Web site of Biff Mitchell, author, humorist, smartass and not-poet.

Chapter 1 

Here it comes, a tap at my back door lock, a click, a clicketyclick, a tumbling metal-on-metal click and a clack. Janie's here. Time to wake up.

     Time to flow with electrons and ether and chi, with waves and strings of vibrating particles kick-started by the clicketyclick of Janie's key. Time to wake up and start the day running; that's me, energetic at the drop. Enthusiastic and motivated! The day's two halves full! Open my door, Janie. You've got me humming; make me sing. C'mon, Janie, turn on the juice, the juice, bring on the juice. And here it comes, the first switch. Flick it, Janie, flick it! And …

click

… she flicks the switch! Whoa, baby! Feel it flow, like a million jolt caffeine rush, flashing fluorescent light over this whole section of chairs and booths, the big round table, the long folding table and rows of machines. They spring up from the shadows in the bath of light.

     And that's just for starters!

     Now, Janie maps out the rest of my waking with the firm pad of her sneakered feet. Yeah, Janie, that feels good, sort of like a nudging massaging motion, a time-space kind of thing, you know, where the photon's here and then it's there, and it doesn't really matter where it was in between 'cause, now it's here and … oops … it's there. Yeah, there, a little more there.

     And Janie pads on, down the aisle between the two big sorting tables and into my long morning shadows. A sharp left turn towards my vending machines and dry clean stacks, as Janie pads unrushed, and stops with more jingling and clicketyclicks to unlock my front doors, then pads back another twenty steps, and stops in front of the office door, and clicketyclick, it's open, and Janie enters humming to herself. Always humming, my Janie. Always upbeat in the morning.

     And now Janie stands in the semidarkness of her office, looking through the single wide window, mirrored on the other side, into my interior, Janie's private view into all that goes on inside me. And she pauses with her hand resting by the main switch, her hand resting right on top of the main switch, just resting there. If I could drool, this is where things would get plenty wet, but this is Janie's moment, where Janie looks out over my rows of machines and chairs and tables and walls and ceiling and all that potential, all that quiet and stillness ready to pounce into noise and action, and treats herself to a moment of pride.

     Yep, here's my proud Janie pausing in the semidarkness, pausing with her hand right beside the main switch, just nonchalantly proudly pausing, taking in all the work she's done, everything that she's done with me, all the glory of a dream made real, and, OK, Janie, I think this moment of pride is taking just a little bit, a tad, too long. Pride crasheth into a spin cycle gone haywire, Janie. Let that finger fall on the switch. The switch, Janie, the switch. Make it happen, Janie. Your finger's moving to the beat of your humming, moving slowly by inches, inching its way down, inching down, less than inching now, kind of like one of those photons having a hard time getting into quantum gear, and it's almost there and …

click.

     WOW! Fire in the circuits!

     Sparks! Yeah! Wires pumping energy like a hundred fourth of Julys compressed into a single nanosecond and exploding throughout me, billions of electrons flowing into my florescent lights, into my video games, into my washroom light bulbs, like a sudden shift … oops … it's there! And I'm everywhere inside myself, in my corners, my crawl spaces, my nooks and crannies, like polarity switching around and around again, and Janie's pride, Janie's thoughts, Janie's ether and chi emanating with the sound of her humming, buzzing through my morning numbness like billions and billions of tiny tickles, mixing with the motions of magnets and coolant and the lightning flow of light bouncing off my walls and floors and back up to my ceiling, and I'm fully awake. Ah, yes, I'm awake and ready!

     And now, now, Janie stands with her arms folded across her chest, just looking over me, proud of me, proud of what she's done with me, tickled pink with my rows of washers and dryers, my industrial-size machines, my vending machines, my television set, my change machine, my coolers, my dispensers, my telephones, my bright walls, and all the signs that Janie painted herself with memorable lines like: 

TABLES ARE FOR FOLDING.

PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THEM.

GRAVITY CAN BE PAINFUL. 

And one of my personal favorites: 

PLEASE

CHECK INDUSTRIAL SIZE MACHINES

FOR SMALL CHILDREN BEFORE USING 

     That's the kind of person Janie is. Loves children, loves a laugh. But I'll tell you more about Janie later. I'm starting to feel kind of … invigorated now, alive and more aware, and calmer now. Maybe not entirely calm, but calmer. I've had my morning jolt and I'm ready for the day. And now, allow me to introduce myself.

