The Wash n' Dri

In my north Chicago neighborhood, just this side of what neighbors called ‘the color line,’ the summer of ’68 was as hot and agitated as Sammy’s Wash n’ Dri on the corner of Ashland and Lake.

As far as I could see not one damn thing had changed in my small world. We all still went to school together, to church together, cut across each other’s yards out and back. Mom still sent me to buy meat and soap from Harlow’s, a black owned market next to the Wash n’ Dri, but the people on our block suddenly started fencing in their yards and talking in whispers. They started drawing lines that I decided I’d just have to step over because as dangerous as they said the world was becoming, there was way too much wonder in the neighborhood for me to pull back now. Neighbors called that summer hellish. At fifteen all I could think of was the hotter the better.

My Mom didn’t like me hanging out at the Wash n’ Dri next to Harlow’s because it was over the color line. She’d tell me to hurry home if she’d sent me over to Harlow’s for milk or ground beef. Out and back that was it, but I always slipped into the Wash n’ Dri and lingered as long as I thought I could safely. I sat back of the L-wall so I was hidden from the huge front window.

It was a secret place, too hot for almost anyone else that summer, but I loved the way the heat drew sweat that inched from my forehead over my lips, down my neck, like some fine stream, through the front of my shirt, into my navel, slowed only by the tight banded waist of my pedal pushers. I loved the Wash n’ Dri for the forbidden ways that the sweat, the sounds and the geography made me feel.

During the heat wave of ‘68, all our neighbors singled out the Wash n’ Dri—said it was some kind of hell with the washers agitating and driers spinning almost out of control. They said they were angry at its sounds and motion, but I think they were angry for the life that went on there, like Lita singing with the Davis boys on the Ashland side after dark. I think they were angry at Sammy Harlow’s proud smile as he carried his cash bags to the car headed to the bank for deposit because he owned both the market and the Wash n’ Dri. Whenever our washer started acting up, despite what she called her better judgment, Mom made me hurry a load or two over there.

I would always stop at Harlow’s first for a pop. I could sneak some change from the laundry money ‘cause I knew how to stuff those washers full. It was cool and dark inside Harlow’s even at noon. Sammy Harlow cleaned the floors with sawdust before opening in the morning, and if he had a crowd of kids watching, he’d do it before closing, too. Kids could never get enough of his steady, dark hand shaking the shavings out before him over the worn wooden floor, how the cracked floorboards swallowed some and what was left Sammy could gather in smooth sweeps of a tattered straw broom.

The cooler with the pop in it was way back. It had a lever that clicked like a tight knuckle when you opened it. The Crush was on the top shelf and Coke down below. I’d heard men ask Sammy for beer, but always in a whisper.

Sammy was a kind man. Tall and strong. He parted his hair down the middle and there was just a brush of gray at the sides. His mustache made him look happy. He had a bad knee that buckled when he walked sometimes. Even so, I saw him take Butchy in three great strides the day Butch thought he’d cop a Butterfinger from Sammy, ‘cause, Butchy said, ‘Sammy’s good for nothing’. Sammy made that knee work and got Butchy to stop with a firm hand on his shoulder and some whispered words that left Butchy kind of teary. Sammy called me ‘Miss’ from the first day we met and always asked after my folks ‘cause he knew my father from Wednesday morning rosary at St. Matthew’s.

Tom Tom was another story, though. He was Sammy’s nephew and what I knew he wanted most from me was ‘sugar’.

Tom Tom’s real name was Thomas Thomas. Some kind of bad joke his parents played. He had better luck when they left him with Sammy and Nan while they took off to Vegas where they lost all they owned, got drunk and parked their car on the railroad track to sleep off a huge one just an hour before a freight train came barreling down on them, pushing their sorry lives so far down the line it took days to find what was left of them.

Ever since I knew him, Tom Tom wore a lid. One of those slick, low-brow caps that snapped down on itself and made him look artistic and cool. It was smooth brown leather that looked fast enough to slide on. I thought if I could lick it, it might taste like chocolate.

