Sep 27, 2019 4 min read

Some things that are satisfying: a new haircut; a pedicure; paying bills online; cleaning the fingerprints from my smartphone screen.

Also, a clean car.

One of my favorite ways to spend an hour is to go through a fast-food drive-through for a large, icy Diet Coke, and then drive to the self car-wash place. I park next to the vacuum, pump quarters into the machine and get to work, sucking up the crumbs and little bits of lint and tiny pebbles from the seats and the floor. It’s also a good way to get rid of junk mail, whose address labels I tear into teensy pieces before putting into the trash can. (I wouldn’t want anyone to look me up or hunt me down.) The stop is for interior cleaning only; although there are bays there with do-it-yourself hoses and brushes, I’ve never tried that, fearing I would end up doused.

Instead, I go to the drive-through car washes. When my kids were little, it was an outing unto itself. As the monstrous mops descended onto the windshield, we would pretend we were in a horror movie, screaming as the mutant sea creature came for us. Our favorite car wash is just a few miles from home, and every time I pass by I go to turn in, but then I remember.

I can’t go because there’s a bike rack hitched to the back of my car, and the car wash won’t let me in. From April through November, my riding months, the hitch is on the car. When it’s finally removed with the first frost, I don’t think to go to the car wash because, well, Pittsburgh winter.

This is why, as of last weekend, my white Subaru was something closer to a gray Subaru. It had not been washed in over a year. While the inside was spiffy enough, the outside was covered in road dirt, bird poop, bits of sap and salt streaks that had to have been there since last winter.

I pulled into the bay, pumped in my quarters, aimed the soapy jet and watched as my car melted into a puddle of bubbles. Could it be that what I’d been driving these last 10,000 miles was not a mid-sized SUV but a Kia Soul? Is this where all my gas mileage went?

This thing I called a car was really just a block of filth in the shape of a car. What must the neighbors have thought, or the friends I’d pick up for a ride to breakfast?

Two bucks in quarters only get you four minutes in those car wash bays, and even though I was speedy, I ended up buying three rounds. By the third time, I’d come to enjoy the way the pink soap foam magically oozed from the big, soft brush. Because the hose and the brush hang from the ceiling and swivel a full 360 degrees, I never got wet, even while scrubbing away at the roof, which by the way was probably the grimiest part of the car. The birds are complicit in that.

My car didn’t get as sparkly as it does after going through a cleaning tunnel, and the do-it-yourself setup doesn’t include that big blow dryer or the nice teenagers who are standing at the exit to rub the car down with towels.

But I’d gotten my car pretty clean. As I pulled out of the bay and drove away, I thought about that old cliche about clean cars driving better.

And in my case, getting better gas mileage.