To the Man Who Didn't Humiliate Me
by Brian Benson
I was seventeen the night I met you, out there in the ice-glazed parking lot of the only chain hotel in our tiny Northwoods town. I was on my knees, shivering, near tears, when you appeared at my side. By that point, I imagine, you’d already been watching me for a very long time.
It was January, a few minutes before sunset, a few degrees above zero. I’d just left school in the little truck I’d bought from my dad, and as was my wont, I’d cut across a field of snow packed down by snowmobile treads so as to avoid sitting in the queue at the stop sign with everyone else. I made it to the end of the snow road, into that motel parking lot, and I was about to pull onto the highway and zoom by all the obedient losers still waiting their turn when I felt something weird under the truck. It was like the truck kept getting tripped. Or like someone had stepped on its shoe, and now the shoe was flopping, dragging. I understood, for the first time, why they called that a flat tire.
I’d never changed a flat before, despite my dad’s many attempts to lure me into the driveway for a lesson. “Trust me,” he was always saying. “You’ll want to know how to do this. It’ll just take a few minutes.” I didn’t trust him, in the same way I didn’t trust him when he said he just needed my help in the yard or shop or basement for “a few minutes.” A few minutes always meant a few hours, hours that could otherwise be spent reading Cujo or juggling a soccer ball or lying in bed eating candy corn I’d snuck from the jar in the kitchen. I didn’t like work. Changing a flat tire sounded like work.
Because I was a teenage boy who wanted to be seen as above needing comfort, I didn’t have gloves in my truck. Or a hat. Or a coat. I stepped outside, into the lacerating wind and cold, and I looked at my front left tire, which was indeed flat. As I stood there, a few other trucks, driven by boys who played hockey and who’d missed a whole week of school during hunting season—boys I loathed and envied in equal measure—skidded on by. Either they didn’t see me or they did and they were laughing. I got back in the truck and called home on the cell phone I’d recently gotten. Mom answered. I told her what’d happened, and she told Dad. There was a pause, and then Mom, in the voice she used when she didn’t agree with what she was saying, said, “Your dad thinks you can figure it out.”
I stared at the tire. I thought about all those invitations to join Dad in the driveway on warm summer nights. I wished he’d tried harder to get me to come out. This was all his fault.
When Dad got on the phone, he didn’t say, “I told you so.” He just told me where the jack was, and what it was, and how I should proceed. I was not the kind of boy who looked at a machine and understood, or even wanted to understand, how it worked, but as Dad spoke, I listened, and I tried hard to understand all the steps, and when he asked if I understood, I said, “I think so?”
I managed to find the jack, then managed to get it beneath the truck and winch the flatted tire off the ground. I stood up and looked around, to see if anyone had seen the big man thing I’d just done. The parking lot was empty, though. It was getting dark. My fingers hurt. My toes, too.
The next step, Dad had said, was to pry off the hubcap so I could get at the lug nuts. He’d said a lot about the lug nuts—what order to take them off and put them back on—but had only briefly mentioned the hubcap, which, it seemed, should just pop off. My hubcap wasn’t popping off. No matter how much I yanked and twisted and pried, it wasn’t popping. I shoved my hands into my armpits. I was so cold and I didn’t know what to do and I knew I should know and soon someone was going to see me and then what? I dug around beneath the truck’s jump seats and found a screwdriver. I worked it under the edge of the hubcap, and I leaned back, put all of my body into it, tried to get the stupid thing to pop free. I was so immersed in my work that I didn’t notice you until you were beside me.
“Need any help?” you said, in a voice much deeper than mine.
You were standing to my right, flanked by your truck, a real truck, the kind that had traction tires and four-wheel drive, the kind that was built to pull trucks like mine out of ditches. You were wearing the Northwoods Man uniform: Carhartt coat, dirty ballcap, dirtier jeans, steel-toed boots. Your hands were in your pockets. You weren’t smiling.
I shrugged. I explained to you that I just couldn’t seem to get the hubcap off. I said it was maybe broken or something. I tried to sound more perplexed than panicked.
You leaned to the side and peered at the hubcap. Then you looked at me. I still wonder what, in that moment, you were thinking. You, a man who clearly belonged in our hunt-fish-snowmobile town, a man who could have been that town’s mascot, a man looking down at a pimply boy with frosted hair and forty-dollar jeans and soccer ball decals on his windows. Could you see I was the kind of boy who couldn’t tie a lure on a line, who’d cried when he shot a squirrel, who had soft fingers and a soft heart? I still don’t know. All I know is, you nodded slowly, then asked, “Can I take a look?”
I shrugged again, like it didn’t matter, like I was just humoring you, and then I stood and stepped aside. I felt so relieved, and so ashamed that I needed another man to relieve me, and so mad at myself and at Dad, because if he’d made me learn this last summer I wouldn’t be out here with you, a man who was not my dad, a man who was now picking up the cross wrench and connecting it to what looked like a lug nut, which was weird, because we still hadn’t removed the hubcap, and… oh.
My truck didn’t have hubcaps.
I’d been trying to pry the rim from the axle.
You loosened a few nuts, then stood and turned to me. I was ready for you to call me a moron, maybe a fag, but you didn’t. You just held out the wrench and asked if I wanted to finish up.
You didn’t say a word about hubcaps. Neither did I.
I dropped to my knees and got to work. It was pretty easy now. I removed the nuts, then removed the wheel, which whumped pleasantly into the snow. I found the spare, which was right where Dad had said it’d be, and I rolled it over and slid it onto the bolts and turned and looked at you. You were standing in the same spot, hands back in your pockets, flashing the barest hint of a smile.
You could’ve left then. I said you could. But you said, “I’ll just stay another minute.” And then you watched as I tightened the nuts, one by one, in a star pattern, just like Dad had said I should. I was surprised at how not-humiliated I felt. How safe. If someone had told me, earlier that day, that by sunset I’d get caught failing to fix a flat by the sort of man I knew I’d never be, I’d have crawled into a hole and never come out. Now, though, I was glad you were with me. I didn’t want you to leave.
Once I’d finished, you gave me a smile and a nod, as if to say, You sure showed those lug nuts who’s boss. Then you stuck out your hand. I wondered for a second if you wanted a tip. But, no, you just wanted to shake. So we shook. And you smiled. And then you got in your truck and drove away.
It was dark by this point. I could barely feel my fingers or toes or ears. Still, I didn’t get in my truck. Not yet. I just stood there, holding my tools, watching the taillights of your truck until they disappeared. That was one of the kindest things a man had ever done for me, I thought. I still think that.
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