At a Car Wash in Little Rock
I used to love to wash my car at night, at a car wash up the street from where I lived with my wife and baby son. At night I sometimes need to slip away. Seldom was there anybody there; that time of night most folks are tucked away and dreaming, so I was startled hard by a man’s voice screaming Hey asshole, across the car wash tarmac, slashed this way and that by the street light’s arc. I turned around as if it was me he called—it had to be, we were the only ones there—and when I did he yelled again, No, not you, that other asshole, but he didn’t say it out of disrespect, as it was more a tip of his hat because I knew who I was, and had acknowledged that “Take me to you, imprison me, for I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / nor ever chaste, except you ravish me” John Donne wrote in his beautiful poem about car washes. Listen, I’m not crazy, I know what he meant: the way you may be overwhelmed by words that come to mean something only after you’ve felt their pain.
