Rita’s Ride with Me

Rita’s Ride with Me

Flat fixing is a dying rite of passage in the ownership of an automobile. You can tell by the way the spare and jack are hidden in modern cars. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a grim first prizewinner in the tire recall lottery. I myself claimed a second prize with my SUV ticket; a new set of tires after 40,000 plus flat free miles of driving pleasure. Tracing your bad luck back to the source helps take the sting out of it. Don’t you agree?

It used to be that telling your favorite flat tire story was a great icebreaker in social situations. Elaborating on the weather (cold, rainy, foggy, etc.), funny juxtaposition of the car’s final resting point (ditch, passing lane, intersection, etc.), and your antics in dealing with it (dirty, dangerous, groin pulling, etc.), made everyone feel the ordeal and maybe learn something. Nowadays it just isn’t funny. Product liability sure takes the fun out of things, wouldn’t you agree?

My favorite flat tire story happened in my youth driving my Mother’s Chevy station wagon. Of all places, I recognized the frump frump noise of a flat tire as I was pulling out of my parking position at the 309 Drive In Theater. Stopping immediately in text book style I was diagonal over the hump that previously had pointed the windshield at the gigantic screen. I had been necking with my date and was perspired near to exhaustion in getting to second base. She was small but very strong. Did I mention that it was winter?

I knew the drill. I put the parking brake on and went into the back for the spare and jack. The snow tires had just been cycled onto the wheels so they were very fresh with mechanic’s dirt that made a nice tire impression on my white shirt while struggling to wrestle it out of the wheel well. You still jacked up the bumper in those days and had to choose a spot where the metal flange wouldn’t slip suddenly when the angle of the bumper was steep enough to raise the corner of the car.

Of course you loosened the lug nuts before you took the weight off the flat so your tugging wouldn’t throw the car off the jack. In this particular instance the snow tires had been put on with a pneumatic wrench, I swear, and my groin muscles ached along with my swollen gonads. My date was amused by our predicament but had every faith in me. She didn’t offer to help. “Close up the tailgate, it’s getting cold in here. “ My shirt had frozen to sheets of cotton so I went in through the driver’s side to fetch my coat. She laughed in my face when she saw me, making me feel worse. I put a cold, dirty hand on her thigh, “Come on, baby, for your hero.” Still small but still strong she threw me the length of her little arms back through the swinging-to-close door – “ouch!”

The flat driver’s side rear tire put me close to the pole that held the car speaker. I kept knocking it off its perch doing deep knee bend exercises in unfastening those lug nuts. I, again by what I had heard was the correct way to do a thing, put them all in the upturned hubcap. By the time all six were off, I had been doing squat thrusts for fifteen minutes. I stretched and knocked the speaker off the pole again. This time my arm sent it against the car startling my date into honking the horn. This distracted me. To regain my balance with her watching me, I decided to gracefully step out of my imbalance instead of an arm whirling catch. I stepped onto the rim of the hubcap, which threw all the lug nuts to the wind. I was really disgusted to learn that the frozen tundra was covered with a layer of lug nut sized stones. The faint light from the huge screen, particularly during the daylight shots, made finding them a tedious process of tracing a grid with my nose a foot off the deck. By then I was on my hands and knees.

I was starting to get nervous that maybe the movie was near the end. I hurried not to be spotlighted by all the headlights snapping on when the last reel snapped off. I lifted the flat off the bolts. That part went fine. But the spare was inflated and wouldn’t go on at the height of the axle. That meant one of three things; jack up, dig down or move the car. I decided to dig down first. The jack angle was weirdly distorted by the hump in the tarmac and I didn’t like the fun house look not leveling the jack base had produced. I took the tire iron out of the jack carefully. The car rocked very easily and I told her not to move. The frost in the ground made digging hard. I would bump the fender with my shoulder occasionally then cringe back hoping it wouldn’t drop down suddenly. My back and shoulders hurt now from digging but my hands hurt the worst.

Finally, finally I had the spare tire on and the lug nuts finger tight. I had to take it for granted that they were finger tight because I couldn’t feel with my fingers anymore. I still had a little strength left and I knew they weren’t cross-threaded. Well, I had to summon all my strength to give me courage to face that jack again. Really straining at holding two tons of car up by a corner of its backside, I'd seen a jack like that fly off the bumper clearing ten feet easy. Now I had to face the primary trajectory of that jack and try and jack it down. I hoped I had the arm strength to keep the handle from flying up on each stroke going down. Just like mountain climbing, the going up with a jack is easier than going down. You pushed down to raise it up but held back to lower it down. Sounds complicated and the first few times I changed a tire and didn’t expect the weight of the car to have such a mechanical advantage over me, I hit myself in the jaw. Once I flew backwards with the handle in my hands, catching the jack practically in mid air. So I minced up to that clown car with the jacked up rear end.

The first three drops were slow going while I waited for the car to stop swaying to the beat of the ‘Happy Trails’ credits song coming out garbled by the banged around speaker. We were going to have to wait along with all the other cars trying to make it out onto the highway from a hollow where the cars cresting the hill could spring on you. The chickens waited long and hard and the crazies, like me, just burned rubber and hoped for the best. I had wanted to have some time to park with my date, if the privacy of the drive in wasn’t enough, but now I’d be lucky to get her home by her curfew. I didn’t care if the car dropped anymore and ratcheted it down in a series of teeth clenching strokes. I tightened up the lugs as tight as my nuts would take and didn’t care if the wheel ran true or my true love put out. I was through.

The wild ride to Roxborough was silent and the walk up to her front door uneventful. A small goodnight kiss, a wan smile and I never saw her again.