The Professor And The Laundromat
Wolf, Howard
THE PROFESSOR AND THE LAUNDROMAT A cycle of American life HOWARD WOLF I have mainly trace memories about doing laundry before my daughter came to live with me soon after The Great Buffalo...
...As much as I'm getting caught up with the life in the laundromat, I doh't want to admit that I have been displaced, too...
...I see her go off to church every Sunday...
...I had cherished the silence there, too, but it was quickly beginning to seem like part of a different social era...
...I bet it's easy to make over-time, time and a half...
...That's nice...
...It's probably a drug bust...
...It's not clear to me who these people are, where they live, how they make a living, if they work at all...
...It's good work, if you can get it," he says...
...You probably know him, Mr...
...You new around here...
...I know what you mean," I say, "but keep an open mind...
...1 took pride on these nights that I had come out of a midwestern graduate school to SUNY (Buffalo) as an assistant professor in a hot department when the university was at the height of its experimental ascent and expansion, that I had risen with the university, that I had made my way from the valley floor of graduate school to the high peak of Professor in about a decade, needing, more or less, my literary and intellectual conscience as I had gone along...
...You're lucky...
...Sarah doesn't get angry...
...I'd give anything if I could work...
...Or you got more...
...and from 1978 to 1981, I only had to walk across a courtyard to a basement...
...education (and/or enterprise...
...I don't want to admit that I'm not as interested in our legendary colloquies (the waitresses are disappointed if we talk for less than two hours...
...But we don't ask any questions...
...were brought up from the basement, folded, and stacked on my bed in our spacious apartment overlooking the Hudson River by the maid (as domestic workers were called, then...
...I'm still rushin...
...Laundry just seemed to get done before this time...
...I tell him no...
...I'm beginning to recognize some of the regulars, to get a sense of the atmosphere...
...Well, I don't get attached to these shirts...
...Atari hook-ups to alternate states of mind and new intellectual vistas through the combining of video and computer...
...What do you think...
...I don't know too much about dead people's clothing...
...This triangular-shaped building, facing both a wide tree-lined avenue and a large circle, defined Buffalo's industrial heyday as a point of transit between east and still emerging west...
...He has spoken with surrealist and unconscious logic about his situation...
...With the oncoming cold and assault upon the dollar, every carload of wash and every quarter in the slot took on added significance...
...I go back to Marie's and am eager to get through with this Saturday's load...
...Is that dryer free, dear...
...Lots of old people will have to keep dirty shirts in their rooms...
...The "boys"—the Saturday Afternoon Discussion Group—are waiting for me at the museum...
...Who could predict how fast my daughter's generation would move...
...One of the cops searches the man, and, when he decides that he's clean, the others lower their weapons and begin to take notes...
...I especially felt this when I carried laundry on certain winter nights across the courtyard...
...I'll go for 20 or 30 nickels if it will help him out of the laundromat, but I doubt if he'll make it, even if the poor have cable...
...Do you play the horses...
...kids running around . . . sparkling arc...
...What will happen to their shirts...
...I noticed that some of the nurses and nurse's aides, even Marie, called me "dear" or "honey" when they wanted something...
...America had moved quickly from the dreamy uto-pianism and Marcusan surplus-thinking of the 1960s to our new Depression by then, and it wasn't possible for me to afford even small luxuries any more—like sending laundry out...
...You can't beat the horses, but maybe the big shot knows something we don't know...
...Two police cars surround a twisted Corvette...
...The privileges seem few for the exclusions they entail...
...All this changed, though, when my daughter came to live with me after The Great Blizzard...
...Other people come out of doors, my neighbors, I suppose...
...I had to accept the fact that for two years, at least, the two years when my daughter would still be with me before going away to college, I'd have to go out—in all seasons, including Buffalo's legendary winters—to do the laundry...
...He figures / need some help...
...Four cops have guns drawn...
...I go out of the laundromat to the Your Host to wait for the machine to go through its cycle...
...I bet you get to make your own hours...
...You better remember," Marie says, "or there won't be room for other shirts...
...she almost never smiles, except when she seems to be smiling at something foolish you've done, something unintelligent, though she can't multiply and refuses, at my urging, to get a pocket calculator...
...Okay, all right," he says, "Sure, though...
...People I know ask, "What do you doT Tie wants to know where I work...
