My Most Titanic Miscalculation

As it is still early in the year 2015, it is still relevant to issue revelations, resolutions, and reflections. I am here now to do just that. I have done many, uh, questionable things in my life: stayed up and out too late with the wrong people, listened to music too loudly, driven too fast in cars I couldn’t afford, spent too much money, eaten fatty foods, talked too loudly and too often, smoked too many cigarettes, and sampled the fruits of the labors  of John Barleycorn, Owsley Stanley and Panama Red. But despite all of the mistakes of my misspent youth, the worst move that I ever made, drunk or sober was buying a coin laundromat.

Now before any random laundromat owner out there in the digital ether gets their nose out of joint over that last sentence, let me qualify. If you own a coin laundromat and it amply supports you and your family as you trudge the road to happy destiny, I am overjoyed for you. Keep counting those quarters and keep those lint traps clean.   I am only talking about what happened to me. Owning a coin laundry was a living hell that nearly led me to gunplay, financial ruin, and made me hate everyone. 

Let me elucidate.

Living in northern California was very expensive. Homes cost a lot. The taxes were high. Everyday living expenses were extreme. Having two working adults with full-time jobs in the house just wasn’t enough. We felt that we needed more income. I was not able to simply get another job. I needed something that would make money full time, while I was at work, and only needed part-time involvement. What could be better than a coin laundry? Think about it-it made perfect sense. The front door lock was on a timer, so no one had to open the place. Customers would show up and toss quarters in the machines all on their own. I would show up, collect the coins, run a rag over the shiny parts and be on my way.

Oh the naiveté… 

Let me be brutally honest in summation. The customers were astonishingly stupid and dishonest: a loathsome convocation of thieving dolts. The landlord was one of the most despicable and contemptible bags of flesh I have ever known. And the "entrepreneurs" I encountered were heartless and cynical. There, I said it. Now let me explain why. Here, in no particular order, are the snippets and incidents which have formed my low opinion of the laundromat experience and humanity in the aggregate.

When I first bought the laundry, I installed twenty brand new washers, and three large capacity washers. This was the dawn of the digital age and these washers were able to set different prices for different water temperatures in an effort to save money and hot water. The price for a cold wash was less than the price for a hot wash. Less hot water used means less natural gas bought and burned, and less pollution. Maybe it’s just me, but this seemed pretty damned obvious. The customers just didn’t get it. They accused me of ripping them off. I posted signs and posters showing how colored clothes lasted longer when washed in cold water and saved them money. They only needed warm and hot water for socks, underwear, bed linens-things that were heavily soiled. After a shitstorm of accusations and threats to go elsewhere, I relented and made all the washes one price-the highest price. The complaints stopped. They would rather pay more and destroy their clothes faster. I was flummoxed. 

Customers would insert slugs and foreign coins in the coinslots. One week I got $35.00 worth of slugs. I came to loathe the Philipine peso with a cold passion. I still have a cup full of coins from all over the world. One of them has a guy wearing a fez. Most of these non-quarters would not work, so they jammed up and put a washer or dryer out of commission. I caught one guy doing a wash with a load of funny money and confronted him. He was very apologetic. The next day, I came to the laundry and the washer he had been using was overturned on the floor. Coincidence? I think not.

People performed every bodily function imaginable. Urination, defecation, sexual intercourse, eating, drinking, shooting up, snorting, smoking, sleeping, vomiting, cutting hair, changing diapers, if it went in or out of an orifice of the human body, they did it in my laundromat. Used condoms were not hard to find in the garbage, so at least they were practicing safe sex. I had to kick out homeless people sleeping in the back corner of the laundry. People dealt drugs out of the laundromat. Someone would come in on a weekly basis and spit onto the glass doors of ALL ELEVEN of my dryers. I could not fathom one person having so much saliva. I had to scrape the dried loogies off of the glass with a razor. 

I got attacked verbally and physically by a little old lady who was lit up like birthday cake one Saturday afternoon, drinking some of those pre mixed cocktails.. I called the cops and someone’s dog peed on the leg of one of the responding officers. I had to pay his dry cleaning bill for that. 

Someone put a pair of hiking shoes in a dryer one Sunday morning and some way, somehow, through some random, unrepeatable cosmic coincidence, this set the dryer lint on fire. The fire department came, put out the fire, hosed down everything in sight, then issued me a citation for maintaining  an unsafe condition. ($200.00 !!!) The person never came back for their shoes.

