This is a song they call the Laundromat Blues

Not having washed any of my clothes for twenty-two days, on a dull Sunday in June some year in the early nineties, I bundled up in my netted nylon hamper bag my fragrant everythings and set off, with the bag over my right shoulder, across two streets, kitty-corner, to the neighbourhood laundromat, which had no name other than LAUNDROMAT, and probably still doesn't. Two women had preceded me into it, both being older women, probably Italian, which it was safe to guess, seeing as pretty much half the neighbourhood was Italian-Canadian. I loaded up a machine and pumped five quarters into it to start it up, opened up whatever book I was reading at the time, almost definitely a novel of some sort or another, possibly by William Faulkner, and read some five pages. When I looked up from the book, I noticed a girl about my age loading up the machine two machines away from my machine, all in a single bundle, as if they were the only clothes she owned; she dug into the pocket of her skirt--yes, she was wearing a skirt, and her skirt had pockets--and pulled out a small handful of change, and put three quarters in the machine. Then she looked around as if in search of something, spotted me--her face was expressionless--and came over. She said: "I think I have to have more quarters. Is there a place around here I can get more quarters? I don't see a change machine. Why's that?"

I looked again at her skirt and noticed there was a small tear in it along the seam in the left side, which I realized with something of an epiphany of course it was torn, just as the trousers I was wearing had holes in them down at the bottom cuffs that had gotten there because of bicycle accidents, and thus we were both wearing what could best be called 'laundry clothes,' that is to say we were dressed as badly as could be because we'd run out of everything else; her shirt had a stain on it under her right breast, a red stain, perhaps from wine, and her socks didn't match, and mine barely matched too, and we like a pair of hoboes, and yet, I liked how she looked, and I liked that she seemed to like how I looked too.

I said: "The store down at the corner made a deal with the laundromat to provide all the change for this place, in the hopes that people would buy something there when they were getting their change; it's quite a clever deal, and the laundromat doesn't have to buy and stock a change machine full of quarters. It's a pretty fine exchange, don't you think?" but she was looking to the door and she said: "Just down there to the left?" I led her out onto the sidewalk and pointed and I said: "I guess you're new to the neighbourhood?" She said: "Yes, as a matter of fact, I've been here since Monday. I moved in on Monday. And I suppose they sell soap, too? They've got the market on soap, right?" "Yes, I suppose they do have the market on soap." She started off, and I followed her for a couple steps, then stopped, uncertain of what I was doing. I suppose I fell out of her peripheral vision because she turned and said, "Come on."

We went into the corner store together, the convenience store as it was called, and she wandered down an aisle to find a little one-shot box of laundry detergent. At the cash register she put it down and said to the woman who worked there (whose name I never learned), as the former pulled out a five-dollar bill: "Can I have the rest in quarters, please?" The woman behind the cash register gave her fifteen quarters. The girl said: "Thanks," and we left the store and went back to the laundromat.

I sat down where I'd been sitting, feeling that the encounter had ended well, what with the girl having her quarters and her soap, so I returned to reading Faulkner or whatever. I saw her shove the steel tray containing the quarters into the machine, and the tray abrasively screamed as was its manner. She tossed her laundry bag--a little ragged, I saw--onto the top of the machine and then she came over to me, looking out the plate-glass window at the same time, and she sat down beside me. She said: "Well, I got some time. Do you? Care to show me what's what in this here hood?"

I looked over to my machine and calculated in a self-interested fashion how long it would be before the washing machine finished, realized it would only be about ten minutes--but I then realized that this girl was offering me the opportunity to escort her around a few of the nearby affectionate streets. I had the idea it was an opportunity not to be passed up regardless of how wrinkled my clothes could get, and so we stood up at the same time and walked out the laundromat door.

I turned her to the right, not in the direction of the convenience store, because we'd been that way already, and we walked up the street. Now, going up that street instead of down was a bit of a bad idea for me because I didn't know that direction too well; I lived down, but I figured I could tell her what little I knew and it would be new to her and she would be naturally charmed by my anecdotes. I pointed out the firehall on the other side of the street, saying: "That could come in handy some day." There was a church a bit further up, I don't know what denomination and still don't, and instead of getting all pervy and repeating what I'd said about the firehall, I said instead: "I don't know when the services are; in case you are interested, we could inquire," and she replied: "Maybe not today; maybe some other time."

I had to look up at the street sign where we turned right in order to say: "And this is Jonesco Street, and here you find residential single unit semi-detached houses typical of the general low-rent utility architecture of the 1940s and '50s in this locale; note the drainage systems on most, with the water sent rather a distance from the foundations." She had her head turned away, and she was actually looking at the houses.