...My grandfather, persecuted and threatened with military service under the Tzar, came to New York City at the beginning of the century where he struggled as a pushcart merchant...
...No, not that...
...I'll take it off my income tax...
...but I don't remember doing this chore...
...They even may have been a bit embarrassed that someone they knew had to go out to do the wash at mid-life...
...He's already thinking of short books...
...I recall going to a lecture a year ago on the most recent fashionable subject in the literary corner of the academy—"On Deconstruction: Images and Afterimages, Traces and Erasures"—and weighing, as I drove down Main Street, the lack of subject against the actual image of Chevy mechanics warming their hands over a trash can, rigged as a stove, as they milled in a circle, carrying placards...
...Because the neighborhood was near a major hospital, a famous cancer research institute and a spate of halfway houses connected with the Buffalo Psychiatric Hospital (a State facility), many of the people in Your Host and Marie's were capable of . . . who knows what...
...Someone begins to play the guitar on a nearby stoop...
...I'll try to remember," Sarah says, "I'll leave notes in the future if I can remember...
...So the Great Experiment seemed still to be working: dispossession...
...I thought it might be wise to move the laundry closer to my old established and socially enclosed neighborhood: near the quaint pastry shop (purveyor of croissants for the Caprice Estate set), the take-out quiche place (fast food for squash players) and the quilt boutique...
...It's obvious that he's in control of his life, has a few bucks in the bank and knows how to survive in America...
...How much...
...No matter how much I might have insisted to myself that I was a loser, I now had to admit that I had "moved the goods" (my father, again...
...I thought about finding a new laundromat, or going more deeply into debt to get an apartment-size washer-dryer...
...A lot of drugs go back and forth over the nearby Peace Bridge between Buffalo and Niagara Falls...
...stationed in Hawaii, hasn't sent anything...
...I like thinking that Joe will be wearing my shirt to work...
...And within the larger pattern, I had enacted a smaller version of it...
...She'll wait 30 days and give them to the Salvation Army or Goodwill...
...I go to Fort Erie a few times each summer," I say, "I let my daughter bet a few bucks on a couple of races...
...from suffering to sinecure...
...He died last week...
...That's no long-shot...
...These people lived at the edge of society and might pull me over with them...
...We're curious, too...
...The little girl sleeping in the next room could rest easily...
...Even I couldn't deny that, at the moment when Ronald Reagan made, and won, his bid for the Presidency at the end of the liberal experiment, I had arrived within the American scheme of things...
...So I sit, half reading the paper and looking at BL...
...my father had gone uptown, at age 15, to work in the garment industry (manufacturing, and then selling, ladies' coats and suits) and had worked hard for 50 years so he wouldn't have to go back to poverty, so his children could be educated...
...He worked construction like us, got laid off like us, but he drives a Caddy...
...I see what you mean," Sarah says, as she smiles at me...
...I no longer give discards to the Ivy set for charitable auction...
...I wanted to enter the halls and club rooms of Ivy in the Silent (but upwardly mobile) 1950s and worked hard in high school so that I could go to one of the better colleges where army pants, buttondowns and sneakers (with Wigwam sweat socks) were de rigeur, but the years have dulled the sheen on the Ivy...
...No, I guess you're a college man, I can tell...
...I don't know...
...It didn't make sense to them that a Professor of English, a plinth, if not a pillar, of the community had to go out to do the laundry...
...It's clear that Michael is intelligent...
...I had put myself in a position to take care of my daughter by taking care of myself...
...belonged to America in a way they couldn't understand because they lived in the fragmented, anonymous and violent City—New York...
...I had to admit that I hadn't died at the stretch...
...I had marched a bit, signed some petitions, stayed up some nights helping some students head west and cross the border to Canada, but I also had conducted a career as usual—writing, publishing, going to a few conferences, cultivating friendships with most of my colleagues, getting to know a few administrators, spending summers near the right beaches, walking the right mountain paths—and had emerged through the bureaucracy and academic pipeline as a Professor by the end of the 1970s at a time when a promotion to Full wasn't a lead-pipe cinch, when a few friends got stuck or crushed on someone's desk...
...Not about tv, I hope," I say...
...I know I'm not young, but I can still work, I'd give anything to be back on the fork-lift...
...You know, I'm not going to get married even if there's a non-smoking section...
