My dad was a longshoreman and a mechanic. That’s what he did for a living before getting hurt at work and put on permanent disability (which now causes him to maintain a steady diet of pain pills; I’ve written it before, but you haven’t lived until you’re driving across the country with your dad in a giant Lincoln Town Car, he’s doing 85 on some desolate stretch in New Mexico, and he asks you to hand him an Oxycontin and Percocet, which he pops like Tic Tacs while he’s driving). My earliest memories of my dad are of him fixing cars, using tools, smoking cigarettes, answering knocks at the door from neighbors and friends having car troubles, smoking cigarettes, fixing more cars, repeat. His entire adult life (and I would guess, much of his life, period) has been dedicating to fixing things: taking them apart, learning how they work, and putting them back together – and getting his hands dirty in the process.

I, on the other hand, have never displayed any type of mechanical proclivities at all. I recently found a pre-K report card of mine, and it said I was bad at tying my shows, but good at expressing myself and during music time. To this day, I still tie my shoes with two loops (the “bunny ears” method) and don’t know the one loop standard method. About four weeks ago, I tried to learn how to tie a double-windsor knot. After an hour of finding instructions via Google and pouring over them, viewing countless YouTube clips, and an extremely frustrating ten minute phone conversation with a buddy (not to mention about 1500 expletives, most of them hybrids involving “cock” and “fuck-ass”), I failed, and got myself so enraged in the process that I don’t think my blood pressure has yet quite recovered. And though my hands are not quite feminine, due to my long, creepy fingers, they are always immaculately clean.

As for cars, I stink at them. Though I passed the written portion of my license test on the first try, I failed the driving part – three times. For a short time in high school I had a car, a yellow Mercury Lynx I called Lucy that seated 1.2 comfortably. But that died, and that was it. After Lucy, I didn’t own a car until my eighteen month stint in LA, which ended just this past December.

(Well, in high school, believe it or not, my dad bought me a motorcycle. Like a real, actual motorcycle. This is a long, incredibly painful/therapist-lovin’ story for another day, but suffice it to say that instead of embracing the motorcycle and spending the remainder of my high school years driving from party to party and crushing p-ssy, I tried to ride it once, more or less shit myself, and my dad sold it within a week, thus ensuring my virginity would graduate high school with me. Good last ditch attempt to “man me up,” dad, but sorry it didn’t work out.)

Everything about the Lincoln Town Car that I drove in LA made me scared. Not scared as in afraid of death or ghosts, but more like that nervous high school kid I once was, faced with the task of asking a girl on a date. Because of my pedigree, I felt like I should be confident, like everything would be alright, like I could handle it (“My dad knows EVERYTHING about cars!”). But each time the car made a noise or started up strange, my palms (and most everything else) got sweaty, my mind raced, and I wound up just like I did in high school: on a side street, sitting alone, taking deep breaths, trying to figure out why I was so scared and so bad.

So while I don’t consider myself a bad driver (failed driving tests notwithstanding) and quite enjoy driving, I’m glad I’m back in NYC and don’t have to deal with a car and car maintenance. No thank you, sir.

But when I was in LA last week, I had to rent a car. This, I actually kind of enjoy. I’ve been without a car long enough that driving one now has a certain novelty to it, especially the tiny-ass Chevy Aveo-type cars that rental car places give you (after driving the Town Car, these things are like go carts to me). And so on Sunday, I picked up my rental car from the Avis in Hermosa Beach (I try not to rent at the airport if I can help it, due to the ever-present long lines there), brought it back to my buddy’s house where I was staying about a half mile away, and parked and went about the rest of my day.

The next morning, I woke up at 4:45am on my own. This wasn’t a total disaster, since I maintained NY hours while in LA and had to be in the office at 6:45am. So I took a long, sensual shower, grabbed my things and car keys, and was off.

A little less than half way into my commute, I noticed the car started to make a screeching noise. I panicked, but I reminded myself that I was driving brand new car (the car had less than 800 miles on it, if I recall correctly). So I kept driving. Everything would be ok.

But the screeching increased – dramatically. Only two or so blocks after I first heard it, it had become unbearably loud, and I was beginning to smell smoke. So I pulled into the parking lot of Panda Express to check it out.

