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.

Dobranoc

Usually, it takes till Sunday night for the dread of returning to work on Monday to lean its weight on me. But as I walked out of the office Friday at five, that dread lay across my shoulders like a 20-pound cat, claws dug in, strain registering from the base of the skull to the small of the back. I could've used a backrub. I could've used a drink. I couldn't have the former, and I didn't want the latter. So I went out in search of a book instead.

I've been reading a lot lately. Partly because of a wealth of free time, partly because of the need for distraction--from work, from dental woes, from the world in general. I've stopped reading the daily papers--more to save money than to avoid the bad writing and 50-point-type headlines and disquieting news within--and started reading books instead. Good books. Books like The Devil in the White City, which, oddly enough, is not the story of a friend's move to Minneapolis, but the parallel stories of two men from the mists of Chicago history: Daniel Burnham, architect and driving force behind the Columbian Exposition of 1893; and H.H. Holmes, druggist, swindler and serial killer responsible for the murders of numerous young women who came to the city for the excitement of the World's Fair. An excellent read, a compelling narrative, a vivid picture of a past time both wonderful and horrible.

From there, I detoured into classic crime fiction--Raymond Chandler, to be specific. Born in Chicago, raised in England. Didn't publish his first story until he was 45; didn't publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until he was 51. Gives me hope for myself, even if I can never hope to string together darkly beautiful, richly lyrical, witty and menacing, rough and tender words the way Chandler did. I'd spent the past couple weeks slowly enjoying The High Window, and now I wanted more. So I walked to an outlet of a local chain of bookstores, only to find not a single copy of a single one of Chandler's relatively small career output. Now the cat of my shoulders weighed thirty-five pounds and was becoming extremely tiresome, even as a metaphor.

So I walked back, one slow foot before the other, to Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile of song and story, to Virgin Megamondoreallyreallybigstore, which, in addition to a vast selection of vastly overpriced CDs and DVDs, has a respectable selection of books of all flavors. And this night, as it happens, they had a complete run of Chandler novels and short story collections. So I scooped up the novels I didn't already have, paid for them in cash so as not to dig my credit hole any deeper than my dental work has already dug it, and left the store a wallet more light, but also with shoulders ever so slightly less tight.

From there, I headed south on Michigan Avenue in a familiar ritual toward the Loop, where I'd catch the Brown Line at a point where seats were still a possibility, and snake my way north toward home. But as I crossed the bridge over the river, it was obvious that this wasn't a normal night. Not in the least.

There were cops on the other end of the Michigan Avenue bridge. A lot of cops. Maybe a couple dozen, all clustered on the northwest corner of Michigan and Wacker. More cops than I'd seen outside of the confines of a police station or a convenience store. Even in those familiar ernvironments, though, you don't usually see them armored for possible combat the way they were Friday night. Shatterproof visors. Flack jackets. Nightsticks the size of Louisville Sluggers. The works.

They didn't look worked up or tense or aggitated in the least. But I knew what their presence meant: there were war protesters somewhere nearby. The night before, there had been many, many war protesters downtown, and things had gotten out of hand. No violence or damage to property or any such thing, but the throng had flowed forth from the Loop through to Lakeshore Drive, where traffic was halted in both directions. For a couple of hours. At the height of rush hour. Hardly business as usual. Hardly what the expensive suits that run this city like to see. Bad for business. Embarrassing. Unacceptable.

So Friday night, downtown was lousy with cops in riot gear. I danced around the congregation at Michigan and Wacker and went on my way. I can't call my way "merry." My shoulders were tightening right back up. The cat was back.

It wasn't until I was on the train that I noticed fellow passengers craning their necks to look up streets and between buildings, back toward Wacker Drive. There, under the bright yellow street lights, was a solid wall of humanity, surrounded by what appeared to be a thick tangle of lights. When the train made the turn north and passed over Wacker, we all saw up close what we'd known from a distance: there was a long line of war protesters moving west in the eastbound lanes of the drive, the tangle of lights beside them the reflections of the street lights off the helmets of the tight line of police holding the protesters in check.

Some of the protesters no doubt opposed any war, anytime, anywhere. Others no doubt opposed this particular war, lamenting that our current President Bush hadn't "made the case" for starting a new war when the previous "war on terrorism" hadn't been finished yet (or was this war part of that war?). Still others directed their voices at the president himself, accusing him of attempting to settle an old score left over from his father's administration. One man--a tall, beefy guy with a thick brown mustache and a broad, if tight-lipped, smile--flashed a peace sign at the passing train. A few passengers flashed the same sign back

As the train passed over the river and made the turn past the Merchandise Mart, I tried to turn my attention away from the scene now behind me and back to the book in my lap. But The High Window wasn't much of a distraction that night, through no fault of anyone's, least of all Raymond Chandler.

I got off at my stop, walked home quickly, scratched my cap at my lack of mail (had the post office stopped delivering to my building again?) and took the stairs two at a time (that's normal for me--a side effect of having legs half a mile long). Lottie and Ms. Christopher greeted me at the back door.

I'd love to flatter myself with the conceit that they did this out of affection or devotion or lack of human contact, but that's just not the case: the MaxCat Lite in the bowl had gotten old (and had, in truth, hardly been touched), and the Girlish Girls sought fresh kibble. I accomodated them with a couple scoops of Iams dry, threw my mock bomber jacket on the couch and flipped on the TV, just in time to catch the tail end of an NBC report on the war, complete with the images of uprising clouds of fire arising from Baghdad, surrounding that curiously phallic-looking building all the networks showed the first night of the war with a sudden, volitile grove of mushroom clouds, Tom Brokaw's attempts to be smooth and soothing making me miss Walter Cronkite that much more.

The Peacock Network decided, for whatever reason, that it would be inappropriate to run a "reality" show dedicated to finding America's most talented kid and a fresh episode of Ed, so they plugged in a rerun of one of their many "Law & Order" shows instead. Rather than sit there and watch Vincent D'Onorfrio casually munch the scenary, I channel-flipped for something more innocent. I landed on a low-power UHF station that shows a mix of vintage sitcoms and dramas during the day, music videos overnight and ethnic-oriented viewing in between. Friday at eight, they were running a Polish children's program called Dobranocka, on which a fortyish woman in a peasant dress on a set decorated with characters from Winnie the Poo--pictures and stickers and stuffed animals--read a few pages from a Poo story.

The program was short--just under ten minutes--and I understood very little of what she said; Mom speaks Polish more or less fluently, but has shared only a few words of the language with me and has flatly refused to teach me any of the really good curse words. But at the end of the program, the nice lady smiled, slid her right hand into a teddy bear puppet in her lap, and waved at the camera with both the puppet's hands and with her free left hand.

"Dooooobraaaaanoooooc!" said the smiling Polish lady in the peasant dress, waving at the children presumably turning in after hearing their story for the night. Dobranoc (pronounced "do-BRA-notz") is the Polish word for "Good night." That much Polish I know.

But it wasn't a "good night," through no fault at all of the smiling Polish storyteller lady on Dobranocka. Nor was the night before a "good night." Nor was the night after. Nor was tonight. Nor will any night be a "good night" until the fighting and the dying and the "special reports" are over.

I can only hope that's very soon.