     I'm the Washing Green. I'm a laundromat. Yep, a laundromat. But you might already have guessed that, or maybe you just thought I was somebody hanging around inside myself, somebody with a strong empathy for laundromats. Well, yeah, I do hang around inside myself, but it's a bit more complicated than that. We'll get to that later. For now, I am a laundromat, but not just any laundromat. Nope. I'm the biggest, coolest, most-up-to-date, user-friendly, human/machine integrated, full service laundromat in town and starting right now I'm going to give you the BIG TOUR.

     Ready?

     First, we leave Janie's office, with Janie still cross-armed and satisfied, gazing over my spectacular contents, and we start at the back door, the one Janie just came through. This steel-rimmed glass door, wired to an alarm, leads in from the parking lot. Notice the steel plates at elbow level? That's so nobody accidentally crashes elbows or laundry hampers through the glass. That was Janie's idea. Loves people, Janie. This door leads directly into my TV nook with a round table surrounded by easy chairs with arms. Arms are important because some of the people who come here need to catch up on their sleep. And the chairs are all solid light greens and blues to endow me with a quiet, relaxing aquatic atmosphere. And just behind the table and chairs, Janie had some study booths installed, because some people need to catch up on their studying. The TV is mounted high on the wall across from the study booths like a big square eyeball staring down. Janie keeps the volume down low during exam times because some people are easily distracted.

Moving along now, we have two six foot long wooden tables for folding – don't sit on them, gravity hurts – and these branch out to the left, into my main laundromat area with four wide, ceiling to floor, picture windows. They don't just let the light in, they pump it in. These windows add exterior dimension to my interior, big wall-size portals into the outside world so that it's virtually impossible to feel cramped in me. In fact, if you don't mind a bit of a reach, it's almost like doing your laundry outdoors, safer too; you don't get sunburn. Notice that the windows surround my main laundromat area, where I have a hundred regular top-loading washers and front-loading dryers and thirty industrial size front-loading washers and dryers. This is the business end of me, le raison de laundroetre. Most of my machines are in rows stretching from the back to the front of me. On the other side of those rows, things get more into the human/laundromat continuum. But before we get into that, there's two more big folding tables, and towards the back of the building, two more rows of washers and dryers, and towards the front of the building, another big round table surrounded by easy chairs, and there's more chairs along the walls.

     Can you picture all that? OK, let's just say washers, dryers, tables and chairs and get right into my favorite part of me.

     In the far corner, towards the front, with picture windows spanning either side, I've got a small circular stage with a sign hanging down from the ceiling that says: 

POET'S CORNER

(No foul language PLEASE) 

     Yep, my very own Poet's Corner, a place where harried housewives, harried students, harried househusbands, and all the other harried people who have something to say about the harried world they live in can get up on the stage and read, recite or just act it all out, with or without guitar, and they don't even have to rhyme. In fact, my personal favorite poem didn't have any rhyme at all – didn't have much reason either – but there was just something about it that moved me.

     The poet was a bald-headed guy in ripped jeans and dirty T-shirt who stood on the stage just before closing one evening and yelled out:

     'Uh oh! Reality!'

     … while pretending to strangle himself. And then he yelled:

     'Uh oh! Reality!'

     …pointing his finger like a gun at his head.

     'Oh no! Reality!'

     … stabbing himself with an imaginary sword, although it really did look like he was in pain. I found it very intense.

     'Oh no! No! Reality!'

     And he dug his finger up his left nostril, pulled out a gross, hard-looking booger and ate it. And get this, everybody just ignored this dirty-shirted artist and went about packing their stuff in bags and hampers and walking out the door without so much as a glance at him, as though culture might be contagious or something. OK, so it was impolite culture, but I thought it was kind of a thought provoking performance art, kind of like mime with voice, sort of like reality is up your nose, and now … oops … it's on your finger.

     Back to the tour.

     The window at the front of the building, right beside Poet's Corner, looks out onto four round tables made of concrete, with matching concrete benches on a tiled patio. Now, I can't guarantee anybody's protection from the sun in this area, but that doesn't stop it from being a popular place on sunny summer days, with people reading, talking, waving to people driving by, or just sitting back and roasting themselves in the sun, knowing that I'm taking care of the washing and drying on the other side of the window.

