In the final days before I moved from Michigan to New York, I sat awake at night thinking about laundry and scrolling through local laundromat listings for hours at a time. In selecting my apartment, I had uneasily traded a place with a full-sized refrigerator and in-building laundry for a separate bedroom. I knew there would be consequences.
Desperate to hang on to clean clothes as long as I could, I finished a final load of laundry mere moments before I went to pick up the rental truck on the morning of the move. In New York, I survived for almost three weeks, growing anxious as the dresser emptied and the hamper filled up. Perhaps the question of laundry would solve itself before the fateful day ever arrived. People here are routinely hit by speeding maniacs as they cross the street and, while the circumstance is admittedly unfortunate, the victims are at least relieved from the misery of laundry. This was not to be, and my luck ran out on the day I exhausted my supply of undershirts.
Even the most charitable observer would be hard-pressed to describe a New York laundromat as anything other than an unbelievable carnival of suffering. There are no written instructions at my laundromat save for a handwritten sign taped on the door of every dryer that reads, “We will not be responsible for customer MISTAKE!!” The machines, one assumes, once had written instructions to indicate which direction to point the dial for each water temperature before the text wore off early in the Giuliani administration.
The effect of this is that new customers must undergo a sort of informal orientation session led by a woman with a thick Russian accent. She explains that the upper left setting of the dial is hot and the lower right setting is cold. There are two other settings but their purpose is lost to history. This is not of great importance because selecting a temperature on the dial is primarily a ceremonial registration of preference and has little bearing on reality.
The orientation also includes a demonstration of the appropriate method of inserting quarters into the machines quickly, which is a necessity given that the smallest washing machine demands seventeen quarters before it will grind to life and some require as many as thirty-nine quarters. Several loads of laundry add up to the cost of a meal at a respectable restaurant.
The washing machine takes twenty-five minutes, which seems hasty for a device tasked with removing the soot and filth New York textiles accumulate. While manufacturers of contemporary residential washing machines have gotten the idea that modern detergents will do most of the work if they are given the time they need, this school of thought has not yet made it to the laundromat. Dirt and filth, in the view of the laundromat washer, is not something to be cleaned so much as it is something to be beaten into submission.
In a strictly legal sense, the machines at the laundromat wash clothes. Water and detergent are introduced. There is a great deal of movement. There is draining, rinsing, and spinning. At the end of the process, there are two possible outcomes. Either the machine stops and the door unlocks, or the machine rotates endlessly and the woman with the Russian accent must be summoned to perform a mysterious procedure on the door of the machine involving a long metal rod.
After a similarly exhausting process with the dryer, the laundromat customer arrives home some thirty dollars poorer and with clothes that are still damp and only vaguely cleaner.
As we know, everyone does laundry wrong (except me) and I was willing to suffer the indignity of the laundromat to retain control over my process until the day that I saw a cockroach scuttle across the floor as I was folding my bedsheets.
The next laundry day, I went to a “wash and fold,” where I pay (by American Express rather than quarters, at least) for the pleasure of having somebody else do my laundry. The process involves my carrying a blue IKEA bag of laundry several blocks before work and dropping it off with a man who hands me a claim check. I return on the way home from work and receive the same bag of laundry with the contents neatly shrink-wrapped and smelling of mid-grade wholesale detergent.
It is difficult to imagine that whatever transpires at the wash and fold is considerably different from what goes on at the laundromat (the stain removal would indicate that it is markedly less productive, in fact). There is a certain magic, however, to picking up a bag of fresh-ish laundry on the way home from work, and I can engage in a sort of magical thinking about the cleanliness of laundry when I am not supervising the process. After all, this is what it must feel like to be a Rockefeller or a Kennedy — though perhaps they would just get an apartment with a washing machine.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“The Six Worst Restaurant Chairs” by Dayna Evans in Eater.
“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That’s why Chippendale is famous.” Said Mies Van Der Rohe, who dabbled in both chairs and skyscrapers. This is perhaps true if you are designing a chair, though it is not very hard to choose a chair. Most chairs are terrible, which helps narrow down the options. A person would not know this when visiting most restaurants, where chairs are selected by people who spend much of the day on their feet and are completely unqualified. I, for one, am glad to see this problem exposed in the media.
“The Hidden Costs of Living Alone” by Joe Pinsker in the Atlantic.
We established two weeks ago that being left alone is one of the world’s great pleasures. This is no thanks to a system that is, as this piece puts it, tilted against the 36 million of us who live in solo households in this country. Living alone, one study suggests, is 28 percent more expensive than living with others, and that does not count the small ways that things quietly benefit people who live with others. The Michigan House has a Families, Children, and Seniors Committee, which I often joked is devoted to just about everyone except young people who live alone. Perhaps I was on to something.
There is especially something to be said for the particular challenges for people who live alone in cities. I do not mean that we are a miserable lot — quite the opposite. I can think of no situation more delightful. My heart goes out to people who have to drive cars or live with roommates — I have tried both and have decided that a cost of living that is 28 percent higher is a small price to pay. I do mean that we treat both living alone and living in cities as a sort of mysterious aberration — a phase that will pass as people move to the suburbs and start families.
We refuse to take urban life seriously. We build terrible housing and talk about public transportation as if it were an extremist program for people living in abject poverty. Once you take that kind of thinking into account, it makes perfect sense that people in my position look at having a washing machine in our homes the same way most people look at the possibility of owning a yacht.