I felt surprisingly fine about driving around with my daughter Poppy’s old Power Wheels Barbie Beach Ranger Jeep in the back of my minivan. After all, my wife Lala and I were doing some creative cross-gender parenting in an environmentally friendly way (or so I told myself). We were converting Poppy’s Jeep into a Batmobile for my six-year-old son London. What was once an explosion of pink and purple—like Baywatch on a beach solely inhabited by candy necklace-wearing Care Bears—would now become tough and black, ready to fight whatever criminal element happened to lurk in our dusty backyard. The first thing I had to do to begin the transformation was clean the thing. A few years ago, Poppy had graduated from the Jeep to a real live pony named Tapdance, so the mini-vehicle in my minivan was papered with leaves and drenched in dirt like Herbie the Love Bug waiting for Lindsay Lohan to bust out of rehab.
When I pulled up to the self-serve car wash down the street from our house, all the bays were occupado. Both the pick up truck on the left and the VW Beetle on the right were covered in suds but the purple Chevy Impala in front of me was glistening in the late afternoon sun. A young guy in a T-shirt was drying the headlights of the Impala with a chamois cloth while talking to his friend who was vacuuming the interior of his Ford Ranchero adjacent to the island that offered car shampoo in tropical coconut, wild cherry, or new car fragrance. The guy with the lint-free rag caught my eye, nodded, stepped into his vehicle, and pulled it up behind his friend so I could use the machine on what he believed would be my minivan.
After I rolled in, I sat there, my gaze moving from these two guys and their lowriders to my cargo, which made me ride pretty low. I felt as if I was in some sort of commercial—beer perhaps—where a undescended male (me) makes some sort of catastrophic mistake that castrates him of front of real men (them) forever. I went to the back, opened the hatch and retrieved a young girl’s forgotten dreammobile. When I saw the look on the other guys’ faces, it was as if I had pulled a family of cross-dressing midgets out of my Mazda MPV. They both froze: Impala Ian stopped his buffing and Ranchero Rick just limply held the whining vacuum hose sucking air. I was a grown man washing an ungrown car that had been birthed from a larger vehicle that no one would ever call masculine.
I squeezed the trigger on the power washer and blew the debris from the Jeep’s wee little grille. In order to get into all the crevices, I had to treat the Jeep like a large dog, raising its hindquarters to spray underneath, and lifting one wheel to get what might be considered the groin of the toy car. The other men just leaned against their classic cars, watching this nancy boy run around like he was being splashed with a hose, not using one himself. Back and forth I scurried, soap and spray, spray and soap, pausing every few minutes to feed the slot embarrassment that came in twenty-five cent intervals.
When I finished, I was dripping like a fat Paris Hilton in a Carl’s Jr. ad. The Jeep was stripped clean, many of the original decals shredded or removed altogether. On the concrete floor, near the drain, was a wet clump of magenta and violet as if a clown had just exploded. I gingerly picked up the pile between my two fingers and walked over to the trashcan on the sucking-and-sudsing atoll next to my audience. When I released the little thicket, I caught the disgusted stare of the two men. I thought, I may be a pantywaist but at least I ain’t no litterbug.