Slick's Garage

An oil change, dimethyltryptamine, and proportional responses.

I still wasn’t all the way back when I pulled into Slick’s Garage. Things still felt more sensory than cognitive, like the computations were coming back half-finished. In the back of the house there’s a garage, and, with the door open, I could see a full-sized car lift, covered with stickers to accompany the obligatory warnings: Alabama golf, a couple from racing companies. There’s a beautiful looking sports car sans wheels in the other bay. And, helping me pull into the garage to have my car lifted, is Michael Thompson.

I had no idea that Slick was Michael Thompson. I told Paresh yesterday, pulling the cart from the parking lot to the first tee, that I was overdue for an oil change and needed a guy. He said I didn’t need a guy, that he’d been doing all the work on his ’99 Land Cruiser for forever, and that a ’15 4Runner was gold. And still serviceable — I’d always thought that new cars were mostly computerized, that the days of being able to do it myself were long gone. But Paresh told me it was an easy job if you knew what you were doing. There isn’t as much running off the black box as I think — it’s mostly stuff you can see and touch, if you know what you’re doing. It’s not hard to learn. It’s a machine. Slick can help.

As I turned the car off, Paresh told Michael I’d just done my first round of contrast therapy. Michael laughed. He’d been doing contrast with Paresh for a while now and knew it well.

“You feeling it?”

I told him I was.

Going to Princeton, I got to know enough people with some money to do something with. Usually it was luxury items — cars, watches, rare alcohols, a couple places in the pricier zip codes, exclusive memberships around the US. Things, primarily, to say something about a person. Michael Thompson has two PGA Tour wins and he put a lift in his garage. He rebuilt a Wagoneer for Keith Mitchell and a Defender for Harris English. You can tell by the way he stands that it’s a place he wants to be, wrench in hand. We’re listening to 90s grunge with ads, because apparently it’s not worth the premium for ad-free music streaming, and that shows you how meaningful every bit of the garage is. It commands a humble, exemplary kind of respect, what you’d hope you’d do if you won a big check or two.

It’s a two-car garage, and I’d pulled my 4Runner in next to a ’67 Shelby GT350. Slick told me he’d done everything himself besides paint it. It might be the most beautiful object I’d ever seen. There’s a level of finish that you can’t see in the details — it’s the whole car that radiates feeling, the way a home-cooked meal was made with love. Try as you can, there’s no way to mass-manufacture a craftsman’s passion.

I thought, in writing this, that I’d do something cute in distinguishing between “Michael” and “Slick”. But this would have been disingenuous. They’re not alter egos. There’s no discernible difference between the man I’ve met on the range and the one raising my truck on his lift. Michael is Slick and Slick is Michael. I think it’s a mark of great virtue for a man to, both at work and at home, be fully himself.

Michael put my truck up on the lift and asked how many miles were on it. It gave me great pleasure, as someone who’d wanted a Tacoma but was convinced it was impractical, to have my vehicle called a truck by someone holding the wrench. It’s a utilitarian word. A car idles in the Starbucks drive-thru line on the way to be ten minutes late to your 9-to-5. A truck is an extension of one’s will, a tool, makes a man freer by giving him the capacity to do more.

Before I drove down here in September, about 10,000 miles ago, I’d taken it to the dealer as I usually did. They came back with the news that something was leaking (I think the drive chain cover) and that it’d be $6,000 to repair. About an hour later, I got another call from the sales department: good news, they were in need of pre-owned cars and were willing to buy mine off me. I don’t know cars, but I had enough sense to know I was getting worked, and I told them I’d pick it up without any of the work later that day. I got the oil changed and drove it down here. It’s easier to trust a guy you pay with a thank you and a bottle of bourbon, and he’ll probably do a better job too.

