Jane Doe: (part 2) The All-Night-No-Fuss Laundromat

(This is the  next part of my book "Jane Doe" and this is the tone I want the whole book to maintain.  As I am re-reading it all I see that there is much smoothing out to do in rewrite.  But this part is my favorite and it's no surprise that this has already been rewritten many times.)

The All-Night-No-Fuss Laundromat

Some city nights vibrate with visceral tension, and if you're paying attention, you can almost feel it like a damp fog, getting under every one's skin. These are nights when it is best to batten down the hatches, rest your shotgun across your knee, and wait for Armageddon to pass. However, if you must go out into the streets on one of these nights when the natives are looking for an excuse to cut into your comfort like it was butter for their crack-toast, then there is one place you should avoid: Laundromats in questionable neighborhoods. Never do your laundry on one of these combustible evenings in a Laundromat in a bad neighborhood because it's a magnet for bullets and knives, for sweat and stale doughnuts. This is the place stiffs are discovered in the cold sober light of dawn with the first flush of morning washers. This is the place where you will find notes to the damned and scrawled threats on the walls in garish dripping spray paint.

This is not the kind of place where the sap of young dreams rises to the surface of life to be drunk delicately and nurtured. This is the kind of place where old whores come to clean their pilled up g-strings and to cleanse the micro-ho skirts they wear to showcase their ass cheeks on the corner just outside of where they do this ritual washing. Living, whoring, washing, all on the same block. Life can feel small sometimes when our dreams have shrunk to fit this miserable little Formica covered palace of pay-per-wash detergent boxes with giant (always broken and therefore useless) change machines. This is no place for the ill prepared, or the still milky youths who have moved from mama's house to find themselves, and their starry dreams, right here on O'Farrell Street. There are no dreams here. Only fossilized broken condoms near the front door, and the gutted frame of what you thought life was going to be.

Into this bleak atmosphere of desperation, on just such a night as I have described, Jane Bauer walked boldly into exactly the Laundromat I told you never to venture into on a night when there is a thick taste of violence in the air. She is not a milky youth, though she is fairly young still, not having reached thirty years of age yet, but you would not guess from looking at her fair clear skin, her dark glossy shoulder length hair, or at her robust tall form that she is a broken person. A person with more contradictions of experience and beliefs you will not find. Everything about Jane is a contradiction. She is broken though you would be hard pressed to find another woman more fiercely independent. She is funny and light and joyful, yet at the same time she carries with her a thousand pounds of sorrow and fear that lap at her light, dimming it in power surges that last for days.

This tall bottle of contradictions with the keen green eyes of a person accustomed to watching came into the All-Night-No-Fuss-Laundromat on O'Farrell Street because she was out of clean underwear. Jane Bauer is not a girl willing to wear dirty underwear. She could feel the thick tension in the city air on this night and it made her alert, her skin alive with warning. Yet she must do her laundry. It is not agreeable to be caught waiting out Armageddon in filthy panties no matter how many shotguns you have to rest on your knees. Jane hates the word "panties". She hears it a lot where she works, at the underwear factory. She is the shipping manager for the factory and all day long she packs up tiny panties, panties with no crotches sometimes, cheap flimsies, bras and teddies, filmy nothings favored particularly by women with breast "enhancements" and frosty hair. There is going to come a moment when the irony of Jane's job is going to sock you in the teeth, but that moment isn't now.

Sometimes these charged nights when no one should be wandering the streets at all are the only nights on which lives that would normally never intersect may cross each other like a streak of stars, blinding, brief, and beautiful. This is one of those nights.

At the very moment that Jane is loading her dirty clothes into a giant washing machine and feeding it ten pounds of quarters, a very tall man in an especially well cut grey wool overcoat and a worker's cap is walking up O'Farrell Street in the direction of the All-Night-No-Fuss Laundromat because he has just gotten off of work and is cooling the sweat from his day, which has already been full of flashing lights, blood, and the evidence that this is one of those days when it is best to stay home. Isaac is a paramedic, a very good man to have around in emergencies, hands built to receive the most desperate bodies. He is egregiously handsome. Women have been known to rip open their shirts for him in public. But he is not a man who enjoys such shameless displays of breastitude. Well, not overly much, anyway.

