Nice N Easy

My favorite hangout spot in middle school was a gas station

My favorite hangout spot in middle school was a gas station.

Nice N Easy was a ten-minute walk down the road from Eagle Hill Middle School. During the last few weeks of the school year and throughout the summer, it was a favorite haunt of a large portion of the male student body. We would saunter in, having compiled loose change dug out from the bottom of folding velcro Yankees wallets and crumpled ten dollar bills earned from mowing lawns, and wander back and forth between the warming cabinet stocked with pizza slices and the refrigerated shelves lined with sodas and beer and feel like the kings of the world.

Nice N Easy, a local chain endemic to Central and Upstate New York, was the uniquely American sort of gas station that offered fresh food in addition to the usual roadtrip fare of Slim Jims and Doritos. The sub sandwiches were well-above Subway quality, and the pizza, while greasy to a plate-damaging level, was mouthwatering. There was no greater joy as a 14-year-old than sinking your teeth into a plate of Nice N Easy buffalo chicken ranch pizza after finishing your final exam of the school year.

The Nice N Easy at the corner of Enders and Cazenovia Roads — our Nice N Easy — was still a gas station. It had a car wash in the back that my family never used once, two or three picnic tables set on the grass median attached to the side of the building, and five or six rows of gas pumps in front of the store. I always thought the picnic tables were odd, as there were no efforts to make the building accessible to pedestrians. And why should there have been? It was a gas station.

One middle school summer, a friend of mine texted me and another, asking us to meet him at those picnic tables. He needed to tell us something. After we gathered in the back of the store with sugary drinks and salty snacks in hand, he told us he was gay. We were politely disinterested in his questions about if this would change our friendship and impolitely over-interested in which of our eighth grade male classmates were considered hot.

Nice N Easy was a social staging ground. Seeing and being seen while chugging cans of Monster and Red Bull was a quick way to mark yourself as one who did not follow the rules. I never participated.

I once saw the most popular guy in eighth grade buy a scratch-off ticket from the machine by the doors of the Nice N Easy. I was sure he would be arrested. He obviously was not. I had calculus with the same guy senior year. While the teacher lectured, he would write notes attributed to his mother in class excusing him from school for the rest of the day. I was sure he would be caught. He obviously was not.

Our Nice N Easy sat at the vanguard of a large commercial plaza, and yet we rarely ventured out past the gas station and into the other storefronts. Other than the ice cream shop that bookended the plaza, the other inhabitants changed frequently. There was a bakery, an urgent care, a wine shop, a karate studio, a chain barbershop where my mother once rushed me like an EMT after my father attempted to give me his own haircut, and, at separate times, a salon.

The final building in the plaza, constructed separately as if to indicate it would play no part in the silly business of entertaining young teenagers on long summer days, was a bank. I never saw a single person enter or exit this bank in all my hours spent doing nothing at the Nice N Easy.

The bank is still in business. Nice N Easy is not.

In late 2014, after my classmates and I had transitioned further up the road to the high school and had started earning learner’s permits that enabled us to venture beyond Nice N Easy with our spare time, the chain was bought by a conglomerate. The new owner was the second-largest proprietor of convenience stores in the country. I was 16 years old and paid no attention to the news of the sale.

The transition happened slowly and then all at once. The Nice N Easy name came off the building and the Circle K name went up. A sign was posted clarifying that, after a certain date, our loyalty sub cards would no longer be accepted. I went to college for a semester and came back for the holidays and the entire layout had changed.

I bought my first legal lottery ticket at Nice N Easy before it finished becoming Circle K, stopping by the gas station after school just because I wanted someone to ask me if I was 18. No one did.

I bought my first legal beers at Nice N Easy after it had finished becoming Circle K, stopping by the gas station shortly after midnight on my 21st birthday just because I wanted someone to ask me if I was 21. But big chains do not inspect your license like a waitress who has already taken your order. They just scan the barcode on the back and process the sale if their machine agrees that you are as old as you say you are. So no one at Circle K noticed I was newly 21.

Circle K does not sell subs. Its pizza tastes like the pizza you would expect to buy at a gas station. The picnic tables are gone. You cannot hang out and do nothing at the Circle K. At Circle K, you are loitering.

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