On Revisiting An Old Place

I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken Drake record.

But, such is the creative writer’s blessing and curse: writers record and creators connect and I am afflicted to see, feel, and associate the things of now with the things of yesterday. At any given moment, I may find myself falling into a think piece on suds and sweet memories.

We used to do this all the time. For six months or so, Daddy would awaken us around 6:00 a.m. every Saturday morning. We would gather our selected detergent and black trash bags stuffed with presorted laundry. We’d unload our bags onto the sidewalk and be the first patrons at the door. All My Soaps was decorated with yellowing wallpaper, spattered with red and blue stars and soaked with brown water stains. If it weren’t for the rows and rows of autographed photos of 1980’s soap opera stars, the place would have put me in the mind of a dead child’s bedroom or an evil clown’s lair.

Sharonia and I had a system: one loaded the machines with clothes, the other recorded the machine number. One divvied out capfuls of detergent, the other stuffed the slots with quarters. One maneuvered the cart, the other stacked it with wet laundry. One shoveled heavy wet clothes into the dryer, the other tossed in dryer sheets.

Every Saturday we’d be greeted at the door by my laundromat boyfriend. Kenny was a chubby freckled, blonde boy whose name, I believe, was actually Mark. He had a gap that replicated his mother’s missing tooth. His mother owned All My Soaps and they lived in a mobile home across the street. Whenever Kenny saw us, his face would light up. He’d grab one of our bags in each hand and bombard my dad with questions about swords and the Marines and why his head was bald. Kenny would slip us free soap sometimes and would race us between the aisles of machines while we waited for our laundry to finish. When I was about 10, and he and Sharonia 8, Kenny won me a yellow stuffed M&M from the arcade machine. That’s when I knew it was love.

We used to do this all the time, but today I’m here feeling like am impostor in a foreign land. Granted, “here” has indefinitely changed. All My Soaps has since been shut down and God knows where Kenny and his mama are. I’m at the Big Coin now, and so much more than a name has shifted.

This whole experience is Greek to me, or, I should say, Spanish. Six years studying the language and I’m only able to pick up the little things. Disfrutar- enjoy. Lo mismo- the same.

I’m no longer thrilled by the coin exchange eating my $20 bills and splashing quarters into my palms. I’m no longer thrilled by my sweatpants sagging with the weight of $40 worth of quarters.

I’m no longer thrilled by the thought of the arcade games in the corner and, instead, I’m annoyed by the sound of Pac Man dying. Again.

I forgot that drying takes less quarters than washing and ended up paying  for $15.50 worth of my weekly groceries in quarters.

I’m the only one here with an iPad. I keep self-consciously peeking up to see what the other inhabitants of the Big Coin do to pass the time. There’s one young woman with a bag of blankets. I assume the man she’s clinging to is her boyfriend in whom she seems equally delighted an disgusted by the cracking noise he keeps making with his wrists.

As I watch the wave of someone else’s suds crashing on itself in a cyclical motion, I’m forced to connect and consider a new thought: what goes around comes back around again, but it doesn’t always come back in the same order. Just as the suds crash and redistribute, so do we. I may have come back to the same establishment, but I am not the same Roco. I don’t have a Kenny-Mark to carry my bags. I don’t have a desire to run through the aisles or splurge on arcade games. It’s my own $20 bill that the coin exchange is devouring. It’s my own soap and my own dryer sheets and my own responsibility to make sure they make it into the machines. We used to do this all the time, but now I do it just a little differently.