From Among my Memories

In the small Vermont town where I went to college, there were several characters, people who made the little picture postcard come to life, but none as memorable as the proprietor of the local Texaco Station, George Boardman.

Imagine, if you are of an age to remember, the actor Robert Mitchum. Strong, straight Roman nose, eyes that seemed to see everything at a glance and could stare the truth right out of you, a tangible sensuality, and the feeling that things could turn violent just like that. On less of a man the cleft chin would have been weak and slightly receding, but by some inner force his gave the impression of jutting out, like a dare.

George Boardman had these same looks, alright, although most who knew him then would have laughed long and hard at the comparison. He was grizzled and bear-like with a barrel chest and a gut from the beer that often accompanied him. His face was dark with the grease of a thousand cars, giving him the look of a coal miner, and contrasting starkly with light blue eyes that crinkled in the corners, broadcasting his roguishness.

The closest thing to the sound of his broad Vermont speech was a cockney accent. In fact, in the unlikely event that the town ever staged a production of My Fair Lady, he would have made an excellent Alfred Doolittle, father of Eliza, retired dustman and scamp extraordinaire.

His Texaco was the only gas station in town and was always full of cars in various stages of being worked on by him and 'the boys.' The building itself was generally what one would expect of a structure inhabited by car guys: filthy in the extreme, and if I remember correctly, Texaco eventually got wind of this and took away its patronage, which made absolutely no difference whatsoever to George or anyone else. George kept a couple of German Shepherds hanging around in the back, which was another time-honored gas station custom, before gas stations lost their individuality and became sterilized convenience stores with gas pumps out front owned by faceless corporations.

George's grown son worked at the station too. Feature-for-feature he looked just like him, but where George radiated a manly presence his son seemed a product of the unlikely mating between his father and Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, with George's Roman nose, but a weak chin that held back where George's provoked you to poke it, and a taller, thinner, hunched body which gave the impression that it would clinch back into a fetal position at the smallest provocation. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of a million other things we will never be privy to, he carried a perennial sourness about him which contrasted greatly with George's robust self-confidence.

Heavy arctic Winters lasted six months in this Vermont hamlet, followed by mud season, which is six weeks of just what it sounds like. Spring was the blink of an eye, then black fly season, hot and buzzing and lazy, then a magnificent Fall where every view was a page torn from a calendar. Three weeks or a month into it, the tourists left, silence engulfed the town and Winter seemed to say, 'it was all a dream. I am the only real season you will ever know. I am the real Vermont. Get your boots on and start shoveling.'

It was during just such an unrelenting winter in 1970 that this daughter of Los Angeles drove her small black 1965 MGB sports car into town. It was only a matter of time before I met George Boardman. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember the steamy gray morning that I stood shivering outside his shop as he took a cursory glance under the hood and said, 'Bring ol' 'enrietta in 'ere, Sus'n, an' let's take a look at 'ah.' My car was thus christened, Ol'Henrietta, and from that day forth I was one of the faithful who came to beg and tithe at George's greasy altar. He and the boys usually worked late into the night, especially if some desperate and savvy customer thought to bring a few six packs. Passing by you could see lights burning and steam and exhaust outlining the silhouettes of noisy men, dogs and cars within. They always seemed to be having one hell of a time.

On nights when it was especially cold, implying temperatures under thirty below, George would stop by my apartment, announcing his presence the same way everyone did in those parts, by stamping the snow off their boots outside the door. Walking right in with my car battery gripped under one arm he would deposit it on the radiator. Early the next morning, on his way into town, he would stomp in, heft the battery back out to my car and hook it up again. I'm not sure why I didn't have an engine block heater, but it wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining.

My last year in Vermont, a college girl started working for George, sitting in the cramped office, writing up invoices and taking care of the paperwork. She was taller than him, with short hair and a tomboyish look to her. Occasionally I would see her riding shotgun with him in the wrecker. She seemed to fit right in. Some time after I left, I heard that George had stopped drinking, trimmed down, cleaned himself up, divorced the wife no one ever saw and married this girl.

I never heard more than that, but in my own private movie of his life, that is the happy ending, the one we all know isn't really an ending, but will just have to do, because it's all we're going to get. In the snow-globe in my mind, George will forever be working with the boys, hammering out bent frames, fixing fuel pumps, covered in grease, smelling of beer, laughing and cursing in his thick Vermont twang, looking, I don't care what anyone says, just like Robert Mitchum, while the snow falls silently outside.