Seventeen years old in 1971, working the pumps under a Chevron sign to earn a car of his own — checking oil, wiping glass, handing out green stamps, filling somebody else's tank for somebody else's getaway. The bridge lands on what his father told him about honest work, and on the pumps that don't need a person to run them anymore. By the last chorus the '69 VW doesn't run, but he does, and the price of that summer turns out to have been the cost of being free.