Judy Gruen | Off My Noodle

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

My Redneck Rescue

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I will confess from the get-go that I have often laughed riotously at redneck jokes. Maybe it’s not very politically correct, but I blame Jeff Foxworthy: after all, he’s the one who has made so many of them famous, including these: “You know you’re a redneck if you’ve been married three times and still have the same in-laws.” And, “You know you’re a redneck if your house still has the ‘Wide Load’ sign on the back.”

But a recent experience with a real, live redneck has humbled me, since the man’s facility with hand tools and genuine excitement over automotive repair challenges saved the day for me and two of my sons. We had been driving the long, yawning stretch of nearly 300 miles from Las Vegas home to Los Angeles. Much of this drive tunnels through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, a region so desolate that there is actually a highway exit for a road whose name is “Zzyxx.” I experimented with various ways of pronouncing this until my tongue started to hurt and I gave up. It was a blisteringly hot day, and we could have toasted a bagel on the hood of the car, in the unlikely event we could have even found a bagel in the middle of Death Valley.

Still zooming through the Mojave Desert, we heard an unsettling groaning sound from under the hood. This was not good news for three Jews whose only tools in the car at the time were a MasterCard and a few volumes of Talmud. We pulled off to the shoulder of the highway and saw to our horror that the front bumper cover was drooping at a rakish angle, the result of a “thrifty” repair job we had done some months earlier. Worse, we saw that a big hulking piece of rubber had shredded, shearing one of the front tires balder than Bruce Willis. At that moment, bald was decidedly not beautiful.

Fortunately, the Almighty always provides a solution even before He sends the problem, which may explain why we discovered this in Barstow, a town whose main attraction for us at that moment was not the outlett mall but the promise of an open auto repair shop. We drove slowly, worried that the heat would blow out our poor, tread-bare tire. Our hearts sank as we drove through the town, which apparently closed down 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and the only sign of life was one lone drunk stumbling down the street. But suddenly, like a mirage, we saw a couple sitting in a truck in a parking lot next to a closed auto parts store.

We explained our problem by pointing to our sad, slumping bumper and naked tire and asked if they knew anyone who could help us. Faster than you could say “Make it a Bud!” they hopped out of the truck, which incidentally had a bumper sticker that read, “Ask me about my beer can collection.”

The couple examined the car for only a nanosecond before the woman exclaimed, “I’ll go get some cable ties!” and disappeared. The guy, meanwhile, slid under the car onto asphalt that was hot enough to grill a steak and deftly pulled out an all-purpose tool, seemingly out of a tattoo on his tricep. I watched in helpless awe as he immediately started stabbing holes in my bumper (without asking) and then happily began to sew it back on with what looked to me to be the biggest twist-ties I had ever seen but were actually the cable ties that the woman had salvaged from a mysterious location across the road.

I stood there and thought, I’m letting a perfect stranger who is missing half his teeth and who has curtains on his truck perform surgery on my car. Am I nuts? As he worked, he waxed lyrical, in a redneck sort of way, about winches, c-lamps, grease guns, ratchets, and other things completely foreign to me.

“Um, we really appreciate this, we really do, but, um, do you work on cars professionally?” I asked.

My heart beat a little faster as I asked, especially since I had heard the woman boast about the town’s surprisingly high per capita population of ex-felons. And this was a guy for whom the word “shop” in high school had a totally different meaning than it did for me. He poked his sweaty head out from under my car. “Nah, it’s not my field,” he said, “but I al ways work on my own cars, since I wannum done right the first time.”

More than an hour later, we emptied our wallets of most of our leftover cash to pay Jim for his medic al triage on the bumper. Jim then directed us toward the Wal-Mart, the only place within 200 miles where we could replace the bald tire on a Sunday evening. However, I had to beg them at W al -Mart to find some way - any way - to change the tire even though we had no idea where to find the critically important lug nut key, without which, they claimed, it was impossible to change it. Naturally, I had never heard of a lug nut key any more than I had ever heard of winch or a c-clamp.

“You’re Wal -Mart!” I cried. “You’re a huge, powerful, hated corporation! You’ve got to be able to get those tires off!” Clearly wanting to get rid of me—and who could blame them?—they miraculously found a way to jimmy the tire off, and four hours later, we finally left Barstow , exhausted and stressed.

We were enormously grateful that the Almighty sent us help in the unusual form of Jim, the Miracle Minivan Mender of the Mojave Desert.

After all, despite my college degrees, I was completely helpless in the face of a common auto emergency, whereas Jim had the smarts, the tools, and the eagerness to help three mechanically challenged Jews, get out of a desperate jam. So the next time you laugh at a redneck joke, remember this story, because on a lone and dusty highway with pieces of your car falling off, you’ll be grateful to find a friendly redneck like Jim, or the joke will be on you!

Posted by judy @ 12:20 PM • (68) Comments