by Lauren Rickert

Created on: January 30, 2008

A Day in the Laundromat

A boy, of maybe two or three, is whizzing around the commercial load dryerspast the mid-century vending machines and around the stacks of expired Weekly World News, launching tiny fistfuls of grease-soaked hamburger wrappers and shredded packets of ketchup into an overflowing garbage can. He's screaming "Throw away trash! Throw away trash!" It sounds delightfully normal to him, but exactly like "Poor white trash!" to everyone else. It's as if he's citing a mass autobiography. His parents shrug with embarrassment and I chucklestruggling to free a foreign, hairy sock from the inside of my dripping, April Fresh sweatshirt.

I am at the Laundromat. Little children with no pants are throwing themselves onto the ground, abhorred with the idea that they cannot, in fact, have another bag of candy covered chocolates. The older ones take turns hurling sweaty, lint-covered rubber balls at bare ankles, three-legged strollers and steaming cups of stale coffee. A large woman, clearly having consumed 27 cups of the aforementioned stale coffee, rapidly fires obscenities into the detergent receptacle atop the washing machine. It's gurgling and sputtering, her powdered detergent caked to the side of it like a barnacle.

I've taken my clothes out of the archaic, metal tub and tossed them haphazardly into an archaic, metal crate (made mobile by bum steering and rusted miniature wheels). And despite having been suffocated by my desperate surroundings, I'm feeling contentswell, even. I roll my handy little cart over to the dryer and pile them in, longing for the steam to illuminate the oily fingerprints dotting the industrial plastic. I slide my LaundroCard through the slot and press the timer40 minutes. I turn to catch a squint of the Ricki Lake show and my clothes start tumblingaround and around, inside the lower dryer. My clothes are in the upper dryer. I struggle to open the door to the one already running. The sign, (tainted with a sticker featuring Calvinsans Hobbsurinating on a Ford logo) reads: 'Door will Only Open when Time Runs out.' I sigh with exasperation, beads of sweat beginning to form near my hairline. It's hot in the Laundromat. I slide my card through the reader in the upper dryer and wait for a friendly bleep. A bleachy, waxed woman walks toward me with determined, lumbering force; she is eager to nab the only other unoccupied dryer. She's about 50 and smells of menthol cigarettes, cheap shampoo and warm Busch Light. Her tapered, acid-wash

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