Laundry Mat Soliloquy

The only unpleasant thing about laundry mats are the clothes that people wear to them. I love the soapy scents, the low hum of the spin cycles, the gentle vibrations, and, most of all, the warm clothes and towels that make you want to crawl right inside that triple-load commercial dryer and take a nap. I've been officially intoxicated.

The fact that I rarely go to the laundry mat makes it easy to forget what incredibly relaxing, quiet places they are --not to mention an ideal hiding spot if you don't want to be found. Although I have a standing invitation to use the washer and dryer in the house upstairs, there's nothing quite like the guilt of paying late rent and mixing a Saturday morning hangover with two screaming children to get me packing up my dirty laundry.

My affinity for laundry mats began about five years ago when I was living in the 9th and Marine neighborhood with my best friend, Jess. Jess and I used to go to the cosy little laundry mat at Arapahoe and 4th street that is, sadly, no longer there. The laundry mat was in a tiny building in the middle of a neighborhood, and sandwiched between overgrown pine trees. A true diamond in the rough, as far as laundry mats go.

It was the perfect place to finish homework, to read, and to gossip until one night something happened that made us afraid to show our faces there ever again. One night, Jess and I left all of our clothes to dry and headed back to our apartment to study for final exams. Several hours later, just before nine o'clock, Jess jumped up from the table. "Oh no, we completely forgot about our clothes in the dryer!" she said.

So Jess raced out the door with three minutes to go, but by the time she got to the laundry mat, it was well after nine. She tried the door anyway, and to her surprise, it was open. Laundry bags in hand, she opened the dryers and began to gather our clothes, when suddenly, the overhead lights shut off, a bright spotlight came on, and the security alarm started ringing at full blast. Expecting the police to show up, Jess shoved the clothes into the bag at a criminal pace --like money from a bank robbery. Unseen, she sped back to the apartment as fast as she could. When she finally told me what happened, we agreed just to sacrifice our forgotten load of towels, and leave them behind for good. Sadly, that was the last we ever saw of the 4th street laundry mat.

Since that fateful day, I sometimes come to Doozy Duds across from campus on the hill. The thing about Doozy Duds is that it's right next to Dot's (dirty-ass) Diner. Nothing says "we're going out again tonight" like a Dot's hangover-curing breakfast, so I dropped a few quarters in the washers and ran over for some scrambled egg whites, the pepper-iest hash browns you can imagine, and a couple of greasy sausage links to settle my shakes. After six beverages (well...water, juice, root beer, and iced coffee) my headache didn't stand a chance.

The thing about Doozy Duds that really sets it apart from the 4th street mat are the college boys. One of my favorite things to do there is hop up on the counter near the dryers and watch last-clean-tee-shirt-wearing college boys pack four loads of laundry into one dryer and wait three hours for it to dry. I mean, there's just something adorable about learning.

Speaking of the opposite sex, let me tell you the truth about something here: You will never meet someone you want to date at the laundry mat. Think of all the movie scenes and commercials where a cute girl is folding her lace panties across the table from a hot man? That never happens. First of all, guys at laundry mats have waited until the absolute last possible day to do laundry, so they show up in ratty tee-shirts and sweatpants without boxers because none of them are clean. The scene plays out a little more like this: nine times out of ten you catch some perv-y creep anxiously watching you unload your clothes from the dryer, hoping to catch a glimpse of the g-string of his dreams. It's not nearly as romantic.

And last, but not least, before you set off on a laundry mat quest of your own, I have one fair warning: These timeless establishments will never go out of business, and that's because God made laundry mat floors dirtier than any other floors in the world. It would be cleaner to drop your white shirt on the dirt floor of a hut, than on the floor at Doozy Duds. You are so incredibly fucked when this happens because now all the dirty hair and crumbs and diseases of the world are caked on your clean white shirt. And, trust me, that is exactly what it looks like. In fact, I've only seen a floor mopped once at a laundry mat, and the next week it was out of business. Consider yourself warned.