It Was All Yellow

Irony. It’s a motherfucker.

When I was first married, finances were always a struggle and it was often a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul, if we wanted to make ends meet. Often, this meant that if something broke or wore out, it might not get repaired or replaced right away.

On one such occasion, our washing machine had broken and we didn’t have the money to replace it right away. I had just started working at a swanky restaurant and clean clothes were a necessity for work, not to mention how nice it is just to be able to wear clean clothes in general and not look and smell like a homeless person. Anyway, with the washing machine out, it meant that our only option to wash clothes was at the local laundromat, which wasn’t quite as simple or as local as it sounds, not when you live on top of a mountain in the middle of Bumfuck, West Virginia and it’s a thirty-minute drive down the mountain to the local laundromat. No Bueno. Nope, no Bueno at all. Still, when shit needs gettin’ done, you get shit done, so you load the wagon, hitch the horses and you git ‘er done.

I mean, it's not like Uber was an option.

Doing laundry became a huge, time consuming pain in the ass. Limited by the amount of work uniforms that I owned, we were driving down to the laundromat every few days and that was pretty much the last place that we wanted to be, because the only thing worse than doing laundry is being stuck doing laundry at the fucking laundromat. I mean, have you ever been inside of a laundromat? Those places are festering fucking pits of pestilence, packed with tales of terror and horrors heaped upon horrors.

Our local laundromat just happened to be next to the local adult bookstore, whose patrons would often cruise the laundromat, stealing underwear from the dryers and often exposing themselves to the customers; a veritable can-can line of swinging peckerheads. It was lovely. Ghosts, ghouls and goblins, the usual cast of characters, those denizens of Hell condemned to walk the laundromats of this mortal plane, casually inflicting their torments upon innocent and unsuspecting souls such as myself.  The laundromat always had a horrible smell and was filled with buzzing flies because someone had left a shit-filled diaper or their nachos in the trash. The place was always overrun with dirty, screaming children, no matter the time of day, or night and the little fuckers always seemed to be unattended. Meanwhile, half of the fucking washers and dryers were full of clothes that had finished the cycle but were left sitting, so that trying to do your laundry turned into an exercise in futility and bullshit, so we’ll just call it futilitous bullshit. Futilitous. I like the sound of that. Almost like it’s fucking Latin or something.

You could always count on the laundromat to provide you with some free entertainment, though. Laundromat drama. Kids fighting, couples fighting, ladies cussing out the guys that were trying to hit on them, people fighting over machines and soap, junkies shooting up in the bathroom and half-crazed patrons, high as fuck on bleach fumes. Crackhead hookers turning tricks in the parking lot, stolen panties, stolen soap, stolen lives, hopes and dreams. Wash, rinse and repeat.

One of our little excursions was particularly memorable. Medusa and I gathered up all the dirty clothes, our laundry supplies, left behind our hopes, dreams and aspirations and we headed to town. Once we got to the laundromat, I started carrying everything inside while Medusa, started the different loads of wash. The first load she started was my white work shirts and she was reaching for the bleach as I turned around and headed back to the car to get the rest of the laundry.

On my way out the door, I stopped to use the restroom and there was some naked homeless guy in there, standing in front of the mirror. Luckily for me, he was standing there with a proud boner and he was washing out his tread mark tracked underwear in the sink. As tempting as the whole scene was, with all those endless possibilities for adventures with proud boner homeless guy, I figured I could keep my hands to myself and hold my pee for a little while longer. I promptly left.

That was before I noticed the trash can with the sign that read, “Not a toilet.”

Judging from the smell, someone had used it for a toilet.

Nice.

Shaking my head, I walked back out to the car and grabbed the rest of the laundry and brought it inside. We started the rest of the wash and then did our best to avoid making eye contact with absolutely everyone. We tried to wish ourselves invisible, while we waited for the wash cycle to finish.

My nose started to burn and I noticed that the smell of bleach was unusually strong. I was catching a bad buzz from the overpowering fumes.

At some point, Medusa looked over at me, caught my attention and said, “I think I may have screwed up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I think I might have accidentally bleached your work shirts twice,” she confessed.

