The Radler

I didn't know what to do after I'd realized it. This was no ordinary message, not by a stretch. It said "help me." I was flummoxed. I walked out of my kitchen and back into my living room with the freshly made shake in hand. The glass was icy. When I sat on the couch I took a long drink as I let my mind wander. From the rim of the cup I saw a small puff of smoke escape when the cold air met my breath. The frothy, bubbly top tickled my lip as it began to harden there and I wondered if I had a green mustache. When I took another sip I noticed the teeth at the back of my mouth were cold. Half the shake was already gone. Slow down, tiger. You don't want brain freeze. Something about the text just didn't make sense. Whoever texted me had access to a phone. If they were in danger, why not call the police? Why text me? While it was possible the person didn't have a phone, that instead they only had access to an automated messaging service, it seemed unlikely. But it would explain the peculiar nature of these events. No, actually, it doesn't. Let's assume they only had access to a messaging service; why try to obfuscate the message and conceal the fact that it was a request for help? Maybe the message itself was being supervised and it needed to be disguised? Already a lot of assumptions need to be made for this to be true. And even if it were true, there was nothing actionable for me to do about it.

I stared down at the empty glass for a moment and noticed I was chewing the shake as I drink it. Why? There's no reason to. The chewing has already been done by the blender. A habit? Or for the satisfying sugary crunch? I don't know. I got up and walked back into the kitchen. There was a slight cramp in my hamstring. I began to think about the muscle fibers in my leg and wondered how a muscle comes to be cramped. Are they a series of tightly wound chords, like the strings on a guitar? If so, how can they ever become entwined? Perhaps they're more like a bunch of taut cables that can get snagged and tangled into a knot? It definitely felt more like a knot. It was still mid-afternoon and I had the remainder of Sunday in front of me. I guess I should do something productive. Laundry? If there's one thing I hate, it's doing laundry. Cleaning clothes isn't the problem. It's the waiting. I loathe sitting captive as my clothes are cleaned. An hour of my time, lost. Forever. Thirty minutes for the wash cycle and another thirty minutes to dry. That's not including the ten minutes or so that it takes to fold and bag the clothes. Sure, an hour doesn't seem like much time, but that's because you're not faced with the task of doing your laundry - I am.

Reluctantly I put on my shoes. I collect all of my dirty clothes and put them in the laundry bag. Socks and shirts and underwear and shorts. Towels. All of it. From the closet I grab detergent and fabric softener and throw them in my backpack. I'd just turned the key to lock my door when I remembered I'd left my headphones on the kitchen counter. The laundromat is bad enough, but a laundromat without headphones is cruel and unusual. I run back in, get the headphones, and run out. To get to the laundromat I have to walk down a steep hill, one that my mother complains about every time she comes to visit from New York.

"How do you walk up these hills all day," she asks in breathless indignation.

"I don't know. I don't really have much of a choice."

"That's why you're so thin. It's these hills!"

In her defense the street is easily cut at a seventy-degree angle. Each time I climb it my quads burn and I feel as though I'm inching along the hypotenuse of a right triangle. With two hands I hold the laundry bag and stomp in an awkward, mechanical motion down the hill. It's the way I'd imagine Frankenstein's monster to walk inside a child's bouncy house. By the time I'm nearing the bottom I've gained so much momentum that I'm afraid I'll topple over and go rolling down the rest of the way. But I don't. Of course I don't; this isn't a fucking cartoon. Speaking of cartoon characters, my sister dropped a piano on her foot the other day and shattered her big toe. Yes, it was an Acme brand piano.

The laundromat is on the next block. It's a small, dirtbag kind of laundromat. The glass windows look more like plexiglass, and they've been etched with graffiti by keys, pieces of metal or sharp rocks. On the inside, the floor, which is missing several patches of tiles, is covered in a thin layer of hair and grime. About a third of the machines are either broken or eat your money. The sign affixed high up on the wall, near the ceiling, says: you're under video surveillance. The adjacent video-camera, which, presumedly is doing the surveilling, seems to be inoperable. I know this because sometimes I'll flash my dick at it to see if anything bad comes of it. Nothing ever does. Homeless kids from the Haight sometimes hang out inside to get warm. But more often it's frequented by older vagrants, and those of the violently deranged, mentally ill kind.

Once, a while back, I was doing laundry on a weeknight, some time in the evening. There wasn't anyone else in the laundromat, which I was thankful for, and I was exactly halfway done. My headphones were in, so I didn't hear the man come in. I only saw him when I turned to transfer my clothes from the washer to the dryer. He was big and black, and he'd ridden in on a Magna mountain bike, but what struck me as odd was that he had no clothes to wash. His phone was in his hand, close to his ear, and I could tell by the way he was bobbing his head that he was listening to music. He was in his mid-thirties, early-forties, but he seemed wired. Soon I was able to hear him rapping. This over the volume of my music, which was already fairly high. Using the controls on the headphones, I turned it down a bit so I could be more aware of my surroundings. This allowed me to hear the terrible, static quality of his phone's speakers. His phone rang and he stepped outside to take the call. I could see him looking back over his shoulder at me as he spoke. This made me uneasy. I paused my music. The two dryers I was using were on so I couldn't hear what he was saying, even with my music off. Since there was still over 25 minutes left I sat down and waited. I didn't want to, because I didn't like the look of things, but I didn't feel like going home and coming back to discover all of my clothes had been stolen. When he came back in he sat down across from me and waited. I looked up and saw he was staring at me. But when my eyes met his he looked away. Then he began freestyling a particularly violent verse. The invectives he'd speak louder and more aggressively than the other words, to the point where I felt he may be trying to intimidate me or muster the courage to commit a violent act. Either way, I was becoming uncomfortable. He started talking to himself.

"Y'all think this is a game?!"

"Y'all don't know! Y'all don't know nuthin!" he yelled as he aggressively jabbed himself in the temple several times with his pointer finger.

He menaced about this way for a few minutes. The sketchy fluorescent lighting and otherwise desolated laundromat didn't seem like a good place to die. Why did you have to do me like this, god? Why was I talking to god? I'm not even religious. Maybe that's the reason god had forsaken me to die in a scumbag laundromat. It made sense. I had been judged and condemned to death by aggravated assault with a bicycle. How would they explain this to my mother?

"Well, you see, they, uh, were able to identify your son by his tattoos, not his face, unfortunately," the first cop says.

"Yeah, there weren't any teeth left to get an ID off of," the second one adds.

"Well Jim, technically there wasn't much of anything left...I mean, of the head at least. I'd never seen anything like it. Mashed his head into paste with a bicycle tire. Just kept beating him over the skull with it until..."

"Yeah. It looked like chewed up meatloaf and ketchup."

Whatever had gotten into my newly acquainted cycling enthusiast had temporarily abated. For the moment he was quiet as a lamb. He still had that glazed-over, "my eyes are open but I'm dreaming" look on his face. I got up to check my laundry and saw it had ten minutes left. Over the course of those next ten minutes I worried for my life as the cyclist continued to yell out obscenities and threats at the air. The good thing was, when he looked at me, he seemed to be looking through me, so I felt less concerned that I might be an unwilling outlet for his anger. I wasn't convinced he even knew I was there. My laundry beeped and I got up to remove it from the dryer. I opened the door, reached in to grab my warm clothes, and when I turned to place them on the table behind me I noticed he was gone. I'd never been so gracious for an anticlimax in my life.

So, here I was, back at the laundromat. But this time, on a sunny Sunday. What could go wrong?