Lloyd sat in the back of the van watching the clouds threaten the river town. It had been raining all week for no reason. He inhaled the fresh smell of loud, burnt sulfur. The back of his leg itched from sitting on the crushed side of the fender, the result of a late night hit and run he hadn't attended. It reminded him of that frustrating morning when he lived in the city and discovered it before his coffee. He moved to the other side of the fender to relieve his itch and avoid reliving frustrations past, though his future wasn't exactly looking rosy.
The threat of rain became reality, so Lloyd scooped up the remaining firecrackers and put them back in a weathered, brown paper bag. He put the paper bag into a plastic Taco Bell bag. The Taco Bell bag had handles and was sort of waterproof. He made the three minute trip across the river to Illinois and the broken town he decided was home.
Cairo looked like it had called in sick to work long ago and never quite recovered. It was once a competing force at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Its strategically placed exchange ports, thriving night life, and traveling carnivals full of sideshow freaks ensured a loud, proud quality of life. But as the highway replaced the river in the commerce world, Cairo suddenly seemed out of the way. One by one, the businesses began closing, their workers choosing an early retirement on the porch. The mayor tried half-heartedly to woo tourists with a replica of the Sphinx, complete with a nose. One sign proudly proclaimed, "THE SPHINX WITH A NOSE FOR FUN! ONLY IN CAIRO...ILLINOIS!" But most of the town tired of cheap strangers invading the town while mispronouncing its name.
"Is there anything else to do in Cairo?"
"It's Care-o, not Cairo."
"If this ain't Cairo then why do y'all have a Sphinx?"
Schoolchildren began referring to it as "The Sphinx that stinks." When these schoolchildren entered adolescence, tourism had diminished to a handful of lost mouth-breathers. The Sphinx became the target of many high school pranks. Over the years he had been toilet-papered, painted to look like a whore, and covered in some unfortunate animal's blood. One year his nose had been sawed off and was rumored to have graced the hood of hot shot Danny Mose's GTO. The nearly bankrupt town hired local weirdo Wilson Woods to construct a new nose for the Sphinx. Wilson lost some of his tongue and most of his mind in the Korean War, and gave the Sphinx a new nose out of the kindness of his heart and a case of Michelob. The result was a wobbly, pock-marked beak that the town called a "broken Jew nose."
Lloyd passed the Sphinx as the lone town skater cut class and practiced his rudimentary ollies under the nose.
He had always been attracted to damaged places. "Broken is beautiful" he once young-drunkenly scrawled on a bathroom stall in Paris. Lloyd didn't get Paris. He dislikened it to the new hot girl in school who became immediately popular but presumably would never speak to him. Therefore Lloyd had no interest in Paris. And that is why he got loaded on beer instead of champagne that afternoon and got into a shoving match with a waiter.
He felt like a beer. But it was 11am and he had learned that there was no real reason to start drinking before noon anymore. So he pulled into the craggy, weed-infested parking lot of what was once Style City, a high fashion clothing store. Probably around 1980 Style City was a chance for the women of Cairo to look like out-of-towners; perhaps too convincingly because by 1990 all of Style City's customers had moved out of Cairo. The parking lot was curious in its layout of the spaces. Cars seemed to face each other in acute triangles, like the wings of a peacock. Or something. Lloyd couldn't figure it out. He estimated from the architecture and the tall gas station-like sign that Style City had once been a car hop; probably frequented by Danny Mose and his GTO.
Instead of a beer he reached for a guitar and searched his palate of chords with the rain as a calmly frenetic rhythm section. He was too aware of the cliche of the sensitive singer-songwriter with a guitar and attempted to dissuade it by painting the guitar an unnatural hot pink. The day-glo gleam gave the guitar a crummy dime-store sound that defeated the cliche in Lloyd's mind. He improvised some lyrics about Style City, focusing on the generic skyline depicted on the sign, probably the skyline to the town where all the customers had flocked. While the rain continued to punish the beaten parking lot he sang about the difficulties of being a roller-skate waitress under such conditions. He jotted down a few chord progressions along with the word "roller-skateress" before heading to work.
In retrospect he should have gone to the laundromat. His stained cotton/polyester uniform was on its third day. He considered smoking out the thick stench of stale sweat with a few firecrackers but he wouldn't have time to go to back to Kentucky. And he was tired of being suspicious in Illinois. So he ambled into Taco Bell #8568 to begin the afternoon shift as a Food Service Shift Leader.
Ken, the Food Service General Manager, greeted him with a cheerful hello that sounded more like "hi-lo." Lloyd had about four years on Ken, and only ten minutes to look presentable. He pushed open the men's room door with a relaxation often mistaken for aimlessness, made a lather of the pink push soap, and blotted his armpits under the wretched shirt. The bathroom was a mess of toilet paper streams that looked to Lloyd like frozen bottle rocket trails. The paper towel dispenser had emptied a jackpot of crumpled kleenex, cascading its filth-encrusted riches onto the gummy floor. In the melee of garbage he saw what appeared to be a small treasure: a travel-size bottle of Brut cologne, seemingly empty save for a drop or two.
He sniffed the bottle to make sure it was Brut and not some horrid homemade radiator gin. Then he applied one drop to the front of the putrid shirt and the last drop on his back, smeared his hands all over his body, and rubbed the remaining imagined particles of male essence on his pulse points, like he had seen his Uncle Bobby do while he watched the Vikings game.
He looked in the mirror. While examining his divorce wrinkles he realized he hadn't shaved, and that his graying hair resembled a matted owl's nest.
