Brooks Peterson

Monday, Mar. 1, 1999

Can you spare a moment for a tale of a tire?

   All right, then: no more pussy-footin'. No more fence-straddlin'. Let's get this thing right out in the open:
   Our justice system is fundamentally out of whack.
   How do I know this, you ask? I know this, I reply, because for the last week or so I have had to drive around in my wire-wheel-equipped (remember that - it'll be on the quiz) '67 MGB on three good tires and one 32-year-old, original-equipment Dunlop SP41.
   What could this possibly have to do with the state of our justice system? Merely everything.
   But let us retrace our footprints. Or tire tracks.
   A few days ago, I was mildly startled to notice that my thoroughbred British sporting machine had adopted a nose-down configuration. I swiftly diagnosed the problem: Flat tire.
   Rats.
   But I'm not the sort of fellow to let such a contretemps get the better of him. I plan ahead. Thus, I had on hand one of those electric-tire-pump outfits that plug into your cigarette lighter.
   Of course, among the many luxuries my little Brit does not have is ... cigarette lighter. So I plugged into the socket on the console of our old Bimmer. Home free? Nope: Socket's dead.
   Never mind. I moved the BMW out, and replaced it with our test vehicle du jour. Success. Pumped 'er right up.
   I knew this was merely a temporary fix. Nothing in the British motoring experience is ever that simple. I swapped the deflated tire for my spare - which, as I have noted, is one of the original-equipment tires that rolled out of Austin's Continental Cars more than three decades ago.
   Then, on the advice of my automotive sensei, I hied myself to a tire emporium. Told the nice fella behind the desk I had a skinny little tire with a slow leak in it. Since the tire was mounted on a Bronze Age wire wheel, I explained, I had to have a tube in the tire. I suspected the tube had sustained a cut, nick, or puncture. Could he accommodate me? Noooo problem. So I left the wheel (and tire) with him.
   The next day I phoned back to check on how the operation is progression. Sorry, I am told (by a different fella): We can't fix that for you. It's against our rules.
   Too thunderstruck to give him an argument, I put in a Fully Urgent call to my sensei. He recommends another establishment. I phone them. I spell out the challenge: Slow leak. Wire wheels. Tube. Can you help me? I get passed along to the manager. Izzit a radial? he wants to know. I confirm that it. Can't help you, he growls.
   Why not, I inquire plaintively?
   Then he utters the universally dreaded magic word: Liability.
   Instantly the scales fall from my eyes. How could I not have suspected it from the outset? If McDonald's can be socked with millions in damages after a woman spills hot copy in her lap, if a stepladder must carry about eleventeen OSHA safety-warning stickers before it can be sold ... how could I, in my sheer naivete, assumed that the legal profession would have overlooked the vast possibilities for wholesale carnage involved in replacing the tube in a radial tire mounted on a wire wheel?
   Later, when I went by the first joint to pick up my (un-repaired) wheel and tire, a different fella explained that when you put a tube inside a tire on a wire wheel, why, at some point the tube may start to squirm around, and then you've got the possibility of Major Tire Failure.
   Identified: The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Major Tire Failure.
   In my defense ... oh, what the heck. There is no defense for such wanton obliviousness. I will merely point out that in 32-plus years of driving more than 160,000 miles in my MG with those homicidal wire wheels carrying maniacal radial tires with killer tubes mounted inside them, I have never - never - experienced Major Tire Failure. And I feel reasonably confident that if I exercise a little responsibility, keep the tire pressure where it ought to be, fit new rubber before the treads go away entirely, and resist the temptation to drive at speeds in excess of 140 mph (a temptation very easy to resist in a 4-cylinder, 98-hp MGB, you should know), I will not experience Major Tire Failure.
   But what do I know? I'm just a car buff.
   Anyway, my sensei finally glommed onto a new tube and took care of the issue. What a nice guy. And you know what? He didn't even make me sign a damage waiver. What millennium is he living in, anyway?
    (Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)