Remember when, very briefly, and for only a few but very vocal motorists (as in electric motor-ists), gas stations were absolute hellscapes where any manner of unpleasantness might go down, and at a minimum, they were filthy places one vacated as quickly as possible once the precious fuel had been dispensed? This guy laid it on particularly thick.
As entertaining as the destination of that link is, I’m actually thinking of that guy because, truth be told, gas stations can be sketchy places where weird things go down. Most are not, of course, as we live in the year 2026, and if you’re in a decently populated area, your local gas stations are probably perfectly benign, well-lit places to fill your tank and potentially grab a roller hot dog. The hot dog is the scariest thing in this scenario.
… Usually. There are times, late at night and well off the beaten path, that a gas station can feel like a spooky or even menacing place. The only truly off-putting gas station I’ve encountered was in the most middle section of nowhere between Texas and Rhode Island, where I found myself in need of gas as the family slept. The gauge was close enough to E that stopping sooner rather than later felt prudent, and Waze said a station was nearby, so why wait? A few turns and barely a mile off the highway, I thought I had somehow been transported to a primordial forest. As I crested a hill, the gas station appeared: two dimly lit pumps, an open sign in the window, and a collapsing door over the lone service bay. Two figures appeared as silhouettes, each with the faint orange glow of a cigarette in their head shapes. One nudged the other to look at the stranger they were about to meet.
(Unrelated scene from Duel, enjoy!)
I noped right out of there and drove like a hyper-miler to make sure I made it to a legit fuel-and-food oasis butted up to the highway and full of both light and patrons. I’ve seen horror movies, I know what’s up.
Your turn. What’s your sketchiest gas station experience?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
ok, this isn’t that interesting, but many years ago (I think early 2000s) I was going somewhere with my dad on the 10 fwy in LA. He decided to get off at Crenshaw somewhere to fill up at some gas station not far off the fwy. It was just ghetto as hell. There were a bunch of homeless asking for money, people who looked like drug addicts, people walking around talking to themselves, and there was only 87 and 89 at the pumps – no 91. (Yea it looks like this in a lot of places in more urban LA areas now, but 20 something years ago, it was only in the shitty areas.) We lived out in a nice suburb 30-40 min away so it was something for me to see what it was like out near the ghettos.
Downtown Oakland at 1AM. I was hit up for money and had a guy try to sell me things in plastic bags. To top it off a group of seriously shady looking individuals kept eyeballing me and my car.
I got the hell out of there and back on 880 as quickly as I could.
After surviving Memphis, Oakland feels like a vacation spot to me.
It was after dark in an industrial-ish area near my friend’s house, and I was the only person there. The card reader was being difficult, so I didn’t notice when another car pulled up to the pump next to me. Beater Sonata with limo tint (window tint is illegal in my state, so it’s always surprising to see a car with it), and the gas cap was on the opposite side from the pump. There was nobody standing around. I was fully prepared to get jumped the moment I hung up the pump, and was thinking of what I’d have to do and say to at least keep my phone and wallet, to hell with my car.
…And then a guy came out of the store with his snacks, got in the car and drove off. He just had to pull up to a pump right next to the only other person there. Baffling.
And then I got my credit card skimmed the next time I filled up there, so I’m never ever going into that neighborhood again without enough gas to get home.
Window tint is illegal? Are the politicians bought by Big Dermatology or do they just love skin cancer.
The excuse is police feel anxiety around tinted windows
Oh, oh no… Whatever will they do if only 70% of light passes through my side window. They’ll be forced to pull me over to see me clearly.
Two stories of sketchy:
When I was in high school in the mid-90’s my father was driving a ’91 MB 300D 2.5 turbo (he just gave it up a couple of years ago after about 350,000 miles due to rust) and I was driving an ’80 MB 240D. We usually filled up at truck stops along I-90 outside of Erie, where prices were the lowest. We’re watching the local news one morning and the lead story was that one of the truck stops got caught selling agricultural diesel instead of road diesel and the state troopers were stopping every truck, checking fuel lines, and fining / pulling truckers off the road. We parked the cars for a few days and then stayed off the highway for a few weeks until we had emptied the tanks.
