“The Laundromat”

by J. A. Frazee

The laundromat is like other laundromats except today it’s crowded.
The thaw had come, everything is mud, all the birds are gearing up for dress rehearsal
and far be it from us, the laundromat crowd, to be upstaged by something smaller and more graceful
whose wings only mask their shallowness and great insecurity
in the face of our vast and immovable parking lots.
At home before I left I made sure that all the CD cases in front of my stereo
were adequately disarranged, as after hours of inspired listening, and that the top of each
leaning unstable stack had an appropriately impressive album cover –
I think about this a lot, just in case a guest shows up uninvited,
or more specifically, invited through my thoughts of them, through telepathy
flung outward like microscopic spiders caught in the jet stream,
migrating across the Atlantic, no kidding.
So, for example, if my friend Kevin shows up at the door – and he doesn’t
really live that far away, so this is a very possible thing, something that can happen in the physical world,
          the world of phenomena –
I would want something like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue at the top of the stack,
with Miles in a close up, darkness enclosing him, muting the photo, eyelids lowered in trance, suit and tie;
or maybe Birth of the Cool – a decade earlier, black and white, with COOL in red,
Miles in sunglasses, short sleeves, you can see the rectangular lights
in the ceiling hanging like UFOs above his right shoulder, reproduced in the picture as being on the left –
either is fine for Kevin, I think either would impress him,
so I’d choose which to display depending on my mood –
if I wanted Kevin to think that I am blue I choose one, and if I want to feel COOL
I choose the other, that’s obvious. I always keep something on hand, hidden
but not too hidden, something appropriately obscure or avant-garde, so if someone with those inclinations showed up on a whim, someone I really don’t know,
who was familiar with the work of, say, John Cage –
and this has never actually happened, I’ve never had this conversation – but we could talk
about composing for the toy piano, chance operations, the I Ching. . .
because those are things I’ve never been able to bring up in conversation
at the landromat or anywhere else, at least not before.
So if say, John Ashbery stopped by, we’d have a good chat I think,
or not, I’d be too embarrassed and concerned with my blushing. Sometimes I worry that
my visions – I’m thinking here of Ginsberg’s conversations with Blake –
drop by the house when I’m not around, walk out of the singularity, wipe their feet, look at my CD’s,
take the last piece of bread and leave,
all when I’m at the laundromat washing the stain out of my jeans
where I dropped a whole mug of coffee on my crotch – of course. It wasn’t hot,
don’t worry, but it was in front of the whole Modern British Literature class, the blind professor’s voice
thrust out of him like a net thrown on ninjas, ranting about Beckett’s idea in his great and famous trilogy
         of novels
that the great crime against humanity is and must be the crime of ever being born into the world at all –
and there’s a deaf girl in the class, too, and the signer at the front of the room
is translating everything into sign language, but she can see the coffee on my pants for herself,
         I’m not even kidding.