...I felt on those cold winter nights, in the year or so after I had climbed to the Adirondacks of academe, that I had spun around and through the third circle of history: each narrowing, accelerating, each refining the human instrument for...
...I moved this summer, my landlord gave me the heave-ho...
...It had taken our family two or three centuries to work itself out of the Pale and Medieval legacy of Eastern European peasantry, about a century to work itself up in America, and less than a third of that time for me to hum and whir through the stages of an academic career...
...A crowd has gathered and begins to calm down when the guns are put away...
...I don't think he believes me, so I give him 13 cents for his birthday...
...We look at each other with pride for not being in trouble, for being on the right side of the law, for defending our neighborhood by showing our approval of the police as they perform their dangerous job...
...I was amused at first by these people and by what they were saying...
...You can tell at Marie's how people live by the quality, kind and variety of laundry...
...But most people knew this about me anyway, weren't interested in my adventures with the laundry...
...Cycled down...
...I even dyed my hair, but they laid me off...
...Where do you work...
...Joe X, a strongly built, black man, for instance, has mainly white T-shirts, blue jeans and thread-bare workshirts, as well as a few fancy silk shirts...
...Yeah," I say, "I take the money and run...
...His children came, but I guess they forgot to ask about laundry...
...I was amused at first by the people I met in the laundromat and in Your Host, the coffee shop (one of a chain) next door, where I waited, reading a newspaper, while the laundry was in the machine...
...from toil to tenure...
...You didn't try to use any muscle, did you...
...Many of them were impoverished, lived on food stamps, welfare, owed money to the mobsters they called Shylocks (this was the only piece of folk anti-Semitism I came across...
...I've got to throw the stuff into the dryer...
...Who knew what they might do...
...I don't want to ask any questions that might lead any of these men to think that I'm snooping, or that the waitress is helping me out...
...He's probably got a union job which is secure, even in these times...
...Each looks past the other and tries to make eye contact with the owner who is one of them, but luckier, or more crooked...
...That's it," he says...
...He folds his laundry carefully, squaring the sleeves of the T-shirts (something for which I don't have the patience...
...I offer it to him with the flimsy excuse, "It's too big for me, it's never fit...
...I don't buy any new hand-paints, and I'm not going to wear the old ones, but they still call me Tie...
...When I turn the comer onto the side street, I hear a crash and a siren...
...Between 1905 and 1978, three-quarters of a century, my brother and 1 had come full cycle from pushcart to professor and lawyer...
...During childhood, shirts came geometrically ironed and wrapped in brown paper from the Chinese laundry...
...hardship...
...she usually wears black and tends her yard...
...I haven't been coming here that long...
...I then drive a few blocks to my new rented house, wedged between an alley and a narrow side street, where, from our second floor, you can see the top of Edwardian turrets and the rough facade of an old horse and carriage livery, now a garage run by an 81-year-old wit...
...I saw you looking curious...
...From 1977 to 1978,1 had access to a laundry in the basement...
...I haven't worked in the hotel that long...
...But there was some mirth for a while—until the first chill of winter began to make itself felt around Thanksgiving, until the severity of the Reaganomic recession declared itself...
...This isn't Sears...
...I'm sure...
...Most of the people who come in here don't send out shirts...
...Joe X is about my age, about my size, though more muscular...
...I was beginning to feel less self-conscious when I went in...
...I wasn't sure if it made sense, or was even safe, to get thicker with the crowd at Marie's or Your Host...
...You're right...
...work...
...We go to the track too, we put money on the ham-and-eggers too, but even when we win, we end up giving it back...
...that the faceless man who drank coffee through bandages, the dystrophic woman who painstakingly and sorrowfully folded her laundry, the toothless vagrant, these people, they—the others, the ones who hadn't known "the lucid air of the American night," possession, belonging, the people without a future—might do something to me, but what...
...Want something...
...They don't mean nothing to me...
...Maybe he knows something we don't know...
...So far as Tie can tell, all college people are different from him...
...I don't know...
...I wasn't sure exactly what posed such threats (I hadn't seen anyone mugged, beaten or abused), but 1 felt as I walked from Your Host to Marie's that there were dangers and risks...
...I had completed a cycle...
...Not me since I was laid off...
...Elmwood Avenue or Main Street...
...our abstractions amuse them) as I was before my encounter with the laundry began...
