Tiny's Car - a meaningful encounter in my youth
Tiny's Car
In
a small town it is hard to get away with much.
A person does not have to be doing anything wrong to be the topic of
discussion. Someone sees you. They talk. Someone else knows who you are. Then right or wrong, a story is created and
passed around town. The theory is that
one should be on their best behavior at all times. Young people ignore this philosophy. They know they are too smart and stealthy to
get caught, or figure nobody knows them or just do not care if they do. This is a sense of security provided by a
false aura of anonymity. The reality is
that everybody knows everybody in a small town.
It was the summer of 1967, and I was
a sophomore in high school. I was
walking to my job at the local drug store where I was employed as a “soda jerk”
at the lunch counter and soda fountain.
The owner assigned me a multitude of other tasks as well, but soda jerk,
short-order cook, and cashier were my primary functions. Instead of walking down the sidewalk along
the main drag through town, I preferred to take a back and more obscure way. My route passed by the municipal swimming
pool, through a park, then around the electric company storage yard, before entering
the main business section of the village via the backside of several businesses. This way I could check out who was at the
swimming pool. More importantly, they
could see me in my white soda-jerk uniform and know that I was cool. It also allowed me to surreptitiously smoke
one or two cigarettes along the way without being seen by the many prying eyes
in the houses along the sidewalk, and having my bad habit reported back to my
mother. So, my circuitous route served
two purposes – hoping people would see me and think I was something, while also
doing something I knew I should not be doing and wishing not to be seen. Yes, I was a conflicted teenager.
The big old black car was parked in
a strange place. It was in a gravel area
at the rear of a row of old commercial buildings containing a restaurant, the
bank, and several other businesses. It
was an area typically used by delivery and trash trucks, by way of two alleys,
and not readily visible from any of the streets. The car was partially hidden by some dumpsters
and a low concrete wall. I had a good
idea who the owner was. One person was infamous
for his flat-black vehicles. Tiny
Young! He was anything but tiny. He had a notorious reputation which was
almost mythical in the small rural village where I lived. This big hulk of a man sported a deep
crevasse below his left eye, which allegedly was acquired while being hit in
the face with a beer bottle during a fight.
That was the story, and as a young teenager I believed it. I believed most of the stories I heard about
rough characters around the area.
The
story about Tiny’s fondness for painting his cars this way was because he
claimed fingerprints could not be lifted off flat-black paint. This was important if the car had been stolen
or was reportedly involved in unsavory activities. That did not make much sense to me because
they stuck out like a sore thumb. The
other story was that he stole a lot of his cars, and he then painted them so
the owner would not recognize it. This
made no sense either. If your ’55 Chevy
Belair came up missing, and a black one appeared in town several days later, it
was rather obvious who had it. But who
wanted to challenge Tiny about a thing like that? It was all part of the myth, yet most myths have
their origins based in fact.
I
knew the reputation of its probable owner.
Heck, everybody knew that! I
approached the black behemoth with apprehension and more than a little bit of
fear. The front door windows were rolled
down on this giant four-door beast, but the rear windows were up. The rear windows seemed the safest to peer
into. The back seat had been
removed. The dirty bare metal floor
contained tools, cans, assorted paper and clothing, all of which was strewn
about. No passengers would be joy-riding
in this car.
On
the front bench seat was the reclined body of the one and only Tiny Young, and
it startled me. I was not sure if he was
alive or dead, plus I did not want him to see me. With trepidation I moved closer to the open
window, hoping a bloody wound would not reveal itself somewhere on his massive
girth. Curiosity had won over. The prone form must have sensed my presence,
for it moved.
“Get
away from here!” he snarled.
“Sorry,
Tiny! I was just checking to see if you
were okay!” I replied with genuine concern, and a measure of fear.
A
swollen eye barely cracked open and stared at me. “Don’t tell anyone I am back here,” he
commanded.
“No
problem, Tiny!”
“And
if I am still back here when you get off work, wake me up,” the big man
growled.
“Okay! No problem!
See, ya!”
The
aspect of everybody knowing everybody in a small-town cuts both ways. I had no clue that Tiny Young would know
me. I was just a kid soda-jerk, and he
was one of the town’s more notorious individuals. In a perverse way it made me feel good. It made me feel a bit more important. A guy like that apparently trusted me. He could have just have easily crushed me
like a bug, or otherwise intimidated me.
But, no, he asked for a favor.
The
car was gone that evening, but it was back the next day and for the next
several days afterward. I always checked
on the occupant but did not talk to him.
It also struck me that here was an individual with an infamous
reputation, and the means to take just about anything he wanted by force, yet
he was sleeping in his car. For that
week in August, he was homeless, and maybe others as well. Maybe the wild-life was not all that
attractive, or romantic after all. Where
were his so-called friends? He had a
soda-jerk kid for a friend that week.
Tiny
and I became actual friends later on.
His real name was Gary. For some
reason he always called me Shred. He
went on to pull some outrageous pranks around town and had more than a few
other old big flat-black cars. But the
notorious side was not a bluff. He got
shot by a shotgun in a bar and lived to tell the tale, plus confront the shooter
many months later. He did time in
prison.
Besides
all that, I knew Tiny as a funny, genuine, loyal, and kindhearted man. He died as the result of his excesses, but
not before he got sober and tried to dissuade others from taking the same path
as he did. And for a moment in time,
back in my youth, a scary man in a big black car made me feel a bit special by
knowing and trusting me.
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