Love, Life and Death at the Launderland

Love, Life and Death at the Launderland

By Daniel Haight

“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is the theme song for depression – he decided. The sweat rolled in fat drops along the small of his back as he stood in line, buying a coke and a few other things to justify asking the clerk at the Drug Barn for part of his change to be a roll of quarters. He hadn’t learned yet that the clerk didn’t really care. The Drug Barn was never crowded, never empty. It was always filled with the sad, tired and/or depressed people that always found themselves in a cut-rate drug store at ten of five on a Monday afternoon. Don’t these people have lives, he wondered.

These people…better amend that, pal. There’s no longer any difference between them and you.

He got his change, ones and fives instead of quarters, and walked back to the Laundromat. Years had worn down the brick sidewalks and thousands of laundry loads had ground lint into the cracks. The bedspread was waiting. He’d never owned a bedspread that couldn’t be washed in a normal washing machine, before he met Carolyn. Now that she had moved back home, he didn’t have it in him to toss it. The comforting bulk of it made that empty spot next to him on the bed feel less total. Less overwhelming. Less massive.

Massive. Now, that was a good word. Massive was a word he’d heard a lot lately. Massive layoff, massive debt, massive depression and finally, massive legal bills following the divorce. Yessir, a cavalcade of misery featuring the Massive Four! Massive Four sounded like a band that would have played in a bar in the Haight during the FSM years. Psychedelic versions of pop covers a specialty.

The Launderland was a horseshoe-shaped facility that was bisected by the rooms for the laundry folding service. Linoleum walls, linoleum tile floors. The drab colors made the cheap flyers offering baby-sitting services in Spanish seem exciting by comparison. The air was thick and heavy with the smell of detergent. A black woman transferred clothes from the washer to the dryer while holding a running conversation with someone on her cell phone. A small Indian woman and a small Indian man in an azure blue turban folded laundry and spoke softly to each other in Urdu.

Duffy walked in from the back parking lot. Allegedly, he worked for the Launderland and its sister location. Maybe he was just another casualty of the fixed-income demographic with nowhere else to go. He wore a white t-shirt that was so thin you could see his strappy a-shirt underneath when he sweated. He was sweating right now.

He thought of the guy he remembered from high school and community college that he met in the mall food court this afternoon. Fat, he looked like a stand-in for Ethan Embry. He wore a black felt bowler in the same style that he remembered from years ago. It was replaced as it became sun-faded or “smelly”. Just graduated from CSU East Bay with a degree in Philosophy. He played bass in a community college theatre in Alameda and cheerfully referred to himself as ‘a bum’.

Hume was his favorite philosopher, he said.

You’re so pedestrian, Jim replied. Not that he knew Hume from Hubert Humphery; sometimes you could pull it off if you had the knack. It got a laugh from his buddy on the other side of the table. They were eating from twin bowls of Manchu Wok and it was all Jim could do not to burst into tears at the realization that even cheap Chinese food was beyond his budget these days.

What are your plans, he asked.

I have none, was his breezy reply. It made for two of them. When he laughed, his teeth in the front had been worn down until they looked like molars. He said he played bass, right? Not sax…

Back at the Launderland, Duffy was shuffling between cartloads of laundry. He spoke to some people and you could tell how rich or poor people were by their responses. The upper crust types were slightly afraid of Duffy. It showed by how they immediately moved to positions of defense on the cheap Formica benches. The more down-to-earth types welcomed him or at the very least were more polite.

Jim took a leak in the propped-open pay toilet. He’d be doggoned if he was going to pay a quarter to take a piss. There were plenty of trees out back. The mirror over the sink was so tagged and scratched that he could hardly see his face. Other inked-up messages were faded from a scrub brush. He washed his hands and used his wadded-up paper towels to open the door again. Who knew how many hobos used this place for their apartment?

It was amazing how quickly his dignity left him. A year ago, he was piloting his 5-series through a twenty-acre lot of cars and depositing his life a day at a time at the job. The job that seemed so secure, offered so many benefits that he never really thought about. Life at the job for the past four years seemed to roll with a calm assuredness to it. Every two weeks, the paycheck was deposited in his account and he wrote out the checks when he got tired of asking Carolyn to do it. He wore hundred-dollar slacks every day of the week.

The slacks, he needed to get cleaned or pressed or whatever. That callback he got this morning was the first major ray of light he’d had in a while. Rays of light were so rare that he actually found a red clay pencil and drew a big ‘X’ through the date. He took fifteen minutes to find the directions to the interview and wrote them down on a Steno pad rather than use up his ink cartridges in his down-to-the-nub inkjet.

Why were things like pants or cars such marks of success? Why did he think about stuff like that so much? You’re really pathetic, you know that? People in Southeast Asia would be selling themselves, their sisters and their children into perpetual sex slavery for the opportunities that he somehow had yet to take advantage of.

PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THE FOLDING TABLES – THE TABLES ARE FOR FOLDING LAUNDRY.

Red or blue 8 ½ x 11 sheets in binder-protectors were thumb-tacked to the wall. He was wearing this tie-dyed shirt that he bought from a street fair just because he had to buy a tie-dyed shirt. For reasons that now are obscure, he’d jauntily reply and then wonder later on why they found him to be so strange.

I should have been an anthropologist, I love studying people.

No one pretended at the Launderland. They couldn’t, really. They were airing their dirty laundry in public, what more was there to hide? No one ever invented a dignified way to be at the Laundromat but Jim was beyond dignity. He was even beyond finding a plastic bottle of booze to make himself forget his troubles.

The thought you really do drink too much was quickly followed by laundry perpetually falling in the dryer is vaguely hypnotic. Jim took another pull from his bottle of diet Coke. He’d drank so many sodas that they now tasted bilious to him. Sweet, fizzy, disgusting. My kingdom for a drink of water.

Duffy had driven trucks for 51 years before retiring. He’d been at the Laundromat at six in the morning and it was now past five in the afternoon. He’ll get a few hours of sleep, he said, and then he’ll check on the other one. He got ten dollars an hour for that job.

Jim began to hate Duffy.

Sure, it was wrong, but Jim hated Duffy anyway. Did Duffy even have a resume? How was his interview style? Jim had three different versions of his resume, had his name in with a dozen head-hunting places and checked Dice and Monster morning, noon and night. Duffy wore a cell phone on his hip and a greasy truckers cap over his wispy and non-existent hair. The comforter was almost dry.

He played a goofy knock-off of Street Fighter II in the front of the place. The players made Engrish statements like “I hate Evil – so sue me!” after chopping the loser in half with his cartoon katana.

Dead men don’t sue.

Life was made of little moments like this. Moments of time where Jim did something he didn’t want to do and had too much time to contemplate all the things he used to do instead of this. Outside, the Jeep sat patiently for him. Carolyn had left him that much – she said she didn’t want to worry about re-smogging and re-registering it back in her home state. The pine trees bordering the lot reminded him of vacations as a kid in the mountains. The general store in the middle of a stand of sugar pines where he ate an Eskimo Pie while sitting on the wide, worn front porch.

He folded the dry bedspread and with it under one arm and a cup he used to carry laundry soap in his other. He carried it like a highball having to mentally remind himself not to take a sip. The Jeep clattered to life and carried him home to wait out the rest of the day and prepare himself for whatever would come tomorrow.