The washing machine at my house was only four years old when it broke. As usual, it was my fault, as the repairman said I shouldn’t wash any thick, puffy comforters in it. Apparently, I strained the washer’s capacity, or insulted its integrity, by throwing in that huge comforter, the one the cats insist on puking on. The comforter is mainly cream color, so you can imagine the job the cats do.  Regardless, the washer retaliated by blowing up its water pump. 

All the laundry came out sopping wet that day, and the comforter felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. I had to drag that monster of fabric across my kitchen floor out to the patio and throw it over the balcony to dry. 

Two days later, a repairman discovered the blown-up pump. He walked outside to get the part from his truck but returned empty-handed.  “I thought I had the pump, but it turns out the one for this machine isn’t standard.” Of course it isn’t, I thought, nothing about this house or me is ever “standard.” It’s always off, weird, a little twisted. I don’t make many smart purchases, so is it a surprise that my appliances don’t fit the status quo?  The repairman said he would order a custom water pump and expected it would arrive in a few days.  

A whole week passed and then a weekend. I had nineteen pounds of laundry – I know this because I took it to a wash, dry, and fold dry cleaner who weighed it and told me it would cost $50 to wash, dry, and fold.  I told him that was too much money. I did the math in my head and realized I needed to pick out four outfits for work. I could reuse a towel for more than one shower if I had to. I could do those things! I could wait a few more days for the water pump. No problem.   

When the part still didn’t arrive days later, I had a problem. Nearly two weeks had gone by, and I was running out of clothes and towels. So I dragged two green garbage bags with what must now be 25 pounds of clothes, towels and comforters, to my car. I was forced to find a laundromat. It had been decades since I’d been to one. I’d read you could drag home bedbugs from such a place. This caused outsized anxiety for me. I was convinced this would happen to me, the way I am convinced every illness will kill me. Still, I’d had a friend whose house was infested with bedbugs, and she’d had to literally dump everything inside her house outside to be cleaned, so I wasn’t being totally neurotic. But this day I was desperate for clean clothes and towels, and I took the risk. 

I found a laundromat that had very few people in it on a Saturday morning and thought I was lucky. It didn’t occur to me to ask myself why there were so few people. I didn’t know what I was doing. First, I threw my dirty laundry into a dryer, because I thought it was a washing machine, the front-loading kind with a big glass bubble on the door. Where do you put the soap? I saw no place for the soap. And where do you put in the coins to start it up? I asked a guy who didn’t speak English, I kept asking him, and he looked at me like I was insane. He kept backing up away from me.

As I said, the place wasn’t very busy but there were a few women there, one had a teenage son and another had a husband. A small family also arrived. They appeared to know exactly what they were doing. I imagined they come here all the time. This led me to the thought that they didn’t have washers and dryers, not even broken ones, which led me to the thought that perhaps I was privileged, even if my appliances were broken.  Fleeting thoughts, you know, and soon I was distracted as I needed to figure out which actual washing machine to use and how to pay for this.  

Did you know laundromats don’t take coins anymore? At least not the one I visited. No, you enter cash into a machine (not even credit cards), and the machine adds funds to a laundry card, which you can’t use anywhere except at this particular laundromat.  How clever and infuriating of them to reel you in and hook you to their establishment, so long as funds remain on that card. The laundromat no longer costs a quarter or fifty cents either. Depending on the size of the machine you choose, it can be seven or eight dollars, just for the wash. Also, in this newfangled laundromat, there is no manager, no staff. If you have a problem, you call an 800 number. 

Once I had my finances in order, my laundry card full, I was so paranoid about the “bed bug” issue, I became anxious and klutzy and dropped a good portion of my laundry onto the floor as I was unloading it from the dryer to move to the washing machines. So much for avoiding potential bedbugs. I have been known, many a time, to defeat my own purpose. I chose two washing machines to fill with my clothes and towels. In a half an hour the laundry was done. As I removed my items, I realized everything was sopping wet, just as it was when I used the broken washing machine at home. The laundromat washing machines were broken, too? Did I not set it right? Did I miss the spin cycle?   

