I’ve been living in a rental house, a small cottage in Sherman Oaks, California since August. With its white tongue and groove walls and high beamed ceilings, it’s as cute as could be. It’s also nestled among lush foliage of all shapes, sizes, and delicious smells. Fig trees, climbing jasmine, angel trumpet, and good old fashioned roses. There’s even a rose bush that grows like a tree! But for all the attributes of our little diamond in the lush, it doesn’t have a washer/dryer. It has a washer/dryer hookup, but no washer/dryer. Rather than buy a brand new set to install in a rental with an uncertain future, my husband and I decided to use existing washers and dryers at a local laundromat.
I have been schlepping multiple loads of laundry into my car and then into a laundromat in the valley every week to two weeks. Prior to this new routine, I hadn’t used coin laundry since college and can’t remember the last time I put a quarter in anything, not a gum ball or pinball machine, not a plastic cup at a party, not even my wallet.
To prepare for the venture, I make a pitstop at an ATM, usually the one at the neighboring gas station, careful not to buy bitcoin at the nearly identical adjacent machine. To avoid crowds and a gnarly parking lot, I only go during the week.
I arrive to the smell of dryer sheets and a symphony of spinning, the foomp-foomp of dryers and the swish-swish of washers, and sometimes the high-pitched sound of the final spin cycle. With so much spinning, it’s a bit like stepping into my own restless brain. I’m welcomed by a chatty supervisor. She’s carefully folding someone else's' linens (the Fluff ‘n Fold service) and packaging them flawlessly in a clear plastic bag. I set down my first load, this one in an overstuffed laundry basket I can wrap my arms around. I help myself to a peppermint candy from the dish on her counter, not the round starlight ones, but the chewier kind that melts in your mouth. And I’m sucking on it when I flatten out my twenty dollar bill and set it in front of the “insert here” slot. For a second, I’m ten years old at an arcade, unfolding the bent corner of a flimsy dollar bill. I wait for the “slurp”, hope the machine deems the bill tasty enough to keep and doesn’t spit it back out. I feel a strange satisfaction when the bill is accepted, some layer of my being registers the machine’s acceptance as an iteration of personal acceptance. I feel similarly at the grocery store when the credit card machine says, “Approved”. This can’t be healthy, but I’ll take the positive feedback wherever I can get it. My success is marked by the clickity-clank of a rush of quarters converging in the metal receptacle, bringing with them another wave of nostalgia–man I loved Skeeball.
The washing machines are anywhere from $3.50 to $7.50 a load depending on their size. My average load of linens takes eighteen quarters, I add an extra 50 cents for the ultra cycle—I can’t help it. It’s the laundromat’s version of an impulse buy. Don’t I want my clothes that much cleaner? Ultra clean? Who wouldn’t want that? Eighteen quarters translates to a full minute of inserting one quarter at a time just to start the machine. I twist open the lid of the old Talenti ice cream container where I store the quarters. Then greet this challenge to my patience with a deep cleansing breath and reframe it as a welcome meditation.
I do a number of things while I wait the 26 minutes for the first washing machine, brand-name Speed Queen, to finish. I listen as a couple of grandmas chat in part Spanish, part English and chuckle about their middle school grandkids scouting potential girlfriends. I smile, noting how lightheartedly making fun of later generations is a good time in every language. I usually step outside for a bit and watch the flow of patrons in and out of the local liquor mart (lotto tickets, cigarettes), “under new management”. I peruse the many placards on the interior walls and learn what doesn’t belong in a dryer. (Rubber and plastic articles, ya’ll. They melt!) And I catch up on daytime television with closed captioning subtitles. Daytime television is something I rarely watch having given up cable in favor of streaming and only streaming services. The local news strikes me differently now that it’s no longer a daily routine. And, I get to watch two different channels at the same time. From one I learn that “More than 50% of Americans are worried about skin cancer” and count myself part of the worried fifty. Then I wonder if spending hours of the day reading everything from a teleprompter has a negative impact on the oral language skills of newscasters. From the other screen I catch the weather report—yet again—and ponder how the weather map is a kind of Rorschach inkblot test. Without fail, these colorful visuals with their concentric shapes, accentuate something that looks suspiciously like a flaccid penis or a gaping vagina to me. I particularly enjoy when these features get named, like hurricanes. Ian, for example, not exactly genitalia, but an especially big asshole.
Today, what feels special, is what we have in common—common, community, the origin of the words making a renewed neural connection. Even if what we have in common is that we’re alive. That, and the necessity of a load of laundry.
I watch as a middle-aged woman maneuvers a laundry basket full of small wet rugs over to the dryers while clutching a football-sized dog under one arm and the leash to a chihuahua in the other. Talk about ambition! She takes me up on my offer to help, handing “Bug” over with two hands like an infant with a dirty diaper, and placing the leash for “Chicken” in my other hand. Bug protests, whimpering and squirming, and I deduce that this anxious little nugget may be the reason these rugs are dirty. I would know. I have a “Bug” (and a rug) at home.
For the woman doing the “Fluff ‘n Fold” this seems to be her mainstay, for the rest, it’s a pitstop, maybe even over a lunch break—if you can find the parking. Despite the transient nature of this shared space, I feel a sense of belonging. It’s like Parten’s parallel play, but for the busy adult. I’ve gotten so good at this I can even advise the curly-haired, college-aged woman who asks if she can open the dryer while it’s running. We lug these piles from our private lives—our private parts!—from floors, maybe sidewalks, beds, into the community. They are a reminder that we do a lot alone, but we’re all in this together.
I often think about the desire to be special. Our culture’s obsession with being special. How we tell our children they’re special. And yet in this moment being special feels as consequential as a used dryer sheet in an empty dryer. Today, what feels special, is what we have in common—common, community, the origin of the words making a renewed neural connection. Even if what we have in common is that we’re alive. That, and the necessity of a load of laundry.
I’m moving to a new spot at the end of the month. The new place is more spacious. There’s a view. And a washer and dryer. My stint with the Talenti container full of quarters is over, at least for now. But if I ever want to be a Speed Queen, I know where to go to hammer out five loads of laundry at the same time. And I know I won’t be alone.