The Boston Phoenix November 23 - 30, 2000
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Auto body and soul
He'll fix your shocks, he'll change your oil, and he'll align your wheels, but what Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad really wants to do is restore your spirit
by Chris Wright
On the face of it, there's nothing particularly striking about the Aladdin Auto Service Center. Located at the end of a pitted, mucky driveway, dwarfed by the somber bulk of North Cambridge's Rindge Tower projects, the Aladdin looks like any other low-key auto-repair shop. Grimy wheel hubs form a heap beside its large metal door. A row of battered cars huddle alongside a chain-link fence. The tang of distressed machinery hangs in the air.
Inside, working amid a clutter of tool chests, oil drums, and jacked-up vehicles, you will find the shop's owner, Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad. Clad in a black turtleneck and a woolen prayer cap, and sporting a thicket of grizzled facial hair, Mahmood looks more like a Muslim cleric than an auto mechanic. And, despite the fact that he is supposed to be awfully good at fixing cars, he doesn't act much like a mechanic, either.
Actually, it's difficult to say exactly what Mahmood is. When he's not aligning wheels and draining fluids, Mahmood moonlights as a mystic, a scientist, an artist, a healer, an inventor, a philosopher, a New Age engineer. Indeed, the only thing you can say about the man with any certainty is this: when Mahmood says "full service," he really means it.
"People come in and they are upset," he says, his voice thick with the sing-song inflections of his native Iran. "So I try to heal them. I fix their car and their body and make them a cup of tea."
But Mahmood's desire to heal goes beyond supplying hot beverages. His auto shop, for instance, must be the only one in town where customers may avail themselves of an on-site meditation room. And there can be few mechanics who will counsel you on modern-day alienation while they dismantle your carburetor. Fewer still who will sit down with you and hold forth on the psychological and spiritual benefits of affixing a glass nipple to one's television set.
"I put in the middle of the screen a little lens," he says, sitting on one of the Aladdin's two well-worn couches, sipping from the inevitable tea cup. "So for my children to watch TV is very comfortable."
When this announcement is met with a baffled silence, Mahmood bites into a sugar cube, takes a deep breath, and launches into a lengthy exegesis of how his nipple can abate the harmful effects of television's helter-skelter sensory input.
"The TV is always changing the image -- Schoom! Schoom! Schoom! Schoom!" he says, making starbursts with his hands. "Without any focal point, this reacts with the brain and creates a very big huge confusion. With mine, the light passes through the lens and so my children remember the square has a center, and they remember that they have a center."
More silence. More sugar.
"If you are able to establish centralization interiorly, you are able to function in the interior of life," he explains. "If you are establishing the focal point inside, the healing will be inside. After the healing inside, we go to the outside, and the outside will be healed by us too. You are establishing the inside out, and that is really happiness."
The path to true enlightenment, it seems, is paved with incomprehensibility. Speak to Mahmood for long enough, however, and all this starts making sense. His TV nipple is, after all, the technological extension of the mandala. "Most people put their very holy things in the center," Mahmood says. "In Islamic science, we believe the body is a small image of the universe. Look at the solar system -- the sun is in the center. All energy comes from the center."
As Mahmood talks, a stressed-looking man comes in to pick up his car. Upon learning that it isn't ready yet -- he's early -- the man does a little on-the-spot dance of frustration. "Have a cup of tea," Mahmood says. "A half an hour. Okay? Okay?" So soothing is Mahmood's tone, so affable his manner, the man can do nothing but slink away, a half-smile on his face. "No problem," Mahmood says. "No problem." He says this a lot. No problem.
Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad wasn't always a mechanic. When he came to the US, 22 years ago, he did so as a sort of techno-prodigy -- a beacon of possibility. As a teenager in Tehran, he had invented a perpetual-motion machine. Although the gizmo didn't quite work -- it was more of a temporary-motion machine -- the project was pretty heady stuff for the son of an Iranian landscaper. His family packed him off to a local university, where he studied to be an engineer.When he was 22, Mahmood was awarded the position of head of construction in the Shah's palace. There he cooked up his first viable invention. "I designed a mechanism for sealing the secret letter," he explains. "It used to be a special wax candle, but I made a machine in which the wax always was melted." The success of the secret-letter sealer was enough to convince Mahmood's family that he had the potential for true genius. In his mid 20s, he set out to make his mark on America.
If there's been a constant in Mahmood's life, it's a scattershot intellectual curiosity. His long college career -- 27 years long -- has seen him study cinematic special effects at the Mass College of Art, broadcasting at Emerson, and holographic science at Brown. It was at Brown that Mahmood established himself as a font of delightfully offbeat theories.
"I was working on the idea that if we read information in the 3- D form rather than 2- D, if we are able to observe the space, we establish a better memory," he says. "Because the body works in 3- D, not 2- D. That was the idea." The idea didn't fly, and despite Mahmood's efforts, books remain staunchly two-dimensional items. Undaunted, in 1989 he began working on a PhD at Boston University -- his field was the combination of Islamic science and Western technology.
The next year, he hit a dead end. "When I was at BU, I had so much ideas," he says. "At the same time I had a problem economically, because I had two babies and my wife she did not work, so I could not provide enough economically for my family." Despairing, Mahmood sat down beside Memorial Drive one day and began to pray. "I say, `God, give me guidance what I should do,' " he recalls, "And he say to me, `Look, all of the cars in front of you, coming and going, all of them will need to be repaired.' I said, `Are you telling me I'm supposed to be a mechanic?' He said, `Yes.' "
So, on Allah's advice, Mahmood dropped out of BU's PhD program. This, he says, was a crushing disappointment. The boy who had once been destined for greatness found himself beefing up on car maintenance at the GM training school in Needham. Still, he applied himself to his new vocation with characteristic diligence. "After five years working on the sidewalk, fixing the cars, working in a parking lot," he says, "I open this shop."
