My job writing and investigating for a secret underworld society keeps me jumpin' like Jack Flash. Stuck in Grossmont County, Kansas again. Some kind of blues brewing within my soul like the piercing guitar solo at the festival somewhere in the spirited 196_.
The last time I did my laundry here was around 25 years ago. Had a job waiting tables at the country club here in the great town of Beulah. Waited on the upper crust during the lunch and evening hours. I remember late nights too, serving food and drinks to get-togethers of the Beulah Realtor Association, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the board of directors of the local community college from which I'd graduated.Late nights I'd cut out with friends I'd worked with at the plastics factory before I got the uptown job. We'd go bar hopping, cow tipping, smoke a little dope, play some rock n' roll. But those lost nights are all an opaque haze now, some fog of life that occurs as you're jetting and jaunting from station to station and sometimes
getting stuck
Dirt and sudz
"Get over here, Gunner, don't be a buttface," the woman yelled at one of the three boys running and crawling over the concrete floor. She's wearing a fatigue jacket over her slightly overweight frame, her dark hair in a bun. She's called those kids "buttface" about 10 times.
There's a pudgy bald guy, a woman (the only attractive one in the bunch) wearing a pink jacket and a gruff man in a fading red shirt, his long gray hair giving him a look like a tougher, countrier version of Frank (William H. Macy). Looks were all he had in common with the user loser character. This guy at Country Queen Sudz was in control of his clan.
"If you make another comment, you're gonna make my decision for me," the old man told his son, definitely not a model of fealty as I'd seen John Gotti, Jr. to be toward his mob boss dead father on a recent 60 Minutes.
A woman in a dark vanilla hoodie was mopping a leak under one of the washers cleaning my clothes.
"I hope I didn't cause this," I told her. "Did I do something wrong."
"Nah," she assured me. Machines there do that shit all the time.
That family comes into the laundromat once a week, she told me while swooping the mop over the water and soap. They live in Cash.
"Cash?" I said. "Shit, that's 30 miles away. There's no laundromat between here and there."
Nope. No place to go
The grandparents are raising the three boys and the baby in the carrier set on a table beside folded underwear, jeans and flannel shirts.
"So they were taken away from their mother?" I said.
"She gets supervised visits, but yeah they were taken away. She's on drugs."
"Meth?"
"Yeah," she said as she placed the "Caution wet floor" sign down. "Those little boys know their daddies but they're no better than she is."
Trap town
The last time I was in that laundromat (it wasn't called Country Queen Sudz then, don't remember what it was) I had washed my clothes at around 7 a.m. in the morning before work. I heard this woman on the pay phone, crying and pleading with somebody, sounding down on her luck and short of hope.
After my clothes were washed, dried and folded, I went into the broom closet-sized bathroom and changed into my country club uniform, black slacks, white shirt and black bow tie. There was a knock on the door. Less than a second later, I answered it, ready to go.
It was the woman who had been crying into the phone. Her eyes were still red with tears. I noticed she was holding a basset hound. "I'm sorry," she said tearfully to me as if she had disturbed one more person in life.
"It's okay," I said. I tried to sound compassionate regarding whatever she was going through, but I was soon gone. I wish I could've comforted that girl way back then but I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to be a life toucher.
I could never reconcile the poverty and sadness in Beulah with my job, serving rich (they seemed rich to me) -- guess the right word is upscale -- people at the country club. Today I would say I'm just doing my job, trying to get by like everybody else. These days I know everyone has problems. Strained marriages. Infidelities. Drugs. Alcoholism. Those well-to-do people had it to, but it's taken time, a lot of time for me to figure things out.
"I'm gonna get the fuck 'outa Dodge," my fellow waiter friend Keith said after each shift. One evening, he didn't show up for work. Four, 4:15, 4:30 p.m. No Keith. He'd been at Schmoochie's bar all day where he'd gotten blasted on gin, Jack, vodka, beer. I knew he did Coke, pills and other shit I had a healthy fear of ever trying. I didn't judge. If my friends wanted to get drugged and snorted out, that was cool for them, but I wasn't going there. I was a beer, weed and Jim Beam man.
I got out years ago, but I've made peace with Beulah like I've made peace with God. God's all perfect. Beulah has some shit, good and bad. There's no reason for me to do my laundry here. I can do that at the hotel I'll be staying in tonight. Guess I just came here 'cuz I wanted to write. Things are getting better.
I've found ways to comfort the afflicted, other human beings, you know.
"Something on My Mind" -- Karen Dalton
