The morning air was dead and stagnant. It reminded me of the stasis of my mind - a numbness inside my skull. I had been working with Toad on the days shift for a few months and never managed to be less than an hour late. Every morning was the same: The spine-chilling electric throb of the alarm would bore into my head at six o'clock. I had the alarm on the other side of the room so I would be forced to stand up and walk over to it, thinking that would get my circulation going enough to keep me awake. I don't know who I was trying to fool. I would shut the alarm off and virtually collapse back into bed only to be awakened one to two hours later by a phone call from Toad.
Toad's wakeup calls were usually just enough of an adrenaline rush to help me overcome my narcotics hangover. I popped some painkillers, pulled on some clothes and groggily drove to work - I never remembered so much as a second of the fifteen minute journey. I was rarely ever certain whether I was awake or asleep.
Once at the station, I dragged out the heavy metal trash cans, air hose and squeegee buckets, then unlocked the pumps. Toad gave me my blue bank bag full of money which I counted to verify it was all correct. With all of my duties out of the way, I dropped my head to the desk and begged for death to the accompaniment of the clattering adding machine and the annoying "comedy" radio show Toad liked.
Eventually, we received our daily call from Lee to get the tank levels and Toad opened up the morning paper so he could read me whatever stories he found interesting. This came complete with his commentary, which bordered on complete lunacy. It was so annoying it actually made me desperate for a customer to pull in so I could escape.
Toad paused from his newspaper rant to take a large swig from his old 40-ounce convenience store soft drink cup. He used a piece of gray rubber tubing he bought at a car parts store as a straw. It was constantly filled with a mixture of vodka and Mountain Dew, reminding me of radiator fluid. He swished the liquid around in his mouth a bit before swallowing.
"Awww damn!"
I looked at him suspiciously, almost afraid to encourage a dialogue, "What?"
"I had a piece of sausage I was using to plug up a cavity back there," he patted his jaw, "I just dislodged it."
I sighed, popped another painkiller and thanked God for the car that just pulled in.
There were three basic types of customers on the day shift: lonely housewives, business accounts, and the elderly. Sometimes, it was fun to flirt with the lonely housewives, though none that I can remember were particularly attractive - some were cute, I guess. They desperately wanted attention and would be overt about getting it. I think some of them thought of a trip to the gas station as a wild night out on the town. I remember one had very long blonde hair. She was pregnant and would get out of her car and chat while I did her gas. She wouldn't let me do the windshield or anything, preferring to talk instead. Laughing hysterically at anything I said even remotely funny, she'd put her hands on my shoulders as if to prop herself up. I would always back away like she had a disease - she was pregnant after all - and that would make her laugh even harder. She already had two daughters who looked exactly like her. Sometimes I gave them stuffed animals that another customer always left us as a tip. Toad loved these women... to me they were just a way to kill time.
The business accounts included the Metro Baptist Church and Gladstone Plumbing, run by that bitter old man Johnny Gladstone. The minister from Metro Baptist Church was really creepy. He was tall and white as a sheet, with coal-black hair and extremely red lips. His mousy wife and three sons looked like him in a sort of inbred way. He was constantly trying to get me to go to church. Constantly.
Everyone at the station had customer groupies. Some customers, for whatever reason, would become attached to a certain employee. They would demand that only that employee put gas in their car, check their oil and air up their tires. Some of them got downright mean about it - if Toad was busy mowing the lawn or unclogging the women's toilet and I tried to pump one of his groupie's gas, they would yell at me angrily and demand I get Toad. One was a woman in her fifties who claimed to be a psychologist, but as far as I could tell, wasn't practicing. Every single time she came in, she had gauze wrapped around her neck and hands. She'd been wearing that gauze for years. Sometimes it would unwrap and fall off while she was digging for her credit card and there would be nothing unusual about her hands.
There was another regular who worked as a salesman for a major drug company - I felt a sort of camaraderie with him. He was into music quite a bit, had personalized license plates that said "SUBPOP," and always gave me new bands to listen to, one tape I particularly remember. I got to listen to it in full once I started using a Walkman to escape Toad's rantings and the more I listened to it, the more I loved it. The name of the album (you couldn't call anything that wasn't pressed on vinyl an "album" around Toad without inciting a one hour long diatribe) was "Bleach" and it was from a little-known band called "Nirvana."