They say God moves in mysterious ways, and this was certainly true in Mahmood's case. Rather than scuppering his career as an inventor, Aladdin Auto Service provided Mahmood with the means to develop his peculiar mix of technology, religion, art, and alternative medicine. Today, his research goes a good deal beyond applying glass nipples to TV screens. "The machine does everything for us at the present time," he says. "Clothing, food, everything. So it has to help our spirituality, too."
In the corner of Aladdin Auto sits a tan 1990 Dodge Colt hatchback. The car doesn't look like much at first -- in fact, it's a bit of a heap -- but this humble vehicle is in many ways Mahmood's crowning achievement -- the culmination of his theories on the health benefits of establishing centralization in our daily lives.
What makes Mahmood's Dodge Colt interesting is the modification he has made to its interior. He has moved the steering column to the center, and the driver's seat, too, and called his prototype the Celestia. It is one of three cars in the world that use a center-seated design. But this one's not just a car. The Celestia, Mahmood believes, will help its drivers achieve mental balance, inner peace, and -- who knows? -- eventual Nirvana.
Not surprisingly, he uses the language of rustic parable to explain how. "If we have a donkey or a camel," he says, "and we put the weight on one side of the animal, in one month what will happen to the animal?"
Um, it'll tip over?
"Yes. The form of the body will change and the animal, if it wants to go straight, will go crooked. We have to put the weight on both sides of the animal equal. That is a very simple principle." He continues, "When we are driving, the information the eyes observe is not equal. The action of the information, if you're driving on the left side, is more than the right side. So this side of the brain reacts differently, the blood circulation to the brain goes to the area where you need it more, so this person will be off-balance. The central focal point will create a balance."
Sitting in the Celestia, you don't feel any immediate sense of spiritual harmony. Then again, on a more mundane level, your field of vision is increased, and you feel less vulnerable sitting a foot or so from the door. I ask Mahmood if I can take the car for a spin, but it's undergoing a few modifications and isn't in working order. But his other on-site invention -- his technological extravaganza -- is very much up and
running.It, I learn, will take me for a spin.
The Motion-Reaction Machine is an impressive, even ominous, sight. Situated in a large room behind Mahmood's garage, encased in a crime-scene canopy of blue tarpaulin, the machine extends maybe 15 feet into the air. It's basically a large, rectangular gyroscope -- a frame within a frame capable of spinning vertically and horizontally at the same time. It looks like the kind of contraption Terry Gilliam might put together -- a hybrid of thrill ride and instrument of torture. In the middle of the device is an upright gurney. Dangling from either side of this is a series of car seat belts. I climb aboard.
Strapped onto the Motion-Reaction Machine's vertical gurney, you feel a bit like Hannibal Lecter -- or what Hannibal Lecter might feel like if he were having a panic attack. To put it bluntly, it's terrifying. At least for the first few seconds. After that it's merely mortifying. "Try to relax," Mahmood says as the machine starts spinning -- faster and faster, over and over, around and around. "Do not grip so tight," he advises. Easy for him to say; he's not getting intestinal whiplash. Still, I give it 10 minutes, twice the time required to feel the machine's benefits.
Yes, benefits.
A spin on the Motion-Reaction Machine is like the ecstasy-inducing dance of the Whirling Dervish, only squared. After five minutes, you will establish an inner focal point. You will feel more centered. You will experience a sense of peace, balance, harmony, maybe even joy. That's the thinking.
"You will see more light," Mahmood says. "You will be able to have a relationship inside and outside." Too true. As I totter off the machine, the contents of my stomach could very well see the light of day. To be fair, though, I do feel strangely okay. As I sit and try to compose myself, I am aware, for the first time, of the clock tick-tock-tocking on the wall.
The Motion-Reaction Machine, Mahmood believes, will one day form the basis of an alternative medicine, used to treat everything from cancer to diabetes. So far, however, potential investors have not been breaking down his door. "So many people can invest their money into the chemical reaction," he says. "Everybody is interested to get the next pill. I bring another source to heal the body. I believe I can heal the body through my machine.
"Sadly, I could not find anybody to
invest."
Moonlighting as a visionary is not always easy. Or cheap. By Mahmood's estimate, he has spent around $80,000 of his own money on his inventions, $55,000 on the Motion-Reaction Machine alone. "If I have extra money," he says, "I put it into my research." He will often stay at the shop until after midnight to work on his projects."Many nights I sit here and I start to cry," he says. "When you come to your idea, you have to sacrifice and you have to suffer to bring that idea to the exterior life. If you don't do this, it will kill you inside. You become a vegetable. You become nothing."
The fact that his work hasn't earned him a lot of recognition doesn't bother him, Mahmood insists. "I believe any knowledge has a time for it," he says. "I do not know if at the present time people are going to be ready for motion-reaction. Maybe they are not going to appreciate it now, but maybe in the future they are going to try."
He pauses and sips his tea. "Every morning I pick up this cup," he says. "We drink the tea from it. We don't know who made it, but we enjoy the pleasure from it. I think the best beauty of life is when we contribute to life and it doesn't matter who we are."
Perhaps one day Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad will take his place alongside the likes of Jonas Salk and Louis Pasteur. Right now, however, he has to apply his healing powers to the crippled cab that's jacked up in the center of his shop. He picks up our empty cups and for the first time I notice his hands -- rough, infused with grime. As I leave the shop, Mahmood follows. In the five-o'clock gloom, Rindge Towers look bleak and menacing. The air is damp and bitter.
"You are welcome," Mahmood says as I pull away. "The tea will be waiting for you."
Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.