Many years later I was somewhere in rural Maryland off of I-68 on my way to a woodland retreat run by a witch’s coven in central PA to see a population of rare Iris cristata plants (another story for another day…). Cheap gas but everything’s run down, had the sneaking suspicion that “I should use cash as this place” but instead pulled out my credit card. Within 24 hours the cc company was calling to ask if it was me buying groceries in a Piggly Wiggly in North Carolina. It was not.
Also, I worked at a gas station for a summer. One time about 30 Harleys came in and swarmed the pumps. When that happened, I just pushed the ‘Authorize All’ button on the pump control.
As the riders came in one by one and in small groups and paid for their fuel by just shouting out a dollar amount and leaving me to guess for which pump they were actually paying, I eventually got all the amounts reconciled as they left and went on their merry way. Many of them appeared to have been drinking, but I was an 18-year-old kid working the cash register at a gas station – who was I to judge?
So the next day, a group of angry leather-jacket-wearing individuals came into the gas station and threatened to beat the sh*t out of me because I let their buddy fill his Harley with diesel fuel and his bike started smoking and he ended up getting pulled over by the police and getting a drunk driving ticket.
They were mad. I don’t remember exactly what I said to diffuse the situation, but I must have said the right things, as I didn’t get beat up.
You probably said, “well, if the dumbass hadn’t been drinking, and wasn’t a dumbass, maybe he’d have been coherent and smart enough to realize what he was doing!”
Just a guess.
I’ve had alot of sketchy experiences that taught me it’s better just to stop at the the known decent travel plaza, pilot, flying j , etc. Some sketchy truck stops where you are sure everyone is on something.
Gas stations around dc during the DC sniper were strange. So many people thought they were going to get killed pumping gas. Wasn’t exactly sketchy but people feeling like that around ducking behind cars like they are in a shoot out isn’t a great deal.
There was this gas station off i-81 in South Western Virginia that always gave me the creeps I was always there around 3 or 4 in the morning. It was super old had no lights pumps worked but slow and wasn’t open. The guy I would drive with always wanted to stop there and I still don’t understand why. It stopped once I pointed the people in the woods in tents making noises. And there was a both a mental hospital and a drug rehab place right down the road. He pulled out a infrared scope and was looking at them.
I’d totally forgotten the sniper effect at gas stations back then – completely true! But I’m fairly jaded as…I was at that Home Depot earlier that evening. I’d gotten my Mustang recently, so I was even parked way over the back 40 so nobody would park near me. I walked across the lot by myself holding a large houseplant. To say I did a double take when I turned on (as that was a thing back then) the evening news later that night…
I never cared for that 7 corners home Depot and always tried to go to avoid it. It always seemed to be the most crazy parking garage. I would just park by the Chinese place outside the parking garage or just inside by it. I had also been in there getting things for my grandparents after visiting them on my way home from work that day. As well as dinner for them a the Italian store I think. They were afraid to go out and my uncle who was a Fairfax county cop basically told them not to.
Fairfax county had given the older guys ar-15s to carry along with riot gear. One of my uncle’s friends was roaming around the parking lot in his cruiser with his window down. We talked for a minute and he said he had a bad feeling something was going to happen and told me to keep eyes on. I always thought it was odd but some guys are like that. That was probably around 6:30 or 7.
My electrician buddy used to be in there all the time. He of course had a white van he said he was constantly stopped during that period.
It was really strange my dad knew a bunch of people who were at the gas stations just before too. There was one guy that was at at least 2 if not more not long before. I think that whole DC is a small town thing everyone knew someone who had been around just before freaked everyone out more.
So I’m driving with my mom in South Carolina on I-95, headed to North Carolina. She announces that she needs a restroom, soonish. I know we won’t be back in South Carolina anytime soon (if ever), and thought I should make the most of the occasion, so I pull in at South of the Border. (She refused to exit the Jeep, not even to sign the credit card slip at the gas pump.)
We had a genuinely creepy gas station experience many years later at a gas station in Virginia. I pumped gas while Mom went to the restroom. She came back complaining that the really bad lighting in there had made her eyes feel funny. Uh-oh. I went in to check it out, and sure enough it was that “special” blue lighting. We put that exit on our do-not-stop list.
