In honor of Labor Day, I share this flash memoir about a summer I worked in an industrial laundry as a privileged college girl with so much to learn.
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In 1974, my plan was to spend a romantic summer on Nantucket renting bicycles with my college boyfriend, but when he broke up with me, I decided to stay in Syracuse with my best friend, Gretchen. Unfortunately, she’d already found another roommate, Ida Chernoff, to share the apartment she secured on Euclid Avenue. George, my boyfriend’s buddy was still looking for someone to sublet, and desperate me fit the bill. George gave me the one bedroom and slept on the three-season porch he’d plan to give the poor shmuck who showed up at the last minute to split the rent.
My relationship with George was purely platonic. He agrees to scrub the clawfoot tub and clean the toilet if I do all the dishes. Our place backs up to Oakwood Cemetery and is closer than Gretchen’s to downtown Syracuse where I walk to my Kelly Girl job at an insurance underwriting company in the assigned risk department.
Every morning I sit at my gray metal desk behind a Himalayan pile of red folders. My task: to pull out the page containing the name of the risky customer and the insurance company to which they’ve been assigned, turn to my typing stand, roll two blank forms and a carbon beneath the platen of my Selectric, and type said information in the appropriate space. It’s a mind numbing routine I repeat for each folder with only half an hour for lunch, and two ten-minute breaks during which I sit with other personnel who drink coffee and nibble Twinkies and Ding Dongs from an unreliable vending machine.
To save my sanity, I save the names that tickle my ear: Angel Hernandez, Emery Kornitzer, and John Beaverwetter, to name just a few. Thank God, it’s only a week before Gretchen rescues me with a job where she works at Coyne Industrial Laundry. It’s not Nantucket, but at least we’re together.
I’m stationed at a waist-high table in front of a dusty window made of glass brick. Before me, a Himalayan pile of men’s pants. My assignment: to sort according to inseam, waist, and color. Any with holes or frayed cuffs, I throw in a box marked rags.
When my mountain of laundry is organized, I catch Gretchen’s eye. She’s been ripping off names and company emblems (Amoco, Sunoco, Cadillac, Reese’s Peanut Butter) from men’s uniform shirts, and sorting them according to collar size and sleeve length. We file our clothing in cubicles according to the Dewey Decimal system of laundry and hide in a half-full cubby in the back. Gretchen has also saved name tags that amuse her and shuffles through: Mortimer, Constantine, and stops at, Pheep.
I roll my eyeballs. “Who would name their kid Pheep?”
We’re stifling laughter, when Nobila, our supervisor, appears at the head of the aisle. “Get back to work.”
Nobila, now there’s a name, but we don’t snicker. She’s from Lebanon, where George’s mother escaped from a war. Besides, I certainly wouldn’t want to be in charge of us or any of the other workers.
Take Wanda, for example. She’s the first one I meet in the break room, the chubby one with straight dark hair who Gretchen says is from the Onondaga reservation. Wanda’s passing around an Avon book. When it gets to me, she exhales cigarette smoke in my face. “Try Skin So Soft it keeps away mosquitoes.”
I reluctantly fill out the order blank and pass the booklet to Gretchen. But before she’s pushed into purchasing Rapture perfume, the buzzer rings, and we’re back on the floor.
Outside of work, Ida and George are who we hang out with. None of us knew Ida before she responded to Gretchen’s ad for a summer roommate on the message board in Kimmel dining hall. She’s an SU student too, pre-med, I think, but her dark wavy hair, rosy lips and thin plucked eyebrows remind me of a 1930’s Busby Berkeley dancer. All she needs is a giant feathered headdress, tap shoes, and a sparkling tank suit. Gretchen and I watched Berkley classics as dollar flicks on campus along with Buck Rogers’ adventures in outer space, and Brando favorites like Viva Zapata.
Tonight, we’re driving to the new Fayetteville mall in George’s Ford Fairlane 500 to see a new movie, Chinatown, with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson. George is developing a crush on Ida, so when we pick them up, I switch to the back seat with Gretchen.
After the movie, we stick around Ida and Gretchen’s to share a joint or two. Then Ida heads into the kitchen. “Anyone want deep-fried bananas with chocolate sauce?”
We stand around the stove while Ida masterminds the bubbling batch. I can’t believe how much I eat, and what a mess. But I don’t have to do these dishes.
I can tell George and Ida don’t want to say good night, so we all pile back in the Fairlane and drive to our apartment. Strangely, the back door is ajar.
I look at George. “I thought we locked it.”
He goes in first. “I did too.”
Gretchen and Ida follow into the living room. Record albums are strewn across the floor. George’s stereo is gone.
I peek into my bedroom. The cheapo record player/radio I bought at the GE employee discount store with my dad is still on my bedside table, but the decoupage box I made for my bits of jewelry is open. A silver ring my dad brought me from his first business trip to Mexico is missing. The window is open, both glass and screen. A steamy thunderstorm is brewing, and the curtain is sucked outside towards the dark. I slam down the sash and lock the latch. It weirds me out that a stranger, roamed my private space. Had he been watching the apartment? Did he escape out my window? George calls the police, but nothing is recovered.
