Fueling Memories

There are simulator games for all sorts of professions, except mine. You can get truck driver simulators. Train operator simulators. But no professional writer simulators. I’m not sure how that would work, really. I’m not sure if it is work. My dad’s job required him to pick up heavy rusty metal barrels, put them in a truck, transport them to a distant location, then pick them up again and put them down. That is work, and it leaves one exhausted. Typing is as taxing as drumming your fingers.

If you played Writer Simulator for eight hours a day, six would be spent doing anything but writing—say, playing computer games. You would have objectives and rewards, of course. Your piece was retweeted by Malcolm Gladwell’s personal assistant: Here’s a badge. Your novel was accepted: Here’s a badge. Your novel got a Kirkus review. Your novel was released. Your novel was remaindered. (This would be an accomplishment, because most writers never get to the stage of having their novel sold for $1.98 on the reject pile at Barnes & Noble.)

To while away the hours between writing sessions, I go on Steam and look for games I can’t play because they’re not made for the Mac. Hello: Gas Station Simulator? And it’s Mac-compatible? ADD TO CART.

My father ran a gas station, you see. I know a bit about how a gas station sim should be. A few impressions:

The station’s design is disappointing. I’d hoped for one of those classic white boxes that populated the land in the postwar era. It was an audacious design decision: Everything about oil and cars is messy and dirty and leaves black smears everywhere, so hey, let’s make the shops bright white! They were outposts of contemporary design scattered from coast to coast, and sometimes the only modernistic building in town, aside from the post office.

The pumps are archaic prewar relics. Perhaps as the game progresses, you upgrade to the familiar boxy robots with the numbers that whir past until the fuel triggers the automatic shutoff: clickclickclickclick KANCK. So far there’s no pneumatic annunciator rope. You know, the ding-ding hose that tells the guy in the repair bay he has to stop fixing an alternator, wipe his hands on his coveralls and go pump some SkyChief for the citizen who just rolled up to the island.

There is a realistic string of unending duties. You have to clean, stock, take out the trash, paint—and every few minutes someone comes along and wants gas. This means you have to stop trying to pick the lock of the abandoned car to get the loot from the trunk. But without the gas revenue, you can’t pay your loans. But because you’re pumping gas, you have to order more. Because you order more, you have to stop cleaning the shed when the tanker truck shows up. It’s always something.

Dad would have agreed with that. But his “somethings” were not the sort of thing the game imagined. One time he was hauling heating oil to a house on the Southside, and some kids blew a stoplight and knocked over the truck. Luck was with him: Nothing blew up. But you’re only so lucky for so long. One day the loading dock that fed the fuel to the trucks had an errant spark. We saw the black plume from our front yard, six miles from the station. I never knew what made the dock blow up. Dad never said. He rebuilt and moved on.

In the game you have to worry about a local kid who shows up at night and sprays graffiti on the side of your station. My dad had to worry about the driver who forgot to keep tabs on his diabetes and drove the wrong way on the highway with a truck loaded with 30,000 gallons of combustible fuel. (Fortunately, he put the truck in a ditch before he hit anyone.)

There’s no brand identification in the sim. We were Texaco, as I mentioned. It was thrilling to be part of such a vast enterprise. Texaco put out an atlas every year with Rand McNally, a comprehensive account of every highway and hamlet in the nation, with special marks to indicate the location of a station or a Stuckey’s. (We had no Stuckey’s in North Dakota and could only dream of their pecan log rolls.) There we were, at the west end of the Fargo metropolitan complex, a little “T” icon to indicate the station, a node attached to the great arteries of America. I felt proud: My dad was literally on the map.

After many years, Texaco pulled out of the North Dakota market. Some of the local managers no doubt clambered up to the roof of the home office and took the last helicopter out; we were left behind to look for a new brand. It would be Conoco. It was strange. Your dad had been a Texaco man all this life, the Man Who Wore the Star, and now he’s Conoco? It’s like your father switched political parties or suddenly went vegan or made some stunning change in religion—say, from Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Who—who are you, really?

I wonder if the game allows you to fail because someone built a newer, nicer station a mile away, and your station just quietly fails. The cities of every town in America are dotted by disused stations, turned into hair salons or dentist’s offices, but you can always tell they’ve transitioned from their true identity. The rectangular building with particular proportions, set back in the lot, with driveways on the main drag and the side street. That was one man’s business, and that was all he needed. He sold some gas. He’d put a car up on the hoist and change the oil. He’d get you some tires or an air filter and sell you a Zagnut candy car on the way out, or maybe a green-tree air freshener plucked from that board with the va-va-voom blonde. He lived out his days here and sold it when he was done. If it was Bob’s Sinclair when he sold, the new guy might keep the name and trade on the goodwill of the neighborhood.

But my father wanted more. He took over another station. He went big into TBA: Tires, Batteries and Accessories, supplying them to the other Texaco outlets. And he bought another truck to haul fuel. And another. And another.

In “Gas Station Simulator,” you open up a junk yard and then an airstrip. That never occurred to my dad. At some point he drew up plans in his head for a new station, a convenience store that would serve the new neighborhoods to the south. When the first station opened, it was a few miles beyond the edge of West Fargo, but now the town had grown around it. New customers—and more competition. If he didn’t raze the old station and start selling meat and chaw and hot meals, the fellow down the street would win. Dad couldn’t exactly restore a saved game and try again.

“Gas Station Simulator” isn’t something my dad would’ve recognized, but I enjoy it. I look forward to adding bathrooms, even though I’ll never worry that the Texaco inspectors will pay a surprise visit, find a mess and revoke my Registered Rest Room status. But I’m haunted by the beginning of the game. You’re driving down a highway, an old two-lane road. You see the station and pull in. You discover that it used to be run by a relative, and you set to making it right. Fine. But where were you headed before you saw the sign? What might your life have been if you hadn’t wedded yourself to the pump? If my dad ever asked himself that question, he never told us. As far as I know he was content in his decision to buy a last-chance station on the west edge of Fargo and spend his winter afternoons looking out at the prairie and the sky, waiting for someone to turn off the highway and say “Fill ’er up.”

One more thing: If you want to play the game, there’s one thing you can do to make it truly realistic. Take a rag and dip it in gasoline, and let the smell pervade the room. Eventually you won’t notice it, because you’re used to its powerful perfume.

Or, like my dad, because you’ve lost your sense of smell.