“Oh. I’m sure it will be fine. It’s bleach. What’s the worst that could happen? The shirts get whiter?” I replied.

Not long after that exchange, the first few loads of wash finished and we both grabbed those little silver rolling carts with the broken wheels that are always full of someone else's shit, just when you need one and we transferred the clothes from the washing machines to the carts and then from the carts to the dryer. What should have been a seamless and efficient process wasn't, because the fucking carts never line up right with the fucking washing machines and one of my work shirts fell on the foul and filthy floor of the laundromat, laying there atop generations of grime and excrement that had accumulated like a crust upon the unwashed tiles. Horrified, I quickly snatched up the shirt, praying that the five second rule applied to articles of clothing too. As I was about to toss the shirt back into the basket, I noticed that something about the color was a little off. In fact, shit was more than a little off, because I noticed that the white dress shirt in my hands had turned to a deep shade of yellow, kinda’ sorta’ the color of cat piss. Freaking the fuck out, I started digging through the basket and sure enough, all my white shirts had either turned yellow or were covered in yellow splotches.

I kept right on freaking the fuck out.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Medusa asked.

Yeah, I just kept freaking the fuck out. I showed Medusa the shirts.

“Look what you fucking did.” I accused.

“Holy shit!” Medusa said.

“Yeah, no shit, holy shit. You ruined my fucking work shirts,” I continued. “They’re destroyed and we don’t have any money to buy new ones. I have to work in the morning. What the fuck am I supposed to do? How could you be so fucking stupid?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was an accident.”

“That’s not good enough,” I ranted. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

It got worse. I got worse. I was freaking out about being able to work the next day and I was being a complete fucking asshole about it, unloading a double barrel full of bullshit buckshot upon Medusa in the process and I just wouldn’t let up. Medusa apologized over and over. Rationally, I knew that it had been an accident, a mistake, but I wouldn’t let it go. Yeah, I was a fucking asshole.

"Maybe if would help if we wash the shirts again?" Medusa asked.

"Maybe," I said.

"Should I add beach?" she asked.

I wanted to fucking kill her. Figuratively.

So, we tried washing the shirts again and while they were in the machine, our bouts of sullen silence were broken and punctuated by more rounds of bickering and accusations. The two of us started fighting about shit that had nothing to do with the shit that we were fighting about. We had just become the free entertainment that I had mentioned earlier. After what seemed like forever, the shirts were done. Yeah, they were fucking done, alright. They were still just as yellow as they had been when they started and this got me started all over again. With an uneasy truce, we finished folding the laundry, packed up the car, drove for a bit in complete silence, but then we started fighting in earnest; a short vicious war.

A war that almost ended with Medusa telling me, “I don’t know what else you want me to say. I don’t know how many times I can apologize. It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

I could have let it go, right there. I could have, but I didn’t. Instead, asshole that I was, I got pissed off all over again and I yelled at her, “Just be quiet! Don’t say another word. I don’t want to hear a single fucking word that you have to say.”

My hand stabbed at the car stereo and cranked the volume up, hoping to drown out any response from Medusa.

And Chris Fucking Martin, that dirty, miserable, motherfucker, sang out from my speakers.

“And it was all yellow…”

You've got to be fucking kidding me. Of all the fucking songs that could have possibly played at that moment in time and it just fucking had to be that one? And at that exact spot? Seriously?

Get the fuck out of here. That was some truly cosmic bullshit, right there.

Motherfucker.

Irony, divine retribution and a dose of instant fucking karma, all in one bite. Lucky me. If I were really lucky, I might just choke to fucking death on it.

No such fucking luck.

Medusa couldn’t help herself, she started laughing her head off, cackling the entire way home.

Fuck me. Humiliated, I changed the station, stabbing angrily at the button as if I were driving a stake into Chris Martin’s cold and lifeless heart and then I just fucking drove home without saying another word. I mean, what the fuck could I even say?

Irony. Yeah, it’s a stone cold bitch.

 Thanks for stopping by.

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