Okay, I need to know what this “Special” blue lighting is
Gas station bathrooms use special blue lighting to make it difficult for people to see their veins and inject illicit drugs like heroin.
I was trying to decide between that and the whole “blue lighting deters crime” thing
Never heard of this
Like this. Sometimes it almost looks like black lighting, except nothing glows.
God that’s terrible!
Wouldn’t they just use in public?
I just did about 2600 miles of driving over 2 weeks pulling a camper and getting 11 mpg, so I feel like I hit about 15 gas stations and had 2 weird experiences and they were both in the middle of the day. Not really that sketchy, but just weird
One just really looked barely open and we were the only people at the pumps, even though it was like 20 cents cheaper than anyone else. Filling up was fine, but I went in the store afterward to buy a snack, and all the shelves were empty except the automotive supplies and about 25 percent of the drink coolers were full. The bathroom was also out of order, so I just went in my camper instead.
The other was a Pilot truck stop, just after I started filling up, 2 police pulled up on the guy at the pump across from me. By the time I left, the guy was in handcuffs and the car was being searched and a 3rd cop car had arrived. I didn’t stick around to find out the results.
I was in Atlanta late at night on my way to my hotel near the Atlanta airport. My rental car was a late ’90s Grand Am. I was about 10 miles from the airport hotel district when the ‘Low Fuel’ light illuminated. I figured that was great, as I could fill it in the morning before I returned the rental car.
Well, about 30 seconds later, the car just died. So I coasted down an off-ramp, through a red light, across a set of RR tracks, through another red light and coasted right up to the pump at a gas station in a pretty sketchy area. There was 2″ bullet-proof glass on the window where I had to pre-pay in order to fill up. Luckily there were two peace officers parked in the parking lot so I felt slightly better about my surroundings.
The other time was just after leaving LAX in another Avis rental car in the late ’90s. Again, it was late and dark, but this time the low fuel light illuminated shortly after I picked up the vehicle and the first exit available said Compton. – Great.
Both instances I got in, out, and back on the road as quickly as possible.
I’ve stopped for gas with a rental near Atlanta’s airport a couple times… definitely not the safest feeling given the neighbourhood and the amount of protection for the attendant.
Gas station in Atlanta. Not Georgia, Texas. It’s about 1 AM, place is dark and deserted. Pump was going extremely slow, like took 15 minutes to fill my car slow. All the lights inside were off, but the open sign was on and I could see someone walking around inside in the dark. Something felt off, so I kept my eyes off the building and watched a couple guys working on a sign across the street. A couple cars pulled up, nobody in either of them was speaking English, and they kept looking at me but were not speaking to me. One of them was also there for gas, but the other was clearly not. I debated just leaving with half a tank, but said screw it and filled it. About 30 seconds after I left, several cop cars blew past me with their lights and sirens on and stopped at the place I’d just left. Don’t think I wanna know what was going on.
I worked in a gas station every year from my sophomore year in high school until college graduation. I can’t count the number of sketchy moments I encountered. Everything from confronting armed robbers to dealing with engine fires. But the most frightening and fraught situation occurred in my first year of work not long after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. The resulting gas shortage caused long, long gas lines and frayed tempers.
During that winter, I had to open the station alone. I’d peddle down on my bicycle (still saving for my first car) in the dark around 5 AM to get the morning prep done before turning on the pumps. Even at that time, there’d be dozens cars waiting for business to start. We blocked off the pump islands with tire racks chained between the light stanchions. And parked wreckers across the lot entrances.
The first thing I had to do was stick the tanks and see if we had received any fuel deliveries over night. If we were still dry, I had to put up the NO GAS sign. That was real popular. If we had fuel, I had calculate how many gallons we had and how many cars, on average we could service. After that, I finished inside prep, grabbed the credit card imprinters (remember them) and stuffed my pockets full of cash and change. Then I switched on the pumps power and island light and went out to first move the tire racks and then the wreckers.
