what goes round will go down

 SUS Tire Service

typical nasty ass garbage truck good for hauling mob bosses to landfills 

       When you walked through the door and old Louie Schlogie would be standing there you knew you were in a tire shop.  The smell of the smoke from the cigar hanging out of his mouth would mask the smell of the rubber tires as he was the poster child of tire shop owners around the world.  We often kidded old Louie about his cigars and why you never saw him eating anything, it was because he was always to busy chewing on the turd of a cigar he had hanging out of his mouth. Half the time it was never lit and if he did light it , he would have to chew the end he was gnawing on off, and then torch the hell out of what was left  to get it going.  

        Louie sold and repaired truck and car tires new and used, and he had seen just about every kind of tire in his life, and I am sure the phrase “Whatever goes around, comes around”, meant a heck lot more than karma to him. I think Louie is gone and he was a nice guy and now his son still runs the shop up off Navarre Rd. called Perry tire shop. I worked the summer there after I had graduated and it was the first real job after high school. My brother JR managed to get me in there and it wasn’t long after I started, that I was out changing tires like a pro with my own truck and 1 inch impact.

     It was a hot tough dirty job to say the least, and it was dangerous to boot. A truck rim that had blown off a tire when it was being filled and was embedded in the ceiling of the repair shop, it stood as a reminder to all the repairmen to never let your guard down. The story was that when it came off it was because it wasn’t seated properly, and that it also took a piece of the guys scalp with it and if you look real close you can still see the skin and hair  hanging off of it. I think they just told us that to scare us and it worked.

     Another time I was told to go out and air up some old semi-trailer tires to see if they could move this trailer that had been sitting awhile. One tire was already blown so it wouldn’t hold any air , and the next one I had to  get down and sit on my butt with a leg on each side of the tire, and reach inside the wheels to get to the valve stem and I finally got it to take air and the tire was slowly coming up . After it was just about up to pressure , All of sudden there was a bang and it spun me around on my butt, and the trailer slammed down leaning towards me, but I was in a hurry to get out of there and my leg was hurting bad. When the tire blew it cratered the ground about a foot deep and picked up a huge gooney rock and slammed it against my leg spinning me around. My leg was alright but I did sense a brown smell in my shorts as it did scare the daylights out of me.

     But the topper story of this job and what made me make sure I never had to do this job again in my life was changing the tire on the garbage truck in what was once called Mellet Mall and is now Canton Center parking lot. . Thankfully this was a summer job and I had already enrolled in college at the Agricultural Technical Institute, part of OSU, and was starting in college in the fall, being the first of my family to go to college. A lifelong dream of my mom, and yet it wasn’t what I really wanted to do, but she was paying the bills and it was her dream, who was I to let her down. I wanted to be an artist and she felt I needed a real job to fall back on. Farmers are the cheapest people on earth, and never made a dime if you talk to them. Thirty years of farming and still have to depend on the neighbors to get something to eat. Just the kind of people I want to work for. Bringing an education home and using it to impress dad wasn’t much better, and never really was worth the effort, for fear of getting my teeth knocked down my throat for being so uppity. But first I had to get to college and it was going to start with me learning a lesson in a parking lot.

    When someone wants a truck tire replaced in a parking lot in the summertime and they park it in the lowest part of the parking lot and beside a storm grate and its a garbage truck,, then chances are it is going to be nasty. In fact I had trouble finding it and it must have been from the flies disguising it in the summer heat as it wafts off the parking lot, you know that same optical illusion that people in the desert get when viewing mirages. Unfortunately this wasn’t a mirage when I ascertained it was the real thing. I searched for my gloves and long sleeve shirt, and proceeded to scrape the flies off to see for sure it was the real thing. course the stench was a dead giveaway so to speak and assured me i had the real thing. But there was flies breeding flies and maggots on the ground as apparently this truck had been setting here awhile before they decided to call. The dripping green slime oozing out of every corner lent itself to let me believe that this thing had been cooking in the heat thanks to the blacktop all around and hovering temps of around 90 or more out there on the blacktop. I had to climb underneath the truck and place a hydraulic jack to get it up off the ground as both tires on one side were blown and it leaned impressively to the side I was working on causing more green slime and flies to hover to the side I as working on. Some jobs just don’t pay enough and this was one. I managed to get the jack underneath the truck and just about had it high enough to get the tires off when the jack just sank right through the asphalt because the truck was too heavy and the pavement was soft from the heat. In no time it was back on the ground. . I called the shop as I just about had it with this job and soon they brought me out a wide steel plate and I had dug the jack out by the time they arrived with the plate. Unfortunately the guy who brought the plate suddenly had another job he had to go to after looking at the fly breeding grounds I was in charge of.

     He didn’t offer any helpful advice except to not forget his steel plate when finished and make sure I put it back in his truck when I was done, and also to hurry up because they were getting swamped with tire orders. I could have cared less and was real close to trying to figure out how to shove a square plate in his round hole and sensing this he decided he better leave. Apparently the heat and the flies and maggots were getting to me. He was right. And ag school looked a hell of a lot better than tire repair at that point. And it was that moment I had an epiphany , Yes I wanted to go to art school and laze away my days drawing nude models till my fingers ached , but I also knew I needed something to fall back on , and this was damn well not going to be it. But I still had to get the tires off and get home and put this job behind me fore  I still had a couple of days working for old Louie even though he deep down seemed like a nice guy. Course I heard of a divorce lawyers wife who also wanted her husband when he died unexpectedly, buried fifteen feet deep. The mortician asked why so deep? She said well deep down he was a nice guy, and this was what I thought of Louie and his tire job right about then.

       Again with a vengeance I was under the fly covered monstrosity and soon it was coming up into the air, and daylight shone under the flat tires as the steel plate displaced the weight over a larger area and at the same time maybe killed a couple hundred flies in the process when I slammed the plate down. The lugs were giving me problems and I twisted off a couple of nuts and had to replace the studs but soon I was dropping it back on to the pavement with tires full of air ready to go. The flies sensing their eminent demise and lack of foraging to be available to them soon, covered the truck again till I could no longer see the truck when I left.
       Some experiences in your life are good remembrances and others are much like this, the lowest of the lows. I remember times after this I would help a friend by filling in a day or two on their garbage runs and was amazed at the things people throw away. My one friend would fill his storage compartments on his truck with tools and just about anything you could imagine, including the kitchen sink, and then head to the sale barn at Carrollton Livestock auction on Monday and earn enough money to buy fuel for the next week for his garbage truck just from things thrown away. Unfortunately the only thing I took away from this garbage truck experience was that I knew I didn’t want to ever have to change tires on a garbage truck for no amount of money and never have since.