‘Your battery terminals,’ the driver said accusingly, ‘are disgusting.’ : A Fury on the Freeway

A friend of mine called the other day to complain about tow-truck drivers. He had not been able to start his car and, being an auto club member, he had naturally called for assistance, since assistance is what he pays for.

I mention that specifically because the clubs do not always seem to understand the underlying principle of insurance. You buy it as a safeguard for yourself, not to please the policy underwriters.

The tow-truck driver arrived, looked under the hood and faced my friend, whose name is Buck. “Your battery terminals,” the driver said accusingly, “are disgusting.”

Buck is a small man with eyebrows tilted in an expression of perpetual surprise and a mouth turned downward in perpetual dismay. He looks as though he has just met the girl of his dreams and she’s a transvestite.

The tow-truck driver, as Buck described him, was a person who had evolved just a little less than most of the rest of us.

“He was hunched like those pictures of the Neanderthal man,” Buck said, “and had a heavy, sloping brow and close-set eyes. When he walked, he swung his arms from side to side.”

I ought to tell you that Buck is a television comedy writer and tends to exaggerate. Comedy writers are born with an emotional inability to comprehend reality, which, while it qualifies them to write for “Punky Brewster,” limits their capacity to otherwise relate to the human experience.

“So he told you your battery terminals were disgusting,” I said, “so what?”

“He called me a pig and said if he ever caught me with dirty terminals again, he would dismantle me. He said filthy terminals were an offense in the eyes of God.”

I think I know that tow-truck driver.

I was stuck on the Ventura Freeway once, which in itself is not a happy experience. The life span of someone broken down on the Ventura is said to be less than that of a partisan in Beirut.

I am not certain that the tow-truck driver dispatched to assist me was the one who had threatened to dismantle Buck, but I do remember thinking when I first saw him that he probably ate his meat raw, and possibly live.

That doesn’t surprise me. The tow-truck drivers I have met in Los Angeles are rarely motivated by human decency and a desire to be helpful. They simply enjoy the sight of someone disabled on a freeway, the way a cat is made happy by a dead bird.

The driver sent to cope with my problem defined it as bad coils. Well, actually, he did not speak in full sentences with nouns and verbs, but said simply, “Coils.” Then he spat on my engine block, seeming to enjoy the sizzle it created.

I cannot to this day tell you where my coils are or even what they are, but the fact that they had ceased to function personally offended the man.

“Be better off if you people took care of your cars,” he informed me.

I was tempted to ask exactly how one cared for a coil. Do you bathe a coil, dip a coil, oil a coil or simply go over it lightly once a week with a feather duster?

However, he was a large man with no neck so I said nothing. One does not debate qualitative aptitudes with a grizzly bear.

I sat next to him in the cab of the truck as he towed my car to a garage. He was silent most of the time we drove, which suited me just fine, but then suddenly turned and asked, “You like Jesus?”

It was a catchy way to begin a conversation.

“Well,” I said, wondering if I should jump from the moving truck, “he was probably a very fine gentleman.”

“That’s stupid,” the tow-truck driver said, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.

“How about this: He had a nice vocabulary?”

“Stupider!”

I don’t know how to discuss Jesus with strangers. I decided to keep my mouth shut.

We drove in silence for another couple of miles and then he said, “You go to college?”

It is well known among those with heavy sloping brows that real men do not attend college, unless it is to play football or chase broads.

“A little,” I said, then added cheerfully, “but it was a small, ugly college and I despised every minute of it.”

That seemed to please him and the rest of the trip was, if not a honeymoon to Hawaii, at least tolerable.

“He asked me about college, too,” Buck said. “I told him I had a Ph. D. in satanic worship.” He paused. “You know, there might be a television series in that.”

“In satanic worship?”

“In tow-truck drivers. I could use Biff the Neanderthal as a prototype. Maybe he lives in a cave and maybe he invents fire. Except, here’s the twist. He calls it the wheel.”

I stared at Buck for a long time and realized I was no better off with him than I had been with the tow-truck driver. They were birds of a feather, flapping madly along in a world full of burdened humans.

“Tell me, Buck,” I finally said, groping for definition, “You like Jesus?”