I told Michael that it had 150,000 miles of mostly northeast driving on it, that I hadn’t changed the oil since 140,000. He and Paresh looked at me. I should change the oil every 5,000 miles, 7,000 tops. 10,000 was too long. I told them I understood. Michael walked under the car, looked around, and gave a small lip-pucker of surprise. Plenty of northern vehicles are all rusted out from driving on salty slush all winter. But my truck was fine. Not much rust at all. It’d get to 400,000 miles if I took care of it properly. As someone who never wants another truck in his life, I couldn’t have been happier.

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A week and change removed from the worst performance of my young professional career, I’ve deprived the feelings of being a piece-of-shit worthless loser of their oxygen, and they’ve started quieting down. Now it’s a mechanical matter: a diagnosis of the problem and a plan for a solution. There’s an important bit of inductive insight: in anything you’ve been doing for a while, there’s only one or two things that go wrong at once. It’s not that my putting is bad and I have bad low-point control and my golf swing sucks and my chipping is shit. There aren’t that many problems. So, when a lot of things feel like they’re going wrong, it’s usually one thing driving them all.

Warming up for an event, before I get to the first tee, sometimes I’ll jot down a thing or two I wish I’d done to prepare better. This does a couple things. First, it’s an acknowledgement that my game will never be perfect, and my professional task is to play, to a degree, unprepared. There’s space between perfect and optimal, further space between optimal and good, and my job is to prepare as best I can and play with whatever I have. Writing down my final doubts on the way to the tee allows the paper to carry them so my mind doesn’t have to. And it’s also a pact with myself: that these are the things that I had the least confidence in, and so these are the first places to look to improve my preparation for the future.

On the walk to the tee, in the notes app of my phone, I wrote that I was uncomfortable and that I didn’t feel I was dealing with it well. Discomfort is at worst an occupational hazard, and at best it’s an indication that I’m exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need be doing. But I didn’t feel I was meeting the discomfort well. I wished I’d been better about practice plans, knowing what specifically I was building. If we fall to the level of our preparation, I wished I knew exactly what that was and what I was capable of.

In hindsight, this is a cunning thought, a way that fear masks itself so not to show its true face. It’s not the practice that I was doubting — it was me. I was my own object of doubt. And, of course, this fits with the rule above: there’s usually only one problem. My swing felt and looked great, I was playing solid, I had a good plan and had put in the work. But I was hitting all the shots, and I doubted myself. It’s not a golf problem; the problem is the guy playing the golf.

There’s another rule of thumb I believe when it comes to these things: that a problem deserves a proportional response. I shot 85-78 in a professional golf tournament, an indication of magnitude. And so will be the response. I’ve deleted all unnecessary functions from my phone (social media included), and my computer’s web browser only opens after a 20 second delay.[1] I used to practice while listening to music or a podcast, but no longer — practice will command my full attention, and the challenge of staying totally focused for several hours is a feature, not a bug, another element of training my craft. And, as much as I’ve talked about meditation in the past, I’ve fallen off the wagon. I’m getting back on. A half hour at a time, and I’m not missing two days in a row.

It’s an undertaking. Admittedly, it’s easier to just work on the golf. I understand it better. The personal stuff is more intimidating, and I don’t really know what I’m looking at when I pop the hood. But I’ve got to start learning, focusing on the person as well as the golf. Anything else would be less than the truth.

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We got to Slicks Garage around 11:30. Before that, at 10:00, I showed up to Paresh’s house, and he introduced me to contrast therapy.

Cold plunges are known to have numerous health benefits. Saunas are known to have their own. However, there’s a third form of temperature-related therapy: contrast therapy. This involves going from a sauna to a cold plunge and back again, repeatedly. As mentioned before, I’ve made it really hard for me to Google stuff, so I don’t have specific studies to reference or explain. What I do know is that rapidly changing temperatures is meant to shock your nervous system. The sauna is 225°F, you sit in it for 15 minutes, and then you hop into a 33° cold plunge for 4 minutes, and you do the whole thing again twice. I can attest: it’s quite a shock.

