Tire Shop

I went down yesterday to fix a leak in my tire. Off Bridge street there's a place 95 cents flats fixed, smeary black paint on warped wood plank between two bald tires. I go in, an old Black man with a Jackie Gleason hat greasy soft with a mashed cigar stub in mouth and another old Chicano man working the other pneumatic hissing tire changer. The walls are black with rubber soot blown black dust everywhere and rows of worn tires on gnawed board racks for sale, air hoses snaking and looped over the floor. I greet the two old men 'Yeah, how's it going!' No response. They look up at me as if I just gave them a week to live. 'I got a tire needs a tube.' Rudy, a young Chicano emerges from the black part of the room pony tailed and plump walks me out to my truck and looks at the tire. 'It'll cost you five bucks to take off and change.' I nod. He tells the old Chicano, who pulls the roller jack with a long steel handle outside, and I wait in the middle of the grunting oval tire changing machines, while the old guy goes out and returns with my tire. He looks at me like a disgruntled Carny handling the ferriswheel for the millionth time and I'm just another ache in the arm, a spoiled kid. I watch the two old men work the tire machines step on the foot levers that send the bars around flipping the tire from the rim and I wonder what brought these two old men to work here on this gray evening in February – are they ex-cons? Drunks or addicts? He whips the tube out,' Rudy ' he yells and I see a gaping hole in the tube, 'Can't patch that,' Rudy says Then in Spanish Slang says, 'no podemos pachiarlo,' 'we got a pile of old tubes over there, we'll do it for ten dollars.' At first I think he might be taking me but I hedge away from that thought and I watch the machines work the spleesh of air the final begrudging phoof! of rubber popped loose then the holy clank of steel bar against steel and every gently the old Chicano man, instead of throwing the bar on the floor, takes the iron bar and wipes it clean of rubber bits and oil and slides it gently into his waist belt, in such a way I've only seen mother wipe their infant's mouth. And I wonder where they live these two old guys I turn and watch MASH on a tv suspended from the ceiling six '0 clock news comes on Hunnington beach blackened with oil. Rudy comes behind me and says, 'Fucking shame they do that to our shores.' I suddenly realize how I love these working men working in half dark with bald tires like medieval hunchbacks in a dungeon. They eat soup and scrape along in their lives – how can they live I wonder on 95 cents a tire change in today's world? I am pleased to be with them and feel how barrio Chicanos love this too – how some give up nice jobs in foreign places to live by friends working in these places and out of these men revolutions have started. The old Chicano is mumbling at me how cheap I am when he learns my four tires are bald and spare flat, shaking his head as he works the tube into the tirewell. I notice his heels are chewed to the nails his fingernails black his face a weary room and board stairwell of a downtown motel given over to drunks and derelicts, his face hand worn by drunks leaning their full weight on it wooden steps grooved by hard soled men just out of prison, a face condemned by life to live out more days in futility. I bid goodbye to the Black man chomping his ancient cigar the Chicano man with his head down and I feel ashamed, somehow, that I cannot live their lives a while for them. Grateful they are here, I respect such men, who have stories that will never be told, who bring back to me my simple boyish days, when men in oily pants and grubby hands talked in rough tones and worked at simply work, getting three meals a day on the table the hard way. They live in an imperfect world, unlike men with money who have places to put their shame these men have none, other put their shame on planes or Las Vegas these have no place but to put their shame on their endurance their mothers their kids themselves unlike men who put their shame on new cars condos bank accounts so they never have to face their shame these men in the tire shop have become more human with shame. And I thought of the time my brother betrayed me leaving me at 14 when we vowed we'd always be together he left to live with some rich folks and I was taken to the Detention Center for kids with no place to live – I became a juvenile filled with anger at my brother who left me alone. These tire shop men made choices never to leave their brothers, in them I saw shame with no place to go but in a man's face, hands, work and silence. And as I drove away, nearing my farm I saw a water sprinkler shooting an arc of water far over the fence and grass it was intended to water -- the fountain of water hitting a weedy stickered spot that grew the only single flower anywhere around in the midst of rubble brush and stones the water hit and touched a dormant seed that blossomed all itself into what it was despite the surroundings. Something made sense to me then and I'm not quite sure what -- an unconditional love of being and living, and taking what came one's way with dignity. That night in my dream I cried for my brother as he was leaving, all the words I used against myself rotten, no good, shitty, failure, dissolved in my tears, my tears poured out of me in my dream and I wept for my brother and wept when I turned after he left and I reached for my sister and she was having coffee with a friend -- I wept in my dream because she was not available for me when I needed her, and all my tears flowed, and how I wept, my feeling my pain of abandonment, all my tears became that arc of water and I became the flower, by sheer accident in the middle of nowhere, blossoming....