Laundro-Love

The Laundromat--like food delivery and the radiator--is an unfamiliar concept for me, which makes me sound quite naïve. Wherever I've lived, there have always been washing machines (like the free one at home and the quarter-munchers in college) or a place (be it a sink or a creek) to hand-wash garments. To be fair, there is a laundry facility in the basement, but I deduced from the terror-stricken face my roommate wore whenever she mentioned it that it was more a place to be murdered than to wash clothes. In comparison, descending into the asbestos-filled basement laundry facility at University #1 seems like a cakewalk.

Okay, I chickened out this time. But in my defense, the bright morning beckoned me outdoors, saying, "Come, take up thy laundry and follow me to the laundromat." I obeyed.

What I found was a sort of alternate universe I hadn’t been expecting. It was pristine. It was bright. It was orderly. There were wall-mounted machines that obligingly doled out boxes of soap as if they were candy, and dozens of easy-to-follow signs that gently held the hands of the uninitiated all the way through the process of completing a mindless domestic chore in a public place. I was a little awestruck by Godliness embodied through Cleanliness, and I paced around the room slowly and deliberately to make sure everything was real. On the way, I ran into other first-timers, identifiable because they looked as dumbfounded as I did. “First time here?” I asked them. They blinked, leaving their own daze for a moment to nod and murmur a wide-eyed “yeah.”

I found myself in a laundromat last year (not to wash anything, strangely), and while that one also was very tidy and well-managed, this one was plain unearthly. And it was expensive. First, one must purchase a charge card: $2. Then, $3.25 per load in an 18-lb washer (I used two), plus 75 cents per box of powdered detergent (I bought two, because my 3-liter jug of liquid detergent was too much dead weight to carry). Dryers charge 25 cents per 5-minute interval (I dried for 30 minutes; therefore, I spent $1.50 to dry). Total cost of clean clothes: $11.50. In hindsight, that's actually not so bad for this neighborhood. A modest restaurant lunch could cost you around $15 here. A meal only lasts a few hours, while clean clothes last you for a week or more.

And it's a small price to pay to avoid being murdered and stand next to Godliness while you wash your underwear.