Then she said: "Seems there's a lot of cats around here. There's one now. Is there some kind of cat farm hereabouts?" "Funny you should ask! As a matter of fact, if we'd gone one street further up we would come across it, at the next intersection in. A breeding farm, don't you know, with about a thousand grade A housecats produced yearly. It's the largest cat farm in the entire city, believe it or not." She replied: "That explains a lot. I may have to make a booking there, since fate has brought me to its environs. I have a fondness for cats. Are their rates reasonable?" I tried to come up with something clever but I couldn't. All I could say was: "I don't know; I've never darkened their barn door. I doubt the prices could be off the scale; I think you could give them a visit. They're probably happy to be of any service," and then we turned right at the next intersection.

We'd walked about six yards when she stopped, saying: "Wait." I turned to see her looking at a house across the street. I shoved my hands in my pockets, awaiting the big revelation. Finally she turned back to me and said, with a happy glint in here eye: "Sorry! False alarm. I've never been on this street." We walked along slowly, and I asked her: "Does that house remind you of another house?" She tutted and said: "What do you think, laddie? Do you think I stop whenever and wherever I want without have a good reason for it? Of course I thought it was a house I recognized." "What house?" She looked at me incredulously for a moment, then looked away and laughed entirely falsely. "Ha-ha! I could tell you, but then that would mean I'd have to kill you." The line sounded familiar, like something from a movie, yes, that's how false it sounded and was intended to sound. I wasn't going to get anywhere using common methods, so I stopped to look back at the house she'd been looking at, and I stared sharply at it, as if it had insulted me and required a comeuppance. The girl said: "Stop that; it's not right; it's got nothing to do with that house; stop trying to kill it with your Medusa stare." I turned to look at her, easing my eyes. "You're right, and there's nothing wrong with that old pile of bricks." "No, nothing," she agreed, and we turned right at the next intersection.

We went right, and walked on.

I didn't know anything about love back in the early 90s; I've learned some little about love since then: but: what did she do to me there, what magic did this girl do?

We were back on a very ordinary road, the one running east-west, an intersection below the higher one from the last page or so, when I, since I'd walked that line of street before, almost every day, to get to a streetcar, said: "Now here's familiar territory. So you live somewhere around here?" She vaguely pointed to her left. "On one over there." She mentioned a name, but I didn't quite catch it.

"Here's the convenience store again." "How convenient."

She continued, after a pause: "I guess you live around here too." I pointed down the street: "There, at 974 Dovercourt, that's where. Day or night, at your cervix."

She raised one eyebrow ambiguously, laughed a little, scratched the back of her head, and stuck out her tongue slightly, before finally saying: "Well, that's original." She didn't mean it.

I thought she was eating out of the palm of my hand when we went back in to the laundromat. My wash cycle had finished; the dull dead clothes I put into a drier; she, girl, sat on one of the laundromat's plastic chairs and seemingly watched me. Her stuff was still chugging though a cycle. Her hair was an average brown, tawny, though that adjective is probably no good these days, and she wasn't taller than me or much shorter than me. (Apologies for my imprecision because it all happened so long ago; maybe I should have been carrying a Sony Camcorder.)

"I think my stuff is done now." She lifted the lid of her machine and yes the things had stopped spinning and were plastered against the outer cylinder. I decided to leave her to it: I wasn't going to offer to help: I wasn't ready to touch anything that had touched her body: so I sat down, picked up the novel, and made like I was reading even though I couldn't get through a single mid-length sentence of middling complexity. I wondered what she was going to do once she had her things in a dryer. Would she come back to me, or was it all over before anything had even started? I felt quite sincerely we had come a fair distance, and hoped it had to continue, considering the intimate and closed space we were both occupying. She put three quarters in the dryer, turned the metal dial, and the machine started up like clockwork.

She came over to me and sat down beside me to say: "That's taken care of. Are these fast dryers, or are they slow dryers?" I replied: "They're pretty fast; they take about a half-hour. They're very hot. The clothes come out very hot." Neither of us picked up on the line; rather, we stared at the opposite wall for a minute or two, which seemed at the time to be a good agreement between us.

Finally she said: "Why don't you show some other part? How about the other side of the street? I don't know anything about the other side of the street."

Even though I didn't know much about the other side of the street, I faked it, saying: "Oh, sure, there's plenty to see on the other side of the street. There are blocks and blocks over there."

"How about just one block? I don't think I can stand too much excitement."

We went outside. It was past noon, and the sun was ahead of us, since we were facing west. We dodged a couple cars to get onto the other side of the street, and we went to the left such that our entire journey made a figure eight.

On the corner was a place that had once been a corner shop but had become a residence. I told her: "This used to be a gambling house. They got raided a year ago, organized crime was involved, and so on and so on. It was in all the papers." "I don't think I read anything about it," she said. "It wasn't international news. It was just some local thing of little interest to anyone anywhere else. 'In all the local papers,' I should have said."

