By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 14, 1942.
“Come on,” said Jimmie Frise, sticking his head in the door, “I’ll drive you home.”
“Thanks, Jim,” I responded, “but I think I’ll just take the street car. I have a few things to do.”
“I’ll wait,” said Jim, coming in and sitting down.
“No, no: you go on, Jim,” I urged. “I don’t know how soon I’ll be ready.”
“Heck, it’s nearly supper time,” said Jim. “I’ll wait.”
“Jim, to be perfectly frank,” I submitted. “I prefer to go home by street car. I’ve sort of got into the way of it now. I actually look forward to my nice, comfortable ride home before supper…”
“Nice,” scoffed Jimmie indignantly. “Comfortable. With people trampling all over you? Besides, it’s raining cats and dogs.”
“Please, Jim,” I interrupted him.
“At my age, a man likes to follow a routine. I have got into the way….”
Jimmie rose from the chair and looked at me a little hotly.
“For the first time in weeks,” he said, “I have brought my car down to work. Just to loosen up the grease. Just to turn the battery over. And it’s raining. And I offer you a lift…”
“It should be a treat, Jim,” I confessed, “but somehow it isn’t. I haven’t the slightest desire to ride home in a motor car any more. The very idea of it bores me. I can’t understand how, for years and years, I went to all the trouble and nuisance of motoring to work. The trouble of getting the car out of the garage, unlocking and locking the doors: the business of wheeling it out into the street and entering traffic. The dreary business of sizzling along the Lake Shore Road in a stampede of cars. The slow nerve-pulling business of struggling up through the downtown nine o’clock traffic and fighting my way into the parking station. I look back on those days with a kind of horror. There wasn’t a day of it that I did not get myself into a temper, with my blood pressure all steamed up, over some other driver. Either somebody drove too fast or somebody cut in on me. Or downtown, somebody sneaked up on the wrong side of me, at a stop-light, and tried to get the jump past me. I didn’t realize, until I started using the street car, how much of an endless quarrel driving oneself to work was.”
“Look at the rain,” said Jim, going over and staring out the window.
“Once you get used to the street car,” I pursued firmly, “nothing compares with it. It is effortless. Tired after the day’s work, you climb on board and sag down into your seat…”
“If you can get a seat,” put in Jim.
“…and you can practically snooze all the way home. You can read the newspaper. I haven’t read the newspaper for years as thoroughly as I have the past few months of street car riding. In the old days, when I drove to and from work, all I did was take a quick gander at the headlines. Now I even read the editorials.”
“Clear up your desk,” said Jim. “And let’s get going.”
The Comfortable Feeling
“Jim,” I pleaded, “you go on. I’ll be quite a few minutes yet. I have a couple of things I want to read on the way home in the street car tonight. I won’t get another opportunity. I have set these things aside all day to read on the way home.”
“Read them in my car,” said Jim. “I’ll turn on that little dome light in the car.”
“One of the things about street cars is,” I said resolutely, “that you don’t have to talk to anybody. Very rarely do you know anybody in a street car. And if you do, they usually have got a seat already, and don’t come bothering you. In a street car, you just nod at your friends and hurry past to find a seat all by your lovely lonesome. A street car ride, you might say, offers you about the only real solitude you will find all day. It is the only escape from your family or from your office. You are completely and happily alone. You can read. Or you can just sit and look out the window.”
Jim was standing looking at me very hurt.
“What you are saying is,” he accused, “that you don’t want my company home? Is that it?”
“I have your company all day at the office,” I pointed out kindly.
“So you’re tired of my company,” said Jim, walking towards the door.
“If you don’t want to understand me, Jim,” I said. “All I am trying to do is preserve to myself a little new-found liberty and freedom that I have discovered in the morning and the evening. A little solitude…”
“Good-night,” said Jim hollowly, passing out the door.
After thirty years of partnership, you can’t allow even these little misunderstandings to distress an old friend. So I leaped up and grabbed my coat and hat and caught Jim at the elevator.
