Dirty

Working the night shift at the Khaleel’s Suds-to-Duds provided a paycheck, and that’s about it. Not that the job didn’t have benefits. It did. Kind of. They amounted to a hill of beans. With no sauce. Served lukewarm. But it came with unlimited laundry time, and a beer. Or two. Seven?

Could I have done better? Sure. I’m in my fifties, and I’ve got the education—which I’ll be paying for until the day I die regardless of the paycheck—a lifetime of experience, and I’m not completely devoid of skills. Or charm. But, hey, I’m a card-carrying member of the slacker generation, right? Or was that Boomer? Gen-X? I can never keep them straight. At least I’m not living in my mother’s basement. I don’t even remember my mother, and dear old dad never had a basement.

If I’m being honest, though, It’s not the benefits that keep me clocking in. It ain’t the paycheck that’s always spent before it arrives. And it sure as hell is not the laundry-detergent-smelling, sudsy swill they serve on tap.

It’s machine number fifty-three—a 1968 Speed-E-Kleen Commercial Deluxe Model 3 Two-in-One. I’ve only ever read the full name in the trade publications, in ads devoted to hobbyists looking to restore retro tech. Coated in brilliant aqua blue enamel as flawless as the day it rolled off the assembly line, the combination washer and dryer, with its retro-futurist logo and real chrome trim, stands out in sharp contrast to the rows of utilitarian gray boxes.

More accurately, it’s the woman who comes in every night (every morning?) at 3:47 a.m. to use that machine. She has the harried look of a housewife who thinks of slipping away to the laundromat as free time. There's a Stephen King novel resting on top of her mound of dirty clothes next to a child’s lunchbox thermos and a hand-pie of some sort wrapped in grease-spotted brown paper.

Her face is gray, as are her clothes, but that must be the fluorescent lights, as her hair is golden, and there’s a certainty in her step not associated with gray … with age. It’s apparent in the way she swings the cheap wicker basket on her hip out in front of her before hoisting it onto the Con-Tact paper-covered table. In the way she removes her goodies, setting them to the side, before shoveling armloads of soiled clothing into the Speed-E-Kleen.

I wonder if the glint I see is the true color of her eyes or a cruel reflection of the machine’s finish. She never approaches the bar, so I never see more than that. And I never approach her. Instead, I pretend to stare at the big-screen TV across the room. On occasion, I’ll muster a ‘hurrah’ if the local team scores a… score-thing as they’re playing the game of the week. Or season. Sportsball of some kind. Sometimes a car race. But no matter what’s on the tube, my eyes are surreptitiously on her.

Or my notebook. I’ve sketched her.

I should approach her. There’s so much I want to tell her. Not just that bringing in food and beverages is against the rules, or that the other machines are more efficient. So many things. But I don’t. I sit behind the bar and stare helplessly. Every night.

Her routine never varies. After unloading the basket, she fishes in her purse for a roll of quarters and unwraps the top enough to extract three for the machine. With them standing on their edge in the slot, she shoves them in before reaching for her box of detergent. Even across a room filled with humming, sloshing machines, I can hear the coins tinkle and clink as they drop into the box.

She uses Breeze detergent. I had to look it up on Google. If it had been Tide, Cheer, All, or Dreft, I could’ve just ignored it, but Breeze … that stuck in my head. Turns out they stopped making it in the mid-eighties. Talk about stocking up! She must’ve bought out the store—every store—when they folded, as she opens a fresh box and pulls out another one of the gimmicky free tea towels each time.

My father had a bunch of them. He used them as grease rags in the garage, or, torn into smaller sizes, he carried them in his back pocket and called them ‘snot rags.’ If I had known where they came from, I might’ve asked him to be a little more gentle. Not that he was gentle with anything else.

A commotion forces me to tear my eyes away. The bell over the door jangles discordantly with the electric-eye Khaleel insisted on keeping. Three men, bums by the look and smell, entered. They’re older with unkempt beards, long, stringy hair, and clothes so stiff they crackle.

Their leader, the one wearing a felt hat that might have been a fedora at one point, or maybe a porkpie, tells a joke as they move to a side table.

“So, I’m seeing this shrink, right, and she asks me, she says, ‘How’s your sex life?‘“

Already, his friends are laughing in anticipation of the punchline, and one of them flashes me a yellowed smile, raising three fingers and pointing at the table.

The boss made it crystal clear. “Jimmy, I don’t care if they stink. If they’re spending, let them stink. I don’t pay you to sniff the customers, just serve them. Make change, sell fabric softener, sell beer.” Although it pains me to look away from the woman—she’s opened up the book, a pressed flower bookmark—I take three mugs from the chiller and start pulling the beers.

“And I says, Doc, it’s in fits and spurts. And she asks me what’d I mean. I don’t understand.” His voice rises in pitch to a tremulous falsetto, both insulting and painful to listen to. “So I tells her, if it fits, it spurts.”

Their laughter is loud.

Embarrassed by proxy, I look at her. Should I apologize on behalf of the management for their behavior? Tasteless. She’s reclined in the chair with one foot folded under and the other stretched out, and she’s adept at ignoring them. And me.

Still, it’d be only right if I threw the smelly, old bastards right back out the door and suggested they wash their stinking mouths out. Especially when in the presence of a lady!

So I set the mugs down and accepted their grubby, wrinkled seven dollars and fifty cents—three one-dollar bills, one two-dollar bill, and two quarters stuck together slightly off center, and no tip—because behavior like that would land me on the street shortly thereafter. No more free beer. No more 3:47 a.m. visitor.

I hope they didn’t hear my sigh over their gulping and belching. I hope she didn’t hear the defeat it contained. And, please, I prayed silently as I returned to the bar, please don’t miss the toilet. Again.