By the time I had the wreckers clear, the islands were packed with cars and people trying to pump their own gas. This was before self service was a thing, so most didn’t even even know where their fuel filler was or how to operate the pump. It was chaos and bad attitudes. Several times fights broke out between customers being accused of selfishly hogging fuel by completely filling up or, worse, pulling in just to top off with a couple of gallons.
I stayed outside this whole time with the station doors locked running from pump to pump to get people in and out ASAP. It was freezing in the predawn and help would not arrive until 7 AM. I had to use a hand counter to click off all of the cars serviced because at some point I was going to reach a number that would require me to get out a LAST CAR sign and put it on the back window of one of the cars waiting in line.
I’ve never again heard so many threats or experienced that level of physical menacing in any situation since. Usually, before we reached that moment, there were two of us to keep the line going and to begin blocking off the pumps. We’d still get people stubbornly parking in the entryway or running over curbs and sidewalks to crash the line. Unbelievable.
That was the period when my faith in the humanity of people was permanently quashed. I still have a scar behind one ear from a flung tire iron. Fortunately, gas attendants are like Hell’s Angels in one regard: you attack one of us, you fight all of us. Not only was the offender stomped, but arrested and eventually convicted.
So yeah, sketchy times at the ol’ pump n go.
Consider that society was less divided back then. It’s half a century later.
We have potential for a real horror show to occur in the USA. Fuel shortages, food shortages, WWIII, hyperinflation, are all plausible scenarios on the table for the near-term future, possibly all at once, when just one of them will be an existential threat to a so-called “civilization” that has only the external appearance of being civil, and only to those with the wealth to insulate themselves from its problems.
Time to rip off the mask and see what happens.
Sorry, I can’t hear you from my bunker.
Funny how twitchy being unable to afford food makes people.
This is a far better story / anecdote than the original article (which frankly barely qualifies as weird)! We deserve to hear a full version of these crazy times (which I don’t remember, I was born right around then.)
Give this man his own full post!
(Edited for puncuation)
There was a gas station near where I used to live that was right next to a bus station, occasionally there’d be folks shuffling around asking what city or state they were in and wanting directions to the Salvation Army, which was a few miles away toward the center of town. I suspect they were being put on buses and sent out of town by another city without being fully informed of what was happening to them
Driving cross-country during COVID lockdown somewhere in the US South – Tennessee maybe?
Stopped off at a random gas station to get fuel and pee.
Went into the mens room – Which was as disgusting as it gets.
I won’t get into it, but I could have taken a dump in the middle of the floor and nobody would have known the difference.
Went outside, gagging and pissed on the side of the road instead.
Then there’s driving down to see my parents in Augusta.
Cross the SC state line outside Charlotte, and exit the freeway to a Shell: Pumps not working.
Low fuel indicator light glowing, I drive up the road to an Exxon where the pumps work.
Walk inside to pee – and I realize it’s a fucking liquor store and bar where they also sell gas.
No wonder the US South is as fucked as it is.
Lots of men hit up the strip club on Saturday night then took their wives to church on Sunday when I lived in SC 15 years ago.
And, sounds right for a Shell. Those tended to be the worst looking gas stations. I avoided them as if they were questionable seafood.
There was a gas station in my town that had a horribly dirty and broken-down, neglected bathroom. Eventually, someone took a hefty permanent marker and wrote, in large letters, their opinion about what needed cleaning, what needed repairing and what they thought about the management and owner who let it get to such a deplorable condition.
Not long after that, the bathroom got a complete remodel.
The life lesson is that sometimes it takes someone to express their opinion, and not just keep quiet like everyone else does.
Not really getting the point there.
You must not have been to Nevada and California.
Most people I meet now are immigrants from California, and recently Texas!
“We thought it would be cooler here!”
I’m a Californian.
Where bathrooms are generally clean.
And so is the air.
(Wildfires, cold-storage warehouse arsons and Harris Ranch excepted)
Yeah – I knew it wasn’t going to be cool here in Virginia.
Because it’s not California.
Yeah, that wasn’t clear enough.
I just met one of the usual Texas refugees from California, that had decided Texas was too much like California, in more than a few ways.