Another of my dayshift groupies was an old woman who was clearly getting a bit senile. Toad called her my Princess. She came in every Tuesday at exactly 10:45am. She'd always pull in the exact same lane and park at the exact same spot. She always got ten dollars worth of gas and had me check the oil, which was never low, and the tires. Her gas cap was behind the license plate, in the middle-rear of the car, so she could have pulled into any spot. But she would even wait behind another other car so she could pull in where she wanted. She'd always give me a fifty cent tip, which was good for a Dr. Pepper at least.
Toad was driving an old blue 280zx at the time - Toad had a different car every few months, because they were usually throwaways from friends and relatives. He really was an excellent mechanic and he taught me a lot about it, but the 280z was on its deathbed. It was pretty much 90% rust and chunks of it would fall off when he drove it. I remember traveling from Kansas City to Saint Joseph with Toad one rainy day to pick up some morphine. Every time we hit a pool of water on the highway, the floor mat on my side of the car would get pushed up by a gush of water. It didn't make me feel any better when Toad told me the friend who had given him the car had referred to it as a Death Trap.
Later in the day, Toad and I had just finished off a couple of cars and were standing outside chatting. He had registered for membership in the "Traveler's Protection Association" - "TPA" for short - through a regular customer who was always trying to lure us into joining this or that club or attending some youth function at the community center. Toad could never say "no." In exchange for his signature and twenty-five dollars in dues, Toad received an official, blue TPA sticker that read in big white lettering "WATCH THAT CHILD!" He affixed it to the rear bumper of the Death Trap, positioning it so it covered a large rust hole.
As we stood in the shade of the canopy, Toad looked out to the street, "There's your Princess!"
Sure enough, the old woman was driving along - and she didn't stop. The station had two entrances, she usually came in the south entrance, but she passed it. I wondered if she wasn't going to get gas or if, due to some bizarre glitch in the fabric of space-time, she had actually decided to use a different entrance. Except she didn't turn. She stopped right there on the street. A couple of cars pulled up behind her and stopped. Toad and I watched as she put her car in reverse and started backing up. The two cars lined up behind her turned and drove into the other lane, honking their horns. Cars traveling in the southbound lane swerved over on the shoulder to avoid the oncoming cars and started honking their horns. Employees of the Amoco next door and Texaco across the street all stopped what they were doing and watched the ballet. Finally, the old woman had backed up thirty feet or so, which was enough to turn into the south entrance of the station. She pulled into her regular position, acting as though nothing unusual had happened.
The old woman got her usual ten dollars, but didn't ask me to check the oil or tires. She heard the pump stop as I let go of the trigger right at ten dollars. (An experienced gas pumper could have the pump going at full speed and stop at an exact amount; you would get to the point where you were able to feel the rhythm of the numbers changing on the analog pumps.) She called me over to the window and I left the nozzle in the tank, thinking maybe she had decided she wanted more gas.
"Could you tell me the number of gallons."
"Sure. It's 10 gallons."
"But, you didn't check the pump."
"Ummm. Gas is ninety-nine point nine cents per gallon and you got 10 dollars worth, so it was 10 gallons." It was amazing how many times I had to explain this to people.
She scowled and wrote the number down in a small notebook, then turned the car on and threw it in drive.
"Oh, wait, I didn't take the noz..."
"You've changed! I'm never coming back here again!"
"What??"
But it was too late, the car lurched forward as she took her foot off the brake. She hit the gas and tore the hose out of the pump, which snapped around and lashed Toad in the leg, startling him. He stepped back, tripped and crashed into the bumper of his Death Trap. The force was enough to knock it completely off the car. Somehow, it broke the back hatch as well, since it wouldn't stay shut after that. The old lady drove off with the gas nozzle and hose still hanging out of the back of her car. Indeed, she never came back.
Yep. Fuckin' employees, fuckin' with elderly customers.
Fortunately, the pumps were outfitted with a mechanism that prevented gas from spewing everywhere when a hose was snapped off like that. It wasn't the first or last time that happened. Sometimes, the nozzle would come out of the gas tank and leave a nice big scratch on the side of the car. Those customers would eventually be referred to Tom or Larry and then never heard from again. They also told us that if anyone gave us a hard time to tell them to leave and not come back.
Toad killed two birds with one stone. He reattached the rear bumper of his Death Trap by running a piece of rope through the trunk, down through a rust hole in the floor and around the bumper, then back up through the top of the hatch where he had drilled a hole. He wrapped it around several times and drove the car that way with that stupid "WATCH THAT CHILD!" bumper sticker patching up a rust hole like some decayed piece of food plugging one of his cavities.
Posted by DevilMonkey at 10:06 PM