I first met him late July of ’68 about a week after he moved in with Sammy and Nan. He came slow strutting around the corner that day looking like a drunken raven wobbling in to scavenge. He sauntered over to our porch and walked right up the five rickety steps, past me perched on the railing, to my grandma in her broken bamboo chair and said, taking her right hand in his, “Enchanté, Madame, enchanté.”

To which she replied, a girlish smile blooming on her ancient lips, “Un très bon homme.” Then Tom Tom grinned. My grandma invited him to stay and sit with us on the porch as though he weren’t the color of coffee, as though the color line didn’t really pass through the middle of the alley behind us, as though I might be able to do something with the flutter in my middle Tom Tom started the moment I saw him as this whole small world of mine was having fences thrown up all around it.

But what I could or couldn’t, should or shouldn’t do didn’t matter. In the next few days I could tell Tom Tom felt the same pull I did. I saw him watching the ways I moved. He watched me go from Sammy’s to the Wash n’ Dri and hide away from the street. I think he knew I drank in the wild heat; I moved really slowly just to make sure he could follow.

Just about the time I thought I might burst waiting for Tom Tom, the automatic rollers at the top of our washer died. Three days later the hand crank froze. Mom had had enough. My father was out of work then, but Mom said she’d be damned if she’d beat our clothes with a rock to clean them. She and grandma pooled their change and sent me to the Wash n’ Dri with a week’s worth of laundry.

I hoisted two bulging straw laundry baskets into our rusted Radio Flyer and pulled them slowly two blocks over broken concrete sidewalks and in the streets some to avoid the huge curbs. I knew Tom Tom was watching. I saw him duck behind the dumpster at Brownie Signs then cut across Lake Street behind me and go deep into Davis’ yard and through to the Ashland side. I went in the side door at the Wash n’ Dri because it set me way back toward washer 21 around the back of the L-wall. Surrounded by the noise and heat I blocked everything out except my waiting.

I was ripe as a plum. I was hot and sweaty, but trying as hard as I could to look cool. I buried my nose in a tattered Women’s Day. My eyes ran blindly over the blur of words and pictures. I turned softer in the heat remembering Tom Tom’s wide smile and sweet cinnamon breath. I rehearsed, behind half closed eyes, all the moves I dreamed of over the past few weeks. And then, as though my mind called him, he came to me on quiet legs that curved gently under him at sixteen. They bowed out at the knees and I knew they’d fit well around my thighs. I stood and backed up to a drier, the glass front warm from use, the metal lip of the rounded glass door cupping my behind. Tom Tom came up directly in front of me, our toes just out of reach. He touched his cap.

“Enchanté,” he whispered.

I just smiled.

He stepped closer and moved his feet to the outsides of mine. The wall of driers pressed up close behind me, urged me forward. The pulse and rhythm of the driers spinning to either side of me inched slowly up my spine. I looked at him from under my eyelashes, and then let my eyes fall on his muscled thighs barely hidden in tight jeans.

He slipped his right hand deep in his thigh pocket. Slowly down its length, wrapping his open palm around the soft inside of his thigh that I knew was hairless from the time I’d seen him in cutoffs. He stayed there unbearably long then slowly removed his hand with a quarter in it. Smiling he stepped closer still.

I kept my head turned down and to the side. I looked at the floor to stay steady through the pounding of my heart. I felt my neck wobble and my middle begin to beg.

He finally closed the space between us and held me tight to the drier with his firm belly. His arms reached up around me on either side and his nostrils flared just above my own. He slid his arms down, rubbed his belly down on me so our eyes were even and only then did I let my eyes turn up to him. He took a beat, then dropped the coin into the empty dryer behind us, eager to waste all that fine hot air and motion. He said through his crooked, rich-lipped smile, “I’m gonna turn you on.” He set the dryer in motion with one soft touch and I felt it kick in behind us.

Tom Tom’s mouth was on mine. The rhythm and the heat were behind and inside us. Our eyes closed to the colors and fight around us. I was just falling into Tom Tom and he was falling into me.