The last sign above the rollaway doors said R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair. The R was for my father Ramon and the Body Repair was supposed to be my addition to the family business. Occasionally, I would bang out a dent or fill a quarter panel with Bond-o. I had a compressor for paint, but hadn’t used it in years. Most of my customers wanted me to do the very least so they could get back on the road and not be pulled over. It was hard to build an auto repair empire when my customers thought I ran some sort of pro-bono resurrection service.
My father knew better. He came from nothing in Michouacan, where he said they couldn’t afford to pave the streets with dirt. I never knew whether he came here legally or not. He would change the subject whenever I asked. He would say “I am here now. You were born here. What does it matter? Your job is to look forward, not back.”
Selling primarily to poor Mexican immigrants wasn’t much of a business plan. But there was money to be made in selling things that cost very little. “Buy low sell everything” was one of my father’s mantras. The other was “you can take the Mexican out of Mexico, but you could never take Mexico out of the Mexicans.”
Although they were all here, their minds were always there and so he sold single cigarettes, cold Jaritos that he kept in a styrofoam cooler or something that “fell” off of a truck. Eventually, it was tires. He never sold new tires. There were tires all over the neighborhoods—in empty lots, stuck between garages or even some taken from parked cars—all brought to our back door by kids who “found” them. My father would pay they with a bunch of greasy bills and ask no questions. The tires were never ideal. They didn’t have to be; they just had to better than their pancake smooth tires. “Where are they going to go? The North Side? Nah, that’s the way to get pulled over. They drive around La Vilita where the cops know better.” Such talks always turned to me and how I would continue the northward march to prosperity as if my father had plotted it on a map years ago in Mexico.
Seven days a week, people would pull up to our garage in the alley, honk their horns and stare nervously as my father would get down on his knees to test the tread with his thumb, so calloused it could drive nails. He told them the tires were no good. There was nothing he could do other than sell them a tire that was a little bit better. They would scrunch up their faces like he told them that they had cancer.
Mrs. Gonzalez across the alley swore it wasn’t she who called the cops. But who else could it have been? Mrs. Gonzalez thought she was the neighborhood’s conscience. From her second-story perch, she would cluck disapprovingly at the girls whose dresses were too high above their knees. Toughs who thought they ruled the street would find out better when Mrs. Gonzalez came down the street with her granny cart full of groceries. I saw the meanest one, with a tell-tale bulge in the small of his back, cringe as she shook her crooked finger in his face. I am pretty sure the kids nowadays wouldn’t put up with it and Mrs. Gonzalez would find herself with her throat slit, but back then, there was still had a code and abuelitas were on it.
I woke up one morning with my room full of blue flashing lights. Running the to the window, I saw my father shrugging in the alley while two cops pulled tires out of the garage. A trash truck rumbled its way down the alley. I thought my father would be arrested, but it was worse, the police issued him a fistful of tickets they knew he could not pay. I saw Mrs. Gonzalez her face with a blue smirk looking down. I would have sworn revenge if it hadn’t been for the code.
The alderman at the time was a Michouacan, too, and owed my father a favor as he was a precinct captain and for unspecified services rendered years ago by generations long buried south of the border. I never heard of the tickets again.
A couple of weeks later my father came running in calling my mother and all us kids. He grabbed my mother’s hand and pulled her out the door to the van. He put her in the front seat and motioned for us to hurry up and get in the back. At first, it felt like we were going have to run from the cops. We looked back at the apartment thinking it was the last time we would ever see it.
We stopped in front of a crumbling building with a large garage covered with graffiti. “There it is,” he said, pointing across my mother’s nose.
“There what is?” she asked.
“The garage. Our garage. R. Guttierez Garage. Come look at it. It is ours. Not some landlords. Our foothold in America.”
He stepped out and stood in front of the two-stories-tall building. The windows on the second floor were broken and the ones on the first were bricked over. He fished out a fistful of keys on a ring from from his overalls. It took him several tries to find the three keys that opened the door. We kids crowded forward, half expecting Jesus to walk out of the gloom. My father put his arm around me and told me one day the garage would be mine as if that was a good thing.
My father had big dreams. He wasn’t going to be repairing and selling old tires forever. The alderman promised to speak to the local bank for a loan so he could fix the place up and maybe even install a lift. If the alderman spoke to the bank, it all went by the wayside when he was jailed for bribery. My father had nothing to worry about, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together to bribe anyone.
With loans from friends and family and bartering auto work for construction, electricity and plumbing, my father was able to fix up the garage just enough to allow it to pass inspection. He could never afford the lift. But even with a real garage, he was still a tire man. Occasionally, he would buy new tires off of gas stations going out of business, but mostly he went back to patching and selling less-used tires. As eldest son, building the business was my job, whether I wanted it or not. I was the bearer of the immigrant success story.
I did everything right—going to trade school and taking business classes at a community college. I wrote a business plan and secured loans to pay for the repairs and build a lift. You should have seen my father’s face when he pushed the button to raise it. His smile was broader than it was whenever one of his children handed him a new grandchild. The golden future in reach. Maybe not his, but certainly in mine and those of my children.
My business plan said the neighborhood was changing and could support a full-service garage. That was true, but it never said it had to support mine, especially when the Firestone and Midas’ business plans told them the same thing. Every year, as the neighborhood improved, new neighbors moved in who had enough money to force out the people who bought used tires.
The new neighbors didn’t want some greasy Mexican patching up their cars so they looked like a leopard. I envied my father who couldn’t read a financial report to see the cash burn rate. He couldn’t understood the graph was pointing in the wrong direction for R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair. At family parties, I perfected a noncommittal smile when my father asked how business was going and quickly changed the subject. “It is going. You are gone. What does it matter?” The undertaker made sure to put a smile on his face before we buried him next to our neighbors who had moved out years ago.
Driving to my granddaughter’s third -grade graduation miles and worlds away from Pilsen, I can’t tell if I am a success with more than $900,000 in the bank. Who knew that R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair was worth more torn down ? They say the developer went bankrupt trying to figure out where the next hot neighborhood would be. His check cleared so I shouldn’t worry about what he tells his son.