Saturday Night at the Laundromat

Saturday night. People across this city are doing all sorts of who-knows-what. They're out drinking. Dancing. Loving each other. Killing each other (or themselves). Staring at what passes for network programming. Laughing out loud at a party. Crying softly by themselves. Beating off.

Me? I'm at the laundromat next to the Pallid Poultry, making dirty things clean again.

I wish I could say that this is an optional trip. That I just felt like getting out of La Casa del Terror. Didn't like what was on TV. Wasn't especially hungry. Didn't feel waxing the tadpole. (Which I don't do much these days anyway. What's the point, really? I mean, the real joy of sex for me was in trying to bring my partner off. Haven't had a girlfriend in a bit. A while. Okay. Years. I've even tossed--no pun intended--most of my never-that-extensive-anyhow porn collection. Just wasting space. More room for storing action figures no longer on display.)

Nope. This trip to the laundromat is a necessity. Not just because I'm short on wearable clothing--how picky of society to dictate that we actually look and smell presentable when we leave our homes! The Nerve!--but because, without prior (or even post) announcement, the washers and dryers were removed from my apartment building. I found out the hard way: I was down to my last clean set of wearables--shirt, pants, boxers (or briefs, whichever it was) and mismatched socks--and I lugged an plastic milk crate's worth of clothing down to the basement laundry room, only to find four large, dusty squares where the washers and dryers used to be.

As I trundled back up the stairs, I passed the kids who live downstairs. "Y'know," I said, "It's really hard to do laundry without any washers or dryers."

They all chimed in at once. "Wha?" "They're gone?" "Oh, snap!" "That's messed up."

"That's as good a way to put it as any," I sighed, continuing my trip to the dark at the top of the stairs.

Not that tonight is my first trip to this laundromat. Oh no. I've been here plenty of times over the years, usually when one (or both) of the washers had broken down, or when I had way too much for the standard-sized units in our building to take, like blankets or the coverings for the futon.

Tonight, I load up the shopping cart Mom gave me when I moved with the basic, practical stuff. Shirts. Pants. Boxers and briefs. Socks that occasionally match. Nothing exotic. Just the stuff that gets me through the week. I also load up the canvas shopping bag. Detergent. Journal. Reading material. Coin purse bulging with quarters. Tennis ball (more on that later).

There's a TV at the laundromat--a Panasonic with iffy reception on its best night--and sometimes I pay attention to what's on the screen. Most nights, given that most of the viewers are Hispanic, we're treated to Mexican soap operas--much more explicit in terms of sex and violence than their north-of-the-border cousins--or variety shows--one show featured a busty blonde sitting next to a Fidel Castro impersonator; another had grown men with bushy mustaches dressed as school children. Other nights, American news magazines fill the bill. Tonight, it's one of the local access channels, starting off with Bollywood highlights and finishing with a preacher fumbling his way through the Scriptures ("It's Verse 53...no, 52...okay, it's 51...").

While the wash is going, I write in my journal. I get most of my journal writing done here these days. I feel sorry for any poor bastard who tries to decipher my cursive after I'm gone. Not like anyone's ever going to bother to translate the daily outs and ins. The love poetry never given. The private triumphs. The public flameouts. Life.

When I get tired of that--either my hand cramps or my mind does--I read whatever book I'm working through. Last week, it was If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor. Bruce Campbell's autobiography. (And don't you dare say, "Who?") This week? Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. The mystery isn't the reason to read Chandler. It never is. He makes the language dance. Sometimes slow and close. Sometimes wild and winging. If you can ignore the racial epithets. And misogyny. And homophobia. Could chalk it up putting words in the characters' mouths. Or the times in which his novels were written. Or sun spots. If you choose to ignore them. I don't. I note them. Grimace. Move on with the dance.

Once the wash finishes, I toss the wet clothes into the dryers across the way and flip in a couple fabric softener sheets after. If I remember to. Which I usually don't. The first load goes in fine. The second is still sopping. The washer is broken. Not draining right. Extra quarters for that dryer. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. Extra time away from home. Not a bad thing.

There are few things more soothing than watching a load of clothing tumbling in a dryer window. Watching Guinness settle in a pint glass, maybe. Or following a plane from one end of the horizon to the other. Or noting the rise and fall of the fur of a cat asleep. Or the swirl of the stars on a clear Michigan night. Or my reflection in the glass as jeans, plaid short sleeves, more-or-less-white socks tumble past.

There's only so much of that I can stand, though, so I return to reading. Or scribble some more in the spiralbound notebook. Or scan The Reader for a better job. Or walk next door to Pallid Poultry for something to drink. Used to be more fun to do that when the cute alternachick was behind the counter. Black hair cut in a bob topping white skin, direct blue eyes and a pierced right nostril. Just the kind of girl I could fall for. Just the kind of girl who could never fall for me. Just as well that she left Pallid Pountry a couple months ago. Shit job anyway. I pick up some Gatorade and return to the laundromat.