They thought they were trading for less heat.
I’ve experienced the bay area being too hot and humid, and then low humidity and cool all in the same week.
Bathrooms everywhere are clean if someone cleans them. I haven’t found a particular difference in the west.
Someone actually thought Texas had a cooler climate than CA?
Maybe in Galveston.
It’s not like there aren’t things like Google where one can look up climate statistics….
They thought Tennessee would be cooler than Texas.
In their case, no. It’s much more complex than that though. Both states have a full range of climates, as does California.
Coastal winds seem to be the reason I’ve experienced a wild range of weather in the same place in a single week in California.
Tennessee ranges from humid flat delta 140 feet above sea level to mountain range.
Went to a place that had cheaper gas than usual. Pumps had video ads and seemed to pump very slow. No vapor capture (which might be illegal in my state?). The video ads kept looping to a part that insisted I leave the pump unattended to go inside and get a deal on an energy drink or something. My car doesn’t have a big gas tank, but I feel like I saw it loop back to that at least 3 times.
This wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. This was like, on a major road in the city. I still pass by it on the way to get groceries.
This was Freedom Fuel, right?
Nah, I think it was “Rocket” something. Can’t quite remember, it was a couple of years ago and I’m in the PNW. “Freedom Fuel” sounds hilarious.
I gassed up a bunch in 2023-24 at a USA Fuel, it was close to a job and 20¢ cheaper, never dared to go inside.
Those fucking screens. I use the same Shell station 95% of the time because:
1) No screens
2) No zip code entry
I don’t care if it’s $0.50 more, I will pay them for the opportunity to slide my CC in, pull it back out, press the 87 button, and get some damn fuel without something screaming in my face.
Rumor has it you can hit the third button down from the top on the left (or right, one of them) side of the screen and they’ll mute or turn off.
At my local Shell (and other gas stations) it’s the second down on the right. Just mute but that’s good enough.
I think I got that to work once…the others never did.
Fortunately, that gas station is the ONLY one with ad pumps I’ve seen in my area.
I tried “gas station heroin” from East St. Louis, IL. Specifically, Neptune’s Fix. That’s pretty sketchy. It was a very interesting velomobile ride back home, to say the least.
Two of them – one was a gas station near a cheap apartment I lived in many years ago whose primary trade was absolutely not either fuel or twinkies, as the collection of feral tweakers out front would attest (note: I am a city dweller with an interest in the practical side of personal neurochemistry, I promise I’m not describing homeless people or drug users as some kind of scary big bad – feral tweaker is a different category than either of those).
The one that really scared me, though, was a gas station in rural Colorado that had an all-you-can-eat Indian food buffet out and uncovered in the middle of the store. I think I was in bigger danger of leaving my intestines on the floor there than at the first place.
You can count on David and Torch to walk you through the distress safely.
Specialty gas station food is a thing.
If a chef becomes popular, they can make bank
Oddly enough, I haven’t really experienced any frightening or dangerous kind of things at gas stations that I recall, but there was a generic name station in Detroit that I used to frequent because it was the cheapest around where two notable things happened. First one that’s not that sketchy, but was a funny Detroit kind of thing where a homeless guy came up and demanded I give him a dollar. At first I thought I was being mugged by the world’s most pessimistic thief (or realistic considering the look of my car), then I realized he was “asking”. I was living on a ramen packet a day, so I told him he ate better than I did and he either believed me or realized he wasn’t getting anywhere and moved on. Second one was months later when I tried to start my Subaru in the winter and it had no interest in waking up. Cranked on and off for about 20 minutes (big battery and didn’t take much to turn it over) before what seemed like a single cylinder banged into life and kept running, shaking the car, as long as I kept it at least at 1/4 throttle. Went to a more expensive name brand station a block the other way unable to get over probably 8 mph and propped the throttle a bit with a scraper to keep it running as I pumped new fuel and threw in some Stabil for the hell of it suspecting water as I recalled seeing a garden hose at that garbage station very late at night looking like it was going into a cover in the ground. At the time, I thought it must have been something else because WTF would do that? Within about a hundred yards of leaving the station, the engine coughed, all cylinders came back, and it never complained again. Needless to say, it was the last time I used that station. News had an expose just after about local stations with suspiciously low prices watering down their fuel tanks at night and how a bunch of new cars incurred major damage from it.
