Mr. Flat Fix

The tire: a car’s most fundamental component. Problem is, they blow, and then you have to change them. But if you live in a certain part of Brooklyn, New York, or more exactly, if you happen to be in a certain part of Brooklyn when your tire goes flat (which is more likely if you live there) then the process of getting the old rust bucket back on the road is considerably easier. Put it this way: you got options.

The way up 4^th Avenue, from maybe 36^th Street almost to Flatbush Avenue is lined with tire-changing stations. Many are greasy one room shops where a guy can pick up some shiny, if not in every case new, rims for the ride—just in time for the Puerto Rican Day Parade. But these places do one thing an awful lot, and that’s change tires.

Ever change a tire?

I have, once, and on 4^th Avenue at that, where I could have limped the car to any number of little flat fix shops and watched a guy with a hydraulic jack and a shirt with a patch bearing his name on it do the same job, in a quarter of the time, for a robust $7. However, I was with a girl at the time, driving her car, actually.

Everyone knows that changing a tire is the quintessential test of manhood. I could not very well pay a man to do a job that I could do myself, especially this particular job, which is so loaded with masculinity ramifications. Failure was not an option, so I spent a good forty-five minutes in very close contact with the hot blacktop of a gas station parking lot and the underside of her Corrola. I suppose it worked out: I butchered my hands using the broken-off end of a screwdriver to crank the jack and working the lug nuts loose, but was rewarded with the knowledge that I was indeed a man.

Flash forward five years to the present: I’m still a man and I still live just off 4^th Avenue in Brooklyn. So, when my girlfriend came home announcing that our 1992 Volvo had a flat, I knew just what to do. Without hesitation I asked her for $7 and took a little stroll down to the local flat fix shop at the end of the block—much closer than the one a block over.

The guy there fixed the tire, removing the screw that had embedded itself in the rubber and patching the hole, a process that was interesting to observe. I also liked the way he gave me a rusty canister of compressed air with which I re-inflated the tire before driving the car down to the shop. He seemed skeptical when I assured him that I knew how to operate this simple device. Hey buddy, I know how to change a tire, okay, I think I can handle this. Great, another gringo with masculinity issues, he probably thought. His name was Ramon.

A few days later I noticed that the rear tire on my bike was flat. Another slow leak, another challenge to my resourcefulness. Usually, I would take my bike to my neighborhood bike shop where they would charge me $30 for the application of a new tire and tube. I had a different thought this time: again, I strolled down to the flat fix shop.

I lucked out because there was nothing going on there when I came in, wheeling my bike. Ramon gave me a quizzical look. I explained that I was tired of not knowing how to fix my things when they broke, tired of the helplessness that the modern world, with all of its conveniences and amenities, engenders in us all. Ramon’s eyebrows went up. Can you show me how to fix this? He smiled and nodded.

Fifteen minutes later I was riding down 4^th Ave wearing a smile of my own. Ramon had carefully disassembled the tire, removing it from the frame of the bike, then removing the inner-tube from the tire and inflating it. He placed the tube in water and worked it around until the water bubbled showing him the location of the hole. He marked the spot on the tube with a white marker, then patched it with epoxy and a bike tube patch that I had found deep in a desk drawer, the one thing I brought to the table. After placing the tube back into the tire, fitting the tire back onto the wheel, and attaching the wheel to the frame of the bike, he had finished. I’m not sure that I could do the same job without certain tools, but I more or less absorbed the process. I thanked Ramon and gave him five bucks for a job well done, feeling not exactly like Mr. Resourceful, and definitely not like Mr. Manhood, but like someone who could get around the neighborhood on his very own bike, and maybe, just maybe, make a go at fixing his very own bike the next time it broke. Call him Mr. Flat Fix, because that would be a long last name.