Laundry Saga: Time to Admit Defeat

After three years absent a washer/drier hookup, I am giving up the ghosts on my local laundromat.

I wrote off the Maytag place and its ancient, ineffective driers, throwing all my laundry eggs in the Sylvan Park laundromat’s basket. With cheap washers, passable driers and small crowds at off-peak times, I could run out and come home with a bag of drier-crisp underwear in under an hour.

Until Tuesday.

I never expected much from the place, but it delivers much less. Half the driers were marked out of order or had dark digital displays.

But technology was not the biggest problem.

Tobacco juice sealant on the front walk is one thing (there’s a side door).

But crackheads lining up for a fix in the bathroom goes far beyond the pale.

I’ve seen it once, in the hands of a man who no longer exists. Since I knew this man carried a supply, I asked to see it. I’ve never smoked it, nor desire to.

But I got a whiff of the same artificial rocks the dead man had in his pocket at the laundromat last night, just a few minutes after he asked me how late the 24-hour laundry palace stay opened. But the Laundromat is hardly in a bad neighborhood – it’s surrounded by a pack of restaurants, at least two are high-end. Houses on the block run from nice condo apartments to

No one spends a half-hour in a dingy bathroom without serious digestive problems or drug problems.

The derelict emerged from an early 1980s van, its navy blue paint peeled away in continents with North Dakota plates - not exactly a vehicle for blending in. Perhaps he fled the dangerously high Red River in Fargo.

But that ugly artificial smell told me otherwise.

I need a W/D hookup, or at least one of those high-end laundromats that only exist on film, because the rich don't need a laundromat in the real world.