Gas on My Mind
I had gas in the back of my mind. It was Thursday, and I was hoping that the gas price at the station by my house had not gone up. It was still the cheapest in the area. These were volatile times, and I wanted to start the weekend with a full tank of gas and with my mind at ease that I was not and yet again ripped off by the escalating gas prices.
I worried about such things. In my brain, I was heading off the Friday stock market before it closed the next day. Will things go up or down? I kept praying for the gas prices, for now and for some indeterminate future.
My mother was in town, and we were going to pick up my daughter at the daycare. I was passing by a station that was actually ten cents cheaper than the one by my place. But since we were on the left lane, and I would have had to instantly cross over two lanes to be able to enter the station, I decided to catch that gas station on the way back from the daycare. It would be a little more inconvenient because I would need to make a left to go in and another left to go back out and onto Beach Street again, but it was worth it to save a little money.
After picking up my daughter, I was a block and a half from the gas station when some jerk cut me off. I honked the horn and leaned on it for about two seconds so that he got the message. He was going into the left turn lane, and I was right behind him. When we made the turn, I was wondering if he was also going into the gas station and if he had something to say if we were placed in that situation. He kept going, and I went into the station and forgot about it.
When I got the card out, I noticed the nice price was only so if you paid cash and if you got a car wash. The real price, which read smaller on the sign, was going to be more and also higher than it would have been at my station. The problem was that we were already at just one bar on the fuel gauge, and we were already here. Was I going to risk running out of gas to save two dollars? I used the credit card and started the gas. I was using the window squeegee, and I usually clean my daughter’s window in a funny way, but everything felt like it was hanging over my head. I didn’t like getting cut off, and I didn’t like getting fooled by underhanded business tactics. I smiled at my daughter anyway, as I was trying to look cheerful while wiping the windows.
I returned the squeegee and then noticed I had dropped it in the garbage can rather than the dirty water bin. I paused for a minute. Should I take it out of the garbage? I decided that if they were going to practice false advertisement, they could take it out of the garbage themselves. I turned around and thought about the next step I had to take. I was supposed to go to the car and start it up. I went in and did just that.
Soon, I was on the last turn about one and a half miles from our home when someone who had also made the right turn caught up with me on the other lane and honked his horn once. I knew exactly what that meant. He was trying to get my attention. I took a glance and saw a glaring, gesticulating figure expressing something indecipherable. I kept going and he was riding next to me, and I could swear that from the corner of my eye, he was still saying something with his gestures. I had my mother and daughter in the car. I was not going to get involved in a verbal tussle at the moment. He swept behind me, and as we passed the freeway ramp, he got on, and I kept going.
I kept imagining the car that I had honked at twenty minutes before and was certain it was a dark car and the one just now was a light gray car. They were not the same person, although for a moment, I wasn’t too convinced. These things happen, accidentally meeting the same jerk a few miles later, and it wouldn’t have been the first time for me.
Just before getting home, I was wondering how many people I had angered on the road and what were the possibilities of one of them recognizing me some other day after a street altercation.
I was stepping into the house, and I was wondering if this one particular guy who was trying to get my attention had connections with the police. Police officers are not supposed to relinquish any such information, but they do. He could viably get my address. No normal person would do this, but it would be just my luck if I angered some former gang member or a nutcase on the road!
I thought about the fact that I didn’t own a gun. I do have sharp knives, and in the dark, a knife might be better than the chaos of a gun anyway. But if there were more than one home invader, I would rather empty a clip of nine millimeter rounds into their direction. What the hell was I thinking! Fear was feeding every mental move I was making. I concluded, while lying in bed, that I was not going to get much sleep tonight.
In the morning, my mother and I were going back outside to take my daughter to the daycare. My mother exclaimed, “What happened here?” She was talking about the car, and that confirmed some of my fears, maybe a message scratched into the door of the car expressing a death threat. As my daughter was getting into her carseat, I looked and found that the cap for the gas tank was hanging out the open door. My mom was wondering if someone had stolen into the night and robbed us of gas. After closing the cap, I turned on the car, and all the gas was still there. I took a moment to reflect on these details. Everything from the past twelve hours was now coming together, and the solution to this mystery was only two mental moves away.
I was going over every detail on our drive to the daycare, and it showed me a different suspect than the stranger — any stranger — at which I was pointing the blame. This suspect is very close to me, and it could be that most of my personal problems can be explained by the movements of this entity, which happened to be the thoughts produced by my own mind.
If I were a little more trusting of my fellow man, I would have seen everything. The man yesterday was trying to get my attention because I was driving with an obvious hazard. He was gesticulating because he wanted to save me from a potential disaster.
But how would I allow for the cap to fall out like that — I, who was so careful about all details? Who was so systematic about even locking the front door and making sure I turned off the lights, always mentally going through the steps to these routine actions?
The answer to that lay at the gas station itself. I was worried about getting ripped off. I found an opportunity to get ahead of the game but found out too late that it was a trap. I didn’t like losing such games, just like I didn’t enjoy losing a point of space in the lane games people play in traffic. The throwing of the squeegee into the garbage was accidental, but its sudden poetic justice gave me a point of pause. That was the lever that turned off the machine. It was that one point that negated the normal cycles of systematic thinking I use for knowing that I didn’t forget my wallet at the store and that I didn’t misplace credit card bills. I failed to cap my gas tank because of a sudden indecisiveness caused by the pull of losing a game on one side and the mortification of leaving the wiper in the trash on the other. The gap between the two forces pulled my thoughts apart. My next step was to cap the gas tank, but I went to my door instead.
— Rey Armenteros