Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I love a nice luxury car. I am also, in no way, a car guy.
Give me a Bang & Olufsen stereo, air-cooled leather seats, and active cruise control, and I am a happy man. Something breaks? I do not pop the hood. I do not “have a look.” I call the dealership and invoke the maintenance plan like a tired medieval peasant summoning a slightly bored wizard.
Under the hood, my understanding of internal combustion peaks at “there is a part called an engine.” Beyond that, it may as well be operated by a coven of tiny unionized hamsters. I have made peace with this. Karie has not. Karie can change a tire faster than I can locate the jack.
No Place Humbles Me Like the Carwash
Nowhere exposes my lack of manliness quite like the carwash.
Every carwash has you execute a hard, counterintuitive turn to approach the entrance, and then you must align your front tires perfectly into a narrow metal track that will drag your car through the cycle. The margin of error is roughly the width of a kazoo. The attendant stands in front of your car waving you left, then right, then left again, with the pinched expression of someone watching a raccoon attempt long division.
Carwash anxiety is, according to actual research into what people fear most about driving, a real thing. I take small comfort in this. I take less comfort in the fact that it is one of my three recurring nightmares, alongside a high school locker I cannot open, and my father digging graves on his neighbor’s property.
Last time I went, a young woman directed me in. She waved left. She waved right. She waved left again. Then she made the kind of face I have seen exactly once before, on a New York DMV examiner reviewing my parallel parking test in 1982, and she waved me all the way back out to try again.
When I finally, blessedly, got my wheels onto the track, I lowered my window to explain to her that this was literally one of my recurring nightmares. That I had dreamed this exact moment. That her face, specifically, was familiar to me in a way I could not immediately account for.
Unfortunately, by the time I got the window down, she had moved to the side of the car and begun the pre-wash spray. I took it directly in the face. I was baptized. I emerged blinking, sputtering, and newly aware that she was now, permanently, in the nightmare.
The Vacuum Does Not Respect Me
After the wash, you exit into the drying and vacuuming area, which is where the real performance begins.
I approach the free vacuum station with the wary body language of a man approaching a rabid swan. The hose is thick and ribbed and longer than seems advisable. The nozzle has the suction of a small industrial tornado. The first time I ever used one, it latched onto the front of my shirt with the enthusiasm of a facehugger from the Alien franchise.
I could not pull it off. I could not turn it off. The kill switch is located somewhere only a mechanical engineer or a cryptid could find. For a full forty seconds, I stood there aggressively breastfeeding a public utility while a man two stalls over pretended not to see me. I finally escaped by unbuttoning the shirt all the way and stepping out of it, like a man slipping free of a carnivorous plant. The vacuum swallowed it whole. I heard the fabric work its way up the hose and thud somewhere deep in the machinery. I drove home bare-chested. The vacuum now owns a shirt.
I have since approached vacuum stations exclusively in fleece pullovers, arms pinned at my sides like a Victorian widow. This has not helped. It has merely changed which part of me the vacuum annexes next.
Everyone Else Knows the Rituals
While I am wrestling the vacuum, every other man in the detailing bay is performing an elaborate sequence of steps that nobody ever taught me and everybody apparently knows.
They have microfiber towels in specific colors for specific surfaces. They have tire brushes. They have a thing they spray on the wheels that hisses and turns purple. They wipe in circles, then in lines, then in what looks like a secret handshake. Their tire shine ends up perfectly even. Mine looks like the tire has a skin condition.
So I do what I have done for roughly fifty-nine and a half years in any situation involving a skill I do not possess. I pretend. I pull out whatever random cloth is in the glovebox (last time it was a napkin from Beer Run) and wipe something, anything, with purpose. I nod at the dashboard like it and I are having a conversation. I take the gas cap off and put it back on, for no reason, the way a chef tastes a soup he has not cooked.
Once, in the middle of this performance, an older gentleman walked over and politely asked if I could give him a jumpstart.
I yelled “Boo!” and lunged at him.
I cannot explain this. I have tried. In the instant between his question and my response, some deep and broken part of me decided that the appropriate reaction to being mistaken for a competent man was to startle him into leaving. He did not find the humor in this. He did, however, find a second carwash patron willing to help, and the two of them worked together efficiently, professionally, and with the silent camaraderie of men who own funnels.
I, meanwhile, hovered nearby in a way I can only describe as supervisory. I offered to hold things. I was not allowed to hold things. When the jumper cables were finally attached, the older gentleman handed me the spare set “just in case,” and as I stepped backward to give them room, I managed to clip one of the red clamps to the edge of my shirt. The other swung free, struck the vacuum hose, and ricocheted back into me at precisely the location and elevation of my left nipple.
This is how, at fifty-nine, I ended up standing in a detail bay in central Virginia, electrically connected to nothing, with jumper cables clipped to my nipples, while two men who knew what they were doing jump-started a Camry.
The Carwash Is Just the One with Witnesses
Tomorrow, I turn sixty. I have been faking competence in one arena or another for essentially all of it.
I have faked it at jobs, at dinner parties, at parent-teacher conferences for a child I do not have, at DIY plumbing, at small talk with mechanics, at remembering the names of my wife’s cousins. I have made it to the doorstep of sixty by nodding thoughtfully, picking up the wrong tool confidently, and leaving before anyone asks a follow-up question.
The carwash is just the arena where the fakery has witnesses, and water, and a vacuum hose that will, if given the chance, take a souvenir.
On the drive home, squinting through a windsheild streaked with somebody else’s tire shine, my nipples faintly throbbing, I thought about this. I thought about how the older man had needed help, and I had responded with a theatrical noise. I thought about how Karie, if I told her this story, would close her eyes for a long moment and then ask, very gently, whether I had at least remembered to roll the window up the second time.
I had.
I turned on the Bang & Olufsen, let the air-cooled seats do their quietly important work, engaged the active cruise control, and drove home to the farm, where Trouble McFussbucket knows exactly who I am and does not require me to prove anything.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
