Intrigue at the Belmont Eco-Wash

Today I watched a man unload my laundry from a machine. It was in a laundromat on Belmont in SE Portland. I went there in the afternoon, after work. Red and I had a late lunch at Dick's Kitchen. We both liked the burgers there. We split a side of fries.

Then Red went off to her workout, and I went off to finally wash my clothes from Burning Man.

I'd been lazy the whole week in Reno, and hadn't wanted to use the small machines way down on the first floor of the hotel. Besides some of the clothes were rather dusty.

I planed to run them through several cycles. On the way to the laundromat I ducked into Zupan's to buy some vinegar, which is regarded as being especially helpful in getting rid of playa dust out of one's clothes. For a moment there I thought I could only buy exotic Italian vinegar, but they had good old Heinz pickle vinegar on the bottom shelf for a dollar sixty a bottle.

At the Belmont Eco-wash, I loaded my clothes, probably ten pounds in all, into one of the huge sixty pound washers, that had instructions in English and Spanish. I swiped my credit card for the wash---six dollars and seventy five cents, and used half a box of Tide from the vending machine, as well as a few scoops of vinegar.

I left one item of clothes out in the car---the Kuhl black jeans that I had worn in the evening during the later part of the week. They simply had too much oth dust in them to bring them into an establishment yet.

Having such a small load for a sixty pound machine meant the clothes really got spun around. Most people load them up until they have a big stuffed tube of clothes. Mine were small in the drum, and got sloshed good and well. After the cycle was over, I immediately started them again, and put in a little more of the soap, and some more vinegar.

When I got up to do this, I relinquished my seat by the door. I had been sitting there reading a copy of Faust someone had left there, switching between the original German and the translation.

Immediately after standing up, a brown-skinned man, either Japanese or Mexican, sat in my seat. It seemed a bit odd, how quickly he took it. But I suppose he expected why not---I wouldn't need it. He couldn't have known I was going to run the clothes a third time in the same machine.

I milled around the laundromat for a few minutes, and when I meandered back to that area, the brown-skinned man was no longer in that seat, so I sat back down and began reading.

I glanced at the clock periodically until I knew it time was the wash to be over.  Then I washed them a third time the same way, using vinegar but hardly any soap.

By this time I'd been absorbed in reading Goethe for a while. When the load was over, and the drum was winding down from the spin, and I was about to stand up, the brown-skinned man reappeared with one of those baskets on wheels. He went down the row of machines until he got to mine, right near where I was sitting. He looked at it until it stopped.

Then he opened the door and began pulling out my clothes and putting them into the basket. He held up my gray Columbia converter slacks and looked at them with puzzlement, then dropped them into the basket. Then my lime green Patagonia Houdini. Then my black shirt. Then my orange shirt. One by one he looked at each item, getting more puzzled, but still persisting in pulling each one out. Finally he got to the very end, and realizing that he recognized none of the items, he hurriedly took them out of the basket and put them back into the machine.

At this point, he looked at the neighboring machine. He opened the door and began pulling out the clothes. The first thing he pulled out was a lime green shirt about the same color as my Houdini, as well as a black shirt.

All this time I was only a few feet away. I decided just to let things play out, and see where it went. When he was finally gone, I got up and went over to my machine to unload it.

As I did, I saw him across the laundromat by the driers, loading one of them with his clothes. I could see the black shirt and the lime green shirt in there. For a moment I thought of waiting until he was gone, and then going over there and putting my clothes in a drier right next to his, and putting in just enough change so it would run until just before the end of his own machine. Then I thought that would be a bit too sadistic.