(Side note: I was just paying for my haircut at the neighborhood SuperCuts when the young man behind the counter called the next name. The name seemed familiar, so I turned...to find the alternachick in the waiting area, playing with her hair. "Sweaty," she said to the stylist. "I got mine done 'cause it gets curly," I chimed in. It's true--my hair gets what a friend affectionately referred to as "The Captain Von Trapp Wave." The alternachick headed for the hair-cutting chair. "Didn't you used to work at Pallid Poultry?" I asked, pretending to be unsure of where I'd seen her before. She confirmed that she did. "Nice to see you again." "You too." Then she asked to use the bathroom. That was all. That was enough.)

By the time the dryer finishes its work, I'm the last one left in the laundromat. I Usually am on Saturday nights. Everyone else has gone wherever they need to go. I unload the dryers. The load from the washer that didn't drain properly is still damp. Doesn't matter. Can spread the sweaters and undies out on the chest in the kitchen and let them air-dry. The Girlish Girls won't sleep on them. They much prefer sleeping on me.

I load the shopping cart up again, this time with folded, clean clothing, shirts on top (to be hung in the closet as soon as I get home). I cross the busy street quickly, but carefully. Once dropped a pile of clean dress shirts on the dotted line down the middle of the road. Scooped the shirts up and made the sidewalk just as headlights approached fast from the west. They weren't slowing down, either. Would be stupid to get killed over clean laundry. People have died for less. I'd rather not. Not just yet. Not for this.

I turn down my alley and take the tennis ball out of the bag. Cock my pitching arm back. Wait for sounds in the dark from either side. Been rats here lately. Big rats. First time in all the years I've lived in this neighborhood that I've seen rats. Racoons? Sure. Rabbits? Absolutely. Possums? You betcha.

But rats? Never. No movement tonight. Nothing zipping across cracked asphalt. Like the tennis ball would do much good anyway. Just an attention getter. Rats are strange. Sometimes they run away when they see lights or hear human footfalls. Sometimes they run toward the sound. Once, a rat dashed across Dearborn Street near Daley Center Plaza, ran right up to my feet, turned around, ran all the way back, vanished down the sewer. No rhyme. No reason. Just did what it wanted. I could learn a thing or two there.

Back home. Hang the shirts in the closet. Spread out the damp clothes on any open surface. Pet the girls. Settle in for SNL. (Mmmm...Tina Fey.) Not much to laugh about. On the TV or otherwise. But at least for the moment, La Casa is filled with the scent of fresh, clean clothing. There are worse things to smell on a Saturday night. And better, too.

Of Possums and Procrastinators

Anyone who has visited this site on even a most casual basis has probably figured out that I like taking pictures. How and why I started carrying a Canon AE-1 everywhere I go and snapping shots of whatever grabbed my eye at any given moment is not the story I tell today--some other time, maybe. No, today's story has more to do with what I don't do and should do than with what I actually do.

Because even though I love taking pictures and showing them off like a mother putting her newborn on display for the cooing masses, I'm lazy as hell when it comes to getting my film developed. This, I fear, is because, as a college student and, subsequently and presumably, an adult, I was and am a master procrastinator. If it can be put off, it will be. I once wrote three term papers in one night, turned them in to the respective instructors the following day, turned right around and went back home, where I slept for about 18 hours. So it has always been, and though I'm not nearly as bad as I used to be (in a lot of respects, not just this one), the habit still manifests itself in various forms--like stockpiling rolls of film like I plan on erecting a pyramid of them in my living room. (Bet that cats would just love that.)

So it came to pass that I'd managed to accumulate more than a dozen rolls of film on the small ledge beneath my living room video collection. This is, by no means, a record for me; I've gotten up to a couple dozen full rolls patiently waiting their turns to reveal their wonders--or horrors--to my sometimes-brown eyes. And I must admit, this process (if you can even call it a "process," since that word implies something structured or planned or even regulated in some half-assed way) can be a kick. Grabbing a handful of rolls--and my hands are pretty damn big, so that can mean a lot pictures and, consequently, money--and getting developed can yield great surprises, usually of the "Oh man, I don't even fucking remember taking this shot!" variety.

Once, while cleaning one of my closets--okay, I wasn't actually cleaning it, unless you want to define "cleaning" loosely enough to include digging through the heaps of action figures, video tapes and long-fallen wire hangers to find one particular thing that, more than likely, I never found anyway--I ran across my first camera, a boxy little Kodak that took 126 film, which came in bulky, awkward cartridges and which, to my knowledge, isn't even manufactured anymore (though the smaller, similar 110 film can still be found in most drugstores). I'd finished the roll, set the camera aside--and forgotten it completely. I wasn't even sure I could get the damn thing developed. But I took it to Osco and, sure enough, they were able to process the film and return to me a set of prints. The pictures weren't of anything extraordinary and would likely have just been looked at once, shrugged over and shoved in a drawer, never to be contemplated again.