     And over here, my heavy duty industrial machines are stacked by the front window, and right beside them is the main entrance with two big glass doors that swing both ways …  that's to make it easy for you when you have a heavy load, entering or leaving. Janie, always thinking about these things. And they have the same elbow-level metal plates as the back door. Beside the main door, there's a phone booth with two phones. Forget about using either of them. They're always busy. You'll have about as much luck making a call on one of those phones as winning a lotto. And moving on past the phone booth we come to the counter with the cash register, the new computerized cash register with over a hundred programmable functions, I might add, and just past this is the automated dry cleaning hangers and the vending area. The hangers are a blast. Janie pushes a button under the counter and shirts, pants, dresses and coats whiz round and around. Now that's using technology! Directly across from the counter, is the office, with a sign on the door that says: 

IF YOUR NAME AIN'T JANIE,

THEN YOU AIN'T IN HERE. 

      The sign is there mostly to scare away the local gossips who come in here three or four times a week with, sometimes, just half a hamper of wash, just enough for a legitimate laundry visit, and all they really want is to corner somebody and talk for hours and hours about things that nobody wants to hear about. And, since Janie is here all the time, she's the primary target. So, the sign. But people just walk right in anyway.

     Right beside the door, and to make your laundromat experience enjoyable and memorable, is the vending machine section, my own little automated store where I have machines loaded with soap, softeners, bleach, detergents, mouthwash, razor blades, cough syrup, Tylenol and Aspirin, notebooks, pens and pencils, cookies, soups, juices, pop, chocolate bars, suntan lotion, sandwiches, tea, six types of coffee including Cappuccino, and lots of other goodies. And I've got shelves with books, magazines, newspapers and gossip sheets. Sell a lot of those. I've got a change machine, the only one in town that's never broken down. Slide in a fiver and the coins come tumbling out like a Vegas payout! Slide in a tenner and you're ready to clean up. Clean up! Get it? Sorry. Back to the tour.

     Over to the counter again and behind it, is the last big window, looking out to a long, thin patch of well-cropped green grass. People bring towels and blankets here in the summer. Well, yeah, people bring towels and blankets here all year long, but in the summer, on hot sunny days, that patch of grass is almost like being at the beach, bikinis included. In fact, I've had more than one close head-on collision on the street in front of me.

     And all of this is just the surface stuff. There's a lot more to me, stuff that you never see. Like, inside my walls, I have studs and joists, braces and bolts, tongue and groove subflooring, trusses over my ceiling. And my wiring! I've got enough wiring in me to light up a whole street of houses, big houses, big houses with lots of lights and appliances. And then there's my plumbing. Each of my washers goes through about thirty gallons of water in a complete wash cycle, and these are just the regular size washers, not the industrial ones. Thirty gallons. And sometimes more. Think about this: on a busy day, when all my machines are in use, I pump out over 50,000 gallons of water! In just a single day! And all that water comes in through my plumbing and goes out through my plumbing. Pretty impressive, huh?

     But that's not nearly as impressive as the next thing I'm going to show you, if 'show you' is the right way to put it, more like 'introduce you to'? Well, you figure that one out for yourself. But before we get into that, let's officially acknowledge the fact that I've been talking to you and you've been listening to me. I mean, who do you think took you on the BIG TOUR just now? Me. Now, in the back of your mind, while you were being amazed at all the wonderful things you saw on the tour, a little voice was probably saying: 'How can this laundromat be talking to me? Have I gone nuts? Have I slipped into a black hole and gone to a crazy universe? Is this a joke? What kind of laundromat talks?' And I realize that this creates cognitive problems like, can I believe a laundromat? Can I trust a laundromat? How valid is anything said by a laundromat? How do I evaluate information from a laundromat? So, let's talk about where I come from … not the floors and machines part of me … let's talk about the part that talks. And keep in mind, some of this is theoretical.

     Now, laundromats are focal points of energy, reservoirs of invisible waves and emanations. There's the electric current flowing through the wiring in my walls, and there's the electricity flowing going through the machines, the washers, the dryers, the vending machines, Janie's computer, the coolers, and the change machine. And let's not forget the magnetic fields around the telephones. These all create electromagnetic energy waves. And then there's the people who come in here. The chi and the electrical emanations from their bodies and the waves of thought emanating from their brains, the sound waves as they speak, the ups and downs of emotional energy, the yelling and the whispering. All these vibrations and emanations mix with the flow from the machines and the wires and the magnets in the telephones and meld into this big pulsating energy oneness.

