was fucking magic. You’d turn it on, and there would be a movie to watch. No commercials. Cusswords and nudity. In our house! Truly it was the greatest achievement in human history. Hey, I was like eleven, okay? The hell did I know about the greatness of humanity’s other endeavors?

Sometimes I’d watch whatever was ON. Could’ve been anything. A Kenny Rogers movie, the fuck did I care? It was a movie, and it was entertaining. Because writers worked on it, actors worked on it. And they were professionals. They wanted to tell me a story. That meant a lot to me.

Then one day, perhaps a week or so before the ON people turned our ON, OFF, I saw a film that changed my childishly ideological stance on movies.

It was a Saturday. Probably. I don’t know, it was a long time ago, I was maybe twelve, my memory is barely serviceable. Back then, there were very little guidelines for what played when, I guess these companies expected parents to police their own damn children, and if they didn’t, fuck it, they’ll get an education of sorts. My parents were always working, so I was to get an education from a rated R gangster film.

Once Upon a Time in America.

Sergio Leone’s sprawling four hour masterpiece of the gangster genre, told in three epochs, with a few slight nods to surrealism.

It was abhorrently violent and sexual. The main character, Noodles, has never known anything but violence, and that violence spilled over into his relations with women. He was a rapist and a monster. And I never cared more about a character in my short life.

This movie looked different than anything I’ve ever seen. The cinematography made me feel as if I was in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1960s. The music, Ennio Morricone’s haunting, perfect score to complement the actions of the characters, and perfectly missing when it was wholly unnecessary. The acting, from people that seemed to embody the character in which they were charged to convey, no bullshit, only realism. The writing, heavy and compelling, saying only exactly what needed to be said, sometimes, nothing at all, for the visuals would often do that job.

Four hours later, I was a different lad.

I didn’t fully comprehend the movie, I am not pretentious enough to make that boast. But I am pretentious enough to acknowledge that this film is singular in its creation, and nothing of this sort will be made again.




This is where current movies fail us. For, indeed (there’s that word again), these movies can be made and remade and reconstituted into new films. Well, new, in the sense that they are not the films from which they were copied. New actors, bad writing, excellent CGI.

In the 1950s, in France, lived a group of film geeks the likes of which the world has never seen, nor will again. They abhorred their current state of filmdom. Movies that seemed to have no depth, no character. Movies that barely needed directors. But they loved american films. They loved Hitchcock. They worshipped the so-called B movies that were of the film noir genre. A monicker they coined due to the stark cinematography. Most black and white film of the time, strictly speaking were grey, not black and white. Economy makes genius sometimes. The film makers of noir had fewer lights and dealt with the darkness of the human soul, so their work was very black. And bleak.

These French fucks became what is now known as The French New Wave. Movies made with no money. But made with the love of films. Their scant budgets made for works of stunning genius.

They rebelled against the oppressive blandness of that which they loved the most: films. And they made some of the greatest movies of all time.

In the late 1960s, the same started to happen here in america. The studio system was in trouble. They couldn’t get people to come to their movies anymore. Television was usurping their market. Even casting the perennial favorites and super stardom of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in the the same film did little to bring the waves back to the shore that had long since fell calm.

Hopper kicked it all off by making a movie with little money that captured the imagination of a public that was lied to and manipulated. Easy Rider, a film that made its budget, times sixty.

And then a bunch of nerds with asthma and bad skin, whom worshipped Godard and Truffaut, the godfathers of The French New Wave made their mark. That rebelled against the blandness that had infected films on this side of the pond. They became the great auteurs of our times. Scorsese. Coppola. Cassavetes. So many more.

The studios had no choice but to take notice. And throw money at these goddamn kids. Francis wants to make an epic gangster film that he co-wrote with the author of the book in which it was based: The Godfather. Sounds like a terrible idea, the kid barely has any experience! Fuck it, give him a few million. Some asthmatic from New York named Martin wants to make a film about his experiences with a bunch of people he knows in his family. Hooligans and drunks that liken themselves to be gangsters. The script? There’s no plot! It’s just about these characters and their problems. Mean Streets? That’s a stupid title! Give him a few hundred grand to shut him up. He’s got some dopey kid named Deniro to be in it. Whatever, we’ll take the gamble. We’re already against the ropes, we’re gonna lose.

That was the end of the all powerful studio era. Films were now made outside of the studio system, and the public loved it. They went to see the weirdest and deepest films, and they didn’t mind being challenged by films. The studio system was dismantled, and rebuilt, and they made copious amounts of money.

Then, with that money, came back their power. With the end of the 70s came the end of the the weirdos and film geeks making movies. The new studios knew better how to make movies. So they thought.

