The Home Altar

I covet laundry machines like I imagine men in the throes of a mid-life crisis covet sports cars. I walk through Lowes’ and Sears’ home appliance centers as though I am strolling through a Jaguar dealership. I try to look like I have money so that the appliance department manager will show me the features of the top of the line washing machines – the I-know-when-your-clothes-are-dry sensor, the allergen rinse, and the vibration reduction technology (referred to as VRT by us connoisseurs). I drool over the cherry red color of the LG 4.5 Cu. Ft. Cuft Stream Washer. I want to run my finger along its top edge to savor its streamline quality. I stand in jaw-dropping awe in front of the Samsung 4.0 Cu. Ft. Energy Star Model WF216ANB. This beauty of a washer, which comes in a striking “breakwater blue,” could probably teach even Al Gore a few things about energy conservation. When I am stalking the showroom floors, feasting on the touch dials, door handles, and water attachments in a sensory buffet it is all I can do to keep myself from leaning over and licking the stainless steel finish of the Whirlpool WFW94005W. I have to constantly remind myself to play it cool. The department manager has to know that I can walk away from any deal. This I inevitably will do because I do not now nor ever have had washer and dryer hookups in my apartment.

I want to talk about doing laundry because I understand it to be one of the greatest class issues of our time. For those of you with laundry machines in your home, consider what follows as a public service message. I, like Sally Field in a Save the Children commercial, am going to give you a brief glimpse into the not-so-distant lands of laundry poverty. I will do my best to tug at your heart-strings and maybe you’ll even decide to donate to the “Laundry for Thirtysomethings” fund.

Since I left home in 1995 I have done my laundry “out” in dorms, in laundromats, and in apartment laundry centers. I spend lots of waking hours daydreaming of having a washer and dryer in our house. I dream of the day when I can turn to my wife and say, “Honey, can you pass the dryer sheets,” and she can hand them to me as easily as she would pass the salt. Currently, our dryer sheets are stored in our car.  (As an aside, the car does smell quite fresh, even despite the wet dog smell that lingers from our weekend trips to the park. For you lovers of dogs-who-can’t-stay-out-of-the-water I highly recommend the power of a box of Bounce.) You see, it is not the financial burden of doing your laundry outside of your own space – not the literally thousands of quarters that I pump into laundry machines each year – that really bothers me.  It’s the inconvenience.

You see, not having a washer and dryer in your own home requires you to be a meticulous planner, and that takes time. You have to spend your moments weighing questions such as whether or not you should leave the Costco-sized detergent in the trunk in order to save a trip carrying it into the house versus worrying that it will be stolen by another human gone-laundry-mad because he just ran out of soap. (When you live in an apartment complex where no one has washer and dryer hook-ups rumors of such car break-ins abound.) You have to budget for what item you are going to buy from Walgreens in order to get the $20 in cash back that will be exchanged for quarters by either a cold machine (if it actually works this time) or a suddenly unhelpful older woman who scowls at the sight of the dog bed covers in your heaping basket. Worst of all, you have to consider what to wear when you go “out” to do laundry. This (along with the exposure of your family’s undergarments to complete strangers) is the centerpiece of the laundry class issue.

When all of your clothes are piled into baskets and bags, you are left to wear something less than desirable to the laundromat. I have learned over the years to keep a set of laundromat clothes. A uniform for battle. Underclothes include my very last pair of underwear that inevitably has holes along the banding and is far too tight, along with a sports bra that I used to wear in high school. In the summer I wear my house painting clothes – athletic shorts splattered in paint streaks from various apartment moves and a sleeveless t-shirt for a Boston Fenway Clinic Fundraiser that has an enormous pink-triangle on the back. Winter is trickier. Usually pinstriped oversized pajama pants, orange UT crocks, and a long-sleeved Colgate College Houses t-shirt that, like my underwear, also has holes. In my earlier seasons when I was a naïve laundry-doer my laundry-day outfits tended to have an odd effect – passersby the front of the laundromat would try to toss coins into my Einstein Bagel coffee-cup. I often wondered if they were quite aware that the donations were going not to my next meal but were being saved for the day, oh that heavenly day, when I would buy my own washer-dryer combo.

