BEAVERTON, OR (1977) “Holman’s Shell Station”
I loved my customers. Even the messy ones, whose futures seemed precarious.
I was 16 when my dad came home one day and asked if I would be interested in a part time job at Holman’s Shell Station up the street.
I was pretty surprised by this. I didn’t know Art Holman, the guy who ran it. I had recently bought a small pickup truck, so I was now stopping regularly there to buy gas. He and my dad must have talked.
At first, I didn’t know if I wanted a job at a gas station. I had no conception of what that would be like. Also, I hadn’t noticed anybody as young as I was working there.
*
It sounded scary. That was probably my first reaction. Holman’s Shell was a full-service auto garage. They didn’t just sell gas, they changed your oil, fixed flat tires, repaired or replaced engine parts. They had two hydraulic lifts, that could lift cars up over your head.
Holman’s Shell was a more serious operation than gas stations today. There were, at times, five or six grown men working there. And I do mean working. Fixing cars was not just hooking them up to a computer. You had to crawl around under the hood. You had to take stuff apart to find the problem.
Not only were these guys grown men, they wore SHELL STATION uniforms. These were brown coats with the yellow SHELL emblem above one breast pocket, with their names written in cursive above the other, and matching brown polyester pants.
*
*
My dad told me there was no rush. I could think about it. But I didn’t really know how to think about it. This would be my first job. Was I old enough to have such a job? How did you know if you were ready?
That night, I lay in my bed and tried to imagine myself in a Shell Station uniform, greeting customers, washing their windshields.
I was physically very small when I was sixteen. My mother still bought my clothes at Young Land, a shop for children and middle grade kids. It was hard to see myself in the gritty, masculine, car mechanic world of Holman’s Shell Station.
But as I thought about it more, of course I wanted to do it. It sounded cool! Working with grownups. Dealing with customers. High school GIRLS might come in and there I’d be, a professional Shell Station employee!
The next morning I told my dad “yes”. And he called Mr. Holman.
*
I wish I could remember my first day. I must have been nervous. But the fact that Art Holman and my dad had arranged it, made it easier.
Art Holman was the kind of guy you’d expect to run such a place. He was shrewd, funny, personable. He was a no bullshit kinda guy. But fair. The kind of guy who got to know his customers. Who became a trusted member of his community.
My training wasn’t difficult. I had to learn to pump gas, which wasn’t hard, but was not something a normal person knew how to do in those days.
We mostly took cash. Though I noticed the older and more prosperous customers often used a credit card.
Credit cards had to be placed into a manually-operated processing machine. You put the card in, then put the carbon paper on top of it, then ran a sliding mechanism back and forth which would imprint the card’s face onto the paper.
Then the customer had to sign the paper with a pen that you kept in your breast pocket. You always had to have a working pen. None of this was electronic.
*
I did other grunt jobs, including cleaning the bathrooms. Art personally showed me the “feminine hygiene products” disposal container, that hung inside the stall of the woman’s bathroom.
Since Holman’s Shell was an exclusively male domain, there was a special respect shown to this silver metal container, the contents of which were considered private and not to be trifled with.
We men had our personal concerns and physical needs, which we kept to ourselves. And so did women. Their secrets were contained in that silver box.
I always looked away when I dumped whatever was in there, into the larger trash bag. Someday, I would understand women on a more intimate level, but for now, it was none of my business.
*
*
On my first day, I was given a former employee’s uniform jacket to wear. It was a SMALL but I still had to roll up the sleeves. It had the Yellow Shell emblem. And a nameplate with somebody else’s name written on it.
I was taught how to interact with the customers. I was to always wash people’s windows and check their oil. To access the oil stick, I had to learn to open the hoods of the various cars.
Sometimes the oil stick would indicate they were “down a quart”. I would show it to the customer and offer to put the oil in myself. Sometimes the stick would show no oil at all, which meant the driver was in danger of burning up their engine. Fortunately, we had stacks of Pennzoil right there at the pump.
I also had a tire pressure gauge, located in my breast pocket next to my credit card pen. This was also important. If I had time—or if I saw an obvious problem—I was supposed to check people’s tires. And then adjust them if they weren’t properly inflated.
Tire inflation was a serious matter. Wonky tire pressure levels could mess up your steering. Especially when you were going fast.
*
Once I got the hang of Holman’s Shell, I was put on the night shift . . . BY MYSELF. I know. It’s hard to imagine. At sixteen, I looked like I was twelve. But there I was, holding down the fort.
I never thought twice about it. Besides, I was busy. Part of the night shift was cleaning up after the day shift. At night, between customers, I had to wipe down the hand tools and return them to their proper place on the wall.
I swept and hosed down the mechanics bays. I stacked the dead car batteries behind the shop. I heaved the old tires up onto the old tire rack.
It was a very dirty job working in a gas station. My hands were always black with grease and grime. My face would get smudged sometimes.
*
As I had hoped, on Friday and Saturday nights high school kids would sometimes come in to the station. Sometimes girls. They’d be going to the football game or a party somewhere. Mostly they were older than me but when they realized I was in high school, they would often gawk at me, just as I would gawk at them.
They’d roll down their window and I would smell their girl-smells, their shampoo or perfume or maybe some pot smoke or cigarettes, depending on what type of girls they were. They would tell me how much gas they wanted . . . and I would pump it.
*
*
During the spring of ’78, Disco Fever hit Portland. One of the only proper discos in the city, Earthquake Ethel’s, opened in Beaverton which was a couple miles down the road from the gas station.
