“Sixty-two dollars,” Teresa Avila said to no one in particular.
“They want $62. Sixty-two frigging dollars of my money that I definitely can’t afford,” she continued when realizing she had an audience. “I could do a lot with $62. A whole lot. Sixty-two dollars. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it.”
And so it went at a central Denver gas station Monday morning as Avila spent a day’s worth of net pay to top off her Dodge Caravan.
The 50-something, self-described “cleaning lady and grandma” was fuming to strangers about oil companies and car companies, George Bush and Dick Cheney and “politicians getting rich off the backs of working people.” The term “rip-off” passed her lips more than once during her tirade, as did several expletives not fit for a family newspaper.
Avila has driven her blue minivan since 1998, when gas cost a little more than a dollar a gallon.
It was the first car she bought new.
“And were my sisters jealous,” she recalls of the day she showed it off to her relatives.
For 10 years, she has carted her kids to school, church and movies in her three rows of two-toned upholstered seating. Now she has baby seats for the year-old twin granddaughters she watches on weekends.
For 10 years, the Caravan has transported Avila, her cleaning crew and her trunk-load of supplies to and from the homes they scrub, she says, “like maniacs.”
For 10 years, her minivan has pulled through for weekly fishing trips near Loveland and semi-annual camping trips in New Mexico. While her husband roughs it in a tent, she sleeps in her sheepskin-covered driver’s seat because she’s scared of snakes.
Hers is the only car in the family able to transport her father-in-law and his wheelchair to the doctor. She spends so much time behind the wheel that she has Velcroed photos of her grandbabies to her dashboard.
Avila needs her minivan. She is proud finally to have paid it off.
But with gas prices soaring, she can neither afford to drive a car that guzzles a gallon every 16 miles nor replace it with “one of those, you know, high-priced environmental hybrids” that in any case couldn’t hold her menagerie of mops and scrubbers.
Which explains her grousing at the Diamond Shamrock early Monday before even her first cup of coffee.
“I remember when it cost $25, maybe $30 to fill up the tank. But $62?” she started again.
That is a week’s worth of groceries, she noted. It’s a monthly cellphone bill. It’s more than she spent on presents for her husband and son for Father’s Day.
“Tell the people we’re getting robbed,” Avila continued, tapping on my notebook. “Put it in big, capital letters. WE’RE GETTING ROBBED. Normal people, we’re being robbed on our gas. And the thing is, is that nobody’s even listening.”
Except for the woman filling up her gray Acura, the man washing the windshield of his red Explorer and me, all shaking our heads in solidarity.
“Amen, sister,” Explorer man told Avila.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Acura woman chimed in.
Then we all screwed in our gas caps and headed into our workweek, fired up by one woman willing to speak out.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
