Issue Seven

One night before dinner when I was about twelve years old, my father took me with him to the carwash.

It wasn’t the regular carwash, he told me. It was a special one he knew about where the line would be short and they did the inside, too.

As we drove down Main Street, my dad told me to keep an eye out for a dummy on the side of the road. I craned my neck out the window and gave Dad the high sign when I saw a Styrofoam-faced stick figure waving us into a driveway.

We pulled in and followed the gravelly path to the back of a narrow, one story building. A man in mustard colored alligator loafers was just stepping out of his car. The reptilian skin swathed his feet in shiny, dark edged squares, pulsating as he walked. I watched him slowly move down the aisle, almost side-stepping, eyeing his car as it went through the machine until he stopped at a glass booth and slid his money in the open slot.

Inside the booth sat Estelle Siegel, collecting money and handling customer relations for the Three Minute Carwash where she and her husband Bernie have been washing, waxing, and detailing cars since 1958.

Now, the economy lags. Downsizing’s in and unemployment’s up. Scattered between fenced in lots and magnificent, crumbling façades, Main Street’s small, independent ventures struggle to improve and attract more customers. But at the Three Minute Car Wash, time stands still. As the world changes around them, the Siegels and their business seem stuck in a past where owners and customers know each other intimately, and it’s still O.K. to smoke inside.

Faded Eames chairs and tarnished ashtray stands form the waiting area where customers watch Bernie and Noah Smith, the daytime manager of 33 years, buff their cars to a reflective shine and wipe the insides clean. A 60’s Miller Light clock keeps time above a 30-year-old metal Pepsi machine declared “Out of Order” by a yellowed paper taped to the front. Water rippled posters and photographs hang on the walls, one almost completely obscured by tiny, black spores of mold.

The Siegels seem not to notice the dirt or, if they do, have made no attempt to clean it. It’s just another thing that collects in a place overflowing with odd trinkets and odd people.

Unless the weather’s bad, the Siegels glide their gleaming blue 1971 Cadillac de Ville to a stop alongside the carwash everyday at 2:30 p.m. Bernie’s at the wheel in blue pants, a blue jacket, blue hat and red turtleneck. He looks tired; his expression bored but tolerant–like he knows what you’re about to say, has heard it before and remains unimpressed. He stands, hands in his pants pockets, overseeing his business like the cool guy in the neighborhood, leaning on his car and surveying the scene. Bernie keeps the carwash machine running and filled with fluids. He supervises the washing, takes part in the drying and, when business dies down, he rests at his desk in a small, dark office behind Estelle’s booth.

Estelle holds the same fascination for me now as she did when I was a child; when my interest in the alligator shoes vanished the minute I saw her enclosed in her bullet-proof booth. Her face is  angular and her makeup dramatic. Vivid green stripes under each of her eyebrows match almost exactly the color of her turtleneck. Black liquid liner rests in thick solid waves above her eyelashes; the result of one deft stroke from a practiced hand not yet jittery with age. Around her neck, neon-bright, spikey enameled shards hang in a tribal looking bunch on a chain of wooden beads. “I made this myself,” she says, waving her long, thin hand over it like a game show model.

The pieces came from jewelry she’s collected, disassembled, and recreated over the years. Evidence of her hobby lies in heaps on every surface of her strange, protective booth. Plastic, wooden, and enameled jewelry spills from three and four and five tiered stands. Necklaces cover one whole wall in color-coded clumps. She has a religious section of rosaries and crosses, a hatpin collection for one customer with a particular affinity for them, and bracelets and earrings of every size, shape, and non-precious material known, clasp or bangle, pierced or not.

Inside her booth, Estelle creates new jewelry and chats with customers. “Three Minute Carwash people are of a different breed than the Delta Sonic customers,” she says. And for the most part, I think it’s true. There’s radio personality Clip Smith, known to Estelle as the Sign Saver ever since he found a company to repair the Siegel’s Three Minute Car Wash sign when nobody else would. There’s April Fourth, who’s birthday falls on that day; Clock Man, who can fix, refurbish, or build any imaginable timepiece, and whose children are displayed prominently in pictures inside the booth; and Big Man, whose defining characteristic is his size. These people come to the Three Minute Car Wash for more than the $7 price tag and a love for shiny chrome. The Three Minute Car Wash is, as Estelle says, a public service carwash. If your watch is broken, your house won’t sell, you’ve got a message you need to get out, you’re looking for a bed and breakfast, a frame, a lamp, or a new garden flower, come to Estelle. If she can’t help you, she’s got a customer who can.

It was a customer who gave the Siegels the free legal advice that ended their three-year battle against workers who wanted to unionize. When he came in much later and mentioned that he wanted to move but couldn’t sell his house, the Siegels bought it. “It’s not the house of our dreams,” Estelle says. “But it was a favor for a favor.”

It was a customer who suggested that Estelle join The Sisters Guild at Our Lady of Fatima Basilica in Lewiston, New York. “I’m Jewish but if it’s about God, that’s good enough for me,” she said. She brought the church’s raffle tickets to the carwash and she and her customers raised $18,000 for the parish.

Another customer asked her to help with fundraising for the Parkside Lutheran Church in Buffalo. She put a box in front of her booth and asked every customer to donate. “I came right out and chased them down. I probably lost some customers,” she admits. “But this is a public service carwash. We help where we can.”

A maroon Lexus pulls in the wrong end of the carwash and stops. “Oh that’s my new friend,” Estelle says, rushing over and greeting the confused looking woman behind the wheel. It’s her first time here. The two met the night before at a meeting for citizens concerned about city demolition of an historic building.

For the Siegel’s, the carwash is everything–their job, family, social life. And neither of them ever thought that this is where they’d end up. But one Saturday, as Estelle sat at the kitchen table giving an old hat a new a leopard makeover, Bernie burst through the door with a plan. He told Estelle he was going to open a carwash business. He’d driven by one with more customers than they could handle and he was ready to offer a little competition. By the end of that day, he’d called from Detroit to California, gauging prices, tracking down materials, asking questions. Then he found the land, borrowed the money–a quarter of a million dollars–and opened the Three Minute Car Wash to lines of cars wrapped around the building and down the street.

Loans were paid back within the year. Thirty employees came to work. A garden burst with color and life in front of the building. Lights danced around the blue and white Three Minute Car Wash sign, beckoning customers toward its glow.

Now, faded, peeling paint surrounds blank spaces that once poured light from the towering sign. The garden below holds weeds and shrubs, encircled by gravel. Cars no longer snake around the building for a hand carwash. The floor pits where employees stood to scrub each car have been replaced by machines, last updated sometime in the seventies. The staff has dwindled from 30 to two or three–Noah mornings, and Bernie afternoons, and on busy days, a guy or two from the Buffalo City Mission.

But when the Siegels pull up for the day and step out of their car, he in his hat and she in her skirt and cognac leather jacket, dry and creased with age, I notice a spray of silver dollars growing up from a green space on the side of the building, and I realize instantly that though time has reached in and changed this place, it doesn’t matter. Because the Siegels have stayed the same.