Friday night laundry near Redwood Street

It is happy hour on Friday night in San Diego. All over town bartenders in crisp white shirts or slovenly Metallica T-shirts or loose and gaudy Hawaiian jobs are placing cocktail napkins with the tasteful logos of the Sheraton or Humphrey’s before their clients and taking their orders for espresso martinis, cosmopolitans, and flaming-Tasmanian-garter-belts-on-the-beach. Some are placing cocktail napkins with bathroom and boob gags in front of the regulars and have their J&B and Cokes ready before they even hit the barstool. Some of us are doing our laundry in North Park.

What drew me back to my old laundry haunt at 30th and Redwood was getting my eyeglasses soldered at Pro-Mec Optical down the street and three items of clothing that needed a wash when the glasses were done.

It is 6:30 in the evening and I’d rather be doing something else. So would everyone here, no doubt. There aren’t many of us: the losers without dates; the married (or girlfriended), whipped into this chore; and Thomas, the soft-spoken Thai gentleman to whom it is customary to wash both his and his wife’s clothing on Friday nights while she works. This frees up their Saturday and Sunday for more leisure and amusing activities. 1 never found out where Thomas or his wife works, what they do on weekends, or much else. The man from Bangkok is polite and serene but not a man to chat just to hear his teeth rumba. In fact, I discovered that a man armed with a camera and a tape recorder will find few people who want publicity while shunting their dirty laundry from machine to machine.

I count only six of us as happy hour is nearing the finish line at 7 p.m. All guys. Five of them don’t want to talk to me at all. I am forced to remember living in this neighborhood for years among crackheads and fugitives from warrants, trivial or otherwise; malt-liquor bikers (whose bikes were forever “down”); and even murderers, like the kid Webb-Kim, who took the life of nine-year-old Amanda Gaecke and dumped her body two blocks from here. If I am making North Park sound sleazy and dangerous, sorry. It was, but it seems to be changing.

The house next door on Redwood, for example, used to look like something along Tobacco Road with a dirt lawn and guys with multiple tattoos and unfortunate dental conditions drinking Cobra and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” until they puked on the porch. As a result of the music or the malt liquor is uncertain. Now the house has been painted and has a lawn...a little brown, but, hey, I know how it is. The place has window boxes with nicely blooming peonies, I think, and an impressive bank of roses and gardenias form a hedge to the east of the property.

I have time to observe these things while my wash cycles in one of the 30-some washers, soon to join one of the 40-some dryers. In the 75-cent wash are three items: a pair of underwear, a sweatshirt, and a T-shirt I bought in Tijuana. I just had to get the T.

I was walking along Revolucion when a barker called out to me, “Hey, Paul McCarthy!” Huh? He was pointing at a pretty good T-shirt, black and rose with a portrait of a famous Beatle, not Paul.

“Paul McCarthy?” I stopped and grinned. “I love Paul McCarthy! Do you have one with his little son, Yono?” I chuckled to myself. What’s the Spanish word for rube?

“No, just Paul McCarthy. You look just like him.” It’s true, I do look like “the cute Beatle” in his prime, though some say I resemble “the quiet Beatle” in middle age. I bought the shirt, and now I’m washing it for the first time wondering if the rubber face of the Fab Four member will resemble one of those dried apple dolls when I fish it out of the dryer.

You don’t get the story on the underwear, but the gray sweatshirt has been stained with lamb-shank grease through three washings. This, the result of spilling the stuff out of a Styrofoam container after a delicious to-go dinner with basmati rice and salad from King Shish-Kabob at Sixth and F downtown.

Happy hour is over in most of the town as I place my stuff in a dryer, another 75 cents. Thomas and I talk a little bit about the traffic in Bangkok and how horrible it is. “Worse than L.A.?” I ask him.

“In L.A. is much better. In Bangkok you car stand still. You betta off walking.” That’s pretty much it for the conversation. The Asian lady working behind the dry-cleaning counter won’t talk to me either, though she smiles and is perfectly charming. She says her English isn’t good enough, but it seems fine to me. I ask if I can take her picture and she giggles and points to her braces, shakes her head. She won’t even tell me her name. She just works there, she tells me. My guess is she isn’t interested in plugging Redwood Laundramat for the boss.

I study the gumball machines, machines that dispense Britney Spears stickers, the video games like “Bust-A-Move” and “Halley’s Comet,” from which issues a progressively maddening Wagnerian/Star Wars rip-off— an electronic martial 20-bar theme that sounds like it’s being played on a digital potato pipe. Other dispensers provide Skittles, M&Ms, “Chicle Tabs,” and temporary tattoos of Powerpuff Girls that all look like Betty Boop, whose copyrighted image, I imagine, must have expired.

The sun is going down over more desirable parts of town on the other side of Balboa Park as I check and find ray stuff to be dry.

The grease stains are still there. Crimeny! You could put this stuff in your crankcase — but I’ll order the same meal again from King, to be sure. The underwear is a little gray, but who cares. The famous Beatle’s visage has survived perfectly, unlike the man himself. Here he is, unshrunken and fresh as a summer eve: the late Mr. John Lemon.