“After all, it’s a filthy night,” I grinned at him. “And besides, we’re having pot roast at my house tonight. I’d forgotten that.”
Jim said nothing.
“When we have pot roast,” I added, as we went down in the elevator, “it is good to get home a little ahead of time, so you can go into the kitchen and smell it cooking. Half the virtue of a pot roast is the way it excites your appetite.”
The way the people in the elevator turned and looked down at me, especially the business girls who were probably going home to get something out of the ice box, spurred me on:
“Pot roast,” I gloated. “With carrots, white onions, several stalks of celery and especially the leaves of the celery. I think it is the leaves of the celery, in a pot roast, that give it that…”
One girl groaned. So I quit.
Outside, the rain pelted cold and hissing. We ducked along in shelter of the buildings and reached Jim’s parking lot and picked our way across the muddy expanse.
“A fine night,” cried Jim, “to stand on a street corner waiting for a car!”
“It’s astonishing,” I said, sliding into the car seat, “how skilful you become at finding shelter, when you are a street car traveller.”
Jim drove out the parking lot, peering anxiously through the flooding windshield. The downtown was jammed with cars, street cars and trucks and dark huddled swarms of home-goers blindly bending along.
“The worse the night,” observed Jimmie, “the worse the traffic. I bet you would have to wait ten or fifteen minutes for a street car on a night like this.”
“All exaggeration,” I assured him, “arising from the impatience born of the motor car age. I have timed myself, even on nights like this; and the longest wait isn’t five minutes.”
“And then you get into a steaming car,” snorted Jim, “and some girl’s umbrella trickles water down your pant leg!”
We made a turn, with motor cars honking at us savagely and street car bells clanging and muttered curses coming through the windows from the pedestrians. Jim was sitting up stiff at the wheel, tense and strained, peering through the windshield like the pilot of a bomber over Saarbrucken.
“It’s restful, once you’re aboard a street car,” I submitted.
“Do you want to get out?” demanded Jim sharply.
“Go ahead, go ahead,” I said hastily.
Tense While Driving
And down the jammed street we toiled, in slow lurches and jolts, three blocks to the Lake Shore highway, where the stampede flattened itself out into the long race home.
The traffic balked and speeded; even in this wide highway, with no cross streets to harry it, traffic still pulled at all the nerves, the car ahead suddenly slacking, the car behind screeching up on you, and cars beside racing past, with arrogant horns braying….
“I’d almost forgotten what it was like,” I mused.
“I hope I’m not boring you,” remarked Jim.
“Take it easy, don’t hurry for me, Jim,” I assured him.
And he relapsed into another silence, sitting tense and stiff at the wheel, staring through the floody windshield.
We got a little way past the ball park when I noticed the car swaying.
“You’ve got a soft tire, Jim,” I warned.
“Feels like it,” admitted Jimmie grudgingly.
The car gave another swerve on the streaming pavement. Jim steered cautiously for the curb, not without a few angry snorts from cars behind.
“Well, well, well,” was all I said.
“Sit still,” said Jim, starting to get out. In a moment he came back and said through the window that the left rear tire was flat as a pancake.
In the gathering dusk, we looked ahead and then looked behind. The nearest service station was a good half-mile. The stampede of cars raced ruthlessly past us.
“I could drive it,” speculated Jim through the car window, “but it would finish the tire. And tires, these days….”
“Don’t think of it, Jim,” I declared. “Put the spare on. I’ll give you a hand….”
“Sit still, sit still,” pleaded Jim. “It won’t take five minutes.”
But you can’t sit still in a car, on a wild and stormy night, and think of your friend out there alone. So I turned up my collar and got out and joined him. He had the jack out and was figuring how he could get it under the car without getting his knees wet, when I gave the spare a thump with my fist. “Your spare has no air in it,” I informed him.
He stood up and felt the spare.
