Small Businessmen Getting Their Feet Wet at the Carwash

The New Year arrives with the glimmer of greater possibilities for 11-year-old Sergio Olivan, after his folks gave him the best squeegee on the block for Christmas.

Kids elsewhere might scratch their heads, or howl in protest, at such a gift. But along Hicks Avenue in East Los Angeles, Sergio and his buddies revere a good window-washing tool--especially a deluxe model like Sergio’s with a spray bottle built right into the handle.

For several years, the youngsters along this small stub of a barrio street, tucked against the sound wall of the Santa Ana Freeway, have hustled money wiping down cars at an automated carwash at a gas station down the block on Olympic Boulevard. Fortunately for the boys, the carwash’s dryer is frequently on the fritz.

Weekends, vacations and many afternoons, one, two or several of the kids perch at the carwash exit, rags and squeegees waving as dripping cars emerge.

They peer in, watching for the nod from the face behind the wheel. “That’s a yes! That’s a yes!” somebody hollers and the boys swarm over the vehicle, buffing the paint and windows for whatever chunk of change will be offered.

“Usually, it’s 50 cents or a dollar,” says Sergio, the current crew’s informal foreman. “If you work with others, you have to split it.” The kids can haul in $15 each on a good day.

It’s refreshingly raw entrepreneurship--the sort familiar to anyone who ever hawked newspapers on a corner, shagged stray balls at a golf course or kept score at the bowling alley for tips.

Near the heart of ever-wary and deeply troubled Los Angeles, there is something vaguely nostalgic and faintly hopeful about the little Hicks Avenue enterprise.

But this is 1993, and nothing is simple anymore.

The operator of the gas station, worried about liability and discouraging customers, is not applauding.

The kids play a running cat-and-mouse game with the gas station attendants. “We don’t mind to have kids doing something for nickels and dimes,” says Carlos Marquez, who operates the business. But the neighborhood kids “play around too much” at the station, he says, and some hassle patrons who won’t cough up a tip for a wipe down. One man had his antenna broken, Marquez said. In addition, the company is being sued after a youngster--it’s unclear where the child lives--was injured on the premises.

“Those kids are a problem to us,” Marquez says.

The Hicks Avenue boys are wholly undeterred, saying problems are created by outsiders who venture on their turf.

When shooed from the carwash by attendants, they circle like a flock of schoolyard sea gulls, waiting to return to their pickings.

There is purposefulness and subtle pride in the boys’ endeavor. “I do windows,” Sergio says with authority.

His sidekick, 14-year-old Ernie Luna, says he handles the harder-to-reach parts of the cars--” ’cause I’m taller.”

The appeal of the carwash hustle, passed along from older Hicks Avenue youths to younger ones, is that it is purely a kid thing. It lacks the whiff of grown-up adulteration found in some adolescent money-making gambits--like the young teen-agers who arrive at the door with $5 boxes of caramels and memorized pitches about “helping to keep kids off drugs.”

Hicks Avenue is no Beverly Hills 90210, but generally the youngsters are not hustling money to put bread on the table or clothes on their backs. “We’re not that bad off,” says Sylvia Cobian, a 25-year resident whose teen-age son, George, is a semi-retired veteran of the carwash.

Basically, this is about conspicuous consumption. The kids earn it and they spend it--on video games, toys, movie tickets or the ever-tempting taco truck parked around the corner on Olympic.

“This boy gets up at 7 a.m. on Saturday, gets dressed and runs down” to the carwash, says Sergio’s mother, Rebecca Olivan. “He won’t even eat breakfast sometimes.

“At least I know he’s got the energy to go out there; that he knows money doesn’t come so easy,” she says.

Saturday mornings are prime time, Sergio explains, when the customers are “mostly girls”--the best tippers.

Competition often rears its ugly head, chiefly in the form of a local homeless man with his own rag and spray bottle.

“I cut in front of him,” Sergio says confidently. “Mostly the people go for the little kids. They don’t trust the big guys.”

Hicks Avenue legend has it that George Cobian, now 13, made a killing Christmas Eve two years ago. He struck a Mother Lode of customers bitten by the holiday spirit and raked in stacks of cash. “It was like 80 or 85 dollars,” says George, savoring the tale.

This Christmas vacation saw far leaner days. The carwash was shut down most of the time for repairs.

But at year’s end, the brushes were spinning again and the boys were back--picking off customers between run-ins with the gas station attendant and the homeless man.

“You don’t see this much,” says their first taker, Jeff Hahn of Fresno, who got off the freeway for gas and watched as the kids swirled about his droplet-covered minivan. “It’s better than being out spray-painting buildings.”

“Fifty cents each,” Sergio says as he pulls away.