The Only Town that Ever Loved Me

Fri Jan 20, 01:28 PM by Skylab Smith

Last month my pile of dirty laundry reached that critical point where it so greatly out-proportioned the amount of actually clean items of clothing I had that I did the responsible thing and hauled a load of it down three blocks to the laundrymat.

As laundrymats go, this one is OK. It is pricey, but there’s an attendant there all the time, so if one of the machines malfunctions (an inevitability at any laundrymat) you get immediate service. The laundrymat is always very busy, which I count as a mixed blessing, since it means the grime never really gets cleaned off of the floors or off the fronts of the machines, but otherwise everything is kept in good working order and the cleaning of laundry is accomplished quickly and efficiently. Which, after all, is the point.

Anyway, on this particular day I got my clean basket of clothes back up to my apartment and dumped them out on my bed, enjoying the simple wealth of a person who knows they have days of plentiful clean underwear and socks stretching before them. It was about then that I found what the rational half of my brain recognized immediately, as instantly and thoroughly as the creative half rushed in to deny the reality: a used condom in my clean laundry.

Somebody else’s used condom.

Someone I didn’t even know.

And crazier than that, even in my horror and panic I knew I would just have to accept this violation, as utterly contradictory to the ostensible point of cleaning laundry as it was. I could take the laundry back and wash it again – but to what end? Only to play another unavoidable game of laundry roulette? While these washed and dried little condom remains were the first physical evidence I had of our messy lives mixing at the laundrymat, it surely wasn’t the first or last time. And, in giving it more thought, I had to acknowledge that it was nice that whoever tied that condom up and put it in their pocket, only to forget to check their pockets before throwing their pants in the washing machine, at least hadn’t just thrown it on the sidewalk or on the bridge like so many other stranger’s condoms I’ve noticed. Presumably there are circumstances I can’t imagine that put these people under considerable pressure to have sex – so much so that they end up doing it in the middle of the road – and yet they still remember to use protection. That’s great! And hey, I forget to check my pockets pretty often, too, though it is more likely to be receipts and lighters and odd change that I add to our communal laundry rather than condoms.

From my desk where I write, I face a window looking south toward the Russian River. South-facing windows are a desirable asset here in Guerneville, a resort town which disappears into murkiness every winter as the Pacific Ocean wraps the town up in fog and pulls us out of the world like some mythical fairy isle on meth, only to re-join society with a vengeance each following spring.

South-facing windows catch the rare sunlight and sustain us through the winter, even when the entirety of the view from said window is the grey wall of the neighbor’s apartment 2.5 feet away. From this window I contemplate the condensation and mildew in my neighbor’s small north-facing (and thus inferior) window. I have never seen my neighbor’s window open or lit at night and have therefore concluded it is either at the back of a closet or covered over by a bookshelf or other furniture. This town has no use for north-facing windows. I note the rot on the windowsill, the patchwork of building styles that makes the apartment look as if the entire construction was a impetuous add-on. I’m on the second floor here, as is everyone in this town in the vicinity of the river, which inundates the town on a regular basis. I consider the way the protruding surfaces of my neighbor’s wall catch the droppings of the termites busy at work in the eves. And I think about this, my third winter in Guerneville.

To be clear, I’ve loved this schizophrenic town. For someone used to suburban life as I had been, living downtown with a population of 2500 is positively cosmopolitan. As my friends can attest to, I’m a big fan of the 24-hour grocery store (Safeway, for those who care) just two blocks away and the fact that nobody looks at me strange if I walk in at midnight to buy beer and tortillas dressed like a bargain bin. Also within a block or two are a hospital, library, post office, fire station, two liquor stores, two movie rental places and no less than eight bars. My 420-square-foot apartment, my $525/mo rent, and my lack of roommates of any kind have been my definition of luxury.

I am more fiercely proud of and connected to this town than anywhere I’ve ever lived before, but when I look back on these three winters and two summers I wonder what – if anything – of value I’ve really shared with this place and these people.

