Illegal Laundry

This is the lonely time. Crouched in the dark, spooky basement of the old mansion where I work on the weekends. My seasonal weekend job is grinding to a halt, so the mansion is quiet and dark this Friday night. The sounds of music and dancing and caterers shifting equipment doesn’t pound through the floor. The only sounds are the normal sounds of a large, old house, slowly creaking through the late night hours. And the sounds of the washer and dryer in the next room.

They belong to the groundskeeper, who lives at the foot of the property in the old gatehouse. He haunts these halls doing his own laundry at odd hours, but we’ve arranged a schedule. I can come and do mine late at night as long as I keep it a secret. No one must know about this strangely intimate liberty that I’m taking.

I fear the laundry room at my apartment. An unhealthy pit of mildew, mold, and insane neighbors that sucks up quarters like a greedy dragon. My friends tire of me bringing my laundry to their houses. So, during my weekend shifts, in the dead of night, I do my laundry, sneaking it out the basement door at 1am when my shift is over. Glancing around nervously for imagined spies.

During the off season, between November and March, when I’m free of working myself to the point of collapse every weekend, I find myself still at my weekend job twice a month, in the basement, waiting on my laundry, sneaking it out the door, sadly keeping the same general hours of a normal shift.

In what many believe to be a very haunted house, this takes a certain level of stamina. There are times when the house doesn’t want me there, or so I feel, but the chores must get done. It’s worth having my eyes sucked out by a ghost if it saves three dollars in quarters and my clothes don’t come out of the machine stinking like they’ve been lying around in a stagnant pool for three weeks.

The off-season illegal laundry time is a time for reflection. A time to get your back against the wall, make sure you have a good view of the long hallway that leads into a gaping maw of blackness, and think about where you are in life. Think about the next steps. Or, if the house is being uncooperative, and you have an active mind, and you’re pretty sure you heard a voice or saw a shadow move, it’s a time for loud music or loud Netflix movies. Create the illusion of an event, scare the ghosts back to the same corners they hide in when the house is full of 150 wedding guests and a dozen caterers who could give a good goddamn about the supernatural.

I’ve always enjoyed the Zen-like quality of domestic chores that require a wait period. Laundry, baking, dishwashing. This flurry of activity followed by a down period where you can sit with the machines and have some wine and stare blankly into middle space without being accused of shirking your duties, without that tiny voice in your head saying that you shouldn’t be idle. The wait is a part of the work. It’s built into it. You have to be on hand to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer, to hang them up when you’re done. You have to empty the dishwasher, and you can’t leave that pie unattended.

For those of us who feel guilty when we’re lazy, there’s comfort in the excuse. Two or three hours of my life spent in the dark basement at my weekend job when I don’t need to be there isn’t a waste of a Friday night, it’s time to think, time to play, my time to throw away on nothing. And that’s fine. All part of the chore.

In the winter months, during these weekends with no shifts, I find myself making stews that need to simmer for hours, I start complicated baking projects that fill the day. I start to look forward to the projects. I spend the week before a laundry night getting more and more excited. What a treat. A free weekend of laundry, baking, cleaning, organizing, cataloging. All marked by extended periods where I’m forced to sit and commune with myself.

There’s also a little bit of the criminal thrill with the illegal laundry nights. Sometimes, an event is going on. One of my colleagues has pulled the shift. Sometimes the house is alive with the sounds of a wedding reception. I creep through the hallways of the basement, beneath the stomping feet of the guests, and I look up at the ceiling. A version of the Phantom of the Opera, lurking in the bowels of the building and listening, observing, plotting… I could trip all the fuses, I could knock on pipes, I could make mysterious sounds at locked doorways at the tops of stairs. Could I slip into the party unnoticed? I could hide for days in the basement. I could get away with anything.

Sometimes, like tonight, I get some of my writing projects out of the way. Catch up after a week of slumping home and sitting, exhausted, on the couch. Unable to bring myself to do anything but stare blankly at a movie I’ve seen a thousand times before.

Strangely, I have the urge to start reading old Bellairs books. See if I can recapture that young adult horror feel. I’m reminded of being dropped off at the library by mom and left sitting alone in the very back of the children’s horror section, plowing through Bellairs and Sleater and imagining myself in the midst of a creepy yet magical adventure. In dark basements, alone with the ghosts, it’s easy to start to feel like there’s not an outside world. Everything around you is a closed, protected fantasy. One in which, perhaps, you’re the star.

But then the buzzer on the dryer screams and it’s time to spring into action. To fold, sort, and pack away. Get everything ready to smuggle outside and drive home, headlights off till the car is past the gatehouse, and then out of sight. Back to the sea of apartments and the bills piling up.