The average nine-to-fiver finds solace in a day off. My father, he filled the paltry time of his leisure in the garage.
A weathered exterior of corrugated steel. Two bay doors: One lifted to weep angle grinder sparks, or raspy rattletrap exhaust, or sawdust confection. The other shuttered by rust, a winking innuendo. Socket wrenches, sump pumps, and the many spins on a saw blade—band, table, jig. Steel hooks anchored in pegboard walls suspending tools. The concrete floor a canvas for inky oil, rubbery caulk, caustic solvents, galls of globby epoxy.
In the garage, any repair found the right tool for the job. To sand, cut, extrude, torch, adhere, ply, bore, screw, inflate, lengthen. With a little elbow grease, a broken thing found a mending hand.
More difficult, however, to repair the broken men doing the mending.
Retreating from the bitter disappointments of domestic life, my father found refuge in the garage. A release valve, a vent, a hideaway. A place for manly commiseration, letting the malted hops do the hammering. Who needs talk therapy when you can talk shop?
During my turbulent teendom, I annexed half of the garage through a blitzkrieg of duct-taped drum kits and my bandmates’ whammy-bent Fenders. Marshalling adolescent rage through gritty punk riffs or gravelly grunge, our anger surged in the very real outlets of high-voltage amplifiers and distortion pedals, spiritual progeny of the 1960s garage rock wave whose DIY ethos became inseparable from the new suburban add-on.
Although I now study literature—no longer power-chording Nirvana covers amongst rusted mufflers and a rousing miasma of paint thinner and industrial glue—the measliest mention of a garage transports me back. Updike’s Rabbit who, after fleeing the doldrums of suburbia, seeks asylum near a noisy auto garage: “While he hides, men are busy nailing the world down.” Or, Gary Lambert’s retreat into the garage after a bout of marital discord in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. “I’m going to fucking go trim that fucking hedge!” Gary exclaims, garage bound in a “rage that was now propelling him.” In the garage, the thread separating home improvement from home impairment frays like a bad nerve.
Maybe Gary Numan felt safest of all in his car, but when Weezer released “In The Garage” in 1994, the paean to the commuter’s refuge found a more quotidian destination: “in the garage, I feel safe / No one cares about my ways.” Here, obsolescence is the price obscurity pays. Replace, not repair. Small wonder you can’t spell garage without rage. If I spent too many summer nights in the garage jerry-rigging pipe bombs from consumer-grade fireworks (and I did), my father proved as ignitable as any improvised incendiary device or short-fused Gary. Expletives exploded. “Lousy piece of shit!” “Stupid motherfucker!” Wrench, meet wrath. Perhaps our modern man caves share with the cro-magnon grotto these private lives that ratchet into primal rage, threatening to tear them apart. Is that blood or paint on the floor? Tears or oil? In the garage, the broken mend the broken.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
