Last Saturday Night
The Wash and Spin has three kinds of washers. Twenty of the ones you think of when you hear the word “washing machine” (i.e. the one in your utility room, or laundry room, or down in your basement). You open the lid, you drop your clothes in. You go off and chill for a half an hour. A buck fifty. They have about twenty of the laundromat washing machines; the ones that are stacked two high and open up from the side. Two bucks. And there are about six of the laundromat washing machines designed to accommodate a much larger load. Five dollars.
I separated our clothes, lights and darks, and dropped them in. Parted with three bucks and two caps full of detergent, and stepped out for a bit of that Turkish and domestic blend.
The Wash and Spin is located on Sacramento. It's about three and a half blocks from our apartment. Across the street, to either side, there are two or three storefronts that are still in business. It seems like a quiet stretch of Sacramento. I'm too new, here, to know if there's a noisy one.
Cliff asked me what I was smoking and I told him. He said he had a pack of those back in his car. I asked him if he was asking me for one as I tapped one out. I got the filter just past the foil and he plucked it from the pack with one, precise swipe. Grace. I offered one to Forrest, in same manner, and he slid it loose, just as sure but slower than Cliff. The lighter was passed around.
Cliff asked me where I was from and I told him. Michigan. The guy lurched and swooped in these big circles around us, laughing hard. I expected to see a chunk of his ass land on the pavement by our ankles. Forrest, apparently, was used to this.
“I wouldn’t believe it from anyone. Anyone, but YOU. YOU, I believe it. YOU’RE from Michigan.”
“Well. . . Hell, yeah,” I smiled the way I do when the people around me are feeling good. Sincerely, that is. A sincere smile.
Forrest just shook his head, as Cliff went on laughing.
“I didn’t think it was funny, before tonight,” I told him. Laughter percolated in my chest. My shoulders shook.
“I shouldn’t have smoked that weed,” Cliff says. He bends down, close to my face. He’s beaming. “Do you smoke weed?”
“Not as much as I used to.”
And the small talk went on for a few minutes. From smoking weed, to buying weed, to selling weed. He said he used to make rent moving real weed. I told him it sounded like more fun than working at a laundromat. And then, after he corrected me (“It’s a wash-house, dammit!”), he went into his rant.
It went something like this:
“Fucking hell, yeah, it beat working at a wash-house. It’s pure Capitalism, selling weed. PURE. This system we got. . . It’s fucked. The whole thing is fucked. It is an inhumane mode of economics. It is NOT humane. You know where you are? You’re in South Berkeley. South Berkeley. Historically, South Berkeley is a predominately black neighborhood. A predominately black area. What you see going on here, what you see going on now, is gentrification. RE-gentrification, maybe. You got all the white people, all these white folks, they’re coming back. They’re coming back to the cities. Why? Why? [Pantomimes steering a wheel.] ‘We’re tired of DRIVING!’ That’s why. ‘We’re tired of DRIVING!’ And they’re all coming back now. And they got the Mexicans with them. They got these border-jumping MEXICANS with them to put up with the most INHUMANELIEST work they got. What happens to the black folk? [Bends down on his knee, clasps his hands, and looks up.] ‘My God, my God, can’t I just be black?’ People say to me, they say ‘Cliff, what do you want to do with your life?’ I say, ‘GodDAMN, I just want to breathe. . .’ ‘We’re tired of DRIVING!’ . . . See, I’m trying to open people’s minds, here. I’m trying to get the black people AWAKE. I think about a hundred forty thousand of us marching from downtown, marching up through the school, we could change a few things. I’m trying to do that. It’s INHUMANE what’s going on. What we need, though. . . I’ll tell you what we need. We need another Katrina! Another Ka-tree-NUH! You saw it. You saw the pictures. You saw the videos. You saw those people. . . not all the people, but there were people, you saw them, they were like this [takes to jumping around, waves his hands in the hair]: ‘Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus, for your Katrina! You got them out of here, thank you! Jesus! MotherFUCKERS! YEAH!’”
And then he finally broke down laughing. . . Forrest had broken down before him. So there stood the three of us, laughing. Sacramento was drenched in our laughter. Our chuckling. Our squeaks and schoolgirl squeals and peals and chortles and snorts. The guy was funny.
“But, no man. . . this ain’t so bad. Not as far as a job goes. The wash-house ain’t so bad.”
“Beats manual labor,” Forrest says.
“I’ll do manual labor,” Cliff cocks his neck, there’s a pop.
“That ain’t what you said.”
“When did I say that?”
“Said it right here. Thursday. . . Wednesday night. You know [he looks at me], he does this all the time. He comes in to work. I show up. He looks at me. Looks me up and down and he says, ‘Okay, who am I going to be to him tonight?’”
“Hold up, hold up, hold up. . . Are you talking about the time, or the place, here. . . Because-“
“Well, you can’t have a TIME without a PLACE, can you? Before you get to a PLACE, you had to be somewhere BEFORE that, so-“
“Aw, shit. . . This motherfucker, I said to him the other night, in the car, I said ‘No more smoking, for YOU.’ He smokes and he turns into Albert Einstein. . . Hold up, I gotta get the phone.”
He goes back into the laundromat, unlocks the office door. Goes inside.
“You been here eleven days. Do you know. . . What a myth is?”
“It’s a story that. . . points to a larger truth.”
“But that story doesn’t have to be true, now, does it?”
“No sir.”
“I read once, in the encyclopedia. . . My gramma’s encyclopedia, that California. . . Originally, it was a myth. It was a mythic place. It was some man’s dream, you understand. It wasn’t true. So when you’re out here, you give that some thought. California is a myth.”
“Yes sir. I’ll think about that.”
The guy who worked the graveyard shift showed up. Old man with a gray beard and wide shoulders. Cliff and Forrest were about to leave. There stood Cliff with his jacket. I asked him if I could buy four quarters from the till. I had ten dimes. He told me four quarters wouldn’t be enough to dry two loads and gave me six. It was cool, he said. He works there.
“Hey, Cliff,” says Forest. “How about my books?”
“Oh. . . Yeah,” and Cliff steps back inside, fishing the keys from his hip pocket. He goes into the office, retrieves two books. He hands them over to his friend.
We bade each other goodnight, each of us trying to use the other’s name, so we’d remember the next time we met.
I went back inside and finished drying our clothes. I folded them. I packed them up in my duffle bag. I put Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy on top of the clothes and fastened the bag shut.
See, it’s on account of guys like Cliff that guys like Forrest and I don’t get any reading done.