It's after 2AM and I am doing laundry. I still think of doing laundry in the home as a special privilege after so many years of laundromats. I can do laundry at any time, day or night. I can launder many things, or a few things. I can hear the buzz of the washer finishing and ignore it until I'm good and ready. Let those clothes stay wet a few minutes longer, I'm not gonna jump just because the kids want to get out of the pool. At long last I come first. Maybe not first, but at least I come before laundry. To be freed of enslavement to laundry is the first step toward having a meaningful life. Hold on now, am I saying that it's impossible for a person who works in a laundromat or a drycleaner to have a meaningful life? Yes I am.

I had to be crafty about choosing a time to do laundry at my laundromat in the so-called "ghetto." I always chose to go on my day off during the week so I could get in there on, say, a Tuesday afternoon. This was a less busy time of a less busy day, which was important because there were many fewer dryers than washers, who knows why, which on busy days meant a lot of standing around with heaps of wet clothes in a wheeled basket until a dryer came free, which meant a lot of tense jockeying for position and strategic timing and hooded looks of suspicion exchanged among the patrons since there was no civilized protocol for such contingencies in such a place, it being more or less a Lord of the Flies situation. So there would be standing around waiting, feeling your life force leaking out of you, tedium mingled with the knowledge of incipient anarchy and the potential for icy confrontations with strangers that could very well explode into violence, all the while aware of the vulnerability of your intimate garments to the scrutiny of these same strangers, your threadbare items possibly inviting scorn and unanimous contempt.

When you are forced to stand around in a neighborhood like mine, trouble of one sort or another is guaranteed to find you and either involve you directly in its business or make you a witness to something horrible and/or dreadful in someone else's. Such a neighborhood is best negotiated with constant motion of a purposeful nature, or the appearance of such. To idle is to draw the attention of the forces of chaos and malevolence.

At my laundromat, you never just blindly threw your clothes into the washer. You had to very thoroughly inspect the machine first for detritus such as living or dead cockroaches, encrusted detergent, coins, buttons, lengths of thread, socks, underpants, men's sleeveless wifebeater undershirts, and other miscellaneous items and substances from which it was reasonable to recoil in disgust. Once I found an amber bottle of prescription medication belonging to someone named Dorothy. I thought of Judy Garland and her lifelong addiction to various prescription drugs and her stunning rendition of "The Man That Got Away" at her triumphant Carnegie Hall performance on the night of April 23rd, 1961.