Relay: Tired Out
I heard it happen, but I didn’t know what it was. I was driving down North Main Street in Southampton, and as I passed the Clam Man I heard a click click click coming in the slightly open window. My random thought was that I had picked up a pebble. I turned in at the nursing home, where I was paying a visit, and thought nothing more about it.
My visit paid, around 2 p.m. I went to my car and when I turned it on to drive home, the little warning light came on telling me that I needed air in a tire. Well, that happens all the time because my car, the cutest car in the world, is notoriously hard on tires, so I continued on for about 30 feet and pulled into another part of the nursing home lot to find out what that flapping sound was coming in the same window.
A fella walking by confirmed that not only did I have a flat, but I had a flat flat.
Could I make it to the gas station intersection that I could see from the nursing home lot over the roof of McDonald’s?
He assured me that I could make it that far, so I went to the gas station that did not require a turn across traffic in any way — the Coastal gas station on the north side of the scary intersection of 7-Eleven, gas station, and gas station that has 40 street lights and 50 lanes of traffic. I should say here that it was Sunday, at now 2:30 in the afternoon on a non-beach day, and the traffic was nuts.
Another reason for the straight-ahead move was that I like little gas stations where the service is personal.
I do not pump my own gas, and never will.
The fella manning the pumps was alone and busy. Cars and vans were pulling in to load up on fuel for the trip home.
“Please,” I said, “I do not know how to do whatever it is that needs doing, but please do something to help me get home.”
This guy was so busy, but between vehicles (I kept watch to tell him if anyone had pulled in, at which point he would run to help them) he calmed me down. I should mention now that it was drizzling. I did have a spare tire, but where was it? (City kid, AAA princess.) Was there a tool (meaning jack)? I showed him the shiny thing that I had seen sticking out of my tire when I had started this journey. It looked big to me, and he seemed impressed and went off to get some tools. No mechanics around on Sundays was his mantra, nowhere. No mechanics. It’s Sunday.
I was now thinking, “Can I rent a car? How many years will I be sitting here waiting for AAA to come to me in Sunday traffic, in the rain?”
Armed with pliers and an adjustable, this fella (shall I begin calling him hero?) extracted from my tire a thing the length and almost width of my pinky finger. It took him 15 minutes of car dental work to pull this thing out. We were both mighty impressed — I took a photo of it — and what air was still in the tire fell out onto the pavement. I was now on a rim.
Meanwhile he was filling car after car after car, then running back to me. We were over next to the air machine and out of the stream of gas-needers, so he was doing a lot of running to service everyone.
During a lull in the traffic he came to the car with what looked like a first aid kit, and it kind of was. It had some very shiny things that looked like you could stopper a champagne bottle, or secure the corner of a tent into the ground, and an envelope of what looked like flat chocolate licorice candy. There was also a container of what looked like zinc oxide or that sun stuff lifeguards put on their noses, or maybe cold cream or lipgloss. Anyway, he slathered the hole — you could have fit a pencil or a ballpoint pen into this hole with room to spare — with this goop, and then using the shiny thing with the point on the end pushed the brown candy stuff into the hole. Then he was off to fill another gas tank or two, then back to me to slather more goop and push more brown stuff.
Did I have “quarters for the air machine, ma’am?” He ma’am-ed me, my savior ma’amed me! I had already taken inventory of how much money I had. I mean, how do you pay a hero? I stacked up the quarters, and when he came back from filling a particularly large S.U.V., I asked him how he knew how to do what he was doing? “Do you go to school for this stuff?” was really what I said.
He laughed and sweetly said, “I learned how to do this on YouTube. This is my first time.”
He said it would be $10. I gave him every cent I had ($15 in greenbacks and $2 in dusty quarters) and got home to East Hampton safely.
P.S. The next day I checked with the tire shop in East Hampton. They said he did a great job and that the tire would last for years, so thank you, my hero, and thank YouTube.
Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.