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.
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