The worst flat I ever had was in June, 1994. It was the day OJ Simpson went missing. I was driving north on I-35 to attend a writing workshop at the University of Iowa when my right front tire blew out. Man, that sucked. It was about 105 miserable degrees that day, and I-35 was as usual scary busy and I had to crawl around on the hot gravel changing that tire worried that some fool was going to smash into my pickup on the shoulder…though eventually I got the tire changed and I made it to a motel room in time to see OJ’s low-speed chase.
Flat tires make appearances in my writing, of course. Here, in the story, “Bad Guts.”
“Why don’t you just change the tire?”
“Can’t,” Wes said. “I’m driving on the spare—it’s the spare that’s flat.” That stupid fucking donut spare. He’d been driving on it for six months….
So I wasn’t too surprised when I looked at my car the other day and saw this:
But then I was faced with--this:
Luckily the guy across the street heard me cursing at the Tire Gods and came over with his portable air pump, and we got some air in the spare and I got back on the road.
But—it could have been worse!