She walked on, around the corner of the biggest intersection for some blocks in either direction, saying: "There's plenty of organized crime everywhere. I hear about it all the time; but they're all just minor players. The biggest crooks--the international crooks--you never hear about. There's only a few of us that know the biggest crooks are governments."

I was taken aback. "What do you know about it?"

She laughed a little and said: "It's because I'm a spy, that's how I know. I work for a particular government, never mind which one."

"Shouldn't you be telling me you're something else, you know, like your cover? Like you're a clerk or a Fuller brush salesman or something like that?"

She paused before saying: "All those covers were taken, so I was given the cover 'spy'. It's a pretty good one."

"You're not much of a spy if you don't do any secretive spying."

"I do do secretive spying, but I cover it up by acting as a completely different spy. No-one knows who I really work for, and they'll never know, because they're busy believing something else entirely."

"I think there's a couple problems with that."

"Yes, everyone does; everyone thinks they know how the spy trade works; but they don't understand it at all, everything they know they got from books; it's all much more complicated than that, which throws everyone off my trail." She stopped and looked at me genuinely. "I may be the greatest spy in history, with my cover."

We were getting to another intersection, with mere houses on all four corners. I didn't know a thing about the four houses, I'd never seen anyone outside the houses, so inside they could have been anyone in the world; perhaps I knew someone living in one of them, or perhaps I was related to one of them: actually, I was almost certainly related to one or more of them, considering the deep reach of time and so forth; so I said: "I have one female cousin living in each of these four houses. In one house, the female cousin likes one other cousin and despises the other two. In another house, my female cousin likes all three of her cousins. In a third house, my cousin likes two cousins and hates only one. And finally in the fourth house, my cousin hates all three cousins. They all want to have sex with me. Which one should I have sex with?" The girl looked from serious house to serious house. "I think you should start with the one who is hated by the greatest number of cousins; that way, the other three cousins will be even more hateful through jealousy, and, if you proceeded in this manner, you could wind up fucking all four of them." Her logic was fine, and she had given me a most useful answer. She then changed her mind to point to one of them and say: "Or: rather: go with the cousin in that house. It has the nicest porch."

I was silent for a while--really only about thirty seconds--to give her some time to come up with another response. We were walking up a residential street, a street entirely unfamiliar to me, that I had never even been on, even though it was less than two blocks away from my home. The houses were originally uniform, probably built all at the same time, and yet they'd differentiated themselves to such an extent that to an unobservant eye they appeared to be unique and without any relationship to their neighbours.

I had to continue to wait, till finally she said: "You're the only person I've told about my profession, and also about my secret profession. I don't know why I told you; I shouldn't have told you, no, never. I think it means my cover is blown entirely, and I may have to give up this profession. But, if I give up being a spy beneath a spy, what could I ever do instead? My father was a spy, and his father was a spy too, and I think his father was a spy also. I've foolishly destroyed a legacy stretching back a hundred years, and all for what? For you? Who are you to me? Frankly, you're nothing. I haven't known you for much more than an hour. And yet--I don't know how I'll face my father the next time I see him. He'll be so disappointed."

Once again, we were at an intersection about which I knew nothing. What people lived in these houses, what did they do, did I somehow know them all?

Up ahead (we were heading north) about half a bock could be seen a non-residential building of red brick seemingly nestled between ordinary houses, and I quickly said to myself: "What could that be? Is it a legion hall? Is it Knights of Columbus or some other service organization? Could it be the scientologists? Maybe a mosque, maybe a buddhist monastery? Dotted all around the city, in each block, some anomaly stood, be it a temple, a bakery, a garage, a gang club, a concert hall: so, what could that one be?" I knew it couldn't be any of those, since all those possibilities were so obvious I'd managed to think of them, so I said: "There's one of those small amusement parks up there. Do you see it? It looks small from here, from the outside, but it's actually rather substantial. It goes down into the ground for several storeys, and they've even managed to get a Ferris wheel in it. Of course, just a small one, with six gondolas, but it's there. Funny we don't see kids around it. Maybe they're doing some kind of maintenance work. They shut it down sometimes; yes, I remember once all these kids crying all over the neighbourhood because the place was closed. That was two years ago or so. They seem to have a problem communicating with the general population."

She stopped to look up the street to it. She said: "So you think it's closed?" I shrugged: "It looks closed to me, and I know the scene." "That's too bad," she said: "I like Ferris wheels, even if they only have six gondolas. Maybe we can break into the place, get it up and running." "Oh, I'm no good at that, that crime stuff. I'm a softie." She nodded to me: "Yes. In any case, I now know it's there, and I can go there at some point. Would you like to come with me?" I blushed, finally. "I think that would be a very nice thing to do. Some time soon." "Yes, we'll do that, sure."

