The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3276 - 3279

 3276. The bicycle store was named Embries after its owner. The store no longer exists, having gone out of business many years ago. The building it occupied can no longer be found, having been torn down many years ago.

 3277. Embries Bicycle Shop was located on Bagg Square. Bagg Square was our town’s equivalent of New York City’s Bowery during the fifties; a place where drunks could be found sound asleep on the sidewalk at ten in the morning. However, Bagg Square no longer exists.

 3278. Where Bagg Square was you will now find the cement supports of two gigantic highways that intersect in the middle of downtown. The highways were built years ago to divert traffic away from the busy center of town that was always gridlocked with traffic.

3279. The highways did their job so efficiently that now you can hardly find ten cars downtown, and almost no shoppers. This city will remain nameless, although I am sure you know of a similar one whose downtown was done to death by car traffic and parking dilemmas, fifty years ago.

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3272 - 3275

 3272. For me that was very odd. After thirteen years of everyone thinking that I was stupid, to have somebody think that I  was so smart was a novel experience.

 3273. Once the bed was finished we put the wood slats in and we put the box spring and the mattress on. Then there was a very strange minute when Mrs. Sweet sat on the bed, and I  decided I  had to leave immediately. I  practically ran out of her house. When I  got outside my bicycle waiting for me on the ground where I  had left it.

 3274. At that time I loved my bicycle more than anything, and in order to explain what had happened, or didn’t happen with Mrs. Sweet, I  have to tell you about the bicycle.  My bicycle was the best and most expensive Schwinn model.

  3275. Most of my bicycles back then I  had purchased for a few dollars from a bicycle parts store down on Bagg Square from a big attic room they had where they stored all the old bikes that had been traded in or damaged.

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3268 - 3271

 3268. The fenders were held on by rusted nuts and bolts just like on Mrs. sweets bed frame.  Here is what you do. You wedge some metal object between the nut and something rigid like the bicycle frame. Then, when you turn the screw the bolt becomes trapped and can’t move and after that it either comes apart, or the screw becomes stripped.

 3269. I  am not going to explain what to do if the screw gets stripped because I  want to get back to telling you about Mrs. Sweet and the bed frame.

 3270. I showed her how all we had to do was to stack up three pennies, and wedge them between the flat part of the nut and the bed frame.  Those three pennies take up about a quarter of an inch which is just the space between the nut and the frame. Then, when you turn the screw, the nut is trapped, but sometimes the pennies get wedged in so tight you have to tap them out with a hammer. 

 3271. Using  pennies for a wrench was just amazing to Mrs. Sweet; she seemed to think I was a genius because of it.  She kept saying, “That’s so, that’s just so...”  she wanted to say, ‘smart,’ but was looking for an even better word. 

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3264 - 3267

3264. Every time we would get a nut and bolt started she would sort of start laughing like it was the most enjoyable thing she could imagine. Actually it was fun, but I  was too nervous to laugh, and our fingers kept touching , and I  had this strange feeling in my stomach from looking down her dress the entire time.

3265. At first I  tried to look away, but then I  just gave up and just looked, I  couldn’t help myself.  She kept looking at me right in the eyes and after a while I  thought my head would explode from confusion and excitement.

3266. I explained to her that we couldn’t pull the screws up really tight because when you are assembling something like that it has to be able to move slightly or else the screws will not pass through the slots, but finally we had it all put together but we couldn’t get it really tight because we didn’t have a wrench to pull it down really snug.

 3267. We needed a wrench, or even just a pair of pliers but I  didn’t mention it to her.  What I  said earlier about there being no household item that can be used for a wrench is not exactly true. You can make sort of a  wrench out of ordinary stuff, and I  had figured this out one day taking the fenders off of my bicycle.

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3260 - 3263

3260. There was nothing to do but to sit down on the floor together and start putting the thing together.  They were the cheap screws that always catch and bind when they start them and the screw and the nut turn around together  so it can’t get tight.  You try to hold the nut with your fingers but it just goes around anyway and digs into your fingers. 

3261. Mrs. Sweet knew absolutely nothing about nuts and bolts. It was as if attaching nuts and screws to each other was a complete mystery to her but, as I said before, she was very childishly excitable, and she listened to me with strict attention as I  explained to her what to do.

3262. We had to each hold one of the supports with one hand.  Then I  would slip the screw through the slot, and she would catch it with the bolt on the other side.  We had to keep trying it over and over because you know how it is with those things, you think it is started, but it jams, and you have to back it out again.

 3263. I don’t think I  have ever seen a person so intensely interested in nuts and bolts as Mrs. Sweet. All I  could see was the top of her head, because she was looking down at her fingers, but when the frame started to pull together she looked up with a look on her face like a person who finds twenty dollars in the street, and has to look at it three times to believe it.

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3256 - 3259

 3256. But people like Mrs. Sweet do not have screwdrivers and wrenches.  They don’t have tin-snips and pliers and all those things you find in any ordinary house.  I  should have known this because right next to the screws was a butter knife. A butter knife is the sort of thing a person like Mrs. Sweet would  automatically  uses for a screwdriver.

 3257. If you look through your house, searching for something to use for a wrench, you are not going to have any luck. You might try a fork, for example, by bending some tines out of the way, but it won’t work, I  know this from experience, like as not it will be too big, or too small.

 3258. Actually I  knew quite a lot about tools from repairing my bicycle all the time. I had left my father’s tools out in the yard so often that they got rusty and he  locked them in a box so I  couldn’t get to them. Often I had to resort to using silverware to tighten screws with.

3259. But, when I  said,”Where’s the screwdriver?”  she just said she couldn’t find it and pointed to the butter knife with her foot. 

The Three Penny Wrench, parts 3252 - 3255

 3252. Against another wall there was a dresser with a drawer missing, and just like she said, in the middle of the floor  were those metal bars that make up the parts of those very cheap beds that have no headboard. 

 3253. She didn’t buy the bed from the store however, it was from the street like the rest of her furniture, but the nuts and screws to put it together were from the store, and were spread out on the floor next to their little cardboard box.

 3254, Mrs. Sweet didn’t need to say anything because, the things on the floor were a sufficient explanation. Even though it was obvious what had to be done, and even though you could see it would take two people to do it, the first thing I  did was to say something very stupid which was, “Where’s the screwdriver.” 

 3255.  What she had on the floor was a pile of those machine screws, the kind that you insert into a square bolt with a screwdriver.  It might just as well have been the regular kind of bolts that you screw in with a wrench.  In that case I  would have said, “Where’s the wrench.”