of life. He also came to represent all of my life’s failures.
I sat in that laundromat and thought about Nietzsche and my failures until the washer cycled through and I transferred my clothes to the dryer. I returned to my white plastic chair between the Santa Anas and stared at the blurred ink on my paperback.
A young woman came into the laundromat at this point. Her hair had been dyed Jayne Mansfield platinum, her bangs cut high across her forehead. They were dyed black. She wore a little white dress tailored to look like something from a ’40s stag magazine. Her high heels clumped across the laundromat linoleum. A barbed wire tattoo wrapped around her ankle. The Santa Ana winds blew through her sheer dress. Goosebumps formed on her pale legs. She plopped her clothes on the three washers closest to me. My glance drifted back to the blurred ink of the paperback. My mind returned to the chart of the typical American lifespan.
If you’re tracking this with me, you’ll see a couple in their mid-thirties. They have graduated from a state university. They’re both gainfully employed. They have health insurance, vision benefits, and retirement plans. They’ve shared a dog for nearly eighteen years. This should be a time in their lives when they’ve proven that they can be nurturing, that they’re responsible enough to have a life dependent upon them for food, shelter, etc. They’ve garnered stability. At this point, they should be focused on taking the next step: breeding. Instead, you see the couple living in two towns separated by hundreds of miles. One half of the couple takes the responsibility of killing the dog (humanely; it’s the best thing for the dog after all). The other half sits in a laundromat washing the new clothes he needed for his first job in a mainstream, white-collar environment. Inspect this development chart more closely. You may realize that, by now, the couple should be four or five years beyond this point. There should be a child. Nietzsche’s demise should coincide with the child’s adventures in kindergarten. At the very least, there should be a washing machine and dryer at home and laundromats should be a romanticized memory of the lean, post-college days. You may look at me, the one in the laundromat with discount department store clothes, and cast the blame. This would not be the right time to defend myself. I would be too distracted.
I snapped out of the chart and my blame when I saw a vague white fluttering in the far right recesses of my peripheral vision. The Santa Anas played with the pin-up girl’s white skirt. It floated up her pale, goose-bumped thighs. She set down her detergent and flattened her skirt. I glanced lower down her leg, watched that barbed wire tattoo twist around her ankle. That barbed wire allowed me to do more math. An unspoken fashion moratorium must have passed on the barbed wire band tattoo sometime around 1995… ’96 at the latest. It reached the apex of its popularity, though, around ’92. The recipient of a barbed wire band tattoo would likely be no younger than eighteen, no older than twenty-three. Looking at median numbers, factoring standard deviations, discarding data too wildly errant to be relevant, I decided that this woman would likely be around my age. Around my age and also at a laundromat, but wearing high heels and a sheer dress that was no match for the January California winds. Her development chart had to be lagging behind mine. I tried to take a little comfort in that and returned my gaze to the paperback.
It was no use trying to read. Nietzsche was surely dead at this point. My life compared to a pin-up laundromat girl meant little to me. I worried more about my life compared to what I wanted, what I dreamed, where I found meaning under this crushing wave of mortality. At what point would I be broken-hipped, blind, deaf, picking at perpetual scabs, and sleeping next to my own vomit? Will someone have the humanity to put me to sleep? Will I have the courage to accept an end to this life? Did Nietzsche know where he was going this morning? Did he shake and quiver in my wife’s arms? Did she wrap him in a blanket and try to convince herself that Nietzsche was shaking because of the cold, not because of the great unknown he was facing? Did that white dress just flutter up higher?
I shot my glance over just in time to see the pin-up girl’s hand smoothing her dress down. Surely, the corner of my eye didn’t deceive me. Surely, the Santa Anas had swept that dress high enough for me to realize—despite my fractured consciousness—that the pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Surely, it was better that I didn’t see it. This woman deserved her privacy. She didn’t need some sad psych hospital grant writer with a dead dog staring at her ass.
I kept my eyes glued to the paperback that my mind wouldn’t let me read. I told myself that my eyes needed to stay there because this young woman deserved her privacy, that she should be afforded the opportunity to sort her laundry into three machines without my lecherous stares. To be more honest, though, I kept my stares off her because I was convinced that people could feel it when you stare at them. A breeze grazes their necks. Their scalps feel lighter. They know. They look around to see who’s looking. I didn’t want this to happen to her, either for her own comfort or because the wind still blew through the laundromat doors. Either one.
I set my paperback down on the white plastic table adjacent to me and my white plastic chair. I picked up the paperclip I’d been using as a bookmark. I used it to dig at the dead skin around my cuticles. I thought of Nietzsche. The breeze picked up. My glance shot over. All mysteries were solved. The pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Her hands were occupied with the sorting of her laundry. She let the wind blow and her dress flutter. She effectively, maybe unconsciously, mooned me. I watched until I felt a bit embarrassed. My mind drifted. My eyes followed the waves of the dress as it floated like a white streamer trapped between the wind and a tree branch. I wanted to look away, but at the core I was still a heterosexual male of the species, prone to all of the instincts inherent to my role in the animal kingdom. The wind died down within a few seconds anyway.
My mind kept fluttering, wondering if it meant anything that the dog named after the man who declared God dead was now dead himself, wondering if any of this added up to anything. Wondering why I hadn’t just rented a car and driven to Fresno. This last thought killed the breeze in my mind because it seemed every other time in my life, I would have acted that way. I could imagine no point in my life when I would not have accompanied my wife in the task of taking Nietzsche on his final journey to the vet. But this time, for some reason, it was like someone had gotten into my head and insisted I stay here. It was that voice—the one that sounded like Dr. Bishop’s—motivating me to act against the way I typically acted. Thinking about this hurt. It sent my eyes back to the pages of the paperback. I still couldn’t make out the letters.
Then the wind picked up. It inflated her dress to the point where I could see above her ass. I could see the dimples where her lower back tied into her pelvis. Again, the pin-up girl did nothing to smooth her skirt or fight the wind. She dropped a handful of quarters into her washer. She selected the proper water temperatures. I wondered if perhaps she could feel my glance, if she knew and she was letting it happen, if she wanted me to look. A wave of anxiety crashed on the shores of my stomach. I swam under it. After all, this wasn’t a situation that required anything of me. I was married. I was happy enough about it. If I had been single, I would’ve felt the pressure to talk to this woman, to invite her to the coffee shop down the road, to buy her a pastry and listen to her life, to maybe get wrapped up in all the drama promised by someone who wore high heels to a laundromat and unabashedly advertised one of the most embarrassing tattoos from the early ’90s. As things stood, I enjoyed a flash of divinity. My dryer buzzed. I pocketed my paperback and went to fold laundry.
Tall double-washers stood between me and the pin-up girl. She picked up her gossip magazine and pink laundry basket, and sat down in the white plastic chair I’d just vacated. She was no longer visible through the double washers. I folded my laundry. I dwelled again on the thoughts of my wife taking the responsibility that I dodged, on the distance between me and Fresno, on my uncharacteristic inability to be in Fresno at this crucial moment, on the fact that I’d spent a hundred dollars on three pairs of slacks, five button-up shirts, and a brown belt to match my dusty loafers. The next day would be Sunday. I’d go to the psych hospital to feel less lonely and use their computer to search out more funding possibilities, to find something to distract me from the death of Nietzsche.
3
The residents of the dual diagnosis dorm were on an afternoon smoke break when I arrived on hospital grounds. There