There are two more lives that will meet at this intersection of disparate paths in just a few minutes from right now. A pimp and his whore are busy counting her $20 bills earned from alley blow jobs and there is a question about the amount, a slight discrepancy of expectation as often blooms between pimps and their girls. The bricks are being laid for their Friday night as they raise their voices, pace up and down the corner; ugly words begin to flow like the ooze of old sores coming loose in the fray. Everything is fast tonight, in slow motion. Try to understand how slowly everything moves in reverse.

Jane is waiting, watching the street ramping up its thumping party vibe from inside the mausoleum quiet of the empty Laundromat. These are the kinds of moments when we tend to notice the burn marks in the old linoleum from dropped cigarettes- little orange melted craters in the floor, and the flickering florescent lights, casting a sickly green cast onto all the ancient dirty white folding tables and dented machines. Jane is simply waiting for her washing to be done.

The pimp and his whore have graduated from the little fight to the accumulating clouds of aggravation expected to explode regularly on a Friday night. They are enacting their drama publicly, with muscles snapping, jaws gnashing, and pushing has begun. They trip from the corner towards the All-Night-No-Fuss-Laundromat, the pimp getting ugly, letting the crack fueled rage loose on the whore's stringy body, she is slightly running from him, yet still attempting to placate and absolve.

Isaac is passing Jones Street. He is beginning to feel the blood of the day loosen its grip from his mind. He is taking deep breaths of the Friday night air, aware that it is fraught with fight. He is trying to think about mundane things like eating quietly with his Grandmother; heading home to the blessings of good books and long drinks of cold beer.

Jane is standing by the washer near the front door when their three bodies collide: the pimp and the woman crash through the door like an explosion of gasoline; Jane turns to the noise but it has already hit her before she can react to this writhing scratching pushing tangle of charged flesh, hurtling into her, knocking her backwards, the bodies keep moving, following her as she hits the wall; they hit it on top of her and she feels elbows smash painfully into her ribs and the smell is intense- sex and death and pollen- the wind is knocked out of her but she's pinned to the wall by the weight of these bodies and then, just as suddenly as the bodies pinned her they rolled off in a fresh turn of the fight on the wall not ten inches from where she's left standing.  The pimp's hard hands are clamped around the whore's neck.

Jane and the woman are facing each other, Jane sees her eyes looking back at her rather than at him, and they implore, they wish and they seek but Jane can't move, she can't actually feel her body anymore. She can no longer tell what is real, what is imagined, if she's awake or in her other life where it's all stark grief and dust curls into open mouths. The woman's skin is turning and the eyes are popping, the man- Jane cannot look at him, she cannot see him, cannot allow herself to see him because she has seen his fingers and already knows what's in his eyes because she's seen it in men before and the woman is going to die not ten inches from where Jane stands against the wall, not breathing.

When Isaac passes the picture window of the All-Night-No-Fuss Laundromat he sees a man killing a woman. Without thought, without noise, he has crossed the Laundromat and grabs the pimp by the collar, prying his tight fingers from the woman's neck and shoving the pimp to the floor like a goddamn super hero who does this kind of thing all night long in capes and gauntlets. He is already phoning 911. The woman, now getting her color back is already leaning down to her man saying "I'm sorry baby, I'm so sorry baby" and no one will ever know whether she's sorry he didn't kill her or sorry he was thrown to the ground or sorry she didn't give enough blow jobs today to score them a dime bag tonight. She sees Isaac's phone out and tells him not to call the cops.

