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Mr. Waters and the Crackers

Lewandowski, my buddy with the car wash job, called too early on a weekend morning, Get your hippy-vagrant-poet ass out of bed, if you want to meet the man.

Lewandowski washed Muddy Waters' car, an old mint green Cadillac cool as cash, Sundays on the side.

Lewandowski's job was in yuppie Downers Grove, and Waters would glide his long lozenge of a ride over from Westmont to have her done up nice.

Lewandowski had brokered a deal to be Waters' personal car wash boy, willing to make house calls on his day off so as to have something to brag about over Sunday barbecue.

And I was being bestowed the honor of tagging along, so I could back him up to the disbelievers, though it promised to be a story for me as well.

I was hauling on my jeans and spitting out the Crest when Lewandowski pulled his Bondo-ed GTO into my drive, playing the requisite Chicago blues only a little too loud.

After this chatty preamble, you might want me to draw the yarn out for you now with humor and perhaps one passing moment of memorable delight.

But the truth is the man only came out to pay us when we were done, to look over our job and see if it was worthy of his cash, and Lewandowski, desperate as we both were to form a bond, let leap from his white trash tongue what shit it was all those British Invasion bands had got their mitts all over Mr. Water's music and made millions, while he had to live in some clap board bungalow.

Well, he said, that's true, but the house is mine.

Caddie too.

And now I got two skinny-ass crackers coming to my house first thing on a Sunday morning to call me Mister and shine it up nice.

Who'd a thought?

He peeled our few bucks off the roll he drew from his gold-trimmed satin robe and strolled chuckling back into his house as Lewandowski stared after him, and I wiped one last smudge from the handle of his driver's side door.