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A true, weird story. I hope you like that sort of thing.
I have always enjoyed finding the odd among the normal. After college, I stayed in the university town, a suburb of Oklahoma City, which was where the people with all the oil money used to live. My rented duplex was on the wrong side of the tracks, in one of the poorer neighborhoods. People in my area were the type who had to buy used tires, and I was one of those people. And, my Luv pickup had a flat.
I called Jimy’s (his spelling) Tire. Jimmy said to come on by, and he’d get me my tire. He was only a block or two away. Turns out he was running the business out of his old 1920s bungalow. There was a detached garage stacked to within two feet of the ceiling with tires. No Jimy, though. A young Middle Eastern male sat on the porch, reading what looked like the Koran. He told me Jimy would be along soon, and that I could go in the house to wait.
Inside were about twenty kittens, and countless empty bottles of what was labeled “raisin wine”. An albino-looking man with a bleeding eye was sitting in a chair watching a soap opera. He didn’t speak. After what seemed an eternity, Jimy arrived, a scraggly Arabic man clad in a white v-necked t-shirt. I gave him my tire size as we headed to the garage.
He then climbed up the wall of tires, and disappeared, crawling away on his stomach, like an infantryman. A minute later, he came crawling back, pushing the tire in front of him. His white shirt was now marked in black. (In retrospect, I remember he looked a lot like Khalid Sheik Mohammed in his famous t-shirt photoshoot. But this was long before 2001.) I paid $20 and left. For the next six years, I kept coming back, as much to take in the atmosphere as to buy the tires.
Discussion (33)
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I had to do an internet search both for "Luv pickup" and for "Khalid Sheik Mohammed famous t-shirt photoshoot." Worth it.
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A great short story!
We've all been there. (Well, many of us, anyway) When we lived in Hollywood, in the Seventies, there was a Mexican guy parked every day outside the car wash, with a set of bodywork tools and materials in the trunk of his '73 Cutlass (a very nice car, BTW). He was a real artisan who could work wonders with steel, putty and paint.
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Thanks for reading! I will write a shorter bit about that Luv soon. A "Luv" story.
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Honored you read it!
Next time I'm back in OK, I'm going to see if they're still around.
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There's been a lot of improvement in dent removal over the past several years.
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