I am not a do-gooder. I am far from altruistic. Though I am by no means evil, I could never be bothered to help the bewildered or obviously needy. I am sure there are many reasons for this: living in cities for so long, I have become callous, because many asking for help are staging a con. Once upon a time, I gave fairly freely of my loose change, until one late night in a Burger King parking lot in Evanston, Illinois the gentleman receiving my pocket coins moved without any thanks or acknowledgment to my companion: his hand was still closing on the 78 cents I had deposited as his eyes sought another source. It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered shoddy customer service from an asphalt entrepreneur, but I vowed it would be the last. At the time, I was sucking up $9 an hour at a soul-withering job, so those lint-ringed monetary discs represented several minutes of my life, and a shard or two of my dessicated soul. 12 or so years later, I come to the sudden realization that this episode helped to make me the cheap and avariocious beast I may see through eye schmutz, if/when I wake up in the morning.
I came to [regular daily] driving (of the automobilical ilk) later in life, having been an inveterate transit user. For months after acquiring a jalopy to call my own, I would snigger inwardly at seeing a stranded motorist, thinking “Well I may be poor and cheap, but at least I know enough to keep an old car running properly.” Such logic is a luxury, and we ought bask in it while we can, for fate has an enormous spiny dildo to stuff in our unwilling orifices, and fate takes all the pleasure in the act. The flat tire without warning; the sudden loss of engine oil; the sinking in uncharted, unfathomed, unknown mud.
Yes, dear reader. That bitch fate laughed at me while applying her namesake slap, and while going about my workaday assignment in suburban (and newly thawed) Minneapolis, my rental sank front-bumper deep in muck.
I needed to take four photos of a site I had identified as a candidate for a clever wireless antenna installation, so I headed out in a drippy balmy 40 degree day, and pulled into what I had previously identified through the ice and snow as a gravel path along a baseball diamond. I noticed some wetness, to be sure, but had no idea that my incursion would release the floodgates of a melting makeshift ice rink. The vehicle hesitated, then stopped, though my pressure on the accelerator had not changed. The black Jeep Compass – “basic,” as described by the friendly Fargoan at the rental counter at MSP – would not even spin its Detroit-engineered front wheels fast enough to move an inch. The very intelligent traction control led the tires to do a very slow spin, which would have been unutterably perfect were I trying to dig two holes in the ooze. Oscillating at a seemingly slower rate than the second hand on my third-hand watch, the generic slicks lazily tossed up fragrant suburban slime in any direction I chose to orient the steering wheel.
Long story shorter than it seemed one paragraph ago to allow: A gentleman of elderish proportions sidled up in somewhat Buicky transport. He asked if I needed help; I guess my confused look was an effective inducement. The Jeep had only front-wheel drive, a bumper made of plastic, the driver’s manual’s suggestions were supremely impotent, and when I tried to push while he reversed, I slipped in the mud (though managed to remain upright, thankfully). He told me to wait a few minutes while he fetched some gear, and I was still thumbing the rental documents and driver’s manual when he returned in overalls on some kind of small four-wheeler, and we conspired to suck the truck out of the muck. When the muddy Chrysler product was righted on the road, he said something akin to “OK now,” and headed off the way he came. I made it back only 30 minutes late to the mothership in the stench of the MALL OF AMERICA [I find I cannot type that using small caps].
I was nearly speechless. This nameless man had helped me out of a sticky situation, for no real reason – other than perhaps to get my unsightly ass out of his town. I would never have the time, means, or perhaps even inclination to do likewise – and that sucks for all the people like me out there.
