Will we soon be Pumping Ethyl again?

Barney kept things hopping around old Happy Jack's. As mentioned earlier, he was a good ol boy from Arkansas.

At Happy Jack's, our clientele was a fairly decent demographic mix. We had farm types only a few miles away, we sat right on the main drag to a white-bread suburban community, also a big state university, and yet we were still pretty close to the guts of the area's urban neighborhoods.

So Barney, who described himself quite accurately as a "hillbilly swamp rat," wanted to expand his cultural horizons. So he had begun tossing out "hip" phrases such as "right on" and "gimme five, baby."

Anyway I walked into Happy Jack's one day and Barney appeared in the showroom, said, "gimme five!" and stuck out his hand for a low five (the high five had not really been invented at the time), so I slapped him five.

He replied, "Awwright, man," and I stuck my hand out for the return five.

He reached under the showroom counter, whipped out a Swingline desk stapler, and planted a staple right in the palm of my right hand.

"Right Ohhhhn, Brutha!" Barney exclaimed.

 

Hillbilly swamp rat? That is an extremely thin ribbon of Arkansas.

 

Well, that's what he called himself. Keep in mind we were probably both drunk-ass into a stupor at the time. And, it was 37-38 or so years ago.

 

Did I miss something? Wasn't this a gas station?

 

It was an old-school 1960s-era big-oil company gas station. For whatever reason, they called the front-office/ cash register / snack machine area the "showroom."

Again, the 1979 movie "Gas Pump Girls" was a fairly decent depiction. Happy Jack's was kind of like Uncle Joe's run-down old joint after the girls painted and polished it all up nice.

 

Right next to Happy Jack's Natco was Mel's Shell. Of course we had a rivalry going on.

Mel's Shell was a very corporate gas station (and Happy Jack's was really... not.). Their pump jockeys wore immaculate pressed brown uniforms, fresh from the laundry every day. We wore red and blue Natco gear, usually stained with grease from working under cars.

The guys at Mel's Shell didn't partake of the nightly runs to the party store. They were very polite and didn't smoke on duty.

At one point, Mel's Shell did hire a few female driveway attendants. Three or four, I think.

They weren't raving beauties (one was smoking hot, a couple were ok and the fourth looked, well, kinda "tomboyish"), but they looked way better in their pressed brown uniforms than we did in our grimy red and blue Natco duds.

Sure enough, this did produce a massive short-term spike in business at Mel's, although not quite to the extent of "Gas Pump Girls."

They lasted about a month as I recall. During which time there were repeated attempts at high-level summit meetings between the two institutions.

We asked Happy Jack if he ever considered hiring girls too. "Oh Hell yeah, I considered it," he said.

"Why didn't you do it?," we asked.

"Are you kidding?," he said "With all you horny fuckers? We get little enough work done around here as it is. I got enough problems with gas prices and supply problems, I need you guys and paternity suits too?"

So alas, there were never any Happy Jack-ettes.

 

As was the case with many old-school gas stations, tires and batteries were the main high-dollar items in the Happy Jack's sales inventory.

So pretty much every week we had to cook up a new display for tires and batteries. For a while we had three or four columns of tires stacked four deep on the sidewalk just outside the showroom.

Tires stacked three or four deep make a nice soft rubbery surface to sit in. One fine warm early-summer day, a couple of us were kicked back in the tires on the ''front porch" in the warm sun. We were lords of all creation. "Morton," one of the other managers, was taking a drag on a Marlboro.

Happy Jack walked by. "You boys certainly seem to be making yourself comfortable," he said. "Getting nice and relaxed? Can I bring you anything? A can of pop? A candy bar?"

"Nah, we're OK, Jack," we said. "You know, it's so nice sitting out here, maybe you ought to get a couple La-Z-Boys and just put 'em out here on the porch."

Jack didn't seem so "happy" anymore. "I already got all the La-Z-Boys I need."

 

These stories are taking a heck of a run at the basketball/volleyball/softball stories for Starman's best series.

 

Andy Williams got jealous by the thread title.

 

Early one morning ole Morton was sitting on the counter in the showroom at Happy Jack's with a cig in one hand and black coffee in the other. It had been a long night the night before and everybody had drunk too much Kessler's, especially Morton. The sun was just starting to rise.
The phone rang. Morton picked it up.
"Happy Jack's Natco."
"Hey. Do you have a wrecker?"
Morton looked at the phone oddly.
"I'm sorry?"
"Do you have a wrecker?"
"Yeah, we can wreck anything."

Click.

About an hour later Happy Jack got a call from the regional VP of Natco Oil.
"What the hell is going on down there anyway?"

 

This is my favorite goddamned thread ever.

 

Morton also liked to rouse out of a Kessler's hangover at 6 a.m. with a full-throttle a capella rendition of this classic:

"You get a line and I'll get a pole, baby!!"


The Natco Oil VP wasn't the only one wondering what the hell was going on down there.