People ask me all the time why I still run this place. My brother-in-law calls it a money pit. My wife says I smell like diesel even after two showers. And maybe they’re both right. But there’s something about unlocking that front door at five in the morning, flipping on the lights, and watching the fluorescents flicker to life that gets me going in a way nothing else ever has. This station has been here longer than half the town, and as long as I’m breathing, it’ll stay open.

Last Tuesday a man came in wearing a full tuxedo at 3 AM. Didn’t say a word. Bought a bag of sunflower seeds, a bottle of chocolate milk, and a single birthday candle. Paid cash, exact change, and walked back out into the dark. I watched his taillights disappear down the highway and I thought — you know what, that is exactly why I work nights sometimes. You can’t script that. You can’t find that at a desk job. Fallon is a strange and beautiful place and this station sits right at the beating heart of it.

Some mornings the sky out here turns a color I genuinely don’t have a word for. Something between copper and rose and a little bit of fire. The trucks roll through, the regulars trickle in for their coffee, and for a few minutes everything is quiet and perfect. My cashier Deb says I get sentimental before 7 AM and she’s not wrong. But I think if you’re going to spend your life somewhere, you ought to love it. And I do. Lord help me, I really do.

I want to address something the regulars already know about: Pump 4. Yes, it is still making that sound. No, I don’t fully know what the sound is. My guy Randy came out and looked at it for two hours, made some notes on a clipboard, and then told me it was “expressing itself.” I paid him $80 for that. Pump 4 works fine, it pumps gas, it reads cards, it prints receipt, it just groans like an old ship when the temperature drops below fifty. I’ve started to find it comforting, honestly.

What I will not stand for is the rumor going around that Pump 4 is haunted. I heard this from three separate customers last week and I want to be clear: I do not believe Pump 4 is haunted. I believe Pump 4 is old and cold and a little misunderstood, like a lot of things in this town. That said, I will admit that the night my security camera footage showed something standing next to it at 2 AM for forty-five minutes before walking off into the scrubland, I did have a hard time sleeping. It was probably a coyote. Standing very still. For forty-five minutes.

In any case, Pump 4 is open for business. If it groans at you, just pat the side of it and say “good morning” I have found this helps, and I am not joking even a little bit. Skip’s is a full-service operation and that includes emotional support for our infrastructure. As always, thank you for your patience and your continued business. We’ll figure Pump 4 out eventually. Or we won’t, and we’ll all just learn to live with it together. That’s kind of the Skip’s way.

I have received feedback about the coffee. Multiple times. From multiple people, including my own mother, who drove forty minutes to tell me in person. And so I want to say, officially, on behalf of this station and myself: we have upgraded the coffee situation. New machine, new beans, new process. Deb has been trained. I have been trained. We take this seriously now. The old machine is gone and I will not be answering questions about where it went.

The new coffee has been very well received and I appreciate every single person who came back and gave it a second chance after the dark times. We now offer dark roast, medium roast, and a hazelnut option that Deb pushed for and that I was skeptical about but have since come around on. We also got one of those little stations with the creamers and the wooden stir sticks, which I know sounds like a small thing but I am genuinely proud of it. Skip’s is moving forward.

Something is going on with the lot. I don’t know what it is. I have found, in the past thirty days, the following items in my parking lot: one bowling ball, a framed photograph of a man I do not recognize standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, fourteen candles arranged in what my nephew called “a deliberate pattern,” two shopping carts from a grocery store that closed in 2011, and a live chicken that we have since named Gerald. Gerald is doing fine. Gerald has become something of a fixture. I have mixed feelings about Gerald but my hands are tied at this point because Deb loves him.

I want to be clear that I do not blame the town for this. Fallon is a good place full of good people who are simply, on occasion, bewildering. This station has seen a lot in its years on this road and I like to think we take things in stride. We dealt with the summer the ATM started dispensing fives instead of twenties. We dealt with the winter the door wouldn’t fully close for six weeks. We dealt with the bat. We don’t talk about the bat, but we dealt with it, and we are stronger for it.

All I ask is this: if you are going to leave something in my lot, please make sure it is not alive, not on fire, and not arranged in a pattern. Everything else we can work with. Gerald was a one-time exception and it will not happen again. Probably. Thank you all for shopping at Skip’s. This is the best job I have ever had and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.

It started like any other slow afternoon at Skip’s. Deb was restocking the cooler, I was doing the books in the back, and the scanner on the counter was doing that thing where it picks up chatter from the highway patrol frequency. Nothing unusual. Nothing to suggest that within the hour, we’d be on the phone with the Fallon Police Department and one of our shelving units would be in four pieces on the floor.

Gary has been a customer here for years. Most of you know him — tall guy, usually in a denim jacket, goes by Greasy Gary on account of a reputation that predates my ownership of this establishment and that I have never asked him to explain. He is not, in my experience, a bad man. He is, in my experience, a man who does not handle difficult emotions in what you would call a constructive way. And on this particular afternoon, Gary was handling a very difficult emotion: his girlfriend of two years had broken up with him, apparently sometime in the hour before he arrived here, and he had made a series of choices between that phone call and my front door that included, if the smell was any indication, a significant quantity of alcohol.

He came through that door like a man who had decided the world owed him something and had settled on Skip’s Gas Station as a reasonable place to collect. What followed was approximately four minutes of chaos. Gary moved through the store like a weather event, pulling shelves down, scattering merchandise from one end of the aisle to the other. Bags of chips, motor oil, phone chargers, a rotating rack of keychains — all of it ended up on the floor. When my cashier, a young man named Trevor who has worked here for eight months and does not deserve any of this, attempted to calmly ask Gary to stop, Gary punched him. Not a shove, not a grab — a punch. Trevor is okay. Trevor is tougher than he looks, and I have told him that and given him a very sincere apology and two days of paid time off.

I called the police. I want to be honest with you all: my hands were shaking a little. Not out of fear, exactly, but out of that specific kind of anger that you feel in your chest when something you have built and cared for gets treated like it is worthless. This station isn’t much to look at, I know that. But it is mine, and it is a place people count on, and watching Gary tear through it felt like a personal thing even if it wasn’t meant to be.

The officers arrived quickly, and I will say this for the Fallon PD — they were professional and they were thorough. Gary was not difficult to locate, as he had not actually left the premises and was sitting on the curb outside Pump 4, which, in retrospect, feels appropriate. He was placed under arrest and is now facing charges for public intoxication, assault, and trespassing. Those are his to deal with, and I genuinely hope he gets whatever help a situation like this is telling him he needs.

As for Skip’s: we cleaned up, we restocked what we could, we replaced the shelving unit, and we were back open within three hours. Because that is what we do. The regulars who came in that evening and asked what happened — thank you for your concern. Thank you for the ones who offered to help sweep. Fallon looks out for its own and I have always believed that.

And Gary — this is not personal, but it is permanent. You are banned from Skip’s. Not for a month. Not until things cool down. Permanently, irrevocably, and with no exceptions, Greasy Gary is no longer welcome at this station. The sign on the door says all are welcome at Skip’s, and I am proud of that sign, and you are the first person in my fifteen years of ownership who has made me create a category of exception to it. I hope you get yourself together. I really do. But you will be getting yourself together somewhere else.