My father would not have hesitated to defend her honor. Bare-knuckle. Brutal. I felt compelled to exceed that. To find a way to convince and persuade without fists and belts. To use words. Law. Ha ha. From Bar to bar.

I suppose that’s why he never told me much about my mother. Even in her absence, Dad defended her.

“Stepped out to do what she should’ve done while I was working,” he’d start, and then pause. The duration of the pause had a surprising correlation to the level remaining in the half-pint of gin he finished every night. The answer never changed, but I’d learned to time the question. Still hoping for answers. Still getting, “No. Just lost her way. She’ll be along eventually. You’ll find her. You’ll see.”

I tried, Dad. Forty-seven years.

If only I had remembered more of my childhood. Not the after. The after I remember vividly. The before. A scent. They say, I read, researched, that scent is the first thing that gets imprinted in memory, and I wonder what Breeze smells like. Nose blind. Not deaf, though. I remember her voice as it soothed me at night. The woman never speaks. Not to me.

The machine dings, and she looks at her watch, back at the book, and then at the machine, surprised at the passage of time. The book is placed face down, but gently, reverently, on the seat beside her. I wish I could see the title, but King’s name takes up most of the spine and the back is just a picture of the man with dark hair and dorky glasses. Maybe she read it aloud to her child. Maybe I could read along with her. If I had known the title.

A corner of the pie has been nibbled away, and its wrapper left open. A fat, round blueberry made a valiant escape attempt, leaving an unfortunate trail of blue, no, darker gray dots down her shirt. Each dot is a different shape and size, and they ooze into the fabric. I could sell her the right stain treatment and a T-shirt. If only she’d come over.

Her shoulders slump when she sees it, and she shakes her head. The golden curls are lofty and wonderful. Bouncy. Or I’m sure it would have been. Before her day. Or is this just the end of the last one? Instead, it is limp and lifeless.

I prefer the fiction. Even if I created it myself. I think.

The drunkards stand, patting themselves down for more change, tossing the dirty coins and pocket lint onto the table to count. The table-wipe bucket is cold and slimy. I dumped it in anticipation of their departure, filling it again with hot water and a dash of sterilizer. Before I turn to the cooler to set out another beer mug, in case they scrounge up $2.50 for a shared mug of swill, I grab the spray bottle and a fresh rag. Generic cotton, not floral-patterned from Breeze Detergent.

She removed the shirts, slightly damp, and, slipping bent hangers into the sleeves, buttoning the top button, hung them from the laundry cart’s arm to dry with fewer wrinkles. The look on her face tells me it’s a thoughtful gesture, but I wonder if it’s for him—I can’t picture her wearing chambray denim work shirts—or her, avoiding the chore of ironing.

The door jingle-screeches again, but it’s the drunks leaving. The table is a mess. They’ve taken the coins, but left the lint. I’ll mop the bathrooms after I work on the table. It will have to be fast. Not so fast Khaleel will have a reason to fire me, but fast enough she’ll still be here when I’m done.

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared, and I made it back in time to watch her fold the clothes. She tucked the socks together, rolling them into a ball. Some were large and looked scratchy where they weren’t threadbare. The others were smaller. Cartoon characters I couldn’t make out paraded around the elasticized cuffs. The jeans, large and small, patched and new, were folded once lengthwise before being drape-flipped over her arm twice and dropped into the basket next to the T-shirts. It amazed me she never toppled one pile while adding to the other.

The bell rings again. This time it’s Khaleel. Why he insists on coming in an hour before his shift starts, why he ruins these last few minutes every night, both confounds and infuriates me. But it is his establishment, and he doesn’t ask me to leave early. Instead, he makes a beeline for the restroom. I smile, knowing he’ll find nothing wrong.

“Khaleel?” I asked when he came back out, a smile plastered on his perpetually oily face. “What was this space when you bought it?”

“A laundromat. It has always been a laundry.” He gestures around the space, bobbing his head, making the ridiculous jheri curls he sports bounce. “When the other chain collapsed, I said to my brother, may his soul rest in peace, this is our chance.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother. You have my sympathies.”

“No, no, no,” he laughed. “He did not want to serve the beer. I did not make that change until after his passing. Had it been his wishes you followed, you would stare at the walls all night and pray for morning. Very sad, no?”

“I suppose. So these machines… they came with the building?”

“The antiques they had in here? No. Most of them did not work. It was cheaper to replace them all than to repair even one, even if they were very much more colorful. But you’re very curious this morning. Were there problems? What are you not telling me, Jimmy?”

“Oh, no. Nothing.” I look at the woman as she drains the thermos—Snoopy dances on the side of it, arms and ears spread wide and feet a blur. She drops it into the basket where it joins the book, the folded laundry, the Breeze. I note that she’s thrown the brown paper wrapper in the trash already, and I smile. “Relatively quiet evening. A couple drunks. You know.”

She drapes the shirts, their hangers carefully tucked under to prevent snagging, over the top of the basket and slides it onto her hip. Then she turns to the door and takes a deep breath, steeling herself before stepping off.

“What color?”

“What?” Khaleel’s eyebrows rose, and were it not for the furrows, they might have merged with the hairline.

“The old washing machines. You said they were colorful.”

“Ugh, yes. Bright sky blue. Far too cheerful for a laundromat.”

She walks through the door. The bell does not ring. The eye doesn’t screech.

“Why do you ask?”

The back wall is a bank of dented, gray washers. And on the television, the red car just passed the blue car on an outside turn with the green car in hot pursuit. I glance at the notebook. A newspaper clipping dated 1974 rests on top. 5 a.m. Drive by shooting. One death. Never solved.

“No reason. Just curious.” I close the notebook. “See you tonight?”

“Yeah. Go home. Sleep. Good night.”

“Morning.”

“Whatever.”