        Someone claimed that their $1500.00 quilt had been stolen from one of the large capacity washers. They had started the wash cycle, gone to the grocery store and when they came back, their quilt was gone. They said I was responsible. I said I was NOT responsible and that maybe they shouldn't have left such an expensive item unattended in a neighborhood infested with junkies and homeless people. They vowed to take me to small claims court but nothing came of it. I would occasionally wonder if there was indeed some homeless person asleep down in the ravine that ran through Fairfax, curled up and blissfully ignorant that they're wrapped in a $1500.00 quilt.

A person named "Blue Gabor" constantly had trouble with the soap dispenser, or the washer, or the dryer, or all three, and would write up refund slips. This was every week. Not for one moment did I believe that the person's real name was "Blue Gabor." I offered to meet them at the laundromat to help them with their laundry. I really just wanted to meet this incompetent assclown who fancied themselves as “Blue Gabor.” They never answered my invitation but continued to demand refunds, which I was obliged to pay.

People stole anything that was small enough to fit through the door. Clocks, doormats, garbage cans, the bulletin board off the wall, brooms, mops, all stolen. I finally had to mount the wall clock behind a plexiglass shield that was bolted to the wall with steel bars. They stole lightbulbs out of the fixtures. They stole the address number stickers off of the door. 

There was a sink in the laundromat with hot and cold running water. Some clodpate would come in on a weekly basis, dye his jeans black in the sink using a five gallon bucket, slop black dye all over the place, then leave the bucket. The dye was nearly impossible to scrub away. I soon had enough five gallon buckets to form a bucket brigade. I finally had to disconnect the hot water from the sink. Of course people complained. I lied and said that my business insurance would not allow hot water in the open sink but that it still had cold water. Mr. Black Dye went elsewhere. Also the homeless people had no place to wash up now. Ahh, bugger…

My first janitor got into a fight one night with a couple of bikers at a local bar and called me at  2AM to bail him out and remind me that, uh, the laundry was still open and hadn’t been cleaned. I had to load my children into the car and go to the laundry to do his job. (Gail was in Chicago at the time.) The next day, I again loaded the children into the car, went to the bank, got $700.00 bail, loaded the children back into the car, went to the lovely Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin County Courthouse to bail him out, and had the deputies inform me that some of my $20s were counterfeit. I had to load the children back into the car,  go back to the bank, get new $20s, load the children back into the car, go back to the lovely jail, and finally bailed out this genius. Of course he didn’t have the money to pay me back, but promised to work it off. He worked two more days, then disappeared.

        I hired another janitor who just happened to live in the apartments behind the laundry. Her name was Barbara. She had a dog that was a Rottweiler-pit bull mix. This was the most frightening looking dog I'd ever seen. If he had two more heads he would've looked like Cerberus, the not so friendly pup who patrols the banks of the river Styx to keep the damned from exercising in/out privileges through the gates of Hades.  Naturally, his name was Caine. Caine was very serious and made me very nervous. But Barbara was steady, and reliable.

        Every April in northern California, there are big windstorms accompanied by torrential rains. During one of these storms, I put out my garbage in your typical galvanized steel garbage can, then went to have a hamburger. As I was driving back to the laundry, I had to dodge a galvanized steel garbage can which was being blown down the middle of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard at an extremely high rate of speed in hurricane force winds, making the devil’s own racket as it bounced and tumbled off of the pavement. When I returned to the laundromat, my garbage can was gone, and I never saw it again.

I had a soda pop dispenser in the laundry. The junkies and bored high school students broke into it and stole all of the sodas and the cash. The machine was destroyed and had to be hauled away in one week. One...week.

I almost had to shoot a guy one night. At the time I owned the laundry, I had gotten into target shooting, and I kept my handgun, a .45 caliber Glock semiautomatic, in the safe at the laundry because I didn’t want to have it around my house and my two small children. I just shot paper targets at a range in San Rafael while I imagined that the bad guy pictured on the target was "Blue Gabor" or Mr. Black Dye Man. There were always about ten rounds in the clip when the gun was in the safe. One night after the laundry was closed, I was in the back store room counting quarters in my coin counting machine. I didn’t realize that I had left the doors open and unlocked. The safe was open and I had bags of quarters on my workbench, and the Glock set off to the side. The coin counter was extremely loud in its operation so I did not notice that someone had walked into the laundry and almost up to my elbow. “How you doin’! Huh? What’s up?” he shouted. I was startled but immediately realized what was up. He intended to rob me. Again he repeated: “What’s up! Huh?” I picked up the Glock, held it pointed towards the floor, and backed away from the table. In that brief instant, I thought that I might have to shoot this individual if he took another step towards me. At that range, a bullet from the Glock would have knocked him seven ways from Sunday and made a hole in him big enough to fit one of Mr. Black Dye Man’s five gallon buckets. I didn’t want to shoot him but I also wanted to see my children grow up. He took a step into the back room, then I saw him register that I was holding the Glock in my hand. His demeanor changed and he meekly asked me if I had any WD-40 he could borrow. He took my can of WD-40 and went all “feet don’t fail me now” out of the laundry and into the night. Even though this was the best possible outcome to this scenario, I was rattled. Shortly after this incident I sold the Glock and swore to always make sure the doors were locked if I was there late at night.

