Sometimes you get the carwash. Sometimes the carwash gets you.
From the May/June 2026 issue of Car and Driver. My first job in publishing was at Car Weekly, a struggling Canadian car-racing tabloid that was less weekly and more whenever we felt like it.
The editor, Donald 'Tex' Swiston, was Texan insofar as he occasionally wore a cowboy hat outdoors. He drove an abused 1965 Ford Galaxie, a former taxi. It appeared to have been rolled, or at least entangled in a score of inattentive parking-lot calamities. The car was mostly navy blue but also primer gray and maroon.
Its tires represented four brands. The Galaxie was so eaten by rust that one headlight illuminated only guardrails. Tex draped towels over the foam-and-vinyl seats, which were crumbling in sticky BB-sized balls that would cling to your pants. The car had a horn, but the chrome ring had snapped, its sheared end poking up like a stiletto eager to penetrate someone's forehead.
Tex suffered from hay fever, and each of his violent sneezes had left its air-dried imprimatur on the inside of the windshield. Strangely, the Ford's engine bay was cleanish, because Tex tinkered daily with the timing, ever in pursuit of intergalactic fuel mileage.
As a result, the engine started without complaint on the first crank but idled anywhere from 900 to 3000 rpm. And without warning, it would stall as if garroted, for reasons not even mechanics could divine. Probably the black-market fuel Tex had been purchasing in nearby Hamilton, Ontario. Traveling in fits and starts, we drove the Galaxie to the Daytona 500, where it collected a tapestry of mud and ivory pigeon crap, notably on the hood.
Back home again, Tex summoned $3.95 to go through an automatic carwash at a place parallel to our grim and windowless editorial offices. I rode along. Keep in mind, my understanding of carwashes equals my understanding of credit default swaps. Nonetheless, this was the type of wash that deployed a rubber and steel triangular block connected to an underfloor chain.
As I mindlessly picked at vinyl bits of the bench seat, the creeping block snugged up behind the Galaxie's left-front tire. Off we went. At the initial spray station, unfortunately, the Galaxie was not prepared for so much underhood humidity, and the engine lost revs, then commenced choking. It shook the entire car.
Tex apparently expected something of the sort, so his foot was hovering over the accelerator, which he reflexively flattened. It was the right thing to do, but not if Tex had left the transmission in drive, which he had. Strangely, the Galaxie's V-8 felt in perfect tune, because the car leaped forward as if in a bracket race. We immediately shook hands with chaos:1.
The rear tire climbed over the pusher block, breaking the car free from the chain that had been propelling it, although we surmised this only later. 2. The Galaxie collided with the rolling brushes at the soap station, hitting them at what felt like 15 mph. Immediately, the larger of the two brushes bent across half the Galaxie's windshield, plunging us into shade.3. Tex was so distracted that he reached for his hat, which had toppled into the rear seat.
His right foot remained frozen on the accelerator—he didn't know.4. The Galaxie barreled onward and caught the twin air-dry blowers, still in their lowered position and surprised by our premature arrival. This jolted me toward the dash. One of the dryers' metal supports bent into an origami pretzel.
It thumped and banged on the hood, conveniently replacing the five-foot-wide soap brush.5. By then I was shouting but wasn't really processing events in real time. Tex incorrectly believed he'd steered us into the air dryers, one of which was now sliding sideways off the hood, trailing red and green wires as thick as my thumb.
So, he countersteered, which hoicked the entire right side of the Galaxie out of the wash's steel tracks and into a protruding electrical box that I feared would spit forth a spark, every erg as blinding as lightning. I'm from Ohio. I've been at ground zero in tornadoes. That's what this felt like—peculiar objects whizzing past the windows, torrential water, shouting, locomotives whooshing, someone probably losing an eye.
I would have added 'wind,' but the air dryers weren't likely to blow again. By then, Tex realized his mistake and shifted into either park or reverse, hoping to mitigate the damage, which was likely in the four-figure range. He deftly raised that to five figures when he determined we were not just stopped in the carwash but cockeyed and clogged like a rusty fur ball waiting to be upchucked.
That's when the Buick behind us slowly crunched the Galaxie's peeling chrome bumper. A gentle off-center impact, yes, but with force sufficient to jar open our car's trunk—it had been held in place by a corroding clothes hanger—such that Tex's leather golf bag was absorbing suds à la mode, as well as useless jets of liquid. And, given the smell, it was liquid whose constituents evidently numbered two: ditch water and sewage. Tex descended into flight mode.
Again, he floored the throttle, again in drive. Miraculously, it worked to unclog us, although we scraped the passenger's-side mirror and door handle against a black metal stanchion supporting I don't know what. We also somehow picked up a loop of either an overhanging garden hose or a fat extension cord, which bent a windshield wiper until I feared it would snap off. I'd gone silent by then.
I remained half on my knees in the passenger footwell, protecting my head with crossed arms. Tex summoned more throttle. Like a watermelon seed spit from the carwash's mouth, we blasted into blessed dry sunlight. A car and a box van on the highway braked to avoid us, horns blaring.
Tex gave them the finger. In our wake there emanated from the carwash tunnel a mushroom cloud of steam that pulsated with amber light eerily strobing from within. The Galaxie's hood suffered dimples and divots, plus some abrasions that resembled HO-scale railroad tracks. No idea how the customer behind us fared.
His Buick could not have emerged unscathed. In our case, the Galaxie's sole working headlight was now cocked at a 30-degree angle, aimed at Ottawa. The front license plate was absent. The windshield sported a crack in an uncanny outline of Florida.
The trunk leaked fetid water for an hour.
'I hope that gentleman wasn't injured,' said Tex of our fellow carwash patron, who had innocently ridden into a $3.95 carny Wall o' Death not of his own making. But we never found out, because Tex was loath to speak of the episode, worried that the orphaned license plate would be trotted out as Exhibit A in court.
'All I'm gonna say is that I'm never going back to that place,' Tex offered. 'A defective operation. 'When I drove to work the next day, I passed the carwash, noticing a three-man crew with jackhammers chipping at the concrete floor. A spray-painted bedsheet had been draped over the sign out front: an emphatic 'closed.
' It remained shuttered all week. I must say, what's odd is that the pigeon shit was still on the Galaxie's hood.
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