Jane is the accidental body that is finally falling, a long long way down from where she so recently stood, she is falling and it doesn't matter to her that her head is catching on the corner of the folding table in front of her. Nothing really matters where she is now, because she is already gone. Isaac, who has been shaking his head at the two drug addicts who will kill each other on some other Friday night when the city fever is running high, has not turned around in time to see that Jane is going to fall, he has had no time to register this extra witness to the unfolding violence. He can do nothing, every super hero's worst day, she is sprawled on the floor, face down, and her head is beginning to leak out onto the pocked floor, a very small pool of dark red, inching closer and closer to a hard grey lump of old gum near her face.

Isaac has already called the paramedics, he does what he can while he waits, a job he performs all day long, he gently checks for broken bones, checks for other wounds and checks her pulse, then he looks for something to staunch her bleeding. Never once moving the body. He removes his coat and lays it across her sprawled form to help with the shock, then he removes his shirt to fold up and hold against the open gash on Jane's temple, which is beginning to bleed more steadily. There they sit for what feels like a hundred years of bleeding; Isaac is cold in his undershirt, but he doesn't move because he would never leave a person to bleed to death. He doesn't question. He has no thoughts right now. Checks pulses, scans the Laundromat, sees that they are completely alone, and off in the distance, cutting the city fugue into ribbons of light is the sound of approaching mercy.

*********

There are voices to answer, lights rushing in and a thickening of pain. Hey, they say, can you hear me? Can you see me? Can you speak? And it is to her and yet not to her. She feels faces move in like shadows on a wall of blurred color. She has no mouth. Isaac, have you checked for identification? We have a Jane Doe, mid to late twenties, with a head wound, BP's low, staunch it, staunch it!, how'd this happen? Hello? Can you hear me? She would like them to stop talking, stop touching her ribs where there is an explosion of white light against the curtain of her head every time those fingers crush into her, and there is so little air she feels as though she might be happiest here in the watery underworld where girls like her go to die.

This is better than those eyes again. Better than all the rushing pictures, the out of focus memories, let them slide away down the muddy riverbanks and let there be no more of this pain. Vaguely feeling hands shift her weight, which is foreign to her, foreign to them. She has heard Jane Doe before, from this same watery place where voices are slow and miles up to the surface, she has been called Jane Doe before. She hears: I'm sorry. She hears it close and it is quiet around the words like a lullaby just for her, a slow burning piano sonata just for her. I'm sorry. Close to her skin like a blanket. But whatever for? Who is sorry for what? It comes closer now but not because it comes closer to her but because she is rising like a corpse from the bottom of the lake up to where the faces hover and she emerges from the water but without sound. It seems she cannot work all at once. Nothing can work all at once. When her eyes focus on the faces looking down at her she can not hear them, not even muffled, there is only the most profound silence and she's not scared because she knows this silence.

They are mouthing things she cannot hear and she watches them with the calm of a person who's already said everything that will ever need to be said. The calm of the half-dead. Uniforms lean in and out and when they lean out she can see the ceiling moving above her. There is one face left for a moment which she evaluates calmly. Hazel eyes. Pale with dark hair like hers. Taller than people are supposed to be. He is watching her too and she  thinks he sees her where she is, so far away from all of them. Impossible. She feels everything shift and shimmer and then the man's face is looking at one of the uniforms and is mouthing something that looks loud and urgent but it doesn't matter where she is. She is warm and she is tucking herself away now.

She says, "I am Jane Doe" and she is unconscious again.

*********

It is deeper here. Like a memory within a memory.

Does anyone know who the victim is? Has anyone found identification? There must be something. Does she live here? Where is the smell of urine coming from? Oh. And the blood? Do we know if there is any other wound? Someone check with the neighbors. OK. Can't see her features well under those contusions. Take pictures before we move her. Quickly. There are flashes and searches for identity. None is found.

We've got a Jane Doe in her early teens, unconscious, one eye swollen shut, a patch of hair missing from her scalp, bruising to her abdomen, a possible broken rib, raped, left lying unconscious on the floor. We're taking her to Marin General. Someone find out who she belongs to.

I have been called Jane Doe before.

I'd like to follow the water.

I'd like to follow the water to the snow.