The Land of Auto Eroticism

I was late coming home from work one day, and when Cinelli asked where I’d been, I said I was out talking to Sunny Sunshine.

“Who is that,” she said in the accusatory manner she has, “some little bimbo who dances topless at a Van Nuys juice bar?”

“No,” I said, “a goateed, pink-faced, bald-domed man who is Car Washer to the Stars in West Hollywood.”

Still suspicious, she wanted to know why in God’s name I was talking to anyone at a carwash, since I care little about cars and am not interested in clean.

I replied in the manner of Sharon Stone when asked why she bared herself in “Basic Instinct”: “It’s my job.”

And that it is.

L.A., with its 6,243,838 registered vehicles, is car capital of America, and anything having to do with cars is, if not important, at least of passing interest.

Sunny and his partner, Marvin Kalin, run the Santa Palm Car Wash which, by Sunny’s own measure, washes the cars of more celebrities than any other carwash in the known world.

To prove it, he has their photographs and autographs along a walkway that parallels the 180-foot-long tunnel where cars are soap-sprayed, soft-curtained, side-blasted, hot-waxed, chemically rinsed and blow-dried.

The only picture he doesn’t have up is that of a Playboy centerfold who gave him a signed photo of herself head-on and naked. He keeps it in his desk and looks at it sometimes and sighs.

*

I became interested in car-washing through a story in, God help me, the National Enquirer, about a retarded person whose only interest in life was to learn everything he could about car-washing.

It was called to my attention by a friend who, coining a phrase, said I ought to write something about the town’s auto-erotic interests, which is to say its love affair with cars. Then he suggested Sunny Sunshine.

I do not have a love affair going with my 1991, company-subsidized Pontiac, and most of the time it is in such a state of filth I can barely see through the windshield. So I had it washed before I met with Sunny.

“That’s nothing,” he said to me when I confessed what I’d done. “I’ve been told by other car washers that cars are cleaner when they arrive here than they are at most places when they leave. It’s a status thing.”

The Santa Palm Car Wash, named for its cross streets, washes about 15,000 automobiles a month, of which close to 1,000 are Rolls-Royces, 2,000 are Mercedes and the others consist mostly of Jaguars, BMWs, Cadillacs, Lincolns and at least one 1991 company-subsidized Pontiac.

The place is so famous that both Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall have shot portions of their shows there. The producers of a 1976 movie and subsequent television series called “Car Wash” wanted to film in the tunnel, but Sunny refused.

“It would have meant shutting down for three months,” he explained as we watched a BMW pass through high-pressure side-blasters that washed grime from its lower parts. “I couldn’t do that to my customers.” Then he added thoughtfully, “Some of them love their cars more than their wives.”

*

I saw an indication of that at Sunny’s place. One customer followed the finisher around with a rag of his own, rubbing off spots that he believed the finisher had missed.

The finisher, as the name implies, is in charge of making sure the car is as clean as it can be. He is also called the kiss-off man, because, in effect, he kisses the customer goodby as he hands him his keys.

This particular customer wanted the finisher to work on a spot so small it was almost invisible on the right rear fender of his Jaguar XJ6. He wouldn’t accept his keys until the spot was gone.

Finally satisfied, he was joined by his wife, who was dressed in old clothes and was a lot grimier than the Jag had been when it was first brought in. I remember thinking it proved Sunny’s point, that some men care more about their cars than their wives, otherwise he’d have made certain she was clean too.

“I’ve run cars through the tunnel as many as five times,” Sunny said. “Some people are just never satisfied.”

Sunny, who is 58, has had a heart attack and two cardiac bypass operations and almost died twice. A doctor told him he was as close to death as anyone could be and still be alive.

Part of that was probably because he worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week for many years trying to keep his celebrity clientele happy.

“Perfection is what makes us great,” Sunny Sunshine said, watching cloth curtains waft gently over the top of a Lincoln Continental as it was conveyed through the tunnel.

“God,” he said, when it emerged gleaming in the sunlight on the other side, “I love this business.”