The 80s were born. A bland, sad decade. I know, I lived through it, and have little love for it. It was a decade of films about the self aggrandized with too much muscle or too much money. A time seasoned with blind patriotism on everything. Action movies were king. And most of them were awful. While there were a few exceptions (Once Upon a Time in America released in 1984), it was mostly a sad time for movies. Turns out cocaine isn’t necessarily the most creative of drugs…

The rebellion was brought forth once again at the same time grunge rebelled against the awful hair metal music of the time. Let’s face it: 80s movie were mostly the hair metal of filmdom.

Another decade of rebellion. Deeper films. Weirder films. Films made by nobodies that would be destined to be somebodies. Sometimes terrible somebodies, but somebodies nonetheless.

Dorks. Geeks. People that knew the history of the art form they had taken on to destroy and rebuild. Nerds that watched movies religiously. Over and over again. Learning from the masters before them.

That’s what they all had in common: Godard, Welles, Scorsese, Lynch; they were all movie nerds. Nothing else came easy to them. Not relationships, not acceptance. Only movies made sense to them.

The 90s. That was my decade. The decade I thought I could be one of those greats. When I spent every hour I could learning from these greats, walking down the path they ripped from the jungle of movie making, a trail barely discernible, so far off the main road, it was impossible to realize it had branched from it at one time.

For my efforts, I fell on my face. I tried and tried and made movies whenever I could, but I could never make them as well as I had hoped. They always fell short, and they always felt amateurish.

But my love never died. It still lives with me today.

Then, slowly, the money came back to pervert the art form once again. To turn the lesser of the indie filmmakers into huge blockbuster directors. The brilliant ones couldn’t be turned, even when they tried, they couldn’t, they would invariably fail.

Two awful genres, seemingly created by investors, appeared to cynically take your money: the remake (or reboot, if you wanna lie to yourself) and the fucking superhero movie.

The remake. The ultimate in lazy drug addled film making. It worked once, it’ll work again! While the lemmings argue about the supposed brilliance of casting an all female cast to remake a film that was all male originally (never mind that the director has a penis), nobody argues the laziness in its inception. Remakes have become so insidious, that they are sometimes marketed as original films. A horror film that lifts from The Shining and The Exorcist, with total abandon and shamelessness. A series that uses every trope imaginable from 80s excess film makers like Spielberg and music from Carpenter. Everyone goes crazy for these films. But I wonder if people love them, not because they’re particularly good, but because they are just so fucking familiar.

Yes. They are original screenplays with original characters. Well, “original” being a relative term, meant to signify a story and character not already used by another film. But the story and character, well, they ain’t exactly Citizen fucking Kane.

Don’t kid yourself: you’re watching a remake.

Which is why perhaps, the cynical controllers of your entertainment have looked towards comic books for new stories. They don’t want to take any chances on anything interesting or challenging, so fuck it, let’s spend hundreds of millions on super hero movies. Movies that some of you have actually hated, and knew you were going to hate! I’ve seen you lament on social media that you knew the next Super-Bat-X-Whatever was gonna suck, but you still fucking went! I can’t even wrap my mind around that level of ignorant trust! Admit it: most of these movies do suck. Because they aren’t made by artists, but by businessmen, who are force feeding you this tripe. Millions of pubescent boys have spent money on these comic books, they are betting that they can make the public regress into their childhood so they can wait hours in line to watch another fantasy fetishizing the hero we wish would save us from the dark world in which we find ourselves.

The movies I loved were about humans. Humans dealing with the harsh brutality of life. From the personal relationships they try make work, to the stalwart courage of a person standing up to injustice. These are the real heroes. Not some rich fuck with daddy issues that imagines himself to be a flying rodent. That rich guy doesn’t exist. But the rich guy who wants to destroy you, he does. And the only ones that can defeat him, are us.

That’s what I’ve learned from movies: that I can, WE can, control our world, our destiny. My heroes were the everyday ones I saw struggle on the screen. Buster Keaton struggles to get a lady to notice him. Cabiria fighting against the whole world so she can make a better life for herself. Kane losing his battle to become everything he hated in his surrogate father. Noodles wants to triumph over his entire worthless life. Malcolm fights a racist country in a dangerous time. Santana struggles to free himself from a world he himself has created.




It always seemed that every decade or so, a bunch of misfits would come out of nowhere to reinvent the wheel that is film making, because in their hearts, they were rebels. Troublemakers. They saw the world differently. Because they were artists. Without the rebellion of the Picassos and Godards of the world, art would stagnate. And if it stagnates, it dies.

So many of these movies today don’t deserve your adulation. The rich and powerful behind them don’t deserve your hard earned money. They will continue this crusade of grey mediocrity until it no longer becomes profitable.

It happened in the 50s.

It happened in the 70s.

It happened in the 90s.

It’s been almost two decades since the last batch of rebels changed film making, and I have yet to see anything resembling any revolution. I see acceptance. The excited acceptance a starving child as he is fed gruel, because he doesn’t know there is so much more sustenance in the world. The creative artist cannot shoulder the burden of revolution alone. He needs the you, us, to expect more. To challenge him. To challenge yourself.

Stop eating Big Macs.

There’s so much more for you out there.