At the car wash

Doppelgänger
Noun: a ghostly double or counterpart of a living person.

A long time ago I stopped at a gas station on the corner of Blake Road and Cambridge Street in Hopkins, a suburb of Minneapolis, in the beautiful state of Minnesota. Three blocks away from a beautiful White Castle.

The gas station isn’t there anymore, it was torn down and replaced with a small building that has a Five Guys hamburger place on one side and a Jersey Mike’s on the other. I filled up my 1997 tan Chevy Cavalier and went inside to pay, and the guy working there asked me if I wanted a car wash. I told him I didn’t, and he said I could have one for free. Odd because who gives car washes away and when I questioned him, he said that I could have one for free because he thought I looked like Jason Alexander and Seinfeld was his favorite TV show. I laughed and said I’d take the car wash and he gave me a receipt with the code number on it to punch into the pay box. I drove around to the back of the station thinking what a nice guy he was.

I never stopped to wonder if maybe the free car wash was a ploy and that once the door had closed behind me knockout gas would be released and I’d be shanghaied off to spend the rest of my life working in a diamond mine somewhere up in the Artic Circle. Or worse, loaded onto an alien spacecraft where I’d be one of dozens of human guinea pigs they kept in their alien laboratory. Or worse, kept alive in some secret basement somewhere where my blood would be drained and my organs slowly harvested to feed an army of stealth zombies.

I worried less back then.

None of that happened. I drove out of the car wash and the gas station guy was standing outside, smiling and waving. I smiled and waved back as I drove away.

More recently I’ve been mistaken for the Rock or Jason Statham, and sometimes Christopher Meloni. But mostly the Rock.