Nebulous Mooch

ESPN’s Sports Center was playing in the coin laundry the other day. We’d gone to the bank while the clothes were washing. When we returned Sport’s Center was on and my husband loudly declared, “This is the best laundry ever! The other men in the place agreed.

As we put our clothes in the dryers, my husband kept one eye on the television. I don’t think he heard a single thing I said to him.

I watched one of the men in the laundry try to fold his clothes. His head was turned up to the screen–his eyes fixed. He ended up kind of balling up his clothes into twisted heaps instead of folding them because he couldn’t pay enough attention to what he was doing.

I decided to try to watch some of Sports Center as we waited for the clothes to dry. It was turned up too loud for me to be able to comprehend anything I tried to read in the newspaper. They claim that men don’t talk as much as women–I don’t believe that’s true, my father and my husband both have a tendency to talk and talk–but when it comes to sports men can sure ramble on and on and on. On the show, they’d show a play and then everyone on the show made comments about it. Never mind, that most of them seemed to say pretty much the same thing. They all took their turns to talk and talk and talk. How much can you possible say about a football game? Apparently, one game can be thoroughly discussed for hours on end.

Once the football part of Sports Center was over and they were discussing baseball, the level of excitement waned and the men in the laundry were able to concentrate on folding clothes or talking to their wives.

I don’t understand what’s so great about football. It doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t want to play it or watch others play it. I certainly don’t want to talk about it or watch others talk about it. If you want to spend three hours watching a game and another couple of hours listening to people talk about the game you just watched, that’s your business. Everyone has a vice. Some people smoke. Some drink. Some people watch football. Some people smoke and drink while watching football.

We spend Wednesday mornings at the laundromat. Our apartment complex charges too much to wash and dry so we choose to wash and dry elsewhere. Up until a few months ago we went to a 24 hour coin laundry down the street from the lovely Chateaux Versailles Apartments and right next door to a tanning salon. It always contained interesting characters.

The constant yelling of The Price is Right played in the background as women laid claim to limited folding table space. There were always people in the laundromat who wanted to claim a wheeling basket as there own. They’d sit in the plastic blue chairs with one hand on their chosen basket snarling at anyone who seemed to be looking at it.

It was sometimes fun to try to guess the relationship of the people who came in together. Once a man and woman came in to wash a heap of clothes. The woman was young and pregnant. The man was in his early sixties. Since they looked alike my husband and I assumed they were father and daughter until they started doing some un-father-and-daughter like things.

There was a couple that came in pretty regularly that always used Dawn dish soap in the washing machine. I’d watch the water, thick with foam, slosh around through their machine’s glass door and think, “At least they won’t have any grease stains.” I always wondered whether they were able to get all of the soap out of their clothes. There was a young couple that would use so much bleach that the laundromat would smell like a swimming pool.

For about a month, a man and woman (I don’t know their relationship because they hardly spoke to each other – probably just co-workers) used to back a pickup truck loaded with sheets up to the back door. They would pack every machine in the place with their sheets and take up every folding table and look at you as if they were daring you to complain. “Great! The eastern European sheet company is here again,” my husband would sigh as we walked in the door. No matter what time we tried to get to there they’d get there just before us.

Fortunately, we’ve found a new laundromat. It is clean. The machines are new and it has plenty of folding space. Usually, when we get there in the mornings, it’s empty. I miss the characters from the other place but the peace of mind I get washing at the new place is far more valuable to me.