SMEAR WINDOW

By CALVIN TRILLIN

If New Yorkers were asked to name the most important symbols of what has been widely celebrated as a glorious era for the city, they would probably start with the fact that the squeegee guys are off the streets. In years past, at certain intersections in Manhattan, menacing-looking characters used to approach cars at red lights and, without invitation, clean the windshield as well as a windshield could be cleaned with a filthy rag. For this they would expect money. They were called squeegee guys.

Everybody hated them. If you called in the board members of the American Civil Liberties Union and the most faithful followers of Mother Teresa, assured them that what they said would go no further and asked them individually what they thought of the squeegee guys, I firmly believe they would have each said, "I hate those squeegee guys."

About four years ago, either the new chief of police or the new mayor decided to get rid of the squeegee guys. (The fact that there was some confusion as to who deserved the credit for the crackdown was the sort of thing that eventually led the mayor to get rid of the chief of police as well.) Following the crackdown, it was widely assumed that the squeegee guys, after a decent interval, would reappear. That hasn't happened. New Yorkers, grateful but intractably suspicious, wonder where the squeegee guys are.

"Who cares where they are?" you might say to a New Yorker. "They're gone. And the stock market is red hot, and the crime rate is negligible, and Disney is making Times Square the wholesome family-gathering spot we always knew it was underneath all that pornography and drug paraphernalia. New York City has entered a glorious new era." At which point the New Yorker might ask what you think of the theory that New York City has given a grant to some down-on-its-luck former mill town to take in squeegee guys rather than become the site of a nuclear-waste dump. Or the theory that the squeegee guys are secretly rehearsing for cameo appearances at that Las Vegas hotel that features a mock-up of Manhattan.

The other night, a New York resident named Jean Vallely, who had just returned from California, told me that her windshield had been streaked up by a squeegee guy on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, Calif.--the first confirmed squeegee-guy sighting I've heard of since this whole thing started. It raises the possibility that the squeegee guys, having heard of the O.J. case, are moving out to Brentwood on the theory that a jurisdiction that lets someone get away with murder couldn't be hard on people who wash windshields with filthy rags.

Then I saw the movie Face/Off. Some of it takes place in an awesomely severe prison whose very existence is secret. It occurred to me that the squeegee guys could be in such a prison. Maybe part of their sentence is to clean windshields over and over with a clean cloth and then decline the quarter offered them by the guard who sits behind the wheel.

Such an incarceration would obviously be unconstitutional. I suppose somebody ought to inform the A.C.L.U. Well, maybe not the A.C.L.U. How about Amnesty International? I'll let someone else do it. I hate those squeegee guys.