Some days Dirty Pete was almost invisible. Usually you could see him, especially if he was standing outside in the bright sunlight. But there were those days - generally near the end of the month - when he went into the shadows and disappeared completely.
He worked in an auto salvage yard, in an area where metals were reclaimed, melted, and poured into ingot molds. Because of that, he always had that strange foundry smell about him, an odor that smelled like burning electrical panels, or like an emergency brake on a car when it had not been released and the car had been driven for six or eight miles. His was a strong and powerful smell.
He wore the same clothing for a whole month, until it became thick and impacted with layered grease and dirt. Each day he got progressively filthier and filthier. He did not wash or bathe himself at all - not even his hands or his face. One day I noticed a small patch of pink near his mouth. Later I heard him explaining to Bob that he had snorted some Coke-Cola at lunch time when Ralph had told him a joke, and that he had wiped the soda from his chin and left a patch of clean there. Bob told him that the pink spot was ruining his look. But the smeared pink spot darkened gradually over the course of several days, and it soon blended in with the uniform blackness of the rest of his face. And near the end of the month, it was very hard to see him at all in the shadows unless he was smiling. You see, he had well-formed and very white teeth that no one would ever expect to find on such a filthy man. Indeed, it was really hard to believe that any human being could ever get that dirty.
And then, one Sunday morning, Dirty Pete showed up in the tavern all red and shiny from scrubbing his hide. He had shaved his beard, and shampooed and combed his hair. He was squeaky clean, and a slight hint of cologne surrounded him like a radiant nimbus after a thunderstorm. He wore a new tee-shirt, with the creases still in it from the plastic package it came in. And you could actually see the color of the brand-new jeans he wore that day. They were blue! He stood there, smiling, enjoying the moment, with his hand gripping his glass of beer. I asked him what happened to him, and then he looked at me like I was crazy.
“What the hell kind of question is that?” he said.
“You’re clean,” I said to him. “You’re freaking clean. I don’t believe it!”
He smiled slightly. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said. “It’s the first of the month, you know. What did ya expect?”
Then he told me that he took twelve baths a year. “Any more than that’s a damned waste of time,” he said, matter-of-factly. He showed me his new white socks, beaming with delight like a little child. “Hey, I even changed my underwear,” he said - as if I needed to know that.
He told me that he threw his old clothing away and changed into new clothing once a month. “Why wash it?” he said. “It’s just easier to throw the old stuff away. Of course, I do turn my tee-shirts around so I’ll have a clean side every week,” he said proudly.
Yeah, I had noticed that myself. The first week he wore his tee-shirt just like everyone else. The second week he wore it backwards. The third week he turned inside out. And the fourth week, when everybody could see that dirty Fruit of the Loom label next to his Adam’s apple, when he had turned the tee-shirt around for the final time, we knew for certain that Dirty Pete was getting ready for his monthly bath. He even told me that he threw his bed sheets away. Oh yes, he used the same sheets for an entire month to wrap around his coal-back body - and then he put new sheets on the bed.
I stood there and shook my head in wonder. “What does your old lady think about all that?” I asked.
He took a sip of his beer. “Hell, she’s dirtier than I am!”
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