...I've got to go back to Marie's," I say, "my wash is probably done...
...That's a good one," he says...
...It's easy to see that he works hard all week and then goes out on the town now and then, probably Saturday night...
...I tried to give someone a C-note, but he nixed it, said, 'Wait, the heat's on,' but that was an excuse, he nixed it himself...
...Yeah, I'll see you...
...What kind of name is Tie...
...I knew how to work it physically now, to make the most efficient use of time...
...His article, "The Last Sanctuary," appeared in moment in October 1975...
...You don't look like a horse man...
...Howard Wolf is Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate English Studies at SUNY-Buffalo...
...Marie is overweight, her hair is gray...
...I had to admit, at the same time, though, that I was getting used to the new neighborhood, to the feel of Marie's...
...Screw the IRS whenever you can...
...An early middle-age man, suave and well-groomed, lies spread-eagled over the hood...
...X, his father used to own Club —." "I wouldn't mess with him," Tie says, "he's got important friends...
...Laundry fell into the center of my life, so to speak, when my newly turned teen-age daughter came to live with me just at this social-economic turn, but there was still an interlude of happy memory and association about doing the wash...
...that I'm one of the people who has to go out to do the laundry...
...Everything was more important than doing laundry during those years: domestic life, romantic life, professional life, moral and political life (especially during the Viet Nam period...
...I came from Russia when I was five...
...Nothing...
...Someone in here will probably end up wearing Old Man Brown's shirt...
...but when Sarah goes to the detergent dispenser a few minutes later, I ask her what Marie will do with the shirts...
...Those days are gone forever...
...I ask...
...Four men sit at the front curve of the counter, aware but inattentive to the others, and stare out the window at a good, but used, Cadillac...
...Joe has seen me around ten or so times and is not wary of me as a person, but he doesn't understand why anyone would give him a shirt off his back...
...One of the men at the counter turns to me...
...I teach, Tie, I teach at the university...
...I go back and Michael, whose growth is stunted, tells me that it's his 13th birthday, that his father, a G.I...
...He wants to know if I want to hear about the movies...
...It happens to be in my pile today...
...I see, in my mind's eye, my father's old neighborhood on the Lower East Side, life in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, just after the turn of the century...
...I pull over...
...Do I look like a muscle-man...
...See you...
...yet...
...My name's Tie, what's yours...
...I wait a few minutes, so Marie won't think that I'm second guessing her on the question of the shirts (I know she doesn't like to be talked about...
...During these years (1978-81), I lived in (for Buffalo, for America) an old apartment house—a pastiche of Gothic and Romanesque elements— that had been built at the time of the Pan-American Exposition (1901...
...He tells me that he and mother were so upset that they stayed up all night watching tv...
...Who could predict the next generation's Buffalos and Ellis Islands: the Moon...
...I gather up the whites and sigh with relief because I won't have to come back for a week, though the weather is likely to be a little worse when I do...
...It occurs to me that he could use another workshirt, something less faded than the ones he's folding today, and it dawns on me that there's a flannel shirt—a relic from an old romance— that I would just as soon get rid of...
...The clothes get cycled down...
...I had loved the walks across the courtyard on Soldiers Place, carrying the whitened load under the silhouette of the bare catawba branches set against the winter sky...
...When I was coming up in the Depression, you went into the plants if you could, or into construction if you were lucky...
...I suppose I was upset...
...I told them that 1 was in a good place, that I possessed something out of their reach...
...her father had arrived, taken his place in America...
...An older, middle-aged woman comes from across the alley...
...I ask...
...I want the shirt to work for someone who's working now...
...I see fire-hydrants . . . spraying water...
...Old high school friends sometimes called and asked, "Where is Buffalo...
...Why didn't you remind them...
...if my landlord hadn't summarily and arbitrarily terminated my tenancy in the spring of 1981...
...This is a harder question to answer, especially when work is hard to get, and people who get paid ought to work from Tie's point of view...
...We all stand around while the police take notes and talk into their squawk box...
...Who knows...
...Marie, the woman who manages the laundromat on Saturday mornings, my time, was talking with Sarah, a university student, who works as a night-clerk at one of the older hotels which has become, in effect, a residence for wealthy and displaced elderly citizens...
...It's a clear, cold day, a good day for a football game...