     And then one day, a neutrino zipped through me. A neutrino so small that you could put maybe a trillion of them on the smallest atom's left eyebrow and still lose it. But as it zipped by, it zapped a tiny little subatomic hairline fracture into the time/space continuum in the pilot light in one of my dryers and created an even tinier hole in the fire. It lasted just the tiniest little subatomic fraction of a second before it closed up. But, before it closed, it dripped a little bit of something from far away into the pilot, and presto! Me! And, to tell you the truth, I don't know if that big melding into vibration oneness and the energy fields had anything to do with it. It could have just been the neutrino; it could have been all of it put together. And like I said, this is all just theory – but there I was, small at first, but I grew.

     I spread from the pilot flame and into the dryer and into the floor and into the other machines and into the walls and the air between the walls. You'd be surprised how much energy you never see is zinging around in air, like light waves, heat waves, chi, you name it. It's crowded stuff. And then I spread into the ceilings and the floors, and the plumbing and the fixtures. And I grew.

     But let's get one thing clear: I'm not the building. I'm me. I live throughout the building the same as you live in your body, and your awareness is spread throughout your body, but you can lose a toe and still be you. Of course, if you lose your brain, that's another matter, and, hey, who can prove you lose your awareness when you lose your brain? Nobody! In my case though, unlike the relationship between your mind and your body, I can't move my building around. Believe me, I've tried. I can't budge a thing. I can't turn machines off when they're overheating. I can't turn off the washroom tap when somebody leaves it on. All I can do is be aware, and move my awareness around the building and into things, and maybe it just all adds up to the right feng shui. 

*** 

     There's one other thing I'll bring up shortly, but let's take a break from all this talk about me. I have some customers in me now, early Saturday morning laundromat attendees. Time for introductions. Let's see, there's Sally, a regular, and her three sons. I like Sally. She's a middle-aged single mother with straight black hair, a few lines around her eyes, and a nice smile. Sally's a bit on the harried side, but she still has a nice figure and she's still pretty, in a slightly harried kind of way. The kids are Jonas, five; Michael, seven; and Josh, nine. A nice mathematical progression.

     Sally's using my industrial-sized machines. She always checks inside for Jonas after finding him in there once. Jonas is a cute little guy with a splash of sandy blond hair that hangs down over his eyes, and he's curious about everything, almost like everything he sees is something wonderful. I can feel this kid's awareness growing by leaps and bounds. Sort of like me. Don't care much for Michael. He whines a lot and torments Jonas when Sally and Josh aren't looking. He never looks anybody straight in the eye, always looks somewhere else, usually the floor, when he's talking to people, except when he's tormenting Jonas. Then, he looks right into Jonas' eyes.

     Josh is a good kid. A little more mature than most nine-year-olds, but I see that a lot in the oldest kids in single parent families, but Josh doesn't seem to be losing any kid-hood over it. In fact, he gets right down with Jonas sometimes and shares his amazement at ladybugs and spiders. Michael steps on ladybugs. Josh, though … he'll make a great dad someday, and a good looking one, with jet-black hair and a narrow face with dark, intelligent eyes.

     And let's see. There's Eddy in the first row of regular washers, by my TV nook. He stands by this washer and dryer the whole time he's in me as though he's afraid somebody's going to steal his laundry or something, and the whole time, he taps his fingers on my machines and drives everyone nuts. He almost drives me up the wall sometimes. Picture that.

     I've got three college girls at the washers close to Poet's Corner, all overweight, all giggling and whispering and making goo-goo eyes at the good looking jock loading clothes from a blue hamper into the machines at the other end of their row. He looks just a little bit like Josh, dark hair, narrow face, dark eyes … but something else in them, a little more intense than intelligence. He's wearing a gray Fruit of the Loom track suit with lots of muscle outlined under them, and I'll bet those Nikes cost a fortune. And judging from the wear and tear, it looks like they're used for more than just show.

     Neither he nor the giggling college girls have been in me before, but I've been getting a lot of newcomers since the Spin Ahoy! burned down two weeks ago. And, no, I didn't have anything to do with that. We laundromats do not do that to our own kind, and besides, I don't need to bring in extra business that way. I heard it was faulty wiring.

