The auto repair closet: Advocate associate news editor John Caldwell is ready to admit that he once donned overalls and wielded a socket wrench, though his passion for the engine was short-lived.

After a loud bang followed by the telltale thump, thump, thump of a flat tire flopping along pavement, I recently pulled my Honda Accord into the nearest parking lot mid called Triple-A road service on my cell phone. "I'm behind a taco stand on San Fernando Road," I told the dispatcher. "Please hurry. It's hot outside and this neighborhood is scary."

As I sat in my car with the air conditioner running, I imagined the dispatcher being facetious with his coworkers: "Emergency! There's a helpless queer boy stranded in Glendale," he was probably saying.

There was a time when I would have happily jumped from my car and changed my own tire or made an engine repair to get myself under way. Paying a monthly fee for roadside service, I once thought, was a preposterous waste of money. I have a secret past that includes lug wrenches and greasy fingernails, a past that I am not quick to share with my current family of gay friends lest they look at me in disbelief. "That's right. I know how to work on cars," I have admitted, hanging my head in shame. "I can change my own oil. I've done it many times."

Before my life included gay community centers, gay nightclubs, and a gay relationship, I was a "straight" teenage car buff. At age 17 I bought a run-down 1968 Pontiac GTO that I rebuilt from the ground up. It was fast and loud and what some might consider to be very, very not "gay." I had a girlfriend too; she liked to snuggle up against me in the front seat. And I had decidedly masculine straight-boy friends, all of whom loved cars and loved to talk about working on them, just like me. This was my life before coming out, and I enjoyed it.

My father owned his own business then, a building materials yard with its own repair shop in the back where filthy overweight men worked under the hoods of delivery trucks, yelling obscenities in between telling jokes about fags. Not only was this shop a car-repair coup for my two sisters and me, it afforded me all the free mechanic's training I wanted. My father, thrilled that his sissy-boy son was interested in something as masculine as cars, gave me a job there.

I donned a set of faded blue overalls and began learning the complicated vocation of fixing cars. I convinced my dad to let me pull my GTO into the shop, where I rebuilt the engine in my spare time. The head mechanic, a 400 pound barrel of a man with copper-colored hair whom everybody called "Red," taught me how to "listen" to an engine in order to find the problem. It was an exciting adventure filled with the smell of oil and gasoline, the roar of air compressors, and greasy lunches around an old picnic table during which my coworkers talked incessantly about "pussy."

It took me less than a year to decide to move on. The thrill of the engine wore off along with my capacity to hang out with a bunch of vulgar straight-boy mechanics. I didn't forget what l learned, though, putting it to good use in the long years of little pay and crappy cars that came with the pursuit of a career in music and writing. I saved thousands of dollars repairing my own vehicles and thousands more in not getting taken by shyster auto repairmen urging me to fix problems that didn't exist.

I don't fix my own car anymore, but I'm no longer ashamed to admit that I once did. Instead I advise everyone to learn something about car repair. I hear my friends talk about $500 to fix this problem or $700 for that repair. I shake my head, turn to them and say, "Honey, you probably got taken for a ride. Too bad you never owned a 1968 GTO."