When we last left our terrified hero I was dreading the inevitable return to our gas station and the maniac that awaited us behind the bay doors. The fateful day arrived, but thank God, the bay doors were closed when we pulled beside the pumping island. A kid’s curiosity got the best of me and I climbed into the back seat, rolled down the window and stuck my body halfway outside. I wouldn’t venture out of the car. I wasn’t that daring. The other-worldly sounds behind the closed bay doors upped my fear: pounding hammer blows, rattling metal, loud gusts of pressurized air, revved engines, and over-modulated human voices. The monster must be ripping off his iron chains readying an escape.
Then the mechanical door began to rise on one of the service bays and out stepped an unrecognizable life form. Not the spiffy attendant with his crisp uniform and ready smile, but a creature dressed in ragged, grease-stained coveralls, hair disheveled, oily streaks across his face and arms, strange tools in his hands—scabby hands with busted, swollen knuckles—a liquid brown substance oozing from one side of his bulging mouth, and bloodshot eyes that bore holes straight through me. My blood froze at the sight of this modern-day Gadarene Demoniac. Where was Jesus when you needed him?
After this, I began to notice “Maniac on Duty” signs at nearly every service station we drove by. The world was filled with “The Walking Dead” before there ever was “The Walking Dead.” Whenever we pulled into a station advertising their “Maniac,” I locked the doors and dropped to the floor board. When my parent’s asked for an explanation of my curious behavior, I pointed to the dreaded sign above the bay doors and asked, “There’s a maniac in there.” Once the different words were written out and definitions explained, my world was restored.
While this particular linguistic puzzle was resolved, the misreading of signs, yea verily, the garbling all things literary, continued to be a problem. There was the humiliation of the first-round eliminations from grade-school Spelling Bees and the writing assignments returned with a fury of red ink scrawled over my papers by an aggravated teacher and long, hot summer schools.
It wasn’t until my early twenty’s when we discovered my youngest brother was similarly cursed. The expert diagnosis was that we had dyslexia. All this time I thought I was “slow of mind and tongue.” It did not bode well for a duel vocation with a heavy emphasis on language. While there is no magic pill to unravel the wiring in my brain, my imagination was never imprisoned by my reversals of words and jumbled sentences. Who knew a “maniac on duty” would launch a career?
