The Spencer and Clive Wash and Fold has five industrial dryers, as well as numerous, cheaper-to-use domestic ones. Judy and Ben, the owners and only employees of the Laundromat, don’t mind when I sit for two hours on a Tuesday morning with my head resting inside the industrial dryer at the end of the row. Anyone who uses the second to last machine, the number four, has never asked me to move. I think they’re afraid to talk to me, they think I’m not all there, that I’m jacked on crack, coming down, or that I’m someone from Cam H who hasn’t taken her meds. It’s Spencer Street and Clive Avenue, they’re not wrong in their assumptions. I would have thought something like that too, about someone leaning back with their head, propped up on a pillow, in a dryer. Spencer and Clive. Home to half-way houses, criminals, rooming houses for the mentally unwell. Apartment alley and the city’s newest, poorest immigrants still. I discoveredthe absence of noise inside an industrial BDH dryer by accident.
I met Judy at the laudromat on the day I chose to walk home, snubbing my nose at the WheelTrans van that was stationed outside Saint Patrick’s Hospital. The hospital shares its grounds with Cam H, hotspot for therapists of the mentally stable and unstable alike. Cam H, where you can never be too sure if the person next to you is going to just walk on by or come leaping out at you in a scream or plea of nonsense. The last time I was there prior to this check-up I was told by a woman that I looked like the ghost of her Aunt.
“Her ghost. Really. Not the real women?”
“No, it’s her ghost you look like. Your pale skin.”
“How old was she when she died?”
“Your age,” she said. “Thirty-two. You’re her ghost, aren’t you?”
Spencer and Clive is five blocks from St. Patrick’s Hospital. It’s the opposite direction from where I meant to head, I live east and this is west, but when I stumbled out from my check-up at St. Pat’s, and after saying no to the driver of the WheelTrans I was sure I was heading home. It happened to be the day the sky decided to drop a month’s worth of rain on us in less than five minutes, twenty minutes or so into my promenade.Drenched, on the verge of tears, standing foolishly at the side of the curb with my hand in the air attempting to hail a cab, I was quick to turn around when I heard:
“Lady? Lady! C’mon you’re not going to get a cab right now, come on in here.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m really okay.”
“You’re about as okay as a white t-shirt in the rain.”
“I just need a cab,” I said.
“You’re not going to get one sopping wet like that. C’mon in here.” That was Judy. Owner, queen of the wash and fold. “Give me your clothes,” she said.
“Oh great. Where’s the door? Let me out of here!” I turned around, walked right into a table, slipped on the floor and almost fell.
“Oh my god, you’re blind.”
“Please show me the door.”
“You don’t want that, really. Give me your clothes so I can dry them.”
She took my jacket, shirts, my pants too because she had extra clean t-shirts and a pair of track pants in the Lost and Found, just waiting to be used. The track pants were too big, they were men’s, the t-shirt was too but they were dry and that’s all that mattered.“Just sit here,” she said. “I’ll put these in a domestic, on low. They look like they shouldn’t be in the dryer at all.” She moved me to the back of the place and gave me a pillow.“This from the Lost and Found too?” I asked.“No. This is Ben’s for when he’s on the nightshift. It’s clean.”She left me sitting against dryer number 5 and that’s when I discovered peace. Not quiet in that meditative way, but a numbness, a white noise void that only the interior of a steel drum can provide. I started with the pillow behind me, sitting upright, but soon my head had drifted down, and there I was head inside the dryer. If you’ve ever had a cat scan, you’d almost understand what’s it like. How there’s an odd comfort in the stillness of space, the lack of human connection while machines do what it is they’re meant to do. During a cat scan, you’re alone in the room, with machines working away knowing that people are not too far off, just not right there. Or perhaps you have a memory of being a child at your grandmother’s house, without your favorite toys. You make the most of the pots and pans pulled out from the kitchen cupboards so you don’t crawl and paw at and try to climb grandmother Rose as she bakes sweet egg bread for dinner with your arguing parents. Bread that, in a few years time you’ll love but right then, at twenty-one months you don’t care about because the biggest pot, the spaghetti pot, the turkey soup pot, is upside down on your head and in there, you can’t hear your grandmother speaking her native Greek that you will never understand. In there, you could be in the ocean, in the bottom of a drilled out empty mine shaft, buried under sand, under snow, it doesn’t matter. Because in there, you can’t hear. Anything.