The walls are thin, so I hear the baby in apartment #12 cry sometimes, and the television broadcasting 24 hours a day from #11’s front door, and mama from #12 helping #11 up the stairs around midnight last week when he collapsed in the bushes on his way home. I hear the cats pawing at #3 to be let in and the boom of the dramatic movies and show tunes this neighbor favors, the incessant squirrels chewing on walnuts up on my roof, inebriated summer karaoke and the orgiastic moans and staccato butt-slaps of men having sex in the hot tub at the hotel and bar next door, and my neighbor in #1 letting his chihuahua and/or monstrous black Great Dane out of his apartment with the loud encouragement, “Go pee! Go pee! Go pee!” or the even more inexplicable plural form, “Go pee-pees! Go pee-pees! Did you go pee-pees already! Go!”

Nobody has ever complained about how loud I play my music – or what hours – and so all of this is great. Here I am, a single girl in a single gay man’s town. One time a guy came to my door and gave me some marijuana and when I told him I wasn’t expecting a delivery he was adamant that it was for me. As he explained, “He told me to give it to the girl.” As in, You know, all these girls look the same to me. I don’t really see what the big deal is.

The mom and baby in #12 are rare proof of breeding in our apartment complex, and they have the whole place absolutely fascinated. The only hetero guy on the block is the Mexican kid across the street, and I’ve taken to avoiding him lately due to his propensity for small talk. Though I guess I can’t blame him. He and I are the only ones that have regular jobs, most everyone else is HIV+ and live off of government checks and charity while dedicating their free time to industrious AIDS-cocktail-and-miscellaneous-drug-fuelled bouts of gardening and home decorating. I’m not exaggerating, or at least not much. For a while there was a turf war between #1 and #3, my immediate neighbors to either side, while they competed for gardening space down in our shared courtyard. This small shady space below our apartments was what the rental ad had described in typical Guernevillian real estate double-speak as “sunny,” but it was pleasant enough anyway. #1 had the edge in the turf war because he would stay up for days at a time, digging holes through the entire night on more than one occasion. Once he even dug a pond. Of course, eventually he would have to pass out for three or four days and #2 would take his revenge, uprooting daisies and slashing out at the irises, while #1 presumably was confined to bed, from whence he ignored the pleas of his neighbors and other tweakers begging him to come to the door or show some sign of life. A truce was made with the one-time gift of a passion flower vine, but it was short-lived. A few months later #1 was stringing Christmas lights on #3’s part of the courtyard. We never lack for drama in the apartments.

But all of this only describes the passive ways our lives have overlapped.

Locals in Guerneville share a kind of common bond, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we talk to each other or get involved in each other’s lives. Our connection is born out of the euphoric sun-dazed high of summer days when Guerneville fills with out-of-town partiers here to show off their hairy chests and let their beer bellies hang out over the tops of their pink tutus in an atmosphere of total acceptance. And in winter, we share a conditional bond based on the constant possibility of catastrophe – an unexpressed and precursory, hypothetical understanding that though we barely greet each other as we pass in the street at this moment, if it began to rain tonight and didn’t let up, by the end of the week we’d be improvising rafts to float from balcony to balcony to share gossip and emergency supplies (i.e. water, beer and assorted medicinal herbs) and watch the muddy water churn by in fashion.

I was convinced that the River would flood my first winter here. It had been six whole years since a major flood. But even in the ensuing winters, no flood has occurred. The biggest community tragedy I have been a part of was the devastating cancellation of a planned 2 Live Crew appearance a few blocks away.

I might have expected an apocalyptic flood to draw my neighborhood together, or friendships struck up in days of lazy summer shared in our cosmopolitan redwood isle. But I got what I didn’t expect. Only the swirling waters of the laundrymat washing machines unite us. Maybe the most I can say is that our dirty laundry all tumbles together down at the laundrymat, and sometimes when I get my towels out of the dryer, they smell like a whole history of laundry softener, and sometimes they smell like an unknown man’s cologne.

Endnote: This was written December 14, 2005. Two days later Skylab left Guerneville. Two weeks later it flooded.

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