Joe waves when I walk past. I see him: dragging his air hose across the sidewalk, cracking jokes with customers, tending to the grill that’s sizzling sausages in the snow. He always waves.

His shop employs no lifts, only a loading zone, a stretch of LeMoyne guarded by a pair of city signs. Customers drive up in all kinds of cars—Mercedes, Caddies, old pickups crammed with scrap—and lean against the wall as Joe and his men wheel out their dented steel jacks and crank up their cars right there on the street. There is no waiting room. This is not Good Year. But Joe is fast. He has to be. There's only so much street and so many jacks.

Three floors on Western Avenue crammed with radial rubber, and when the storage-room garage grows bare they toss their replacements from the upper windows. Smack! And thud. And as my dog and I doze on our saliva-stained couch with a book on my belly and the door gaping open we dream to the zip of lug nuts unclenching their steely grip.

I wake to a hydraulic hiss and step on my deck to see the artist’s airbrush spitting black paint on a pancake stack of old, dusty Coopers and Goodriches as a makeshift potter’s wheel spins slowly around. The pink-nosed pit bull flips circles behind his bars and toots his bugle bark in protest at the spayed babes trotting past, peeing hello, too far for a snort.

Joe charges me ten bucks a leak. I kid: you’re dropping nails. He pauses, almost takes offense, then laughs.

The sun setting, he locks up the shop and crosses the alley, sits in his garage, flips on baseball or boxing. Courtiers come with tribute—a cooler of Coronas, reefer—a little empire, squatter rich, living off the land, happy to watch it turn each season richer and richer, like good soil.