I’ve considered myself an intermediate meditator capable of maintaining focus despite various discomforts. Admittedly, I was nervous that this practice would be a separate beast, that I’d flinch or panic or quit in the face of extreme temperatures. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle the suck. But, to my surprise, once I was in it, the breath is the same breath I’ve been breathing for a while, even if it stings my nose as my boiling sweat goes up my nostrils. At least, it was the same for a while.

As it turns out, when the body is shocked to the extent this practice provides, the nervous system doesn’t know what to do and assumes it’s dying. In response, it releases a massive dose of a preservative to reduce neural oxygen need and maintain synaptic connections. This preservative happens to be the substance N,N- dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a highly psychoactive substance that, when taken recreationally, is in a similar vein as LSD or peyote.[2] As I sat for my second stint in the sauna, Paresh asked if everything was spinning — a huge relief, because everything was spinning, and I was getting worried. But he said that spinning meant it was working, and we were on the right track. I had him check my pulse just to be sure. (Paresh was a medic: there’s nobody I trust more to keep me alive, and even if I died next to him he could bring me back.) All was where it was supposed to me.

I’m not one for drugs, and my inexperience means that everything I’ve tried to write in this graf has come out sounding really dumb — I’d rather leave descriptions of trips to Hunter S. Thompson and company. But, in that second stint in the sauna, I felt the breath as my own breath but with less of me. In the next cold plunge, I told Paresh that I felt like I was dying but in a good way. I drooled into my lap for some of the third sit in the sauna. At the end, after the last plunge, I stood in the yard, feet on the grass, looking at the tree in the neighbor’s yard Paresh calls the Tree of Life, and it told me that nothing was wrong with me. I looked down at the carrots in his garden and they gave me permission to let go of my fear, at least until I came down. I turned around to see a bed of flowers and said “holy shit” out loud, and Paresh asked what was going on, and I pointed at the flowers and he laughed and understood.

The half-life of DMT in the brain is around 5-10 minutes, and the comedown is more like coming to, back to equilibrium without going beneath it. After a couple minutes of talk, I was ready to drive us over to Slick’s Garage to work on my truck. But I think Michael could tell that this moon-faced kid had something else going on in his head, that just learning to change the oil couldn’t be this revelatory. Or maybe it could be — after all, he’d built this garage. When Paresh told him we’d been doing contrast, his laugh told me he knew.

I’m a high-strung dude. I know that releasing some of that tension is important for my golf, to free myself up. It’s unnatural for me — like opening the hood of a truck and seeing nothing but tubes and fluids and metal. I don’t know what to do.

But I have people in my life to help me figure it out. Paresh told me not to practice today, to take it easy and relax after the contrast. So I didn’t practice. I’m watching a full slate of Opening Day baseball with two Chick-fil-a sandwiches, and I have a half-finger pour of bourbon from a bottle I got myself when I got Michael’s. The golf wasn’t the problem, the guy playing the golf was the problem, and what he needs is to learn to loosen up. I’m starting to taste the vanilla notes in the bourbon and Shohei just hit an opposite field dinger. I think the guy playing the golf is starting to come around.

Michael’s been hurt for a while, and he’s not ready to compete yet. But I’ve watched him chip, and it’s like that ’67 Shelby in the garage. The bones are world class, unquantifiable, tapping into that magic that runs through engines and people and the Tree of Life. He’ll keep up the rehab and, already a thing of beauty, he’ll be one in motion when he gets back on the road.

As for my truck, when we drained the oil, it was as black as the bogeys on the 85 I signed for last week. I saw it with my own eyes and knew I never wanted to let it happen again. But we put it up on the lift and saw that the bones are good, it’s not rusted out, and that it’ll take me 500,000 miles if I learn how to take care of it. And I’ll learn to take care of it, and it’ll take me wherever I want to go.

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[1] This is all a la Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism — he calls this purging phase the “digital declutter.”

[2] I’m sure those more familiar with these substances are livid I’m equating the three — I apologize for my ignorance. Not a huge drug guy. Tripping balls was a new experience for me.