Yesterday, I did laundry for the first time since the Trifecta incident. I don't understand what it is about laundromats, but they seem to encourage bizarre and borderline-criminal behavior.
It was Labor Day, so I had hoped everyone else with dirty clothes and no washing machines to call their own would be too busy getting drunk and eating grilled meats to join me at the laundromat. I was wrong. The place was hopping.
Fortunately, I arrived during a lull in activity, so I was able to stake out enough washers and a chair. The chair is really key, because it's awkward to linger in there if you have no place to sit, and I have a paranoia about leaving my clothes unattended. I had a very creepy experience in college related to the theft of one specific pair of underwear, and I don't want it to happen again. Anyway, there are four plastic patio furniture chairs in this facility, one at the far end of the room and three along the window by the front entrance. The far chair is usually occupied by a normal person who also doesn't want to interact with strangers at the laundromat, and the other three chairs are bolted together because obviously it might be tempting to steal one. So, according to the physics of personal space, only two strangers can ever comfortably occupy this row of chairs, because the middle chair serves the sole purpose of being a buffer zone.
Needless to say, I was grateful to see that the entire row of chairs was vacant as I sat down to wait for my clothes. I was finishing up the last few pages of Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams when I noticed that a fashionably dressed guy in his late 20s had entered the laundromat. I found it refreshing to see someone in there who didn't look like an extra from My Name Is Earl. He even followed social protocol and took the seat on the other end of the row instead of creepily seating himself directly next to me. So far, so good.
He pulled out a laptop and settled into his seat, and I returned my focus to my reading. Krakauer was scaling the Devil's Thumb in Alaska, and I was right there with him, vicariously exhilarated, when I was rudely jolted back to the laundromat. The entire row of chairs was violently shaking. Too scared to actually turn and look at this guy, I relied on my peripheral vision to figure out what the hell my seatmate was doing.
Out of the corner of my eye, all I could see was a violent fapping motion under his shirt. This went on for at least 30 seconds, during which time my brain frantically searched for the most benign possible explanation for his behavior.
He's shaking fleas out of his shirt? Or body dandruff? He's having a hot flash? A flashback? He has Tourette's? He's masturbating? Oh God, please let it be Tourette's.
He finally stopped, and nobody else in the laundromat seemed to want to look at him anymore, so I am probably better off not knowing the truth.
Seriously. Is it me? Am I just a magnet for these kinds of experiences? I mean, I'm not complaining, it's entertaining and all, but it's not like I go out of my way to find these people. Is it like Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, and I just put so much of my own weirdness out into the universe that it comes back to me tenfold?
I choose to believe he was masturbating because that makes for the best story. He was probably just shaking a bug off his shirt and had the heebie jeebies and did it a little more vigorously than was needed. I saw a man masturbating in his minivan at a red light once. We held up traffic, him masturbating and me watching him trying to figure out what he was doing.
ReplyDeleteomg i want to know so bad what he was doing why didn't you look
ReplyDeleteWould it be possible for you to share your college underwear theft story? I would like to know the background to your laundry fears.
ReplyDeleteHaha, Sarah, that's fantastic. Way better than catching someone in big SUV playing a porno on their backseat DVD player.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous(es), I didn't look because like, what if I turned my head and he really was masturbating and he saw me watching him and I ended up with a money shot to the face? And I will share the underwear theft story, but a lot of my knowledge of it is speculation.
I once had the unfortunate experience of seeing a homeless man furiously masturbating in a port-a-potty at a construction site in Baltimore.
ReplyDeleteHe had the door wide open on a rather busy tourist-centric street, but had his back to the road so I don't believe it was some sort of devilish trick to shock people for sexual pleasure. I believe that he truly and completely just didn't give a fuck.
The only condolences I have is the fact that I wasn't the only victim of this perverted experience. Ideally, some foreign tourists were so scarred by the incident that they used that isolated incident to paint a perverted picture of all American's lifestyles to their friends when they returned home.
Haha, I don't know, if they were European, it might not have phased them. But you're right, masturbating hobos are funny as performance art, but sad masturbating hobos are just...sad.
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