Jesus Christ Sign-Spinner
[title type="subtitle-h6"]Caleb Weisnicht[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text] In the beginning (June, 1999), he spun that sign at just under 10 revolutions per minute. “Spanky’s Car Wash: Suds & Scrubs” set in a slanting blue script that bubbled all over itself. He spun it out on the corner of 3rd and Carlisle, but no one came. Out there in the sticks with the gutted white warehouses flaking and the bummed out awnings all sun faded and sagging like spandex hand-me-downs. He kept spinning, but no one ever came to get clean.And by the end of August, he spun right into a slump. His RPMs were down drastically (6.7 from 8.9 in July), his hands were severely blistered and bleeding, and Spanky’s CPD (customers per day) hung right around zero.From a window above the double-doored garage that housed the car conveyor, friction and high pressure washers, and red row of fixed nozzle Buff ’n’ Dry™ air dryers, the eponymous Spanky cupped his hands and called down to his human advertisement below, “Keep spinnin’ that sign, boy!” Spanky’s birth name was Douglas. “That’s the ticket!” He was an old 76 years old, and he inhabited the two tiny rooms above the squat, whitewashed garage. He’d lived through the golden days of the auto wash industry, and he wasn’t letting go.“There’s something to that boy,” Spanky would mutter as he watched with a frightening intensity. “I know there is.”By October, the boy was back on track. Not only were his spins quicker (now topping out at 22 RPMs), but he was incorporating subtle dips, turns, and dives that crescendoed into graceful little tosses of the sign up into the air and back down again. His hands, once fleshy, were now sure and strong, the pads of his palms and fingertips capped with little red coins of callous. Spanky’s CPD climbed to 2.“This is the beginning,” Spanky whispered into the window pane, his breath hot and wet against the clouded glass. “This is only the beginning.”By November’s first snow, the boy was spinning at 52 RPMs. Salt-stained vehicles rolled in and out of Spanky’s at a rate of 34 per day, and the boy spun faster. A new top-to-bottom brush pendulum combo was installed, and the boy spun faster still. Though it could hardly be sprung for, Spanky crunched some numbers, observed a fairly encouraging upward trend, and had a pivoting rain arch attachment trucked in and equipped by the beginning of December. And the boy spun even faster.“Yes.” Now it was a hiss. Spanky stood shaking at the window, his sweating hands moving in and out like a clap, his breaths coming quick and clipped. “By God, keep spinning.”By mid December, lines of minivans, SUVs, and station wagons pregnant with Christmas-crazed shoppers and their purchases wound out down Spanky’s driveway and along a good three-mile stretch of Carlisle. With the boy’s continued increase in speed (now 90 RPMs) and stamina (seven 12 hour shifts per week) came a resurrection of the long despondent retail, residential, industrial, and even agricultural districts situated in and around Spanky’s neighborhood. The boy was a drop in the pond, and his ripples radiated for miles.“Yes, yes, yes!” Spanky’s screams were muffled by the recently installed ProtoVest® T260 Touch-Free Tunnel Dryer blasting below him. Though it operated at a decibel level that violated OSHA’s occupational noise exposure standards, he opted out of the Silencer Package because he wanted to “feel the blow.”The boy, becoming increasingly concerned by the one-dimensionality of his sign-spinning program (his was an art of athletic heroism, one that relied too heavily on physical feats of speed and stamina alone), began dabbling in the more expressive crafts of dance, musical theatre, and miracle-working. Though he could average 175 RPMs for a good 16 to 18 hours uninterrupted, he now insisted (as he did before the Christmas Eve performance of his own script, Jesus Christ SignSpinner) on being flanked by phalanxes of shirtless male dancers singing songs like Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” while he threw the sign hundreds of feet up into the air—“Oh, my!” From his window Spanky watched, his nose flattened against and greasing the glass as he traced the sign up through the night.—and caught it again in his teeth. Fireworks fractured the northern sky, and the crowd of 50,000 crammed up and down 3rd and Carlisle began cheering wildly and chanting Revelations 19:126.“That boy’s the Second Coming.” Spanky’s voice was low and soupy with something like reverence. He moved two quaking hands up to palm the glass and touched the face reflected there—his face, old and jowled against a backdrop of exploding light. But I am the creator, he thought. I am the architect. Reds and blues tessellated through the glass before him. It’s time.He then took an hour-long bath in a tub of tepid Nestlé® Holy Water, dried himself off with a blood-stained cloth (embroidered), and donned his A1200 God the Father™ Robe w/ Heavenly Sash (white Poly-cotton blend, $666 off at shopholy.com). He admired himself for a few minutes before removing the robe, climbing into bed, and falling asleep to the sound of 25 male voices singing, “You can’t start a fire without a spark. This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]