“It’s got enough,” he muttered. But on shoving at it with the handle of the jack, it proved to be as I had said. Soft.
“I’ll thumb a lift ahead to a service station,” said Jim, “and take the spare with me. And I’ll be back in the tow truck in five minutes.”
I thought of the pot roast and was on the point of suggesting that I too might thumb a lift and get home somehow. Once I could get near a street car line, I would be all right. But down here on the Lake Shore Drive, it is a long hike to a street car line. Then I thought of how Jimmie would feel.
He soon had the spare tire unhitched. And with it for a sign and symbol of distress, he had no trouble getting a lift. A dirty old car with five smudgy and big-hearted war workers pulled up; and tire and all, Jimmie was invited in. He waved me good-by.
After at least 17 minutes, in which time I got so expert at remembering how a pot roast smells that I was practically watering at the mouth, I saw the tow truck slow down across the street and after nearly a minute and a half of trying to make the turn against traffic, it drew in behind.
“Sorry,” cried Jimmie, “but I had to try three service stations.”
And in about four minutes, the service station man had the spare on and the old tire back in his truck.
“I’ll pick it up tomorrow,” said Jim, as we drove off.
The tow truck whizzed past us, in the manner of tow trucks that belong to service stations that shut up bang at seven sharp.
We got along near the Exhibition Grounds when the engine gave a couple of funny coughs and jerked.
“What the…” said Jim grimly.
But there was no mistaking that sound. After another 50 yards, the engine barked and coughed several times and then quit.
“Out of gas,” I submitted.
“Don’t be crazy,” growled Jimmie. “I put three gallons in only last Tuesday.”
But the gauge showed empty and the dry jack handle Jimmie explored with down in the tank showed empty. And it was empty.
“Well, thank goodness,” said Jim, appearing at the car door all wet, “there’s a hill ahead only a little way and we can coast down it and turn up beside the Park, where there’s a gas station.”
Back to Street Cars
So I got out and we shoved the car about 100 yards, not without numerous helpful comments from car horns from behind, to the start of the slope down to Sunnyside. And when the car took the slope, Jim jumped in and seized the wheel and I ran and boarded her. And down the slope we coasted, not too fast, so as to let a clear place in traffic grow ahead of us so that we could get fullest advantage of the coast. This caused quite a lot of horn comment from behind us.
But we coasted almost to the Merry-Go- Round before our momentum died. And from the Merry-Go-Round to the Park is about 300 yards.
And at last we shoved her into the nearest service station.
“I certainly feel terribly,” said Jim, as we ran her stern level with the attendant waiting with the hose. “Keeping you all this time. I had only the kindest intentions…”
“Forget it, Jim,” I assured him. “This only makes a more confirmed street car passenger of me.”
“But that pot roast?” said Jim, feeling in his pockets.
“A pot roast is all the better of a little longer cooking,” I informed him.
The attendant laid the end of the nozzle in Jim’s gas tank.
Jimmie was still feeling in his pockets.
“Holy!” he suddenly exclaimed, snatching his hand out of his pocket as if he had been stung.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“I lent the ration book to the kids last week…” he said.
“Hmmm,” said the attendant, lifting the nozzle out of Jim’s tank.
We explained the situation to the man
“The law,” he said, “is the law. Besides, there is the darndest lot of chisellers.”
So we shoved the car off to one side on the service station lot.
“I’ll pick it up in the morning,” said Jimmie brokenly to the attendant, who was already looking at his watch.
And in the rain, we walked three blocks back east from the Park to Roncesvalles where we caught a street car.
And the family was just finishing the deep apple pie when I walked in.
“Oh, those street cars,” said my wife.
But the pot roast couldn’t have been better.
Editor’s Notes: Because of gasoline rationing during World War 2, Greg has been taking the streetcar to work, and Jim decides to take his car out for a day to make sure it does not seize up from being parked too long.
The illustration advertises the “Send Over Smokes” campaign that Greg wrote about earlier.
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