skank-o-mat

After happy hour on Thursday — from which my bartender was suspiciously absent, harrumph — I decided it was Time. Yes, it was Time for Laundry, especially since I had Big Weekend Plans that required me being clothed.

Instead of heading to the Omygodmyretinas-o-mat, thusly named for the blinding white decor, I decided to try out the darker, more modest establishment nearer to my flat. I threw two loads of black clothes into a hamper and headed that way.

I would soon have my introduction to the Skank-o-mat.

The first warning sign was the bald woman in the white hatchback parked next to me. She kept staring at me as I fumbled with my hamper, the detergent, and my shiny purple plastic purse of quarters. Her dog, the standard result of one of Lassie’s drunken encounters with a dachshund, also stared at me. The windows were starting to fog up from all the heavy staring as I realized that the woman was sharing a meal from Jack in the Box with her dog. Not in the usual sharing way, either: she was putting bits of kinda-burger in her mouth and letting the dach-collie eat them from her lips.

I love animals, but that was a bit much for me.

Warning sign number two came in the form of the homeless guy who, in generic homeless guy stereotype form, reeked of Mad Dog 20/20 and looked like he had not bathed since the ’90s. He, too, stared at me, and I started to wonder if I had a gargantuan booger hanging from my nose ring, as I am wont to wonder after being the subject of excessive staring. Then I realized he was talking to me through the plate-glass window.

Not one for common sense in times of absurdity, I talked back. We had a really meaningful conversation, I think, except for me not knowing what the hell he was saying aside from certain catch-phrases like “fucking homosexuals” and “the great white myth”. My side of the conversation was somewhat less intriguing. I stuck with “huh?” and “what are you saying, sir?” and even mixed it up a little with “I am just here to do my laundry; I am not a proponent of the great white myth.”

He tired of my denial. I set about the important business of sorting black clothes from other black clothes and putting them in washers.

After minute three of listening to the gentle strains of industrial-strength machinery, I became bored. I had not brought reading material, and I was too bored to even write in my journal. Instead, I decided to do something else productive: figure out how to set the clock on my car stereo, which has been exactly 54 minutes fast for I don’t know how long.

Without a manual for aforementioned car stereo, and without access to Google, I text-messaged Andrew with my dilemma. He was happy to oblige, and returned with the exact instructions, and just thirty seconds later I had an accurate car stereo clock once more.

Great. Twenty-seven minutes to go.

Being a fan of people-watching in general, and specifically people-watching in laundromats, I decided to stare back at all these starers. But the homeless guy had moved on, and the Best in Show rejects had too. All I could do was watch a very skinny and rough-looking blonde pace back and forth and talk animatedly into her mobile. Soon she sensed my surveillance and shot me a dirty look, the kind of dirty that’s less of a threat and more of a promise. I promptly focused on shuffling through junk mail that had been collecting on the passenger seat. She grabbed her clothes from the dryers and left.

For the last three minutes of the wash cycle — scientifically proven to be the longest three minutes of your life, right up there with the three minutes before you can find a bathroom after ingesting a double latte — I took deep breaths and pretended I was at the ocean. It sort of worked, too, if only for the fabric softener sheets strewn about the grimy linoleum floor like so many dead jellyfish. Finally I could make the blessed washer-to-dryer transfer and return to my car.

Just at this moment, a middle-aged sporty-looking fellow entered and began stalking up and down the dryer aisle, looking pointedly inside all of the dryers. They were all empty, save mine, and I sensed his agitation (no pun intended) growing. Finally, as I was about to ask if he was in the right place, he exclaimed, “Fuck! Someone fucking stole my laundry!”

Pollyanna that I am, I replied, “Are you sure someone stole your laundry, sir?”

He turned and glared at me. Oops. “Yes, I’m fucking sure someone fucking stole my laundry! I was in here earlier with my son doing our fucking laundry and someone fucking stole it!”

Really not taking the hint, I responded, “Are you sure you put your laundry in the dryers?”

At this point, if he could have set fire to me with his mind, I would have been a very crispy little person. Eloquent as ever, “Yes, I’m fucking sure I fucking put the fucking laundry in the fucking dryers!”

I felt I had wandered onto the set of When Mamet Met Beckett. Not knowing what to do, and wanting so desperately not to help but more to salvage my idea that Things Like This Do Not Happen In Marin County, I just stood there, wet black clothes in my grip, and murmured, “I have been here for an hour and I think I would have seen someone stealing your clothes.”

“Was there a blonde woman in here?” he spat. “Blonde ponytail?”

O. Shit.

“Yes, there was. She had a ponytail and was talking on a mobile,” I gushed helpfully. “Do you … know her?”

He growled. “Yes, I fucking know her. She fucking stole my clothes.” And then he proceeded to say a few things that I wished I hadn’t heard about her character, her proclivities, and the size of certain parts of her anatomy. Right before he stormed out.

While pondering the logical implications of anatomical distortion, I finished loading my clothes into my dryers. And that’s right about when paranoia came to play.

Shit, she is going to come back and she is going to kick my ass for snitching on her! She is going to come back with a knife or a gun and I don’t even know kung fu or anyone who knows kung fu! She will stick me like a pig and I will bleed all over this unsanitary floor and no one will know I am missing for days and the weasels will have eaten my guts by then and my mother will never forgive me for leaving the house without a bra on even though I am wearing very bulky layers and that couldn’t have been why people were staring at me could it have been no of course not that’s just ridiculous I mean how could you tell I wa–

A truck pealed into or out of the parking lot. I didn’t see, you understand, because in that millisecond of sound I hit the floor so fast I still have a bruise on my knee. Old reflexes flexed: when in doubt, hide your sorry white ass and hope that when they find you, they don’t aim for the face. And there is where I remained for the remaining fourteen minutes of the drying cycle. The dryers went off just as the proprietor, who had entered sneaky like ninja to close up the place, was rounding the corner.

I maintained my shit, the shit they speak of when they say “scared the shit out of”, by one fraction of one nether-muscle. The proprietor might not have been so lucky, from the look on his face. He could have been Ed Asner‘s twin, replete with ’70s wardrobe, and his face was gently stern as he looked down at me.

“Uh. What are you doing down there, little lady?”

“My laundry,” the quick thinker in me replied. Surely he could not fault my logic if I were greasing his palms with quarters.

“But your laundry is,” and he pointed helpfully to the dead dryers bloated with black clothing, “up here.”

Another old reflex awoke: when in doubt, tell the truth. If it’s weird enough, you might just get left alone.

And so I told him. He was neither amused nor upset, but instead nodded thoughtfully in a very Asnerian way, and then opened his mouth to speak …

“It’s ten o’clock. I have to close up. Nothing’s going to happen to you; I’ll watch you from here. Have a nice night.”

Skeptical, I shoved my warm clothes into my hamper and rushed out to my car. No one was waiting for me with a knife. No one was waiting for me at all. Merry red taillights blinked across the parking-lot from the Jack in the Box. The rest of the town had not noticed the lip-feeder, the great white myth, the clothes-stealer, my brief brush with death. Nothing out of the ordinary; it was just another Thursday night at the Skank-o-mat.

I think I’ll go back this week.

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