Sylvia's Journal

On Wednesday, the day before Axel went into the hospital for his back surgery, I met Willie. I had not planned to meet Willie. In fact, I would never have crossed paths with him if it wasn’t for my Toyota car keys that have the unpleasant tendency to turn the car lock on active when I don’t carefully put them down. And so, after filling my car with gas and was ready to get back into my car I found all doors locked. And my phone was in there too.

Long lines of cars were waiting to get to my spot at the pump, but I couldn’t move my car. I made a ‘so sorry’ gesture to the car behind mine and then sought out a person whose cell phone I could use. I hoped that Axel would pick up the call even though it may have seemed like a robocall. Luckily, he did. I explained my predicament and left him to figure out how to get his keys to me (we have only one car). We have good friends who had a car available and gave Axel the wheels to bring me the spare set of keys. It would be a bit of a wait.

In the meantime, here I was in the cold in the dark, bereft of phone and keys. And this is when I met Wllie. Willie is the guy who sits in a small box in the middle of the pumps and presses buttons to allow the next customer to fill up. Willie took pity on me out there in the cold and let me in his warm little box and pulled up a chair. We started to chat, and I learned a lot about him and his job. He is originally from the Dominican Republic and told me he that he hates the cold more so than the hurricanes that fly by every so often in the fall in his homeland. He told me he can handle hurricanes, but the cold gets him. Funny, for me it would be the other way around. 

He said the cold aggravates his asthma and then proceeded to tell me how, since his childhood, all sorts of remedies have been tried on him, herbal concoctions, and pharmaceuticals but nothing helped until he started smoking pot. Of course, he cannot smoke pot on the job. He only smokes when he is alone.

So, getting in and out of his small box in the winter is a challenge. I asked him why he ended up here in cold New England. He shrugged his shoulders and told me he didn’t know that it is a hard place to live, expensive and cold. But anything is better than staying on the island because there is no work, and the little work that is there pays next to nothing, much less than what he makes now (he did add that he’d like a little more money, but even Nelson Rockefeller said that in an interview in the 50s).

He came here because his uncle brought his father here and his father brought him here. After 5 years he became an American citizen. He is still trying to get his wife here, but the paperwork stalled when the pandemic hit.

I told him I was, like him, not born an American. We exchanged notes on the process of becoming one. We talked about the intimidating practices of uniformed officials and how small they made us feel. He observed that he doesn’t often hear from white folks about such things. And why would he, we live in very separate bubbles.

I watched him press buttons on his computer and realized he can never take his eyes of the computer because the gas pump’s system needs to be reset after each fill up. It bleeps when someone has paid, and the next customer pulls up. He needs to press a button to allow the next customer to fill his tank. He does this 8 hours a day, from 2-10 pm, without a break because there is no one else to take over. He does have a bathroom in a small room tacked on to his box. But even then, when he is in there, he can hear the bleeps and must rush back to his computer. As he told me this, he made a gesture of pulling up his pants (so I gathered we were talking about number 2!). His bathroom is so clean that people from the nearby store that belongs to the same company walk over to his bathroom because it is so clean. How he manages to keep it so clean while attending to the tyranny of the bleeping computer is a mystery. I didn’t ask him.

Occasionally he must leave his box to deal with pump problems, cards that don’t work or gasoline spills. He told me that he couldn’t leave me alone (the cash register is in the box), and so we traipsed out now and then to deal with such problems.  I also watched him interact with cash paying customers or people with problems and I was touched by his kind and friendly manner in his dealing with people, some very exercised about the long wait (it is the cheapest gas around).

After about 45 minutes Axel showed up with the spare set of keys and I introduced him to Willie and said goodbye. He had made my long and cold wait into a very pleasant experience. I think I will go back sometime to bring him something to help with his asthma.