Date: Monday, November 11, 2002 2:35 AM

Last Spring I saw a woman who really knew how to work a squeegie, how to squeeze gold right out of it. The other rag/muffets were in awe, and so was I. This is a woman who knows how to give her audience what they really want.

You know how the squeegie routine works, right? I mean, do they have these people in Thunder Bay and Gimli? In Dar-es-Salaam? The schtick is this: you have a homeless, or at least visibly-downtrodden person armed with a squeegie they ripped off from a gas station and bucket of more-or-less water (sometimes it’s more like thin, watery mud). They park themselves at an intersection and wait for a red light, whereupon they emerge from hiding like a flock of Vampires from a Romanian belltower; just like that. Anyway, they squirt or slosh the water over the windshields of the cars waiting at the light, then either rub it back and forth with rags or squeegie it off. Then they go around to the window and ask for money. Sometimes if the mud is really sticky mud they can ask for money to get it off again. Anyways, some people give it to them, as they look as if they are working, and crappy work it is, too, running into intersections knowing that most people are automatically pissed off at you because here in Canada we would rather slit our own throats than utter the word “No.” Don’t know what the racket pays, but it must be better than regular begging, because they are out there at all hours, in all weathers, slogging away and running, like as not, because some of those lights aren’t very long.

Anyway, back to this woman. She was young, and most of the young ones have given it up. You don’t often see squeegie kids anymore, though you used to alot. Now it’s mostly old-timers or guys in their thirties who have been rode hard and put away wet. This woman was in her early twenties, and she had an entourage with her, also in their twenties. Some had rags and some had buckets, so maybe they were more of a pit crew, but they didn’t squeegie, just sat on the church stairs, watching, cheering. They had the Axl headscarves and tats everywhere, the homemade kind, and silver skull jewelry and lots of black denim and leather. A heroin rock look. Shoulda been a photographer for some Euro mag, they would have loved the shot.

But this woman. Right, her. Anyway, she was wearing very faded, very dark purple lowrider jeans with a Harley Davidson bandanna as a belt, and she had a little do-rag on her head to keep her shortish blonde curlyques out of her eyes, and a jean jacket, open all the way down.

And no shirt.

Lavender lacy bra; she had clearly studied that chapter of Dress for Success for Women, where he says that odd colours of lingerie drive men wild, and the lacier, the better, no matter what kind of man you are trying to attract. Yes, there was every reason to believe she knew what she was doing.

She was raking in the dough as she leaned WAY over the windshields of those Lexii and Mercedii. And the entourage watched, and cheered.