The car wasn’t rolling like it usually does, and it didn’t sound right. Just a half-block from home, I pulled over and did a walk-around. The front-right tire was nearly flat, but I got it home. Before swapping out the spare, I tried inflating it and was surprised when it stayed hard. I didn’t see or feel a nail, and hoped that that maybe a pothole or curb-strike was to blame.

Sunday morning it still looked fine, but after picking up some bagels, I came out of the store and saw it was dead flat. With no choice, I popped the trunk and went to work. I was a little surprised that I had a full-sized spare, an option that’s becoming less common due to weight and space requirements.

Only half the people who get flats actually endeavor to change them themselves. Usually they call Triple A or somebody else.

A lot of cars come with temporary spares, sometimes called “donut” tires. Am I being overly picky by observing that any tire could be so described? Doesn’t matter, but these kinds of spares are smaller and lighter, and can’t be driven for long.

Others cars are equipped with “drive-flat” tires, which as the name implies, allows for getting the vehicle off the road under its own power. This appeals to me as there are plenty of places where it is not advisable to change a tire. Sometimes it’s the neighborhood, but often its the proximity to speeding cars that don’t give a damn if they leave you as flat as your tire.

Another approach car manufacturers are taking is the tire repair kit. They used to sell products like this, with names like: “Spare in a Can,” or something like that, which I’m pretty sure didn’t work very well — if at all.

The new approach is that the kit includes a small compressor that plugs into the cigarette lighter (God help you if your battery is also dead). It includes some sticky, rubbery spray that you squirt into the tire before using the compressor, which allows you to drive home, safe and sound.

It saves a lot of weight and space, is much easier than jacking up your car, but there is a significant drawback: it doesn’t work if the hole is too big or on the sidewall, which is about 15% of the time. So, you might want to keep that Triple A membership active.

In days of yore, a car would be jacked up by hooking a device onto its bumper. Trying something like that on a modern bumper would quickly result in a full reveal of what is hidden by what passes for bumpers these days, and a giant piece of cracked plastic that will cost upwards of $1,500 to replace.

The modern tire jack is much smaller and lighter, and slides underneath the chassis. It’s called a scissor jack, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because you raise it by turning a crank.

I admit, It’s pretty cool that you can lift a car by turning a crank, but the bad thing about it is that you have to get on your knees and align it at the right place under the chassis. If you don’t do this properly, you can mess up your car and really, really wish you called Triple A to do it.

Everything reminds me of something else

In 1972, Marlon Brando starred in a movie called Last Tango in Paris. It  was a worldwide sensation because it contained nudity and somewhat explicit sex scenes between Brando’s, Paul, and his costar, Maria Schneider. It was one of the first legitimate movies with a real star that ventured into such taboo subject matter. Schneider was 20 when she made the movie, which was the same age I was when I saw it. Brando was 48 and struck me as being pretty old — now, not so much.

Paul is a recent American widower whose wife has committed suicide. Schneider’s character, Jeanne, is a carefree Parisian girl who is soon to be married. They meet at an apartment that’s for rent and have a sexual encounter, after which they agree to return for ongoing trysts.

Paul is a sad and damaged person who is wracked by guilt and shame over his wife’s death. Through their depersonalized and often depraved sex, he vents his suffering and grief upon the inexplicably compliant Schneider, who seems an almost indifferent spectator of her own debasement.

Paul insists they keep things anonymous, to the point where they don’t even know each other’s names, another demand Jeanne goes along with — but in spite of the rule, they can’t help but reveal more and more about themselves.

There are quite a few interpretations of the movie, but one thing that’s pretty well agreed upon is Brando’s acting put him in the running for being one of the greatest screen actors ever.

Toward the end of the movie, Paul deserts Jeanne, but then returns, this time treating her much better and expressing his love and a desire to get married. He starts telling her about himself, and this is when he says something that the flat tire reminded me of:

“I picked up a nail when I was in Cuba in nineteen forty-eight, and now I have a prostate like an Idaho potato. I’m still a pretty good stick man, even if I can’t have any kids.”

What an odd admission! (The urban dictionary defines picking up a nail as catching a venereal disease, and I’ll leave the definition of stick man to the reader’s imagination.) Here’s the scene — I’m afraid you have to watch the commercial, but it’s not too long. To get back to this page, use your browser’s back arrow.

Me again

In the dance hall there’s a tango competition taking place and the couple gets very drunk. At first it looks like they’re going to end up together, but for reasons that are unclear, Jeanne decides she doesn’t want to see him anymore. Here’s the dance hall scene:

The movie is over forty years old, so there’s no harm in exposing that it ends with her shooting Brando dead — and it’s just after she tells him her name. As she waits for the police to come, she’s heard practicing her lines: saying that she didn’t know who he was and that he was threatening her.

All and all, quite a period piece from the seventies, and they sure don’t make ’em like that anymore.

All the best until next time.