Round and round and round. When I first discovered the sheer entertainment derived from watching laundry machines operate, I was just as shocked as you might be hearing about it. I think the entertainment value comes in the variability of the different cycles. The washing machines, or at least the ones that I always plopped down in front of, never did the same thing for long.
Once someone put the quarters in, there was the satisfying click that meant the lock of the door, and then the jets came on. Water flooded into the little compartment from all different directions like a car wash, and the clothes at first started slowly spinning, the washing machine getting all of them thoroughly wet before the real spinning started. Then, over the course of a quick 36 minutes, the clothes would be tossed in all sorts of directions, first slow and then so fast that they got pinned hard to the outer metal edges of the washing compartment, the machine rocking and shaking in a compelling crescendo. The washing machine would switch directions, add more water, drain some water, and suddenly explode with a wall of sudsy bubbles, only to be cleared out by a new rush of water in a matter of seconds.
The washers that my mother brought me to watch were Speed Queens, the best in show for commercial washing machines. They were small but mighty, and an owner could pack rows and rows of them into one small laundromat. One Speed Queen was entertaining on its own, but a wall of them, this was exceptional. When they were all being used, the totality of their power created an undeniable mechanized hypnotism. This was only compounded when they were all on similar cycles. This created an organized symphony of Speed Queens, magical possessed boxes of iron that all whispered tenderly and then screamed and shook at the exact same time, perfectly calibrated. When a bunch were on at the same time, I would frequently take turns looking at each of the cycles, standing up and hustling over to the next one every couple of minutes, making sure none of them were lonely. When I sat criss-cross applesauce, my face was at the perfect level to stick right into the concave glass door of each machine, so I could watch every flip and flop of the clothes up close, trying to discern individual articles from a mass of wet mush.
The Speed Queens had far more notable, mystical properties beyond the spectacle they created. I enjoyed watching their show, but there were other reasons why I was held captive in front of them for the entirety of their cycle. Any given machine’s miraculous ability to absolve my clothes of so much stench, the punishments and tribulations of my overactive adolescent body. The ability for them to take in even the most disgusting, stench ridden gym shirt and deliver it back to me, damp but completely delicious smelling, liberated.
Sometimes I sincerely wondered what the laundry machine did with the smell and mess. Was there a giant drawer where it all accumulated, that if opened would release a staggering scent, enough to stop anyone dead in their tracks? Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to matter. They kept on cleaning, so we kept on coming back.
When we went to the laundromat, the next couple days to week after were the best of my childhood life. My friends in school would treat me normally, I would feel confident sitting in class, beaming at my teacher, I felt totally whole. Then, after the days slid into weeks, my pile of neatly folded pristine Speed Queen-blessed clothes would disappear, and I would be left with nothing to wear. Not the “I have nothing to wear” which really meant a small group of old graphic Ts I didn’t like. I mean literally nothing clean to wear. It was then that I meticulously ranked my clothes in order of how gross they got on the given day that I had worn them. The ones that were the least gross would go on the top of the pile to be worn again. As week two turned into week three, my movements would slow. I would stay away from people. I would be quieter, and I began to talk to less and less people.
The thing about talking to people, especially in school, is that it’s very hard not to be close enough to smell them when you do it. I could never quite tell if the other kids could smell me, because most people are nice enough that they never show they can when they pick up on your stench. So I would stand there, talking to someone, in a horrible limbo of uncertainty about whether they were secretly looking at me completely repulsed, or were perceiving me as a normal person. Eventually I would usually just say nevermind and walk off, or not even say nevermind and just abruptly end the conversation, not wanting to risk anything. Sometimes I tried to talk to people far far away from them, kind of yelling between an awkward amount of distance. This didn’t work well either, because I’d just get looked at as weird for other reasons.
My worst nightmare were events where I had to be in massive groups of people, like at lunch or during an assembly. After week two I usually ate lunch in the bathroom, which was a comforting place because at least there were things that smelled worse than I did. Assemblies were far harder, like an hour long hot torture chamber. Especially if it was a big one and I began to sweat, I always worried that this would unlock the leftover scents from my clothes, creating a rich resurrected mural of the past week's activities.
I frequently wondered if any of my friends noticed this multi week cycle. How I acted totally normal for a while, and then slowly became stranger and more isolated until one day I miraculously came back to my peak self. I concluded that the time scale was long enough that no one was astute enough to recognize the pattern, so they probably just thought I was some kind of bipolar weirdo who really wanted to hang out sometimes and hated them other times.
I started attempting to devise plans to clean my laundry on my own. Sometimes I would bring my favorite shirts and shorts into the bathroom with me and soap them up under the shower with me and rinse them off, and then let them air dry in my room. This worked sometimes, but a lot of the time they didn’t dry fast enough to avoid getting that awkward damp smell that’s arguably even worse than clothes being dirty, because it screams I was weirdly wet for a weirdly long amount of time and now I smell weirdly like dog and some other thing you can’t put your finger on. So either my owner is irresponsible about changing their laundry or there’s another far weirder, definitely dirtier explanation for my smell.
When my mother told me that it was time to go back to the laundry mat, she had collected enough extra money, it would be like going to church. She would usually bring some year old magazine, I swear it was the same one over and over, and she’d let me sit in front of the washers and watch them go. Over and over the clothes would turn, until they were back to their former, pure form. There was a pregnant anticipation while I waited for my clothes to be ready, and also one last trial of ignominy. I usually had to sit in the laundromat in some of my dirtiest clothes, the smelliest I had been in weeks, waiting for all of the other clothes to be absolved of sin. Eventually I picked out a set of clothes that I always used for this that never got washed, and I hid them all the way in the back of my closet, trying not to think about them.
By the end of the trip, no matter how messy I had gotten anything, it was always back to its smiling self. The Speed Queens were more than Queens. They were Gods.