"What a mess," he lamented.
"Yeah, this place is a fucking dump," an anonymous voice reverberated from the stall. It startled Lloyd but he didn't show it. Instead he grabbed a visor in lieu of a comb and clocked in.
The shift went by. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Lunch rush, after-school rush, drive thru dinner rush, clean up. None of the rushes exceeded five consecutive orders. Because of his shirt Lloyd spent most of the shift in the back with Mofles and Pablo. Together they magically turned the same five ingredients into fourteen varieties of Mexican food, like a couple of fast food Jesuses.
Mofles and Pablo worked quickly and efficiently with a grace that Lloyd hadn't mastered. They made his burritos look like grade school craft projects. Conversation between the two was exclusively in Spanish, a rapid kitchen Spanish that slowed down to check out women and often exploded with jagged homophobic laughter. Or so Lloyd guessed. His conversations with Mofles and Pablo rarely veered outside of their idea of him as a pothead, which he was not. They called him "Yoyd" because his name began with two L's.
"Yoyd, man. Fuma mucha mota?"
He supposed the pothead image was easier to deal with than a homosexual image, which he was also not. He didn't think he was much of anything these days.
Lloyd, sore from standing, clocked out and went to the laundromat. To his name he had two pairs of jeans, one pair of work slacks, five T-shirts, one vintage button down long sleeve shirt, two Taco Bell shirts, ten pairs of socks, six pairs of boxers, and a pair of jogging shorts. He could get it all done in one load.
Ken had given him shit that day about ringing a "no sale" on the register to get change. When Lloyd explained it was for laundry quarters Ken let it go.
"You oughta wash that visor, too."
Lloyd remembered to leave the visor at work. He sat in a row of orange, plastic bowling alley chairs reading the newspaper with one hand while massaging the back of his neck with the other. The morning had found Lloyd unwittingly using a pair of vice-grip pliers as a pillow. Halfway through the massage he realized the newspaper was over a week old. Now with both hands devoted to soothing the chronic sting he noticed a woman pulling his sopping clothes out from the washer and setting them aside. He approached the woman at the same pace and with the same smirk he carried into Taco Bell.
"Excuse me. Those are my clothes."
"I want to use this machine," snapped the woman. She was wearing an over-sized #1 Grandma shirt that he assumed she had purchased or won.
"There are plenty of other machines."
"Yeah, I know that. But I wanna use this one!"
The other three patrons took their eyes off of the rattling Mexican TV game show and focused on the show that had just begun in the laundromat.
"This is my machine!" she declared. Lloyd was baptized with spittle from the woman's angry mouth, and she emphasized her point by plopping a fistful of Lloyd's underwear on the folding station, creating another blessing of droplets on his face. Lloyd turned to the small audience for sympathy but they hurriedly shot their eyes back to the blaring television. Their ears continued watching the laundromat show.
"M'kay," he said and attempted to put his clothes back into their rinse cycle.
"Oh no you don't!" she sprayed, and made an X with her arms over the machine. When Lloyd gently tried to move one of her arms, the woman let out the loudest scream he had ever heard. It felt like he had crossed polarities while jump-starting a car battery and it exploded. He immediately let go and wiped the sparks of saliva from his face.
"What the fuck is goin' on in here?" yelled an ape of a man emerging from the wood paneled door marked OFFICE. He wore a stained tank top that accentuated his Bluto biceps as well as his Bluto beer belly. The gold around his neck chimed pleasantly as he hobbled toward the unpleasant scene. Somebody turned down the volume on the television.
"You have the face of a rat!" she hissed from behind the wall of muscle that now stood towering over Lloyd.
"Why are you fucking with Gayle?"
It was apparent that Lloyd wasn't going to win this battle. So he sighed and explained the situation. During the explanation he speculated that Gayle was using the water and soap he paid for to get a free wash for herself.
"Yeah, but this is my machine!"
The ape spoke.
"21 is Gayle's machine. Now I recommend that you leave before I call the cops."
If this had happened a few years prior Lloyd would have waited for the police and pressed charges against Gayle for theft. But he had lost his desire to fight in the divorce, along with most of his possessions. No longer content to play the fool, now he simply was the fool. In a laundromat.
"Can I at least dry my clothes?"
"Did you just hear what I fuckin' said?" The ape pointed at the door with a fat, mangled finger. Lloyd suspected it wasn't mangled from playing softball. He sniffed his dripping mound of clothes. If there had been a detergent scent called "Good Enough," this would have been it.
He left Gayle and the laundromat at the same pace and with the same smirk he had approached it, while she jeered "rat-face" and other compound words using "rat" as a prefix. Somebody turned the television volume up, but not as loud as it had previously been.
Lloyd drove to Walmart. In the parking lot he ate the bean burrito he was saving for breakfast. His clothes were laid out around the van, its bucket seats wearing work shirts and its windows acting as a clothesline for the jeans. Socks and boxers were scattered neatly next to his sleeping bag. What happened at the laundromat should have made him feel something, but all he felt was the observation that an event had occurred. He was worried his soul was turning into numb polenta.
Lloyd silently acknowledged some facts: he was 31, divorced, working at Taco Bell, living out of a van and eating tomorrow's breakfast in a Walmart parking lot at midnight. Instead of a beer he reached again for his defiantly ugly guitar and improvised some ugly lyrics about the laundromat incident. Uninspired he wrote nothing down and lied down next to the frigid undergarments, his neck at an angle opposite from the previous night to even out the pain.
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