I’ve only been to Detroit a couple of times and never for overly long as Buffalo is my close US city. However a couple of years ago my wife and I went to a show at the Masonic Centre, which is an absolutely fantastic venue. Waiting in line a guy was selling cold beer from a cooler to those waiting in line. Now being Canadian we figured this probably wasn’t legal but who knows. Then a police car drove by, looked at him and just kept going.
Still not sure about the legality. Also I’d 100% enjoy it if people sold beer outside my normal venues in the Toronto area. Or would of in my drinking days.
IME, as long as you didn’t shoot at the cops, they didn’t seem to care much what you did.
In high school, a friend of mine and I decided to play “Let’s see where this road ends.” (Do kids still do that anymore, with GPS and such? Probably not. Shame.) The road we chose was US Route 34, Ogden Avenue to us residents of the Chicago suburbs. We headed east in her Granada, just as the sun was going down. Turns out, 34 runs into US 66, still called Ogden Ave, and dead-ends at the Chicago River. You go under a bridge, and it just sort of peters out.
“Well that’s boring,” my friend said. “I’m thirsty, let’s find something to drink.” So we turned around and headed back out of town. We stopped at a dimly-lit gas station, and she went inside to grab us some drinks. She returned thirty seconds later empty-handed, with a seriously creepy-looking dude following close behind her. She jumped in the car and turned the key, and for a second I was sure it wasn’t going to start; I had seen too many horror movies, even back then. But the old Granada sputtered to life, she threw it in drive, and away we went.
To reinforce the point that we were out of our depth, a gunshot rang out from a few blocks away as we were leaving the lot. We rolled up the windows and ran the next few stop lights. We finally did stop at get a Coke – at a nice clean White Hen Pantry in Naperville.
Had a similar experience in Chicago when my wife and I were there as part of a 6000 mile road trip. My wife wanted donuts and found a place on Michigan Avenue, thinking it was somewhere near the hotel we were staying downtown by the river. Nope, it was in Southside and my wife and I were way out of our element when we got there.
As we were making our hasty retreat I ran a yellow light that turned red as I was through the intersection and I then heard a nearby cop yell “Oh, you’re just gonna run a red light in front of me?” I thought I was cooked but seems he had other things to tend to so we hopped on the highway without incident. At least the donuts were good.
I did a “let’s see where this road ends” in 2009 ended up on a powerline road overlooking lake Mojave. Not another human in sight, would reccomended.
Last time I played that, a buddy and I wandered around the country roads around Lexington for a couple of hours while listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol II. We started disc one when we left, and the second disc ended right as we pulled back into the same parking spot.
I was bored one afternoon and did it myself, ended up going though a very low one-lane overpass (maybe for train tracks?) before the road ended in a tee intersection. On the other side of the perpendicular road was a field with some zebras. I wished I’d had some sort of camera.
Not a gas station, but meets the spirit of the question. Back in 2001 a friend and I drove from San Diego to Vegas for a few days. On the way back on a Tuesday we decided to stop at the famous Zzyzx Rd exit off I-15 just to see what was there. Shortly after the pavement ended we got a flat tire, which is when we learned the factory lug wrench in his car wouldn’t fit the aftermarket wheels he got.
Called AAA and they arrived about 2 hours later and took us into Baker, CA, a tiny highway roadstop along I-15 (home of the world’s tallest thermometer!). The tow truck took us to a couple of tire shops which were closed, and we were losing hope of making it home that night. We pulled into a third tire shop outside of town that clearly was a former gas station from old Highway 91 days, and it was open.
The owner looked like Jonathan Winters in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World except with an eye patch, and the employee was a skinny greasy guy in a white tank undershirt who reminded me of Kid Rock in 30 years. Now that I think about it, he did kinda look like Kid Rock today. We thought there was no way they’d have a 205/50R15 or whatever it was on the ’94 Integra we were driving. But Kid Rock hopped up into an old semi trailer they had on the property and to our utter amazement he pulled out a brand new Goodyear in the right size and got it installed and us back on the road fairly quickly. A pleasant surprise since we totally expected to be walking back into town and staying at some seedy motel.
