Late Night Laundromat Ambience — Spin Cycles, Dryer Hum & Nighttime Background Noise

Late-night laundry — No one likes laundry, but I have some fond memories of the sights and sounds. The flickers of evening traffic flashing by the windows in yellows and reds. The crisp autumn air waiting to cleanse you of the steamy confines.

When I lived at the top of Winter Hill, I frequented a laundromat at the confluence of Broadway and Main. You could look south from there and see Boston towering in the distance. Her high-rises twinkling.

Next door to my old laundromat was a liquor store—I would pick up Smirnoff Ice and drink that **** surreptitiously while folding boxers.

Alcohol can be pretty great on laundry night because, sentimentality aside, doing laundry sucks. Especially if you have to do it in public. It can be simultaneously tedious and stressful. The way I've heard war described by soldiers.

Obviously, laundry is lower stakes. Yet not without its own cast of belligerents. I had a lady dump my sopping underwear into a cart that wasn't even mine. She kicked it down the aisle toward me as I returned from a smoke break. Me and the dude that had dibs (and clothes already in the cart) were like, "Hey!"

That lady was a peak-hour lady. Don't do your laundry during peak hours — folks do not play during peak hours. If you want to learn about a laundromat's institutional knowledge, how it operates, and what is expected of its clientele, subject yourself to peak hours. It's going to suck.

I learned a bunch from my one stressful peak-hour laundry visit. Most notably, how to change a dollar and avoid the nickel "convenience fee" on the dollar changer. A lady grabbed my wrist as I went in on the changer. "Use the soda machine," she said, pantomiming, feeding my dollar, and then pressing the white coin return button.

Off-hour laundry is less stressful. When regular folks are outside being social, doing homework with the kids, or whatever peak-hour people do at night.

I washed my dirty drawers with the lady who cordoned off the back corner with universal dibs, the unkempt dude and his stash of Reader's Digest, the repairman making his rounds, and the ever-changing couple propped against the window making out.

Episode photo by Ekaterina Belinskaya