People from the East Side would drive all the way across town to go to Earthquake Ethel’s. They’d get lost and then pull into our station to ask for directions. This happened so often we had those directions posted on a special sign in the office.
You could always tell who was going to Earthquake Ethel’s. They were mostly young men, alone or in pairs, with feathered hair, their shirts unbuttoned far down their chest. Tight white bell-bottoms. A beer between their legs. The interior of their cars reeking of cologne.
The cars they drove? Camaros. Thunder Birds. Datsun 240Zs. Usually in some state of disrepair. These guys were in their twenties. To me, they looked like outlaws, street-smart operators, dudes who lived on the edge. Some of them probably dealt weed or sold used (stolen) car stereo speakers out of their trunks.
And yet they were always nice. They appreciated my succinct directions. Many of them were probably intimidated being so far from home. Compared to the East Side neighborhoods they came from, Beaverton was rich-people land. The girls in Beaverton were “foxier” but more “stuck up” than their girls. They were in foreign territory.
*
*
The female equivalent of the Earthquake Ethel’s guys were the chatty, 20-something, working-girl types, heading into downtown Portland to hit the clubs on a Saturday night.
They’d be smoking Virginia Slims cigarettes, their shirts were also unbuttoned provocatively low. They’d have Farah Fawcett haircuts, flowery blouses, tight designer jeans. A waft of feminine fragrance would follow them out of their unkempt cars, toward our freshly cleaned (by me) restrooms.
They’d have Fleetwood Mac or Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” playing on their car stereos, which I would nod my head to as I stood waiting for the five dollars of regular to flow into their gas tanks. I was a “kid” to them, so they would chat me up, flirt with me a little, maybe a lot if they were already drunk.
I always enjoyed these interactions, though at 16 I took my responsibilities as a representative of the SHELL OIL COMPANY fairly seriously. So I didn’t get too crazy with the customers. But I loved them in a way. Even the messy ones, whose futures seemed precarious.
*
*
My position as the “night man” at Holman’s Shell never felt as prestigious as I imagined it would. As I got into my junior and senior year of high school, working at a gas station began to feel like a low-status job, comparatively.
This didn’t bother me. Although, I would sometimes not mention it around certain people. On weekend nights, I took extra time to clean the black grit off my hands before I closed up the station and went to join my friends at parties.
But I continued to work there. It was a fun job. The constant flow of people. All the various characters. Helping people out. Fixing their cars. Sometimes people would call us and we’d go rescue them on the side of the road.
The mechanic guys in the shop turned out to be more interesting than they first appeared, with their odd hobbies and unpredictable opinions. One guy was a Christian Republican. Another guy was a stoner Deadhead. I learned a lot about cars from those guys. Knowledge I still make use of today.
Art Holman was a great boss, though I didn’t appreciate that at the time. He was the only boss I’d ever had.
*
The one daytime shift I worked occasionally was Sunday afternoons. That was a slow day at Holman’s Shell. Usually it would just be me and another young guy on duty.
On Sundays, an elderly gentleman would come to the station and kind of camp out in the office for an hour or two. We never figured out who he was, or why he did that.
He would pull in, park his car, hobble into our little office area with his cane. (The office was designed like a waiting room: a couch, a couple chairs, a coffee table with old magazines.)
He would settle into one of the chairs and watch the goings on and try to chat with us a bit. Had he worked there at some point? We didn’t know. He seemed to have some history with the place.
*
Another common occurrence on Sundays: middle aged guys would come in with their spanky clean, slightly older American cars.
They’d want to check the antifreeze and clean the hubcaps. And tinker with this and make adjustments to that. These guys were of my dad’s generation. For them your car was everything. Even the smallest detail was important. Your car was how you proclaimed your style and personality to the world. For many, their car was where they lost their virginity. Or proposed to their wives.
These guys would spend all afternoon vacuuming their floor mats. Me and my friends did not care about such superficialities. When it came to cars, the most important thing for us was your car stereo, what kind of speakers you had, what kind of receiver. And most importantly what you listened to.
Music was how we defined ourselves. We didn’t care about Ford versus Chevy. For us it was Led Zeppelin versus The Rolling Stones.
*
*
I remember one Sunday I was working with the other young guy. One of the customers told us about a new fast food place that had just opened down the road. It was similar to McDonald’s but it was called “Burger King”. It was new. People were saying it was better than McDonald’s.
So I drove to this “Burger King” to get us lunch and brought back two orders of Whoppers and fries and milkshakes. With great curiosity the two of us opened our bags and inspected these “Whoppers”. They looked pretty good. We bit into them. They tasted pretty good. And the fries were delicious (despite the oil and grease on our fingers). This was an important discovery. This Burger King place was just two miles away!
*
But mostly on Sundays, it was just hanging out. The old guy would sit in the office, hunched forward, leaning on his cane, talking mostly to himself. The nit-picky car guys would be polishing their door handles.
While me and my fellow Shell Oil employee would just sit there and drink Cokes out of the Coke machine and stare at the road beyond the pumps.
*
It was hard to think too far ahead while working in a gas station. Something about that environment tended to block any overarching ambitions you might have.
I remember when I got accepted to my fancy college back east, having to put that out of my mind while I worked there. I wasn’t a fancy college person just yet. I was still just a guy who pumped gas.
You have this interesting writing style where the story always seems to be building toward some dramatic revelation, but then in the end the conclusion is just…an appreciation of ordinary life. But somehow you’ve made it a bit more dramatic.
Love this. It's so tangible I can see it and almost smell it.