Sure enough, there was smoke, smoke that appeared to be coming from the back right wheel of the car. Not good. As I sat there getting those nervous rumblings in my tummy that say, “Hey, we might lose control here,” I thought about what I could do. First, I checked the car, and it looked fine. Everything was working, there was no stuttering, I had no trouble driving, etc. But there was the screeching and smoke, coming from the back tire. Then I thought about the emergency/parking brake, which my Lincoln Town Car didn’t even have (or at least, I didn’t know where it was). But that was down, so that wasn’t it. I contemplated calling my dad, but he was probably still asleep. So instead I called Avis and explained the problem. They were very helpful as I explained the situation and joked about how my dad is a mechanic and I’m a moron (so charming, even in times of crisis). Ultimately, after running through a battery of questions about the car and the noise and the brakes and the emergency brake, the guy dispatched a tow truck and new car to my location, which was thankfully just two miles away from LAX and a Avis center.

And so a small brown man in a tow truck showed up in 45 or so minutes and gave me a new car and its keys, simple as that. I was back on the road in minutes, and the new car got me to work safely. End of car troubles, on with life.

Two days later, after work, I went to visit my agent Joel at his office. This is always fun for me. For one, I enjoy Joel’s company, as well as the company of several of his fellow agents, many of whom have become my friends over the years. Second, I have a fucking agent who has a fancy office in Beverly Hills, so why shouldn’t visit him? Sure, both Joel and UTA are definitely in the red based on the money I’ve made them versus the money and time they’ve spent on me. And sure, Joel and I don’t talk about “projects” or “meetings” so much as we discuss “I don’t know if I can justify validating your parking” and “Please stop calling [assistant] Phil and asking for free stuff,” but until Joel stops returning my calls (roughly four months from now), I’m going to stop in to see my goddamned agent when I’m in LA.

After the meeting, which was lovely save for my denied request to take home a “case or two” of diet coke, I went down to get my car to head home. As usual, I tipped the valet egregiously to prove that, despite having an agent, I’m just a simple man, from common roots, who values loyalty, respect, a cold, domestic beer and a job well done. He held the door and I stepped into the running car and was off.

But then, just a few blocks away, the screeching. Again. Impossible, I thought. Though it was the same model, this was a different car! How could it possibly make the same screeching noise, which, like last time, was getting much worse very quickly? I pulled off Wilshire onto a side street in Beverly Hills, turned off the car, and thought. The screeching was the same, and there was a little bit of smoke started to come from the same back right tire. What the fuck was going on? Had these cars been recalled or Avis hadn’t pulled them yet? Both times this happened, I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary – I simply got in the car, shut and locked the doors, put the key in the ignition and started it, put the car in drive, and drove off. That’s it. So why was it doing this?

Now standing outside the car, I figured I would call my auto lifeline, my dad. This was a preposterous situation, but if anyone would have an answer, it would be him. But I realized it was about 8pm ET, which meant he’d be around my grandpop’s house, having dinner with him. The last thing he’d want is his first-born son whining about a car noise from a posh side street in Los Angeles (what a gaybird) while he ate dinner with his dad, a man who only has a half leg remaining, a man who has been administered last rites on three separate occasions, a man who got so worked up at Christmas when my cousin Jimmy said that there were no great Irish mathematicians that he had to be physically restrained (despite the half leg, not as easy as you’d think).

So I resigned myself to calling Avis again, and focusing my questions about these stupid cars and how they must have been recalled. But before calling, I sat in the driver’s seat and did one last inspection: the car was definitely in drive when I was driving, there was definitely no problem with either braking or accelerating (though the noise got worse when the car accelerated), and the parking brake was definitely down, laying flat, like a parking brake should be when it’s not on. However, just on a whim, I grabbed the parking brake, pushed on the button, and pressed down to see if it would go even further down.

And it did.

The parking brake was on.

The parking brake was on, thus causing the screeching and grinding when the car(s) accelerated, and creating the smoke.

I, Jason Mulgrew, pansy/nancy-boy son of mechanic extraordinaire and real man Dennis Mulgrew, grandson of bull and real man Robert Mulgrew, had been driving around Los Angeles with the parking brake on TWO separate cars, going so far as to have a tow truck and 4’11″ Mexican man rescue me at 7:30 in the morning from the parking lot of Panda Express and LaCienega and Centinela. All my life I had known that I was terrible at cars, so bad that it’s possible I’m not my father’s biological son, but this…rock, meet bottom.

I pushed the parking brake down, started the car, and sped off toward the 405, doing my best to pretend nothing had ever happened and that I was, in fact, a real man. Though I (mostly) convinced myself of this, thank god I didn’t call my dad (especially during dinner). Let’s just, you know, not mention any of this to him, ok? Yeah, best if we keep to this ourselves. Thanks.