The Fluid
His girlfriend was straightening up the apartment for the cleaning lady. He did the breakfast dishes thinking he was helping out but his girlfriend said the cleaning lady liked to do that. Oh, he said, feeling partly contrite and partly satisfied with his accomplishment. On another day he might have left the dishes but he was glad he had done them on this day. There would be plenty for the cleaning lady to do. No matter what else happened today he could at least say he had done the dishes, even with that pesky asterisk hanging about reminding him that he had taken something away from the cleaning lady.

He would have to find someplace else to be for the day because the cleaning lady could take up to five or six hours to clean the small apartment. She would in fact not stop cleaning until you told her she had done enough for one day. She was very thorough and hard working.

As it was Monday, to avoid the wrath of the street sweepers he would need to move the car anyway and he thought he might just go for a drive somewhere, leave the city for a day and enjoy a fresh perspective from outside the walls. The city was not actually walled around but it did occasionally feel as though it were. He couldn't really go any distance though without first procuring power steering fluid.

He did not know if his thoughts could be backed up with fact but he was pretty damn certain there was an auto parts conspiracy against him. Oh New York with its vast array of everything you needed if only you could get to the product before the nearest place selling it shut down and turned into a place that could not be expected to sell it. When is a door not a door? When it is a jar. There must be laws governing what can and cannot be sold at certain places and power steering fluid is likely on one of the more strict lists.

The array of noises that could come from his car were at times, in number, staggering to consider. On a road to Queens one cold night in search of remarkable Thai food he lost some of the plastic detail attached to his fender with clips and a very specific grooved alignment and finally a self applied silicone adhesive which proved temporarily satisfactory but certainly not strong enough in the final analysis to withstand the shock absorber rattling pot holes of New York City area roads.

He had gotten out to see if the car would fit into the space his girlfriend was attempting to back into and it was then that he noticed the curved piece of plastic from formerly above his tire well laying on the ground, but still attached to the tire well by one grommet. This dragging of the plastic car ornament over pavement was a noise he was just minutes before hearing and wondering about, although a thorough inquisition of its origin was made impossible because of an Englishman's diatribe in the back seat. Outside in the weather it required that he grab the hard plastic ornamental detail in both hands while stomping on it with one foot and after he did this, under a slightly frozen heavy rain which dripped down the back of his neck, he returned to the business at hand which was telling his girlfriend that while she could potentially fit in the space it would require liberal use of bumper mechanics. She opted for a space across the street and while attempting the U-turn they both noticed the power steering noise, which could just be heard above the sound of the teeth gritting squeak emanating from the windshield wiper motor.

They were going to take this vehicle on a 2000 mile road trip soon and she had some concern about the noises and the overall wisdom of traveling that far in a piece of well used machinery (junk.) For his part he was happy no one had stolen his tires yet, which were in good shape, with not a bit of steel belt showing through the rubber.

There were rat droppings on his engine block which he noticed this morning when checking the power steering fluid.

His girlfriend was getting him an electric rat zapper for Christmas and he was excited about it but had not really anticipated using it to electrocute rats lodging in his engine. There was a newly dug rat tunnel in the back postage stamp sized yard and that is where he had imagined using the rat zapper, powered by its not included 4 D sized batteries.

He spent a lot of his time walking around the Lower East Side and into Chinatown and SoHo in search of establishments that do not currently exist or possibly never did and how they ended up in phone books or any of the electronic versions of phone books he frequently used he did not know. Calling ahead would probably improve his success rate or at least save him some walking but as walking could sometimes be its own reward he never called ahead. Still, he felt some frustration over the difficulty of finding power steering fluid in NYC.

It was too late in the day to leave town now. It was already noon and would be dark in four hours. It did not seem like a good idea to start out on a trip with only fours hours of daylight to look forward to, in a car whose growing list of noises might in some distant future ruled by robots be considered melodic but to him and his girlfriend were simply mundane annoyances.

He went back to the building even though the cleaning lady was still upstairs. Going up and down the narrow stair well made him think of himself as a gerbil in one of those colored plastic tunnel arrangements that kids with permissive parents have in their bedrooms.

His cat, formerly from the country, was going through her own adjustments to life in a city she may but only ever see through window glass. She had taken recently to skittishly descending every morning five and a half flights to the basement to spend her daylight hours in its darker recesses. At least partly because the dog on four was in love with her and would sometimes sneak up to see if she wanted to play. But she never did want to play, except for the occasional round of One Clawed Swat Upside the Nose. Some of the building's occupants were reporting that she seemed somewhat feral and was hissing and spitting and nipping at their ankles as they made their ways up and down the stairs. But as the cat is almost as big as a NYC rat, another group of residents optimistically hoped for her basement presence to become a blessing against the occasionally spotted behemoth rodent and took her sometimes surly attitudes in the stairwell as just another necessary due or a tariff or a tax or a surcharge or a fee, in exchange for which might be derived some vague benefit.

There was no straight line marking the shortest distance between two obvious points when going out looking for power steering fluid in New York. He had always heard about the power of unions in the northeast and he figured it must be some sort of union influence causing this lack of power steering fluid at the usual places like the corner convenience store or the big chain drug store, both of which were within easy walking distance.

So he had come back to the building and used the basement bathroom (to his caffeine naïve system the substandard coffee he had ingested at a diner on Delancey was acting swiftly in its diuretic function) and told his girlfriend about the rat droppings under his hood, because he found such things interesting and hoped that she would too, and about his lack of success finding power steering fluid. She recommended that he go to the nearest gas station at Ridge and Houston streets and that is what he did. He bundled up and went back out there and got his small bottle of no name power steering fluid for 5 dollars and some change, while mumbling under his breath—holy shit that must be some kind of good power steering fluid. He took it back to the car and looked for something to puncture the protective foil top but found after unscrewing the cap that the protective foil was already punctured and as he had no more room for the ire inspired by minor annoyances he poured in most of the bottle while running the engine and then he got inside and turned the front wheels back and forth until the noise lessened. Now he could go somewhere if he wanted but it was too late and getting too dark for that, so he just went back home, situated himself comfortably in the basement, and waited for the cleaning lady to finish.
- jimlouis 12-08-2009 4:09 pm [link]