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It was 7 degrees out on Saturday, and the do-it-yourself car wash at Dupont and Bathurst was packed. A mist of fine debris and water blew out from the station, giving one the feeling of being near the ocean.
Smoking cigarettes or chewing gum, pimped out gangsters cleaned their Audis and Mercedes. Dumping their empty Tim Horton’s cups into the trash, they still swaggered, daring you to make eye contact.
Getting out of a pick-up truck with Georgia plates, two men in their early 20’s begin to clean out the car before giving it a thorough vacuum. They remove a game of trivial pursuit, a fishing rod, several pairs of boots, a thermos, a copy of Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full, and a football. They put everything on the hood of the cab, and then, sharing a smoke, pull out a map and discuss their next destination.
A Jeep screeches in, and the driver yanks it into a parking spot like he’s part of the opening montage to a cop show. He wears a baseball hat on backwards and has a pierced lip. He sends his eight- year old boy–who probably thinks his dad is the coolest person on the planet– off to get some loonies from the machine. The boy takes off at a dead run, and the father turns away to make a phone call.
A man and a woman step happily out of their sportscar. They have a tiny water fight with the spray guns over the hood, but an employee, who had been standing unhappily off by a dirty snowbank, steps in and puts an end to it.