American Jobs—The Diamond Standard Station
When I turned eighteen years old in February of my senior year in high school, my mom gifted me with a set of luggage and a rent bill. The message was clear. I was officially 'of age' and had to choose between going out in the world or paying my fair share while I finished up high school. The free ride had ended and, as a lesson in responsibility, the choice was clear.
I went out and found a job.
For seven months before my freshman year in college, I worked at a gas station. Diamond Standard Station, proprietor, L. D. Diamond.
L.D. Diamond was in his late sixties by the time I started working for him. A shock of brilliant white hair and a dark farmer's tan made him seem a bit like a Vegas performer in a greasy blue work shirt. He was larger than life in so many ways, it's hard to relate the very idea of the man. Full of stories, relentlessly obscene, and one of the absolute nicest bosses I've ever had.
L.D. Diamond was not his real name but I never got the skinny on his true handle. The story, collected over the months I worked as an attendant (a job that now sounds like 'that time I worked as a soda jerk' or 'the year I spent collecting tin for the war effort'), puzzled together a tale of a kid from Oklahoma who tried his hand at a number of businesses. L.D. had apparently owned an ice cream parlor, a bar, a soft porn magazine, and had worked as a disc jockey at the advent of sixties psychedelic rock.
However he arrived at the corner of Central and Oliver streets in Wichita, KS with the outsized name, the Diamond Standard Station was a fixture in the area. Established in 1971, it was pretty much the place to swing by, fill up your tank, get your oil checked, tires topped off, and shoot the shit for a few minutes. If you needed real service work done, L.D. had the oldest mechanic on record with the toothless gent who went by 'Snuffy.' That's it. Snuffy. No last name I ever heard and a Louisiana accent so thick you needed subtitles to get his take on the weather. Snuffy was easily three hundred pounds, bald as an egg, and I never saw him wear anything but his oil-stained blue coveralls.
L.D. and Snuffy were a couple of old, salty guys who had been running that Standard station so long, it had the feel of an old General Store. Instead of barrels, he and Snuff had stacks of Pennzoil to perch on as they sat and chewed on beef jerky (L.D.) and Big Red Chewing Tobacco (Snuff) as they commented on the world through the lens of a stream of regular customers.
Early on, my girlfriend, Kathy, came by to visit. She was in a mini-skirt and these two old fuckers had to pull their eyeballs back into their irregular heads. That said, both men were congenial to her, never crossing the invisible line from two older grandpa-like figures into creepy, fucking leering cranks. Once she had left, L.D. called me over.
"That your girl?"
"Yup."
Snuffy smiled a toothless grin. "You penetrate her?"
"What?"
"Do you PEN–AH–TRAIT HER? Chew Deaf?"
"Um... well, yeah. I guess so..."
From that point on, my station nickname was "Penetrate"—as in "Penetrate! Go check that boy's oil!" and "Penetrate will fix that tire!"
Even regular patrons of the station called me Penetrate. That was my work title. Explaining the designation to Kathy was a challenge. She took it in stride but never wore anything less than a full covering when visiting the station from that point on. She even decided to call me Penetrate when she swung by to pick me up after work sometimes, a fact that endeared her to L.D. and Snuffy.
"She calls you Penetrate, boy! You must give it to her GOOD!"
"I promised her I wouldn't talk to you guys about that anymore."
"Leaves it all up to the imagine. Better that way."
L.D. liked her so much for her sense of humor he got her a job at the florists down the street. The florist was a regular customer and L.D. was persuasive in that blue collar, straight-shooting, sort of way.
The job wasn't hard. It was basically three ongoing tasks wrapped up in an official Diamond Standard work shirt (with my actual name stitched onto the right breast pocket).
The first third was attending to the customers. They'd drive up onto the concrete filling area and over a cable that rang a bell. I'd hear the bell and hustle over to the vehicle. Most just wanted gas. "Fill it up with Premium." Some wanted a bit more service. "Fill it up with Unleaded and check the oil." The range of service provided included the fill-up, the oil check, washing the windshield, checking and airing up the tires, grabbing the patron some coffee or a danish.
Sometimes the customer had an unidentified issue. I was the first line of diagnosis.
"Hey, Penetrate! Top it off with Unleaded and could you check the engine? It's making a squeaking sound."
"Pop the hood, please."
The squeaking was usually a worn belt so I'd look into the engine and see for signs of wear. If I couldn't find any, I'd spend a moment with my head snuck down. I'd pop out. "I can't locate the issue but I'd guess it's a worn belt. If you want to pull in to the bay, we can have our mechanics check it out."
"How much will that cost? How long will it take?"
"Not sure. Depends on the problem but my guys will talk to you before doing any work."