Quite pissed, I dragged that sopping wet laundry in the two green garbage bags, over to the tiny, little dryers. I filled up multiple dryers and they kept stopping after seven minutes. I couldn’t figure out how to get the dryers to stay on for longer. I had to keep filling up the frigging laundry card with more money. Eventually, the laundry came out of the dryer “dry-ish.” 

I wish I could say this was the end of my adventures in laundry, but it dragged on, much like this blog post. To make this long story a little shorter, let’s say my washer at home was fixed, but it turned out my dryer was also not working. The dryer was less than six months old, but it dried nothing, as it turns out, even when the wash came out of the washing machine fully spun and partially dry.  

On a second trip to the laundromat, I hauled semi-wet clothes and towels, approximate weight, well over 50 pounds, back to that overpriced, poorly managed laundromat establishment. I still had money on my laundry card, as the last time I was there, when needing another $7, I only had a $20 bill that I had to feed to the laundry card machine. I had a $17 credit, so I was back at this hell-forsaken place with broken laundry machines and frightening gunk lodged between them, not to mention the caked over soap dispensers. While the laundromat no longer takes coins, it does still sell powdered laundry detergent in those small, square boxes: Tide, All, Gain, something generic, all overpriced. In any case, I was there just there to use the dryers. 

Again, there were not many people there, maybe four or five. There was a man who came in while I was loading my clothes into the dryers. He walked to the back of the building and sat down where people wait for their laundry to finish. I didn’t see him use a washer or dryer, but I thought maybe he was with one of the few women or families that had come in and was just waiting on them. 

I’d finally figured out how to get the dryers to run for more than seven minutes at a time. I was staring and obsessed with the spinning laundry and lost track of my surroundings. Eventually, I looked around. I thought I might sit down while I waited for the laundry to dry. I headed toward the back where the man sat but stopped suddenly, startled. The man was no longer sitting but was completely slumped over with his head over his knees almost to the floor, one hand touching the floor, the other hand also pointing toward the floor, clutching what may have been car keys.  

Was he drunk? I took a few steps closer, but not too close. I watched him for several seconds. Nothing moved, nothing at all, not his head, not his arms, not his hands, not his legs, not his feet, not even a twitch. The one hand continued to clutch those keys. Still no movement. I don’t think he was breathing, but I couldn’t be sure.  No one else in the laundromat seemed to notice him.  I turned back toward my dryers, but every so often I glanced at him. Would a very drunk person be that motionless? Not a twitch? I still saw no signs of breathing, but I was a bit far away. His stillness unnerved me.  

Again, I turned back to the dryers. But now I could not stop checking on the man. Honestly, he looked dead. Not a rustle or an obvious breath. 

I decided to call the police.  

“There’s a guy sitting in the back of the laundromat in the Price Rite Plaza. I think he’s dead. Maybe he’s drunk, but he looks dead.” The police told me they were familiar with the “individual” and would be right over. 

I loaded my laundry into the green garbage bags and took them out to the car. While I was doing so, two police cruisers pulled into the parking lot. I did not wait to speak with them. I didn’t want to get caught up in whatever was going on. I did the bare minimum to help that man. I drove away, and when I turned the corner an ambulance with siren wailing, was on the way. The poor guy was probably dead. 

There are people who live without washer and dryers. They understand the laundromat, wash and dry their clothes there, live and die there. They know where and when to add the detergent, how to get the most out of the machines and how to get the dryers to stay on for more than seven minutes at a time.  And then there are people like me, who have a washer and dryer at home, who expect these machines to work for us, but sometimes the machines break. We end up at the laundromat and don’t know what we are doing. This is a sometimes thing for us, and the hope is not to live and die at such a place. Be grateful for your washer and dryer. Be grateful for your life.