Who would expect so many dryers to be a-tumblin’ at 2:30 pm on a somewhat sunny Tuesday afternoon? Not I.
I pushed open the door, my jumbly bags straining my shoulder with their dirty things and the word “F**k” came my way. I don’t care how old I am, that word is still an attention-getter. It came again and again in what sounded like a one-sided conversation between two women. Tears were streaming down the cheeks of the woman on the rapid fire cuss. “How the f**k could he say that about me?” she said. “I never did nothing to him.”
I did not expect to enter into the hornet nest of someone’s life, but this is the Laundromat, people. The buzzing is just below the foamy water. Even if you choose the lengthier two-wash, two-rinse cycle, it’s there. I tend to go at the same time every other early Saturday morning and over the past two years I’ve become comfortable with the buzzing that our little group of semi-regulars make.
We give each other a wave, share newspapers, a little conversation, soap detergent on rare occasions. Marine Guy is the one I’m most familiar with since I see him at the Y nearly every day. We don’t get much past “Hi, how are ya,” but I feel like I know him. I’ve seen him and his stuff go from sweaty to fluffy clean, sometimes all in the same day. I’ve heard him make involuntary noises, or maybe they are voluntary: I’m not a grunting, weight-lifter type at the gym. I know how he folds his socks and underwear. The first time I saw that I came close to rude staring. Luckily, a dryer buzzer went off and snapped me out of it.
Folded underwear. What’s the point of that? Well, over time I got to know and see he has a whole folded underwear mind. He wears gloves when he weight lifts, that’s not so unusual. Then, one day as we were walking up the stairs to the gym, lengthening out that “Hi, how are ya” conversation, he held the door open for me. I noticed he had a clear plastic bag on the hand that was holding the door open. It was a gallon-sized zipper lock bag, unzippered at the wrist. He took it off after he unzipped his trunk-sized gym bag, found his gloves and slipped them on.
After that, I got covered in an avalanche of similar sightings. He wiped down each machine before and after he used them. Twice. That’s four cleansings. He used his own spray cleanser and get this: he brought his own paper towels. These things were in their own plastic bags inside the colossal gym bag. Once I got a sneaky peek inside the gym bag when he was getting a clean cloth towel for his before-and-after body rubdown at each weight machine. It was like looking into a computer rendering of a plastic futuristic city.
I saw him everywhere with that bag. I finally put it together that he went to the Laundromat immediately after each workout and washed and dried his clothes and towels. I wondered if he hand-washed the plastic bags and reused them or threw them out and got new ones each time. I'm sure I never will know.
I also overheard him talking when he was on the treadmill and I was on the Elliptical Crosstrainer a few times. Each time he was talking about germs. He actually was saying the word “germ.” Once he said he just couldn’t face dating anymore because it was too dirty. I thought this was shocking and sad and I was late for the backward part of the crosstraining workout by a few seconds. The guy he was talking to clucked in sympathy but he didn't missed a beat on the treadmill and I never saw him exhibit any of the same cleanliness behavior.
Click for Part Two