GAS STOP

By Cliff Gromer
4/8/05

"That shore is a fancy car you got there. Bet she's a real ripper, eh sonny?"

The dried-up 85-year-old gas jockey grinned broadly as his violently palsied hand brought forth the hose that would infuse the 1970 440-6 'Cuda convertible with the precious life-giving elixir of Mobil Premium. The remnants of what appeared to be three upper teeth contrasted in shape but not color to the smoothly ridged gum lines and sharp stubbled chin. All was a monochrome of tobacco juice brown.

It was 1970, and I was testing a then-new Plymouth 'Cuda for a Mopar magazine. The fuel needle was playing footsies with the Empty peg, otherwise I'd never have stopped at this God-forsaken excuse of a gas station, long forgotten by time in Owl's Head, NY.

The old man's shaking hands gave the hose a life of its own, and it took both his fists to get the berserk nozzle even near the tank filler. I secretly marveled at the way he tamed that hose without the aid of a whip or chair. But I’d bet he had a revolver nearby, just in case the thing really got out of hand.

"All the way," I said, pointing to the pump. My directive fell on ears deafened by long decades of the incessant roar of crickets, field mice and growing grass in Owl's Head. I had been thirstily eyeing the Coke machine that was standing some distance away, tilted at a weird angle by its supporting three legs and a couple of bricks. But, I decided to postpone the soda until the filling process was completed. I doubted that the antique gas pumps were equipped with a dead man's switch. And, should the old guy expire and go into rigor mortis with his finger on the nozzle trigger (an event that seemed imminent) well, things could get messy.

The old man was into the rhythm of what he was doing, a rhythm punctuated by the pump bell dinging after every gallon was gasped into the tank, and the grinding pump motor that promised its next tortured and convulsed revolution would be its last.

Ding! Ding! There was a certain mystique about that bell. The same mystique that must have caught up this old man decades ago, in his youth, just as it was doing now. I could picture the scene in my mind. The old man's father taking his son gently by the elbow on that never-to-be-forgotten June afternoon, and guiding him over to the corner of the gas station, where the air hose lay limp and flaccid in the crook of its hanger. And there they stood alone. The sun bright and fierce, the air hushed and heavy with the solemnity and significance of the moment.

As his father started to speak, the boy bowed his head in reverence, aware somehow of the awesomeness of the event that was about to take place in his life. His father chose his words carefully. He had been planning this for sometime now, and he'd rehearsed his speech a thousand times in his mind.

"Reuben," his father began in a voice quivering with emotion, one hand outstretched expressively before him, majestically sweeping back and forth in a two-degree arc. "Reuben, someday all this will be yours."

The boy looked up, the tears flowing unashamedly from under his blinking eyelids, streaming down his cheeks, beading up for a moment on the greasy smear by his mouth (the evidence of his mother's chicken fat sandwich) and thence downward to spill from his bright red chin, where he had squarely caught a geyser of boiling water and steam when he had uncorked the radiator of an overheating flathead Ford. He looked up, gazing tenderly into his father's eyes. The sun reflecting off the massive white head bandage that covered the deep scalp wound incurred when the force of the boiling geyser lifted him off his feet and into the Ford's upraised hood.