We turned that corner, and we should have been going east at that point. Houses, houses, houses. I felt like we were walking along a street we'd already walked along, as if we'd skipped over or under Dovercourt without knowing we had. It was the funniest feeling, for sure, because it was completely impossible, and yet I felt like we'd done it. However, it was only a feeling: we hadn't travelled over, or under, the most main road for blocks and blocks. Something had been crossed, that was certainly so; but what it was that had been crossed or how the crossing had taken place or even why the crossing had been made, I doubt I'll ever fully understand. I have some ideas about it, though: and you're reading them.

Allow me to think out loud. We got to an intersection, and I didn't know which way we should go. We should have gotten back onto Dovercourt, but it seemed we hadn't. Where were we? She was looking around as if everything was familiar to her, every eave and every brick and glass. I never learned the name of the street we were on, even though later I learned the name of the street we were on, or even if it had a name, even though it was so close to my heart back in those early '90s.

She was at home there, on that street which I've avoided for so long, not only because she knew nothing about it but also because it's not where I remember it to be, she was at home there in one of the houses, as if she were a ghost allowed out only for a certain part of any particular day, maybe just to go to the local laundromat to wash some really old rags (which she, being a ghost, didn't have any use for anyway) and maybe talk to someone; a ghost whom I couldn't touch no matter how many pointers and indications I gave.

I said: "Come on, there's a five-corners we passed, we're going to get back to where we were. Come along, it can't be very far. All our clothes will be clean when we get there, you'll see. It can't be much farther."

Another intersection appeared up ahead, and I again checked the position of the sun. We seemed to be going, unexpectedly, south. Had we turned somewhere without knowing it? How can you become so disoriented? It couldn't be denied the direction we were going in.

She said, continuing on from earlier: "So the spy business is a family business--though I never knew it for quite some time, a time long after I started in on it. You see, my father put some facts together, and saw me for what I was--a natural liar. And he told me he was the same. He wouldn't tell me who he worked for, mainly, he said, because we might be working for antagonistic entities, and, if so, we might feel like taking our work home with us, and cause internecine conflicts. We had it in common, and he also told me that his father had been a spook too, but a long time ago when he was quite young, something about the first world war, which seemed possible to me. The dates lined up all right. I don't see my father that often; he moved to Belgium after my mother died. That must've been five years ago now. He gave me some advice last time, though. He told me that I had to always know when I am not telling the truth. He told me to have a firm sense of what's true and what's false. So don't worry about me, buster: I know what's what, and I know when I'm not telling the truth.

"There's the laundromat." She was pointing, and I looked even though I thought it was impossible, only to find that yes there it was, on the other side of the street. Somehow I'd miscounted the number of turns we'd taken, that we'd gone to the right five times instead of four, but I haven't ever been able to figure out where the extra corner was. I invented a corner, that was certain, but, as you've read, I've accounted for every single incident of our neighbourhood travel. It could not have happened, really.

So anyway we were back at the laundromat and we went inside. My clothes were dry, so I folded them up on one of the handy folding tables; while I was doing this, her clothes stopped tumbling and she started folding them up on a table near mine. I had mine all ready to be carried across the intersections, and she was still folding hers. I thought waiting was a pointless thing to do, so I said to her: "Time to go, and I hope I meet you again." "Oh, you'll meet me again, rest assured. 974 Dovercourt, I heard you say. I'll come see you." "Oh really, you will? When?" She jumped. "I haven't decided. Do I have to decide right this minute? Some time soon, maybe next week, or next weekend, some time soon, if that's all right with you."

I said: "Oh, yes, certainly, come over any time, really. I'd like that a lot!" I thought of kissing her at that moment ... which was the last time I ever saw her, by the way: but I didn't kiss her; I simply said: "Okay, see you soon then," and left the laundromat.

I went home, and for the next week I knew I was in love. I could barely think of anything else, and I'd catch myself staring off into space blankly as I tried to come up with a strategy; however, of course, she didn't show up that week, or the next week, and I did my laundry again two weeks later, expecting her to be there, but she wasn't there. I started walking around the neighbourhood, up one street and down another, thinking I would run into her, but I never did.

I thought: perhaps her spymasters pulled her to another city to do a job, and I thought maybe she'd come back: contrariwise, maybe she'd come to town to do a job in the first place, and she'd completed it. And, of course, maybe the far-fetched 'spy' thing was as ridiculous as it sounded, and she simply moved to another part of the city. I'll never know, and frankly I don't know if I'd recognize her if I ever saw her again. There's a special place for these kinds of emotions and ideas and feelings.

Anyhow, I know that I'll never in my entire life go through a spin cycle without thinking of her, and of the laundromat blues.