Neanderpundit

No, again.

When I had my first car, a remarkably pathetic Plymouth Valiant, I washed it, exactly once, by hand. Gingerly, because there was enough rust that an uncautious move would result in a slit wrist or a badly lacerated finger. Chryslers were good to not put liners in the fenders, consequently the tires threw salt etc. on the underside of the fenders and they rusted through at an alarming rate.

Then, our little one horse town grew something I’d only read about in books. A car wash.

Truthfully, the car wash was just a garage the local guy built behind the laundromat. It had a coin operated high pressure sprayer. For $1.50 you got five minutes of spray. For another quarter, you got soap. Nobody ever got the soap, that I know of.

A couple years later they put in a giant industrial vacuum cleaner. It sat in the parking lot like R-D2 only about six feet tall, and stainless. It sat on a pedestal of concrete, and the exhaust was a PVC pipe cast into the pedestal. it cost fifty cents for what seemed like thirty seconds of vacuum. This wasn’t too much of a problem, because the vacuum was SO powerful that just getting the nozzle near the car would suck out all the dust, as well as the floor mats, one or two of the seats, half of the sparkplugs, and of course any loose change.

The owner of the vacuum probably made nearly as much money digging change out of the filter bag.

Eventually a delivery truck backed into the vacuum, and far from damaging it, it simply yanked the concrete pillar out of the ground, a little bit. Now the extremely high powered PVC pipe exhaust was pointed a bit skyward, and every time it rained a bit, the pipe would collect some water like the P trap in a sink.

When you turned the vacuum on, it would usually spray the cup or so of typically vile water loaded with vacuum cleaner lint out, invariably at your freshly cleaned automobile. Folks in the know got good at parking their car where the contaminating spray of smeg would not land on or near them, and some even realized it was a good place to put their floor mats, as they would get a good secondhand washing (You had to secure them to the concrete pedestal with a concrete block, which were readily available)

My Valiant, at the time, was good for three starts a day. I could start it three times, and then I had to hook it up to the trickle charger for four hours so I could drive to work the next day. I had driven to work. I had left work and driven to the carwash, and washed the car. I had left the car sort of outside the carwash garage so I could wash it and then vacum it, then drive it home. Having accomplished the washing, I took out the remains of the floor mats, popped the back seat out, and dug around in the cushions for fifty cents to vacuum. I found it, and had just about inserted it when some toothless old hag in a pickup pulled up and started screaming at me to “get the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY so she could warsh (sic) her truck!” I couldn’t move it, because then I wouldn’t have a start left, and home was six miles away and no phones handy. I told her I was going to leave in just a few minutes if she would just be patient, but she kept screaming as I dropped my two quarters in the vacuum.

The carwash backed on a little stand of oaks, maybe seventy or eighty nice trees, with a cornfield behind them.
The summer had been fairly dry, but we’d had a light rain just the night before.

Apparently, the local vermin were aware of the properties of the vacuum’s PVC exhaust pipe, and one had crawled into the pipe for a drink of water.

The vacuum turned on with a muffled whoosh, and the unfortunate squirrel was propelled backwards from it’s hidey hole in the PVC pipe at a speed which can only be described as impressive. it cleared the hood of the Valiant, and flew through the open window of the Hag’s pickup. It must have been quite a sight, seeing an angry squirrel being shot at you ass-first, but I’ll never know. The squirrel proceeded to run around the cab like a maniac, and the hag simply floored the truck, spun around, and headed south on US 41, screaming and flailing her arms.

I will never know if the squirrel came to harm, or if it inflicted any harm on her. I don’t want to know. I know she sprayed gravel and gravel dust all over my freshly hosed down car, and it pissed me off royally., By the time I came to my senses, the vacuum had stopped, and my car was less clean than when I began.

I put all the mats and stuff back in the car, and drove home.