My first job was at a car wash. My job title was ‘Detailer’. When the cars came out of the automatic wash, I dried it by hand using a towel, used blue window cleaner on the front and back windshields and passenger windows, vacuumed it out, and put a polish on the rims. Sometimes the customer would try to give me a tip; but the manager Russ told me on my first day that we weren’t allowed to accept tips, so I never did. I was supposed to work every day after school until closing and four hours on Saturday. The job wasn’t time or physically intensive, and as long as my grades didn’t go down any lower my Mom didn’t care.
I got that job during my Senior year of high school, right after my Dad died and I inherited his car. I’d driven it a lot since I turned 16 and got my license; I even took the driving test in it. But up to that point, it had always been HIS car. After he died, Mom gave me the keys and told me it was mine as long as I paid for my own gas and kicked in on repairs. Her expectations were low, but she had other things on her mind. She was mourning Dad’s death. He had been much older than her, and I wasn’t sure if it was just the fact that he was dead or the thought of living alone, or both. But, honestly, both her and my Dad had stopped expecting anything out of me. So I figured it was a pretty good deal.
The car wasn’t a classic or anything; it wasn’t sporty or cool. But then, my Dad wasn’t a sporty or cool kind of guy. He wasn’t one of those guys who turned 40 and had to drive a little red sports car or have an affair. He was a stand-up guy who had married late in life and who bought stand-up cars that he didn’t trade in until he had to. It was a metallic green 1989 Pontiac Grand Am with two doors, cloth bucket seats, faux wood interior, a pokey V6 engine, and a factory Delco AM/FM stereo. It was most definitely NOT a cool car. But it was a car. And it was paid off. And, if I didn’t take it Mom said she was just going to let it sit in the driveway and rust.
“Nicky,” she said with an intense and earnest tone. “You need to take care of this car.”
“No worries, Mom. I will.”
“You REALLY need to TAKE CARE of THIS CAR…”
“I know, okay? I’ll take care of it.”
At that point I almost tossed the keys back at her; but she didn’t mean it the way it sounded. The next day I found an ad in the paper looking for car wash attendants, so after school I drove the car there to apply for the job. That morning Mom gave me 20 bucks for gas, on top of the two bucks she usually gave me to buy lunch (which I usually pocketed anyway. The cafeteria food was a god damn gastric nightmare.) I topped the tank off with 5 and pocketed the rest. It wasn’t the good ol days Dad used to talk about when gas was a quarter a gallon; but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it is now. At least gas was still hovering under a dollar.
The drive to the car wash was a half hour if traffic was good and if I hauled ass – and I usually did. It was near the new mall at Eastgate, spitting distance to the county line and the Cincinnati city limits. My friends and I had been driving downtown since the first one of us had his license; as far as I was concerned, it was the Promised Land. We used to sneak into some of the bars and clubs and check out the hookers that walked the sidewalks on 4th and Vine. The four or five block section of Vine Street between Columbia Parkway and Washington Street was an open-air market for anything you wanted. As long as you had cash and as long you didn’t look like a cop, nobody cared and nobody messed with you too much. I figured since I was getting a job – and one so close to the city – that I’d have even more excuses to go downtown. And while I would still pocket the lunch money Mom gave me, I’d have a little more money to blow on bootleg 40’s and weed.
Russ, the car wash manager, was extra nice to me when I applied. After he hired me and started showing me around, I figured out why. I was the youngest one there. Everyone else on my shift was an out of work carpenter. All of them but one was at least 40 and had families to support. They were beaten up, scraggly, tired looking men who didn’t really do a good job on the cars and who openly disrespected Russ and ogled the attractive female customers like horny stalkers. They’d all been union carpenters and when the economy was good they’d put down payments on houses and started families; but another recession hit and construction tanked. So their bosses laid them off to hire non-union workers who would work for much less money – usually kids or Mexicans who didn’t leave after tobacco harvest. Naturally they didn’t like me and didn’t bother to talk to me on breaks or try to include me in any of their banter. I wasn’t One Of Them. Even the youngest one – he couldn’t have been older than 25 – ignored me. They liked him because he was One Of Them, even if he didn’t have kids and a wife to worry about.
I found out later that they all took tips when the customers offered. I never told Russ about it, even though they didn’t like me.
They did notice the car, though. Vance – who lived way the hell out at the edge of Brown County and drove an hour and half one way to work at the car wash – did say something to me about it on break once.
“That’s a nice car.” He had this look on his face like he knew what I was going to say and was planning to use it later to make fun of me behind my back.
“Thanks.”
“Where’d YOU get it?”
“I inherited it.”
That stopped him. “Huh?”
“It was my Dad’s,” I explained. “He died and I inherited it.”
I learned to talk about his death from watching late night TV. I wasn’t sleeping very much. I hadn’t been since he went into the hospital for the last time. And so I read or wrote or watched TV. There was always an old movie on at 3 in the morning. Sometimes it was a black and white one. My favorite was this early Cagney flick where all he did all day was sit in this bar wearing a nice suit and drinking gin and tonic, and people would come in to ask his advice. Sometimes it was a more recent movie – a Lee Marvin or a John Wayne or a Charles Bronson. They each handled death in a very specific way. They didn’t break down and cry the way Mom did all the time; they bore it up, sucked it in, and never showed that it bothered them. When they talked about it, they spoke very matter-of-factly. If it was an unjust death, they had a few drinks and took care of the people responsible. Dad’s death wasn’t unjust; he just wore out the way people do, so I didn’t feel obligated to go out seeking justice.
Vance must’ve felt bad; he mumbled his condolences and stopped talking to me.
Not sleeping much made it difficult to go to school and go to work; I drank a lot of coffee, took up smoking, and took those pep pills you used to be able to buy at gas stations until the FDA made them illegal. Once, just to see what it was like, I bought some speed on Vine Street; but it gave me the shakes and kept me up for two days straight and made my heart beat so fast I thought I was going to die. After that I stuck to coffee, nicotine, and ephedrine. What little sleep I did get was usually in Dad’s recliner. It wasn’t a nice one – he’d had it for years and refused to get rid of it even after Mom talked him into new living room furniture; but it was comfortable. I usually managed to get a half hour or so of sleep before I had to get ready to go to school. Mom never said anything to about it. She had her own stuff to deal with.
When I wasn’t working or at school, I stayed away from home as much as possible. Saturdays after work I drove into the city and let myself disappear. Sometimes I met up with friends; mostly I went alone. Sometimes I went to the library and listened to records or found books nobody had read in years and read them. Sometimes I hung out in coffee shops or I sneaked into bars; a lot of times I just walked around and took in the city. Downtown Cincinnati after the 5pm Friday was a ghost town. The people who worked all week in the office buildings commuted from safer places like Milford, Glen Este, Mariemont, or Anderson; when the weekend came, they deserted the city until Monday morning, leaving it in the control of the people who still lived downtown and kids like me who drove in trying to escape small town suffocation. When I was downtown, I never really worried about the car. Of course I rolled up the windows and locked the doors; but there wasn’t anything about the car that would inspire any would-be car thieves or joy-riders.
