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You need your florist. You need your hairdresser. You need your butcher. But, if you drive for a living in New York, you really need your auto glass man.
So it was last week that Mike Veksler, a tire man, paced back and forth at Brooklyn Auto Glass, waiting for the latest bottle-bashing job on his leased 1992 Toyota Camry to be repaired.
Veksler visits Brooklyn Auto Glass on Coney Island more often than he buys a rose, a shave or a cut of prime rib. "It's part of doing business; every other month, you're back here," he says, resigned to his latest motorized injustice.
As a city cabbie for 10 years in the 1980s, Veksler always had an auto glass man. And since he opened up Mike's Tire Shop in Richmond Hill, he's found a new auto glass man closer to his home.
Different men, same work. Torch the rim. Pop out the glass. Take a new sheet of glass. Caulk the borders. Glue it down. Seal it. Whack it a few times with the heel of a calloused, grease-stained hand. Send the cars and trucks out the door. Know they'll be back.
"It's New York. Crime everywhere," says Angelo Ruggiero, 22, who's used to customers' weary tales of vandals hitting their cars time and again. Ruggiero stands outside, arms folded over his bright red T-shirt, and paces.
Customers are relieved to find him, standing guard over an inventory of 5,000 panes of used glass, cataloged in black wax crayon and shelved from floor to ceiling like the displays at a megastore warehouse.
Having accumulated his inventory from salvage-store buyouts, Ruggiero cuts the cost of a repair job nearly in half, which is why he's legend after just three years in business on Neptune Avenue. Veksler paid just $250; the same job with new windshield glass would have cost $450, he says.
Ruggiero surveys the cars waiting for repair, a scene that suggests that meteorites fall every few seconds onto the city's vehicular landscape.
Webs of shattered glass, still perfectly in place, are lined up in the garage, and dozens more cars sit out front.
Ruggiero sizes up the jobs and decides where best to send the steady traffic.
To the middle-aged woman...