Rebuilding a motorcycle didn't seem that hard when I first set out. Take it apart, clean it, fix a few things, put it back together. How hard can it be, right?
But I'm (still) lousy at labeling things, and so now my garage is overrun with little ziploc bags full of doodads and whatnots. The bags have little masking tape labels, labels like "left" and "don't lose" and "important." There's a bucket of parts that I'm pretty sure belong to my old Volkswagon but might be part of the front forks for my bike. A vat of rancid motor oil is hidden behind the deep freeze, because I keep forgetting to recycle it. The floor is littered with greasy rags. It is, in the words of my four-year-old daughter, "yucky."
I'm all thumbs, the Inspector Clouseau of engine repair. It would be funny if I didn't want to do this thing so badly.
There are people who just "get it." They look at an engine the way I look at a sentence. It comes naturally, the gears and pistons sliding into place like a series of prepositional phrases. A sticky valve is nothing more than a dangling modifier waiting to be nudged gently back into its rightful spot. I "get" grammar, but I'd kill to "get" engines.
This is, I'm sure, very much how Dr. Watson feels, watching with slight homoerotic envy as Holmes slips his way into yet another case, gazes icily around the room, and emerges, bored and triumphant. I bet that Watson would just love to see Holmes fail, to watch his eyes bulge, to see that little vein in the side of his neck beat desperately as its owner searches with increasing desperation for the last elusive piece of the puzzle. I'm sure he'd love to see Holmes' shoulders slump in defeat, to see him take an unchecked blow to the gut, to stumble, to fall. I know that's what I'd want to see if I were him.
But that won't happen. It won't happen because Holmes "gets" being a detective, unlike the rank amateurs who apparently congregate in the halls of Scotland Yard. Holmes, a man who turns to cocaine as a refuge against the dreary life of mere mortals, Holmes, who somehow manages to be rail thin and yet boxes like a whirling dervish, Holmes, whose mere interest can raise the coldest case from the dead, whose knowledge of foreign cults and soil samples appears boundless, whose spidery hands can coax the voice of God from a worn out violin - this guy "gets" it.
Watson, meanwhile, has to claw and scrape his way through life. He has no talent that we're aware of, no personality quirks, no peculiar habits, no offensive beliefs. He displays neither vice nor virtue, exceptional skill nor deplorable decadence. He's off white and bland. If he were oatmeal he wouldn't even be lumpy. He's the Walter Mitty of the late Victorian set.
And, what's worse, he knows it. He knows how he looks next to that statuesque bastard. He knows that at any moment, Holmes' brain might crawl out of its skull, slither across the floor, and hump his leg. He's a microbe, full of pseudopod and flagellum, signifying nothing.
And sitting right across the table from him, slurping his morning coffee, air whistling in and out of his cavernous nostrils, sits the man who solves with backhanded ease the very mysteries that Watson can't even fathom and yet of which he so desperately wants to be a part. They're Mozart and Salieri, an early pair of literary frenemies. Every once in a while Holmes tosses Watson an intellectual bone and Watson grabs at it, worrying it to the quick, accepting the gristle and marrow as a temporary substitute for Holmes' jugular. They're not partners, not friends. Watson can't pretend to know the inscrutable Holmes, and there's really nothing to know about Watson. Even if there were, Holmes wouldn't care, bare-knuckle boxing coke-fiend that he is. Because he "gets" it, and Watson doesn't. What else is there to know?
Which reminds me: my neighbor is pretty good with a wrench.
He'd better watch his back.
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