Monday morning at 6:00 a.m. I awake to the wall phone ringing in the kitchen. I throw on my bathrobe and answer. It’s Gretchen. “Do you think George could give us a ride to work? It’s raining cats and dogs.”
I pull the curly cord to its limit and part the curtains. “I’ll ask.”
Resting the receiver on the red Formica counter, I tip toe into the three-season porch. George is on his back snoring when I wiggle his toe.
His eyes open wide. “What are you doing here?”
“Gretchen and I were wondering if you could give us a ride to work.” I turn my head towards the bank of rain-splattered screens. “Just for today.”
George’s gaze shifts to his cut-offs lying in a puddle on the floor. “Yeah, yeah, give me a minute.”
I race to tell Gretchen and get dressed. We have to punch in by seven o’clock or we get demerits. Three strikes, and you’re fired.
At the intersection of University Place and Comstock Avenue, we drive through a massive puddle. The Fairlane churns a wake until we climb the hill on the other side. A right, a left, and there is Gretchen waiting on her stoop. Just running from the front door to the car and she’s soaked.
My Timex says 6:35. We head downhill towards Coyne. At a railroad crossing the road dips below the track, forming a pool. Before our sleepy brains think twice about driving through, the water becomes deeper than it appears. The brakes fail. The engine goes silent. The car drifts into water up to the door handles.
Without a word, we crank down our windows and climb on the roof. Gretchen’s lunch floats out the window. A baggie full of snickerdoodles escapes the brown sac along with her liverwurst, lettuce, and cheese sandwich.
My attention turns to the lights on a police cruiser which pulls up behind us on dry pavement. We wade to the officer who calls a tow truck. It’s already 6:45, so Gretchen and I wave to poor George, and sprint through the underpass on the sidewalk which ironically is high and dry.
When we clock in, Nobila tells us to pick out a dry uniform dress and change in the rest room. She’ll launder our clothes for us before the end of the day.
By noon, the sun is out, at least until the next storm blows off the Great Lakes. Wanda and Drew, a woman, shaped like a giant oatmeal container on toothpicks, asks if we want to eat with them on the roof. The flat asphalt is strewn with loose pebbles and a skim of steamy water. Hearing our lunches were washed away, Wanda offers me half her tuna fish sandwich. Drew gives Gretchen half her bologna and cheese. We share the two packets of cheese curls the vending machine spit out when we selected potato chips.
Wanda takes a sip of coffee. “You know, you guys could have drowned. Want to come to my Fourth of July party?”
The first part of the non-sequitur doesn’t sink in. My answer to the second, “Sure.”
Gretchen asks, “Can we bring anything?” I’m sure she’s thinking potato salad.
But Wanda winks, “Just BYOB.”
The afternoon of the party, I pedal my turquoise Schwinn to Wanda’s. Gretchen borrows Ida’s ten-speed, and we park them together on the front porch of Wanda’s three-family tenement. Walking through the narrow space between houses, I can’t help but see into the window of her first-floor neighbor. There’s a guy in a grimy wife-beater T-shirt brushing his teeth at the bathroom sink. We lock eyes until I look away.
In the center of Wanda’s small patch of grass is a picnic table covered with bowls of chips and dips. A grill smokes in the corner of the yard next to a rusty garden shed.
Wanda smiles at the six-pack of Schlitz I brought in my bicycle basket. “You can put that in one of the coolers on the back porch.”
To start with, we chat with Wanda’s brother who is plugging an extension cord into a stereo system. By the time Drew arrives in a red wig and cat-eye sunglasses, Jimmy Hendrix is wailing “All Along the Watchtower.” The backyard fills with dancing. The party spills down the block. Day becomes night, but the more we drink, the more time stands still.
Then there are sirens. Men in uniform pants and shirts explode from a vehicle with a flashing light. They enter the first-floor next door and exit with a man on a stretcher, a cloth over his face. Is it the guy who was brushing his teeth? The word dead echoes like a foreign term among the crowd celebrating Independence Day. Was there a gunshot I didn’t hear? A fight I didn’t see? I think someone whispers alcohol poisoning, but I’m too drunk to absorb it. Not until the sirens retreat, and the flashing light disappears, do I realize dawn has drawn a searing orange line across the horizon.
Gretchen and I ride home, and I climb into bed beneath the window where a thief recently climbed out. The curtains flap in the breeze of another incoming storm.
I turn on my record player and place the needle on a Rolling Stone’s album, Keith Richard’s unnerving guitar is my morning lullaby as I ponder why the law cannot prevent crime, why the police arrive after the flood, why all our lives back up to a cemetery. It’s Sunday, and I pull the covers over my head at the thought that God is nothing more than an unreliable vending machine, giving you a body like an oatmeal container when you pressed the button for a Busby Berkley starlet. Placing your birth in war-torn Lebanon when you pulled the lever for peace. What in the world can ensure that a boy named Angel won’t grow up to be a risky customer?
Mick Jagger shrieks, “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away. Just a shot away….”
And for the first time, I understand the title of the song, “Gimme Shelter!”
