There are many wonderful things money can buy, but probably the best is fluff-and-fold laundry. Perry hadn’t made a fortune at Boing! But he had made enough—and been busy enough—to fall into the weekly habit of dropping his laundry off at Flair Cleaners on Saturday and picking it up Tuesday after work, with his shirts nicely starched on hangers and the rest of his laundry neatly folded and wrapped in blue paper. Fluff-and-fold was a given in Perry’s life—an indulgence, sure, but one that he deserved.
Or used to deserve. The new Perry had a humbler, downsized existence. Perhaps the most concrete example of that was in his hand right now. A miniature box of Tide, purchased, at a premium, from a vending machine. Perry was about to embark on doing his own laundry in a coin-op Laundromat.
He had his quarters. He had his tiny box of Tide. He had two adjoining machines—one for colors, one for whites. All he needed was Prozac. Or heroin. Anything to make him forget that he had now fallen to the lowest of lows.
Doing laundry didn’t scare him much. But as he looked at his collection of J. Crew cotton button-down shirts, he became extremely frightened. Cleaning a shirt is one thing. Folding it is another. He’d never quite mastered folding, but he could fake it. Ironing was another, bigger challenge. He had never ironed before. Nor, for that matter, did he own an iron. He wasn’t even sure where you could buy them.
He recalled a conversation he’d had with Tim years ago. Was it years ago? Maybe, given the speed of his descent, it had been only months ago. Perhaps weeks ago. So much had happened, it was hard to remember. He had chided Tim for his one-note wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts. “Don’t you own a real shirt?” he asked Tim, who seemed permanently clothed in Old Navy pocket tees. “What do you wear on job interviews?”
“Oh, I have a job interview shirt,” said a chipper Tim. “But it’s such a pain in the ass to iron it that I save it for very special occasions.”
Of course, the last time he’d seen Tim was postmakeover. Sandy had added just a touch of GQ to Tim’s closet. The pocket tees were gone, and Perry couldn’t imagine Tim, the least dexterous person below the age of ninety in Los Angeles, doing the work necessary to maintain that crisp new look. That meant that Tim was getting his laundry professionally done. And Perry was in the coin-op, clutching his Tide.
It didn’t bother Perry that Tim was finally finding some success. What bothered him was Tim’s attitude. It wasn’t open arrogance—Tim was never openly anything. But Perry could tell. He could sense a certain cockiness. It wasn’t just that Tim
was suddenly making money, either. Tim was getting off on Perry’s misfortune. That’s what was irksome. Not that Tim had said anything—that would be very unlike Tim. But Tim wasn’t fooling Perry, not for a second. Tim was flaunting his own success while basking in Perry’s failure. And he was being much too subtle about it for Perry to call him on it.
Perry put half the box of Tide in one washing machine and half in the other. He shoved his quarters in and found a chair near a stack of old magazines. He picked up a Newsweek, but the cover story on the Internet only made him think of Tim’s success. The Us magazine reminded him of Tim’s syndicated column. That left Reader’s Digest, a magazine he hadn’t read since his one and only physical exam when he turned twenty-one.
I am truly pathetic, he thought. I’m doing my own laundry and reading Reader’s Digest. And Tim is probably at a premiere or some party. Life had been so much better when Tim was on the losing end of their sibling power struggle. Perry handled success with much more aplomb than he did laundry.
He looked around the Laundromat. Somewhere, perhaps on MTV, he had gleaned that a coin-op was a great place to meet women. He’d feign ignorance over some tough laundry problem and an attractive single woman would take pity on him, explaining the difference between fine hand washables and bath towels. Then he’d take her next door to the Coffee Bean to thank her. Love would blossom. She’d love him so much, she’d never, no matter how much money was at stake, fire him from his own show. And she’d never cozy up to a prima donna like Heather Windward. The people who do their own laundry are real people, he thought.
Real old people, he realized as he looked around. Senior citizens do their own laundry, judging from this crowd. This might be a great place to find a surrogate grandmother, but it was no place to find a girlfriend.
At least Tim was alone. Perry took some comfort in that. No one ever seemed to truly likeTim, and Tim was unable to bond. While it was true that Perry had made a few errors in judgment when it came to the women he bonded with, at least he was capable of a relationship. That’s more than Tim could say.
It was sometime during the rinse cycle that guilt set in. While Perry was quite sure that at that particular moment, he didn’t much like his brother, he was willing to accept the possibility that his own sad situation had warped his thinking. When your mother’s a pseudo-shrink, you do learn to be a bit analytical, and Perry—sitting in a hot, stuffy Laundromat that reeked of lint and chlorine bleach—was miserable. It wasn’t Tim’s fault. But it certainly wasn’t Perry’s fault, either.
The further he spiraled into self-pity, the more convinced Perry became that he simply wasn’t meant to do his own laundry. At the very least, he could have his shirts done—how expensive could that be? And really, wasn’t fluff-and-fold an amazing bargain? Shoving quarters into these machines adds up, he thought, and miniature boxes of Tide do not come at miniature prices. Plus, I’d have to buy an iron—God knows how much a good iron costs.
By the time his clothes were done drying, Perry had made two important decisions. This was his last trip to a Laundromat—ever! Tonight, he’d go over his budget very carefully. Perhaps if he trimmed a little here and tightened his belt a little there, he could once again start dropping his clothes off at Flair Cleaners. Hell, he could probably hire back the cleaning lady he’d laid off last week. It might be pricey, but given the depths of the depression he felt coming on, it would be much cheaper than therapy.