A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

The Biscayne

48 The Biscayne Somewhere in a junkyard in Lake County, Illinois, my father’s once-tan, nine-passenger, 1962 Chevrolet Biscayne station wagon sits rusting and moldering. Any usable parts are long gone, including the wheels, carburetor, generator, pumps, radiator, headlights, radio, and anything else forty years of backyard mechanics might have needed to fix their own Chevrolets. The demand for 1962 Chevrolet parts has abated. Grass—and maybe even a small northern Illinois hawthorn tree—is probably growing up through the engine compartment and floorboards. The front bumper is no doubt gone, but I’m fairly sure the back one is still there. There was that tear in it where the hook on the end of Wayne Kick’s tow truck cable tore through the chrome when, in our youth and innocence, working twelve feet below the surface of Lake Minear, brother number three and I hooked onto the bumper instead of the frame of the car, then shot to the surface and told Wayne to hit it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My father bought the station wagon virtually new from a mechanic who worked for Wayne’s father, Sid. Sid Kick owned the gas station, and he’d had my father’s business for years. There must have been something turbulent going on behind the scenes, because Sid changed brands several times over the years. He was Texaco when I learned to read. He was Conoco for a while, then Citgo, if I remember correctly, and I think he may have given up THE BISCAY NE 49 on the majors altogether by the time I left for college and lost track of his operation. He wore blue or green twill Sears, Roebuck work clothes and completed the look with a grease-stained hat, the kind worn by the singing Men of Texaco on Milton Berle’s television show. He wore the hat and the vaguely preoccupied look of a man juggling details. In those days, before credit cards, regular customers could charge gas at Sid’s—“Put it on the cuff.” Often, Sid and his staff might fuel five or six customers’ cars between trips to the office to jot transactions down. I would guess that between filling tanks, washing windshields, running the tabs, keeping whatever oil company whose sign he’d hung over his station that year at bay, supervising whatever mechanics were on the payroll that month, and keeping an eye on his inventory of minor parts (wiper blades, spark plugs), Sid had plenty to distract himself with. To talk to Sid was to try to insinuate yourself into the ongoing conversation he was already having with himself. You could learn quite a bit about auto mechanics and manhood hanging around the repair bays at Kick’s. How to read a greasy lubrication chart, locate all the fittings, and take a grease gun to a car. How to change oil. How to hot-patch an inner tube, plug a flat tire, set ignition points, and clean and gap spark plugs. How to use a timing light. Perhaps most important of all, how to swear like a mechanic who’d just had an unfortunate encounter with a hot exhaust manifold. There were other things to learn, too. Sid’s brother Harry, a simpler, more childlike, and less preoccupied version of Sid himself , worked at the station. Every so often, he would roll up his green twill sleeve and show us the fading, wrinkling, pre–World War II hula girl tattoo on his right forearm and make her dance by clenching his fist and rolling his knuckles. Back then, before lawyers, a kid could walk around the service bays. You could stand under the hoist and look up at a drive train and the rest of the undercarriage of whatever car they had 50 THE BISCAY NE overhead. You could lean over a fender, peer down through the wheel well, and ask a mechanic on a creeper below, “Whatcha doin’?” More often than not the mechanic would take the time to tell you. They appeared to be gruff, conflicted, and unrefined men in blue jeans and black engineer boots—men like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. But they were generous with their time and patient. Even as they worked, they would explain things to you and answer your questions more than thoroughly—to the point where you became bored...