Have you ever seen the movie The Big Empty? It’s set and filmed in Baker, and from the couple of times I’ve been there, it’s a pretty good portrayal of the town and its denizens. Weird-ass town.
I have not, but it does not surprise me. Desert folks are strange.
Something vaguely similar happened to my now wife, not me, but it was at Buttonwillow, CA on I-5, not Baker. They got a flat tire on her Plymouth Arrow (re-badged Mitsubishi IIRC) in the wee hours and were without a functional spare. Hiked along the freeway in what turned out to be the looong way to an exit because the bass player started out that way. Ended up sitting in front of a Union 76 until it opened and the sheriff’s car kept just swinging by to stare at them. Turns out the station was run by the sheriff’s kid and the sheriff was suspicious of 3 “long hairs” sitting in front of the station when it wasn’t open.
But when the station opened, the folks at the station found a dusty tire that would work, charged them very little for it and they were finally on their way back to Pasadena. And they got a good song out of it “Buttonwillow Blues”
My 69 VW Bus also broke down there in Buttonwillow, but that’s a different tale and doesn’t involve gas stations.
I have plenty of Buttonwillow stories too.
Any of them involve cash only motels and fixing your vehicle in their parking lot?
Got a speeding ticket near Buttonwillow once. Hard to believe a 1983 Mazda 626 could go that fast.
I guess I have lived a very sheltered life. I usually start looking for gas at 100 miles to empty and have never had to stop somewhere sketchy. I did once stop at a shack with a pump in the middle of Kansas because the wife needed to use the toilet, which was accessed by a door around the corner on the outside. I gassed up and bought some snacks. It was run down, but the proprietor was nice enough. Gas and food was way overpriced, but, hey, middle of Kansas and not much competition.
Sketchy? No. I think it’s kind of funny. I was propositioned by a prostitute. It’s happened to me three times in my life. Besides a nightclub once, the other two times were outside of gas stations. What is it with gas stations?
A gas station is the only place I have ever been approached by one. It was very weird. I left another gas station without even getting out of the car because there was a pack of (very obviously) hookers hanging out at the pumps. Don’t go to Indianapolis
Crap. All of my friends and family know it. I’ve never posted it publicly. I used to be a field service engineer for ophthalmic laser systems years ago, my first job out of school. I traveled ALOT. Took a redeye out to Tampa, Florida. The doctor’s office wouldn’t be open for hours, it wasn’t worth getting a room yet. So I drove around. Finally, I realized I didn’t know where I was…these were the paper map days. I pull into a gas station, ask the attendant in the nice bullet proof booth how I can get back to the 75. In a really think accent (either Puerto Rican or Cuban is my guess from what I was told…I don’t know, I’m from California and really removed from that part of the world), he starts telling me where to go. Suddenly, he changes tone, “Hey man, look at me when I’m talking to you”. I smile, and say ‘yeah, sure’. He pops back into the prior tone, “OK you go there and take a turn at….hey man, look at me when I talk to you”. I slowly start to back up. The guy leaves the booth and starts moving towards me. I turn, but slowly still backing up. The coked-out bastard continues talking to me. Flip flopping between the two personalities. Florida man? Yeah, it’s real.
I was coming home from a funeral. I needed gas, and it was about 1-2am. I was waiting in line, I think paying at the moment. There was a couple behind me, and I asked the woman “When are you due?”
She was not pregnant.
Everybody say it with me now:
“Unless you can SEE A BABY COMING OUT OF HER, you never – NEVER!!! – ask a woman if she’s pregnant/when she’s due.”
…a lesson I have lived by since.
“ I noped right out of there and drove like a hyper-miler to make sure I made it to a legit fuel-and-food oasis butted up to the highway and full of both light and patrons”
Ahhh yes, been there, done that. At first sign of tribal inbred mutants with cloven hooves, I hightail it outta there.
Oh, Pete, you and Rufus have made my day.