...or, sometimes, were hand-washed, hung out and tucked into shape by my mother...
...I rush to work in the morning...
...emigration...
...Marie looks at Sarah as if Sarah has done something stupid, "When's Old Man Brown going to pick up his shirts...
...I found a place after a few weeks with some added and attractive elements (a separate, renovated carriage house with rose bushes and a patio, to say nothing of dishwasher and automatic garbage disposal), but I had to give up ease of parking and, to my chagrin, access to a laundry...
...They just take up room...
...Between going away to college and coming to teach in Buffalo, I must have left laundry off at a trail of cleaners...
...or told me to come home, but I chided them, told them about my 22 windows, the vista, the gently sloping string of street lamps which, at night, strung along Chapin and Lincoln Parkways, easily brought to mind an image of the young F. Scott Fitzgerald (who lived in Buffalo for about five years in his childhood...
...1 had taken care of business, as my father might have said...
...Gathering up the wash and going out with it seemed almost comical for the first month or so, an opportunity for wisecracks and anecdotes, a chance to show friends, if they needed to be convinced, that I was a dutiful parent to the nth degree...
...I usually have enough time to go through a few sections of the Saturday paper...
...Nothing," I say, "I just can't use it...
...They have enough reason already to think that I—wearing a tweed jacket and blue Oxford button-down—am a government agent...
...it's not much, of course, but he now believes—I can see it in his eyes—that I will give him a nickel for every book...
...1 had to descend, but not socio-economically...
...I'm as strong as an ox, but they don't want old guys anymore...
...Do you know what...
...If you wasn't on duty, why didn't you leave a note...
...I suppose they stay in the family and end up in a yard sale...
...His children had gone away to college and university so that they could become professionals, make a contribution, leave behind the great American struggle...
...I rush home for lunch...
...Why are you there...
...As it turned out, though, he owed someone something at my expense...
...He says he hit it with the horses...
...From the horsey set to welfare...
...it's also a good day for standing in the street with these new neighbors...
...he asks...
...I wasn't on duty...
...I'm not sure I would have asked "for what...
...Many prostitutes, alcoholics and dead-enders—who lived in the city's few furnished apartment houses in the adjacent bohemian and gay part of town (Allentown, Buffalo's Greenwich Village)—walked in front of Your Host, stopped for coffee and did their laundry in Marie's...
...A few children join the guitar player and begin to hum...
...I thought it might be best to prevent a potential slide down the . . . into . . . who knows what...
...We don't have a lay-away plan, you know...
...We want to know, too, how Big Louie gets his bread, but we don't ask any questions...
...On these nights, chill, pinpointed with stars, I felt as if I had found a safe niche for myself during increasingly hard times...
...She's seen me around the university and now at the laundromat...
...I want him to read books and will give him a nickel for every book he can tell me about whenever I see him...
...upward mobility (success/wealth/fame...
...Louie says he hit it big all summer at Fort Erie and Woodbine...
...Outer Space...
...for what...
...As far as Tie is concerned, there are two universities whose one difference is where they are, how far they are from where he is or isn't working...
...THE PROFESSOR AND THE LAUNDROMAT A cycle of American life HOWARD WOLF I have mainly trace memories about doing laundry before my daughter came to live with me soon after The Great Buffalo Blizzard of '77...
...Then you went into the army, and if you didn't get your butt shot off in Europe, you were lucky to come back to Seniority...
...he asks...
...I want to ask the waitress, a kindly looking, rotund black woman, who these men are, who BL is, but I've been in the new neighborhood long enough to know that some of these men are horse players and touts, bookies, runners, strong-arm men and maybe even killers...
...In less than a century, a family that spoke no English, as it touched these shores and moved through Ellis Island stalls, had turned out children who preserved the language and interpreted the laws...
...I get attached to some of the older people...
...A former school teacher, she has informed me already that, though a bit infirm, she "remains interested in life...
...I used to wear good ties, hand-paints, when times were good, when we built the P-38s, P-40s...
...The tall and elegant lady, who lives next to me, walks with difficulty...
...The owner of the Cadillac, who wears Dingo boots, Jordache blue jeans, a suede jacket, Swank jewelry, who actually twirls a key chain, leans against the side of the Caddy, near his monogram—BL...
...I had responded, in part, to the challenge of the 1960s...
Vol. 8 • March 1983 • No. 3