Laundry is a class issue because for those of us who have to do it out of house the hours that could be spent on self-improvement and self-serving capitalistic endeavors are instead spent schlepping pounds of clothes from home-to-car-to-laundromat-back-to-car-and-car-to-home along with anxiously worrying about whether we can squeak by with just enough quarters to get everything dried. Not to mention that the laundry outfit, especially the underclothing, is terribly damaging to one’s self-respect. (This, by the way, is why I like to do laundry on Friday nights when the fewest people will see me who may, despite the color and mixed-cloth of their own uniforms, pass judgment on mine. Also, please no comments on how pathetic Friday night laundry sounds. I am sure that this is also just part of the plight that keeps us down.)

The problem of not having our own washer and dryer became particularly acute last February when our apartment laundry center suddenly burned to the ground (probably an arson attack by an irate launderer, enraged that the dumpy machines stole his or her quarters again). This meant that we had to do laundry at a laundromat a mile-and-a-half away. Now, when you do laundry at your apartment center you can at least maintain some of your dignity by spending the time between cycles in the comfort of your own home. When you do laundry at a laundromat you are stuck, suspended in deadening boredom for 25 minutes during the wash cycle and double that time during drying. Over the years I have fruitlessly tried to fight this boredom with efforts that screamed “I will not allow you, oh demons of the laundry, to squander the precious years of my youth!” I have played games like Brickbreaker and Freespace on my phone for hours. I have made calls to long-lost friends and family (who, by the way, get annoyed when you say that you have to hang-up because you need to move your clothes, accusing you that the only time you call is when you are bored at the laundromat). I have watched NASCAR, which is inevitably on in the laundromat that I frequent despite the fact that the NASCAR season does not run the entire year nor 24 hours a day. I have tried to read, but reading is something that I prefer to do when I can really focus on the words on the page and not on sneaking a peek at other people’s garments. The tightness of my underwear tends to block such efforts of concentration anyway. When things have been desperate, both my wife and I have resorted to more unhealthy means of entertainment –drinking and gambling.

A few months ago Summer returned from doing laundry with a dozen $2 used scratch off tickets purchased from the convenience store next to the laundromat. I inquired as to why she bought so many. She said that she just kept scratching and winning, scratching and winning again, and she just kept scratching away hoping that “under the printed cowboy-boot was a washer.” I banned her from that particular laundromat. In the deepest troughs of my own desperation I have resorted to walking next door to the same site of the scratch-ticket-scandal, purchasing a 24 oz. Heineken keg can, and slouching over in the front seat of my car drinking it out of a brown-paper-bag. Those were the darkest of my laundry days.

Marx was right that there is something to be said for laborers having a direct physical connection to the products of their labor. I love my clean laundry. I likely love it more than most because of the work that goes into its preparation. But I, like many in the former Soviet Union who were also intimately tied to their work through physical labor, want more. I want the LG or the Samsung or the Whirlpool and I want all of the benefits – being able to watch football while your laundry is washing, being able to produce clean clothes without handling $20 in quarters, being able to do laundry naked in the privacy of your own home if you really, really needed to.

When folding the last load of laundry that I did over the weekend, a little green Monopoly house fell out the pocket of my black Adidas sweats. I held it up, the plastic still hot to the touch, and amidst the other laundry-doers bustling around me I drifted off, quietly picturing a tiny me and a tiny Summer and an even tinier border collie holding hands and dancing around in a circle. (And no, this wasn’t the day I was drinking in my car.) In that little green Monopoly house we circumambulated what I have come to covet as the ultimate symbol of grown-up status, the modern home altar: a brand new front-load, Energy Star washing machine.

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