     That's all that's in me for now, but I'll get busy as the day goes on. It's Saturday, washing day for students and the working folk. I'll have over seventy people in here, some of them regulars, some of them refugees from Spin Ahoy!, and some of them people who finally had to know what color their clothes were when they bought them.

     I've gotten to know my regulars well, through little things like their moods and their postures, and sometimes through the things they say. I even know them by the things they forget they've said. For instance, one day, Sally told Jonas to stop flicking crayons across the floor. Jonas wasn't listening and kept on flicking.

     'Stop that right now!'

     He heard that. He stopped. He sat. He stared. For five minutes.

     'I'm bored,' he said.

     Sally, busy sorting and folding clothes, said: 'Look, I'm busy. Do something … anything. Flick crayons or something!'

     I knew she was going to say that. Because I know Sally.

     I guess the biggest clues I get are from their clothing, from the holes in their socks, the runs in their pantyhose, the beer stains and vomit on their shirts, the missing buttons. They bring their lives in to me packed in baskets and bags and backpacks, and the shape and texture of their clothes is almost always the shape and texture of their lives. Hey now, that was almost worthy of a few utterances at Poet's Corner, huh? But it's true. I know the regulars, and even the newbies, by how they wash their clothes, how some separate whites from colors and some don't. How some stack their clothes neatly and others toss them into plastic garbage bags.

     I've seen people spend one or two hours in me without ever once looking at another person. They just spend the whole time with their heads buried in the TV or a magazine, or, like Eddy, buried in their own world and suspicious of everything outside it.

     I may be a laundromat, but a lot more than just washing and drying goes on inside me. I'm a panoramic view into the human condition. I'm a thousand stories unfolding on my folding tables alone. I'm a steady stream of secrets shoved into plastic bags. And on top of all that, I'm a Mecca of regeneration. Hey, suddenly, all new clothes. OK, so maybe not new, but suddenly wearable. Some people don't wash their stuff for weeks, maybe even months. They pull things out of my dryers and look at them like 'this is mine?' Shirts they forgot they had, pants that don't fit any more, a pair of socks without holes!

     And speaking of socks, ever wonder what happened to that missing sock? I know what happened to it, and it's no big mystery. Almost always, you'll find it in the drum of the dryer. They stick there. Sometimes, it'll even work its way under the agitator in the washer. Other times, it'll be on the ground or floor somewhere between me and wherever you keep your laundry hamper. Sometimes, it'll be between the machines, a variation on the floor scenario. Sometimes, it'll be in your sock and underwear drawer. The good thing, here, is that it's probably clean. The bad thing is … it's probably wedged into the back of the drawer and you're never going to find it. And if it's none of these, then the only logical possibility is that your sock was eaten by a sock monster. Back to the people.

     These people, the regulars and the newcomers, are what make my awareness a special thing. Without them, I'd be aware of what? Wiring, florescent light fixtures, wooden beams and struts, machines, rays of light, creaks and cracks and whirring sounds. My awareness would just settle along with the insulation in my walls and harden. 

*** 

     And now for that one other thing I promised I'd bring up. Let's see, not Sally, not the kids. Somebody new. No, not the chubby girls, and definitely not Eddy. How about this new guy? The jock. There's something in his eyes that interests me. He just pushed his quarters into the coin slot and he hears the sound of water splashing into the washer. Sometimes sounds and sights help with this, but they're not really necessary. I'll explain that later. Let's go with the flow of the water splashing into the washer.

     Whoa. Lot's of physical stuff here, like lobes, thalamus, hypothalamus, pons, corpus callosum, cerebellum, hippocampus, pituitary gland, neurons passing electrons from axons to dendrites. Had enough Latin? I have. And, to tell you the truth, I don't understand any of this stuff any more than I understand how I move from the cross beam in the ceiling over Janie's office to the pilot light where I was born. All I know is that I'm in the jock's head. Oops … I'm here! But I'm ignoring all the wet, physical Latin stuff, and going with the flow, and … water splashing all over his body, all over his arms and legs and head, dripping down his chest, rivulets swishing on his stomach, and it's scalding hot! I can feel it. I can feel the boiling spray and his hands rubbing in soap under his arms and across his chest and he's rubbing the soap in harder.