I never got my WD-40 back.

The Scumbag Landlord was a piece of human excreta. Did I just say that? He was a demanding, foul-natured, foul-mouthed, paranoid, manipulative, lowlife beast. He had NO redeeming qualities; no mercy, no sense of humor, just a reprobate money-grubbing property-owning parasite. Any telephone conversation with him was laced with threats, accusations, demands, and denials.The laundry was located in a small complex that had three businesses along the street, and about ten crumbling apartments behind. The rent was cheap, but whenever it rained, you had to get out the buckets (thanks Mr. Black Dye Man) and cookware because the ceiling leaked. Everything was filthy and falling apart. He insisted that I bring my rent checks directly to his house and leave them in the mailbox. If I needed any repairs and offered to pay for them by rent deduction, he would refuse to cooperate, threaten to evict me, make some completely addle-brained suggestion,  promise to have the repairs done, and then never make the repairs. A young woman ran across the street in the rain, slipped and fell on the sidewalk and sued the city of Fairfax, myself and the Scumbag Landlord. Suddenly he became all sunny and friendly because he wanted me to share the expense of an attorney. After the case was tossed out, he went back to being his old malodorous self. Even though we never met face to face, I hated that bastard.

So, after three years of this madness, I concluded that enough was enough and I decided to sell the business. I found a business broker and we filled out the necessary paperwork, I signed where I needed to sign, and I sat back to await further developments. It only took a couple of days for the broker to contact me with the news that the Scumbag Landlord had put the property up for sale. Never once in our monthly telephone conversations had he mentioned this fact. Of course, this would have an effect on my proposed sale of the business. Aside from the actual washers and dryers etc, the lease is one of the most valuable assets a laundry possesses. With uncertainty looming over the state of the lease, the business was unsaleable and worthless.

But there were buyers for the property: two young hotshots whose names I have forgotten, and a third partner named Preston. How can you ever forget some rich bugwit named “Preston?” I met with Preston and the Money Men on a couple of occasions and they made it perfectly clear that they were not interested in maintaining the property in its’ present condition. They wanted to evict everyone-all of the tenants in the apartments as well as the three businesses in the front. They were going to tear everything down and build a new development on the site.

Admittedly it was a slum. But to the people who lived there, it was home. It was one of the only low rent residential properties in very wealthy, expensive Marin County. Some people had lived there for twenty years. Some of them came into the laundry in tears, and lamented that they were going to have to uproot their kids from school and move far away. But none of this mattered to Preston and the Money Men. They actually had the nerve to tell me at one point that “It’s nothing personal, just business.”

Without going into needless detail, Preston and the Money Men won out. Everyone had to leave. I managed to coerce a little money from them, and I sold all of my equipment to an equipment broker. I was no longer a laundry owner and at that moment that I realized I was free from the tyranny of the laundry business I learned the true meaning of the word "relief." 

But then karma caught up with Scumbag Landlord and Preston and the Money Men.

When they started to tear down the structures and dig up the parking area, the demolition crew uncovered some old gas tanks buried beneath the parking lot. All demolition came to a screeching halt. It seems that at some point in the past, there had been a filling station on the property and the old tanks had been buried rather than dug up and removed. In the eyes of the virulently liberal and hyper environmentally aware Marin County government, the only thing worse would have been to find an unexploded hydrogen bomb.

The last I heard, Preston and the Money Men and Scumbag Landlord were engaged in the great American pastime called Everybody Sue Somebody. I sincerely hope that they deranged each other’s lives and finances in a satisfactory manner. 

        Shortly after this, we moved from Marin County to the Chicago area. 

So, as with all events that happen in a person’s life, what did I learn?

I have never fully regained my faith in humanity. I used to believe that your average person was good and smart. Now I know better. Now I know that the average person is swinish, revolting, treacherous, and laughably dense. Business people are cold-hearted, gormandizing vampires for whom mammon is the omneity here in God’s America.

       I did get a short letter from Barbara the janitor. After she lost her apartment, she had moved to the Gulf coast of Florida and found work. She was able to rent a house on the Gulf Coats. She wanted me to be a personal reference for a job application. 

      She included a photo of Caine frolicking in the surf.