Diamond Standard had a reputation among the regulars that they never did unnecessary work and they never over-charged. If Snuffy could fix it for free, L.D. didn't even charge for labor. I never felt like we were scamming anyone and that informed me about how I wanted to do business in my future. Fair, no inflated prices, honest work for hire. It's a lesson that has stuck with me since then.
The second task was far more mundane—constant and unending cleaning up. A gas station is a dirty place so my tools were several sizes of brooms, a mop and bucket, rags for days, non-specific spray bottles filled with chemical concoctions designed to de-grease, clean glass, shine chrome, you name it. I had a bucket of stuff that I'd dump on an oil spill and soak up the oil so I could then sweep it up followed by a chemical compound to clean up the stain.
I was charged with cleaning everything. The outside filling area. The pumps. The signs outside facing the road. The bathrooms. The mechanic bay. The hoses. The coffee station. L.D. wanted everything as clean as I could get it and he would do a slow strolling tour about three times a day to check my work.
"You planning on going to college?" he asked once.
"I am. This fall."
"Don't let it get to your head, boy. Never forget the simple rules. Work hard. Never think you're too good to get your hands dirty. I know some college boys coming in here to work who think they're too good, too educated, to get in there and earn. The world will always need people to clean things up."
When L.D. said 'educated' it was like a pastor saying 'pornographic' laced in a bit of disdain and an accepting of the existence of a pitifully corrupt state of affairs.
The final task was far simpler. When there were no customers and I had cleaned the living shit out of things for the moment, I was required to sit on the Pennzoil throne and listen to L.D., Snuffy, and Mario (the part-time mechanic who could've been thirty or seventy) hold court about anything on their minds.
"You need those glashes, Penetrate?"
"Yeah, Snuff. Used to get headaches when I was in school. It was because I needed glasses."
"There was this Eye-tal-eean boy who used to come round hee-yah wore glashes..." and Snuffy launched into a story about this guy that had nothing to do with his glasses but instead was about him accidentally wrapping a hose around his legs and cracking his head on a pump which then inspired Mario to jump in about a being so distracted by a beautiful teenage girl on the street that he got knocked the head by a falling wrench that left a scar which, in turn, got L.D. to jawing about a Jewish fella with a limp.
Everyone in their stories was labeled for ease of understanding. Most were marked by their ethnicity—Hebes, A-rabs, Micks, Wops, Negroes, Jamaicans, Russkies, Slopes, Beaners. Women were either eyesores or beauties. Men were either soft or hard. Queers and dykes. These guys were equal opportunity offenders because no one was safe from the labels they used but my understanding came to be that due to the fact the everyone was boiled down to some indelible brand, no one was particularly hated for their label. It was merely their way of reducing the world to comprehensible terms.
"You know, L.D., you aren't supposed to call black people 'Negroes' anymore."
"Says who?"
"Uhm. Black people, I think."
"Huh. You talk to all the Negroes and they voted or something?"
"No. I don't know."
"No, you don't. You’re not a Negro so what you think doesn’t count, see? You think I'm some sort of KKK jackass over here? Most of my business comes from Negroes. I have nothing against anyone for what they look like as long as their money is green and they don't behave the fool."
'Behaving the fool' was more about any attempt to get one over on L.D. than any other sort of activity. Try to scam him and he'd hand you your ass. I remember once a gentlemen came in claiming that his wife had brought their Honda in for an oil change and that, according to her, I had broken something in the engine in the process of the service. The fist mistake was that I wasn't qualified to do oil changes. I checked the oil but Mario usually actually did the work.
Snuffy looked it over and found nothing wrong with the vehicle. He told L.D. The guy was looking for some sort of compensation for something that hadn't happened. L.D. dressed the guy down and told him if he wanted to behave the fool to go over to the Shell Station down the street.
The truth of it is that in the seven months that I worked at the Diamond Standard, I never saw L.D. or Snuffy treat anyone with disrespect or animosity unless it was a scammer or a kid. They did not like the local kids with no regard for skin color. If you were a kid, you were suspect. True to form, a lot of the high school crowd that came around were looking for trouble or a quick shoplift so I suppose their narrow view of my generation wasn't entirely unwarranted.
After a while, I found out that L.D. paid me more than the legal minimum wage—by almost two dollars an hour. I asked him why because that seemed unusual for both a completely unskilled laborer just out of high school and hard to parse out in terms of the day-to-day business model of a gas station.
"I pay you more so I can expect more outta ya. Not so hard to figure."
Interestingly, I realized during that time, my first real job, I wasn't working harder for the additional dough. I didn't have the sense to even ask what I was being paid until a few months in. I worked hard because it was my job.
Nearly four decades later that ethic remains true.
