Honey, Where Did You Get The Brakes Fixed?

On Atlantic Avenue outside of the AutoZone, of course:

They can be seen all along Atlantic Avenue — urban foragers of a sort, often bedraggled and always in search of a dollar. Many of them pump gas, but that is not the only hustle along the strip.

As one regular walks on sections of Atlantic, a traffic-clogged 10-mile road that runs from the Brooklyn waterfront to the Van Wyck Expressway in western Queens, he holds a bottle of glass cleaner and offers to wash car windows. Outside an auto parts store, street mechanics replace brake pads and tune transmissions, using tools hauled around in shopping carts.

. . .

Street etiquette dictates that once a hustler claims a car, he has exclusive rights to approach it. But sometimes this arrangement breaks down, as it did recently.

“Yo, why you step in front of me like that?” a gas pumper yelled to another as passengers in a sedan that had pulled up to a pump looked out the windows with stunned expressions.

Amid such competition, the gas pumpers sometimes turn to intimidation.

“I’m going to get every car that gets in here,” DMX announced loudly at one point. “I got to eat.

“If they get in my way, I’m going to cut somebody.”

. . .

Outside an AutoZone store near Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill, several street mechanics work under cars parked on the side of the road, installing parts purchased by the store’s customers.

On a hot spring day, a 36-year-old street mechanic named Matthew Joseph lay precariously on the baking asphalt of Atlantic Avenue, near three lanes of westbound traffic that whizzed by as he jacked up the left front side of a Hyundai sedan. Mr. Joseph wore a black do-rag and a white tank top that exposed his muscular arms. After a few years of working on the side of the road, he is used to the traffic being only a few feet away.

. . .

Later that day, Mr. Joseph sat in the passenger seat of a blue Jeep, the brakes of which he had just replaced. The driver sped up and down Atlantic Avenue, testing the work.

“The front brakes is good,” Mr. Joseph announced. “Beautiful. Beautiful delay. Hard and sturdy.”

Mr. Joseph offered his cellphone number to the car owner in case there were any problems. “You could call me, too, all right,” he said. “You’d be driving, even at nighttime, call me. I’m official.”