Of Laundry, Mark and Hannah Arendt

I suppose one of the reasons I hate doing laundry so much is that I do it so infrequently that it all piles up so that when RTT finally runs out of boxer shorts, I’m stuck washing 70 pounds of laundry. Then it has to be loaded up in the car, chauffeured to the laundromat, stain-treated, loaded into washing machines, washed, dried, folded, sorted, driven home, stashed in dressers, hung in closets. An enormously dull task broken down into even duller constituent parts.

The laundromat I go to has a juke box. Today someone was playing tunes from the very first Jackson 5 album. I used to listen to this album a lot when I was living with Mark on 41st Avenue in Oakland. I think of Mark practically every day, but I hadn’t thought of 41st Avenue in years till this music brought me back there. And then I couldn’t remember any of the important details -- What was I doing for money? What was Mark doing for money? Where did I think I’d be in 40 years? Certainly not in Freeville, NY. All I could remember was the horribly claustrophobic layout of the rooms and a peculiar smell that emanated from the apartment upstairs whose tenant -- increasingly beknownst to us -- was slowly going mad.

The Jackson Five album made me melancholy, but, of course, that’s kind of my ground state these days. Melancholy. Not depressed. Mark’s dead, and it was all so transient, and I never guessed that while it was happening. Not that I would have slowed it down or anything. Mark and I had Issues, and I was already thinking it had been a bad idea to fall in love with him -- though I really had control over that. No, if anything I would have sped things up. So I could lurch into the next, ill-advised period of my life -- which I think was the ménage a trois with George and Suzanne. Although, honestly. I don’t remember.

I was also maybe more melancholy than usual because it was the 17th anniversary of Tom’s death. Christ, I know a lot of dead people!

But Tom is the dead person I mourn the most because we were friends, not lovers, and because he stuck around after he died. For years and years I could feel him taking care of me.

And then one day, he wasn’t.

###

When Craig, my horrible next door neighbor, came back from Florida, it was really obvious he was dying. Hadn’t been so obvious before he left.

They were gone a long time, him and Punching Bag Janis. I actually thought maybe they had decided to stay in Florida.
You know how in every Stephen King novel there is always one character who’s slowly rotting from the inside out? That’s Craig. You look at him and you kind of know his organs are foul smelling liquid, held in place by slippery membranes. His insides are one big basket of poison sausage.

I don’t like Craig. But he lives next door. Best to be polite and neutral. Problem for me is that unless I’m actively emitting whiffs of poison gas, I can be easily co-opted. Thus, I’ve had conversations with Craig in which it has occurred to me that he’s not unintelligent. That the problem is that he made the wrong choice, the most lethal choice, at every possible branching of the probability tree.

Plus when someone who has six months to live asks you for a favor, and the favor merely consists in driving him to Ithaca -- where you’re going anyway -- can you really say no?

Well. You can. You have boundaries.

I couldn’t.

So yesterday, I gave Craig a ride to Ithaca. And I think maybe he’s got brain metastases because not only was he evil which is kind of his ground state, he was also stupid, and you know what Hannah Arendt says about the banality of evil -- it’s the very worst kind.

So throughout the entire drive down there, I had to listen to his crazed monotone. “So we’re sittin’ in the Red Lobster and Janis gets so drunk that she starts pukin’ her guts out all over the table. Didn’t go over big with my family. So I said something, and then she slugs me right in front of a cop. So she gets hauled away to the lockup and I go back to the motel to get her purse and they wouldn’t even let me back in the room ‘cause my name wasn’t on the motel contact or whatever the shit it is. She’s got the credit card, right? So then I call my wife -- I guess she’s my ex-wife except we’re still married, I didn’t get no divorce -- and she says I should come and live with her, that she still loves me. Janis just fuckin’ hates her. I had to call Janis’s daughter, the chiropractor, to get the money to get Janis outa jail. That took three days. So Janis gets out, and she starts cussin’ me and hittin’ me again ‘cause she says I spent three days with my ex-wife.” Craig chuckles. “Well, she did slip me some Roxies --“

I am finding this unutterably sordid and also inappropriate with RTT in the car. I slip RTT an anxious glance, but he is oblivious in the backseat, texting 8 million teenagers simultaneously on his phone. Like anything old people say is worth overhearing, right?

I look at Craig sitting beside me. His face is grey. I swear. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody with a grey face before. And of course he is a horrible human being, but it’s also true that he’s being medically mismanaged --

“-- supposed to do the MRI and the biopsy tomorrow,” Craig is saying. “But then I get this call from Syracuse University: We can’t do the MRI ‘cause you got heart stints, and we don’t know if they’re metal or plastic. So now I gotta call that hospital in Florida --“

“Craig,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to call anybody. There should be a medical social worker or case manager who makes calls like that --“

But he isn’t listening. He’s ranting on and on. And I want to stop at the side of the road, open the door to the car: “Sorry, buddy, the ride stops here.”

But he’s dying of liver cancer, so I can’t.

Instead I try to focus on the fact that Craig was once an adorable pink baby. That some doting mother counted Craig’s little pink fingers and toes. Maybe she had a Craig baby book with a stiff white satin cover.

“What did your father do for a living?” I asked Craig. Fully expecting the answer to be, Oh, he raped 12 year olds and made moonshine.

But instead Craig said, “He was an architect.”

And that made it all so much worst!

Christ!

He came from a professional background!

This was atavism, like some fucking Jack London story. Craig told me he used to smoke crack regularly. I didn’t realize smoking crack could do this kind of number on your brain cells.

By then we were in Ithaca. I parked by New Roots which fortunately was also near the Commons where Craig was going. Watched anxiously as RTT got out of the car. “Have a great day, honey!” I said. “Love you!”

“Yeah. Love you too,” said RTT, not looking up from his phone.

Then I drove to the coffeehouse where I regularly write my stupid fluff pieces -- on the agenda today, Arizona short sales! Plus NYC limousine services! -- sat in their parking lot and cried for 15 minutes.

Fucking Craig.

Horrible thing is that I’m sure I’m going to end up giving him rides again, because you can’t say no to someone who’s dying of liver cancer.