A Cure for the Panic Ignited By a Mechanic

“Lady, it could be a lot of things. Could be somethin’ simple, could be somethin’ serious. I won’t know till I get under the hood.”

These are the dreaded words that initiate my Pavlovian-like response: shortness of breath, tightness around the throat, white knuckles where I grip the phone. I have heard the words from mechanics before.

Holding the receiver, I instantly am transported to that gas station where my friend once pushed my car when its battery wouldn’t start.

“Yep,” the mechanic said knowingly as he pointed into the maze of hoses, doodads and doohickeys in front of him. There was my problem: the manifoldvalvepistontimingbelt.

Probably a $175 job, he said, but he’d try to keep it to $125.

It wasn’t until my friend, as an afterthought, checked the water level in the battery and discovered the real problem. “Heh, heh,” the mechanic said. “These cars get trickier all the time, don’t they?”

*

And then there was the time I went to the absolutely reliable, honest repair shop where my good friend’s first cousin’s best friend’s boyfriend worked.

“Well lady, we did what we could to keep it under $600, but we couldn’t with all the problems,” the mechanic said lugubriously as he dangled a grease-covered piece of metal in front of me. It could have come from my son’s bicycle for all I’d know. “And we really ought to replace your struts.”

When I was assured I wouldn’t die imminently by not immediately replacing the struts, I drove away. Several months later I learned that my car does not even have struts.

Whatever they are.

So I am hardly surprised that I am sweating now. The minute a mechanic sets eyes on me, he must hear the ringing of tiny cash registers. Avoiding a face-to-face confrontation is my only chance.

“It went ‘Urrrrrchhh! Urrch! Sccrrurrggg!’ ” I say, hoping he will answer like a pediatrician who is called at 2 a.m. about a child’s runny nose.

But there is a long silence.

“Sccrrurrggg?” he asks. “You’re certain it went ‘Sccrrurrggg?’ ”

Yes, I say, I’m certain.

“Well, you’d better bring it in,” he says finally. “That could be serious. Unless, of course, it isn’t.”

I, of course, am not the only person whose response to auto mechanics resembles Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ description of the four stages of dying. One friend told me about his mate, who is so afraid of mechanics that she simply never goes to them.

“I looked under the hood of my girlfriend’s car, and it looked like an adult who’s never seen a dentist, like something from the movie ‘Alive,’ ” he said.

“When I asked her what she does with it, she said, ‘What do you mean? I GO places with it.’ ”

And women aren’t the only ones. In a highly unscientific poll of men friends and colleagues, I discovered the same vulnerability to being taken for a big financial ride.

“A manifold?” says one. “Well, it’ll crack if you pour water on it.”

Says another: “Mechanics could say anything and I’d be totally at their mercy.”

So how do we mechnophobics protect ourselves? Perhaps a partial answer lies in the hands of David F. Allen, an automotive specialist with the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Ventura office.

Allen occasionally sits in at local radio station KVEN to answer callers’ questions about their cars. Sometimes, he says, he can even determine what the problem is.

“They’ll say, ‘It goes Thawunka, thawunka,’ or ‘Whenever I go around the corner it goes, ‘Rickita, rickita,’ and sometimes you can figure it out,” he says. “Once, my wife said, ‘It sounds like there are butterflies in the engine.’ She meant it was misfiring.”

*

But there’s a better way. Allen oversees a service called M.E.D Check (Mobile Engine Diagnosis) that is available to both AAA members and non-members at various locations throughout the county.

For $39.50 ($49.50 for non-members), cars are visually inspected for such things as belts, hoses, fluid levels and battery cables. They are then given a computerized engine diagnosis for such things as the charging system, timing, fuel injection and cylinder power. Afterward, the computer printout is taken to a mechanic and only the necessary work is done.

“We want it to be a source for motorists to get an objective point of view,” says Jeff Spring, with AAA’s public affairs office in Los Angeles. “We don’t have any financial interest because we don’t sell them anything but the service and we don’t do the work.

“They can trust it.”

And you thought you’d never see that word in a story about mechanics.