But now, years after they'd been taken, these shots, mundane as they were, fascinated me. The pictures on this roll had been taken about five years earlier, when I was still living with my parents in Ukrainian Village. Damn. I had taken these shots, packed the camera with me when I moved, thrown the camera in the closet and forgotten all about it. But now the square little color shots were in my hands, recalling a a time in my life that wasn't necessarily better or worse than my life was the day I got the pictures back, but somehow remote, alien...just different. Some of the occasions portrayed were obvious--a chocolate cake, a stiff-backed pose and a glazed, reluctant smile I'd seen staring back at me from countless photographs could only have been from some past birthday. Other shots were more difficult to place in the timestream: kitties who'd long since passed away; roses in my mother's garden; the vivid hues of a now-forgotten sunset. It was like I was looking at someone else's life, even though the signposts of my past were visible all over these shots and I must have been the one who'd taken most of them (except for the birthday shots--only my mother could coax that particular fixed stare onto my face).

So, with the intent of, at the very least, culling the herd, I took six rolls to a camera shop downtown and dropped them off for pickup the next day at the same time. None of these rolls were nearly as ancient as the roll described above--the oldest couldn't have dated further back than, say, last September. But the fact that I'd accumulated that many rolls over such a span of time sent my imagination off and running. What would I find in the pictures I got back? Christmas decorations along Michigan Avenue? A sojourn among the ruins of Riverview Park? Lottie and Ms. Christopher contorted into seemingly impossible shapes? Some bizarre self-portrait?

At this point, allow me to direct your attention to the upper left-hand corner of this page, just in case you hadn't already glance up there and recoiled in horror. You know, the place where you'd usually find a cute kitty picture or a kitchy bar sign or a seasonal trifle. Go on. Take a look. What do you see?

That's right. It's an opossum, or "possum" for shory. A particularly pissed-off possum at that.

I'd just about forgotten this scary fucker. I had other pictures of him (her? it?) taken with a 110 camera Mom had given me one Christmas when I unwisely requested a simple point-and-click camera that I could pull out of my pocket and use anywhere, anytime, and thus wound up with this clunky little thing that was, maybe, one step removed from that Kodak 126 she'd bought me 25 years earlier. But I'd forgotten about the black-and-white shots I'd taken right afterwards, getting as close to the critter as I felt I safely could without risking having it charge me in a fit of camera flash-induced rage. (I had no idea how fast possums could really move, but I had no burning desire to find out.)

It was just before Halloween (which I know only because some shots from my apartment decorations for the annual Halloween Movie Bash JB and I usually host, like the nearly life-sized Bruce Campbell action figure at the right, were on the same roll), and the particular possum had trundled all the way up my back stairs and was rooting around on my porch. Now, this was unusual, but not unheard of--my neighborhood is host to various creatures one would not think of as being urban dwellers, like raccoons, rabbits and, obviously, possums.

But it was quite a surprise to find one of the little buggers making the substantial effort to walk up three stories just to find nothing of interest. It moved slowly, but quietly--I'd never have know it was there at all if not for the fact that the Girlish Girls, both of whom are relatively placid, relatively lazy balls of fur, transformed into tumbleweeds of rage, their tails inflated to several times their normal size as if someone had hooked the Girls up to jumper cables and switched on the juice. Oh, that and the fact that their loud, yowling protests against the invader on their porch made a sound similar to what I imagine World War III will sound like when it finally breaks out.

So there it was. A possum. On my top step. Checking out the view. And Lottie and Ms. Christopher were charging the door and making remarkably effective attempts to launch themselves at the screen door in an effort to defend their turf. Eventually, either one of them would succeed and wind up tangling with a wild animal that could have any number of diseases or, more likely, they'd wind up hurting themselves or getting splinters or ripping down the screen or some such thing. So the possum had to go. Um, right. Like, exactly how?

My first thought had some logic to it. The Girls hated getting shot with the water bottle; that usually made them run for the figurative hills. So why wouldn't the possum react the same way? Maybe because it's a possum, not a cat: it blinked at the first shot and the second, but stood there resolutely as I pumped what must have been twenty shots of water at the hearty, determined little beasty. Okay, that was a huge success, not. So what next? Where logic failed, perhaps technology might succeed. That's where the cameras came it. I mean, people who actually pose for pictures don't like flashes directed at them, so why would the possum?

Obviously, it didn't care for the flash one bit. After a couple of shots, its mouth opened into the soundless hiss you see above and started to turn--toward me, not away. I backed up the stairs slowly. It didn't follow, but it didn't leave, either. Sometimes, it takes doing something--or several somethings--stupid to get around to doing something smart. Why had the possum climbed three flights of stairs? To play with my shamrocks? To piss off my cats? To help me set up Halloween decorations? To be a Halloween decoration? No. It was just hungry. I threw it the ends of a loaf of Brownberry Oatnut Bread and closed the inside door. When I checked again about half an hour later, there was no possum--and no bread. Not a single crumb. The porch had been licked clean.

The possum hasn't come back since. And, considering the, um, hospitality I showed it upon its last visit, I can't say I blame it. But I'll always have the shot you see above. I'll always have that moment, frozen in time, and all of the ridiculous memories and emotions that the shot recalls. And most of the shots you see on this site carry similar loads. Each one has a story, a memory, a set of memories, a smile or a wince of recognition. And I still have pile of rolls--smaller than before, but still more substantial than it ought to be. More smiles and winces to come.

I can't wait.