Yesterday, I brought my car to the Bay Bright Car Wash on Dowlen Road here in Beaumont. I had heard good things about it, but I must have missed the part about having to stay in my car as it's being pulled through the scrubbers and sprayers. As I sat trapped in my car at the mercy of the big scary machines, I imagined myself being crushed, drowned and electrocuted. It seems the older I get, the more neurotic I get. Something else to look forward to.
When I reached the end of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I pulled into one of the bays where my car would be detailed. I was barely out of my seat when the guy assigned to my car sprinted toward me with some sort of spray bottle. I got out of the way and walked across the driveway to some benches and watched him work like a fiend on the inside of my car.
When he finished the inside, he moved on to the hubcaps. I have hubcaps like the one in the picture above. In the seven years I've owned this car, I've never cleaned inside those little holes. I watched amazed as the guy cleaned each little hole on each hubcap. At each hole he would scrub, look at his towel and scrub again until every piece of gunk inside that hole had been vanquished. I wanted to walk over to him and say, "Dude. Seriously. That is totally not necessary," but, I was afraid if I did, he might give me a Travis Bickle "You talkin' to me?" and beat me with the vacuum cleaner hose. So, I let him scrub.
As I watched Travis Bickle clean out each little hole, I thought about the time my brother e-mailed me about his first experience with Biore strips. At the time, he was telecommuting from home several days a week and enjoyed e-mailing me about his cushy life as I sat in my cruddy office. On this particular morning, he was sitting at his computer in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt with a Biore strip, which he had found in his wife's side of the medicine cabinet, resting across the bridge of his nose.
Later, when he pulled the Biore strip off his nose, he e-mailed me that he was sure that some of the gunk on the strip was from a football game he played in 1978. I'm sure that some of the dirt that guy got out of my hubcap holes was from a beach trip I took in 2005.
When my car was finally ready, I said goodbye to my fellow carwash waiting people, tipped the detail dude and drove away flicking dirt into my little hubcap holes. See you next month, Mr. Bickle.
