Month: August 2006

Look around and tell me what you see?

I see the usual things, the too-muchness. I see the fuzzed scrim of darkness falling, the green world receding beyond the window screens.

I see, everywhere I look, patterns and textures, sprawling across the upholstery of the furniture. The geometric chaos of the rug beneath me. I see the comfortable jumble of color and type aligned on the bookshelves.

I see a red-and-white checkered rocketship, three midgets, prosthetic eyeballs beneath a shimmering bell jar, and a fat, stainless steel clown with a bright glow settled on his belly like the moon resting on the surface of a lake.

I see Nancy and Sluggo out for a stroll beneath an old wooden sign that reads, in fading red block letters, “BOOKS.” I see a blind rabbit, a monkey wearing a fez, and the skeleton of a bat. I see three grinning donkeys conjured from a schizophrenic’s nightmare.

I see long-dead baseball players, baby bottles crammed with astronauts and entire families of little people, and a blonde go-go dancer trapped in a cage with a paralyzed, slate-gray bird. I see beetles, a skeleton riding a white horse, and an elf with a gaping hole where his stomach should be. He has swallowed a handful of keys.

I see a dancing mouse wearing bright trousers.

What do you hear?

I hear David Bowie, howling so loudly that he is rattling everything I see.

And how do you feel?

I feel hungry. I am counting on a bag of radishes to keep me alive.

The man who ran the Giant Wash was an obsessively neat character, inordinately conscientious, officious even. German, he seemed, like someone stepped right out of one of August Sander’s portraits.

I’d heard it intimated that he lived with his elderly mother somewhere in the neighborhood, but this may have been mere speculation.

Customers were always running afoul of the Giant Wash man. The neighborhood had seen better days, and a good percentage of the clientele were beleaguered, hardscrabble types. It was a minor miracle, really, that the man was able to keep the place so spic and span and the machines in such good working order.

He’d clearly been at it for a long time, and seemed to know how to take apart and put back together every machine in the Giant Wash. Half the time when I went in there he would have the dollar bill changer completely dismantled; he’d be muttering sourly and dispensing change with his greasy hands.

The Giant Wash man’s mantra, which I heard him bark at customers on countless occasions, was “Respect the machinery!” There was a hand-lettered sign above the detergent dispenser that read, “Laundry privileges may be revoked at any time, for any reason!”

I saw some incredible scenes in that place, but the Giant Wash man never backed down, and I can testify that laundry privileges were, in fact, routinely revoked.

It had to be the best-run laundromat in America, and I loved it for its close proximity to my apartment and for the fabulous theater that played out there everyday.

I eventually moved to a different part of town, however, and I noticed when I happened to drive by there the other day that the Giant Wash is now some kind of fancy coffee shop.