On Sunday night I went to do my laundry and a fight broke out. I know that's not how the old joke is supposed to go: I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out. The joke, of course, being that at a hockey game it sometimes seems as though there is more fighting than hockey, and indeed there are those, I'm sure -- I am not one of them -- who attend hockey games more because they are interested in seeing the fighting than because they are interested in seeing the hockey. For these voyeurs of the violent, the hockey itself is nothing but an alibi; or, indeed, the hockey itself is perhaps nothing but an alibi for the professional hockey leagues themselves -- the NHL, of course, which was out of business last year, but also the various secondary and semi-pro leagues -- who know very well that their success and their appeal has everything to do with the encounter they offer with violence, but know just as well that if they announced and marketed themselves as fighting, or violence, rather than hockey, many of the people who do in fact watch or attend hockey games because they want to see the violence, the fighting, would no longer do so. It's not the league itself that needs to lie to itself and tell itself that it's about sport, rather than violence; rather, the fans need to lie to themselves, to tell themselves that they are going to the hockey to watch sport because it would be too painful, or too frightening, or too revealing, to tell themselves, or acknowledge to themselves, that indeed they are going to this event as audience, as patron, because they desire violence. Is the bullfight, in Spain and elsewhere, any different? Are not the beauty and poetry and narrative of it simply alibi, that about which the audience can say I am going to see that, instead of saying that which would give a good deal more pause: I am going to see six bulls die.

I have been to bullfights. I have traveled to Spain or lived in Spain on no fewer than eight different occasions, but I have been to fewer than eight bullfights. I enjoyed the first two or three that I saw. It was my first trip to Spain. It was my first trip out of the United States without my family to encase me in familiarity. I was reading Hemingway and thinking that if only I could live as adventurous a life as Hemingway, I might be lucky enough to write that Hemingway which Hemingway himself had not succeeded in writing himself, because he died before he had the chance, or because he died before the world that now existed before me existed for him. I enjoyed those bullfights, or at the very least I told myself that I enjoyed those bullfights because I felt that it was important to enjoy those bullfights, that a writer who is going write Hemingway had better enjoy bullfights. And, indeed, I came back for my senior year of college and wrote a number of short stories, and no fewer than one of those short stories dealt with bullfighting: an atmospheric piece about the death of a mute member of the peña, something along the lines of a fan club, in a town called Arcos de la Frontera, for a bullfighter called the Jesulín de Ubrique. There, indeed, exists a bullfighter named Jesulín de Ubrique. He carries the name Jesús and is from the town of Ubrique, and I can only guess that there was another bullfighter named Jesús from the town of Ubrique who existed before this one, and that the existence of this other bullfighter named Jesús from the town of Ubrique is the reason that this bullfighter named Jesús from the town of Ubrique is referred to in the diminutive: Jesulín.

My own, name for instance: Eli S. Evans. Never mind what the S stands for or why. There already exists a writer who is known and successful and much older than I am who carries the name Eli Evans. He lives in New York, I have gathered as a result of having run an internet search on myself in the past, but is from the South, and like me, is Jewish, and has done a good deal of writing, in various genres, about the experience of and the history of the Jewish South.

I am from Milwaukee. I am not writing about the experience of the Jewish Midwesterner, but given that I am Jewish and from the Midwest how can I help, on some level, writing about the experience of the Jewish Midwesterner? And so it seems to me that I would be stepping on toes to do so and then call myself Eli Evans.

Eli S. Evans: and, these days, the bullfights disappoint me, or I am disappointed in the part of me that would enjoy seeing an animal die, that would take pleasure in that in which there is pleasure to be taken in witnessing the death of an animal, the banality of it all and the color of the blood.

These days, I house myself in Los Angeles for the nine months out of the year that I am not in Spain, and sometimes, especially on Friday afternoons or Sunday evenings, I do laundry, and if I say that this past Sunday I went to do laundry and a fight broke out -- making reference to the joke without actually making the joke -- it is because fights usually do not break out when I go to do my laundry, and, even if they did, they would not be the reason that I do go to do my laundry; in other words, in no way might it possibly be true that when I go to do my laundry I simply do that laundry as alibi, so that I can avoid telling myself or acknowledging to myself or reconciling myself to the fact that I am actually going to the Laundromat, under the guise of going to do laundry, in order to have an encounter with anger or violence or anything of that nature. And yet, this past Sunday, I went to do laundry, with the primary intent only of replenishing my supply of clean underwear for the week, and had an encounter with something of that nature. I can't say, properly, that I had an encounter with violence, given that the encounter was primarily with anger, and yet anger is, finally, a kind of violence, to the extent that it cannot really be witnessed except as physically, and so although no punches were thrown, no helmets ripped off of heads, there was violence, and I encountered it.

Mostly it had to do with my bathmat.

*

Perhaps it would be best to situate the story in the present tense. It is Sunday night. I am going to do laundry. It occurs to me that a number have weeks have passed, and perhaps more than two months, since the last time I washed the bathmat that sits on the floor in front of the shower. In theory, a bathmat should not be too dirty. After all, we are not dripping when we step on it, dirty, on the way into the shower, and so only those germs which are adhered to the bottom of our feet can make their way onto it, and on our way out of the shower, when all of our body is flowing down off of itself in rivulets, we have, in theory, cleaned ourselves. But water and mold and all of that: a bathmat should be washed once a week, and certainly more than once every two months. The problem is that a bathmat needs its own washing machine -- one does not put a bathmat in the same load of laundry as underwear, given that the underwear will soon be touching one's genitals and the bathmat was quite recently touching the bottoms of people's feet -- and a washing machine costs money. On Sunday night, I separate my clothes into two separate loads, whites and darks -- disregarding, for the moment, the problematic racial implications of such an act -- and put each of those loads into the double-sized machines that take $1.75 USD apiece. I am not willing to spend $1.75 USD on a double-sized machine only for my bathmat, but this is where I encounter a problem: the smaller machines, at the rate of $1.00 USD, are all eight of them in use. I do not know what to do about this, but I do know that we are out of toilet paper back at the apartment, and so, like Husserl, I leave the problem for which I have no solution in suspension while I go to tackle the problem for which I can find a solution and, in this case, a nearby solution. A solution that is in walking distance, and in a place like Los Angeles, where almost nothing is ever in walking distance, one would be beyond reproach to pass up a solution that offers itself within walking distance. This solution offers itself in the form of a Ralph's grocery store. The toilet paper aisle is next to the cleaning supplies aisle. It is also a site of great complexity. One is making two choices when one chooses which toilet paper to buy. On the one hand, one is choosing, quite simply, the number of rolls of toilet paper one will buy. Rolls of toilet paper come in groups of four, six, eight, twelve, twenty-four, and more. On the other hand, one needs to choose something along the lines of roll density. That is to say, some rolls actually contain more paper than other rolls. This volume of paper exists in two forms: length and thickness; and it is important to keep in mind that thickness does matter, since the thinner the paper, the more times it needs to be doubled over before a wipe in order to protect effectively against any sort of finger penetration. Single brands offer varieties of choices that render comparison effectively impossible. Charmin has four different levels of thickness and packs that seem to come in every multiple of two within reason, perhaps up to about forty-eight or fifty. Is a pack of fifty of the rolls of the lowest level of density equivalent, in terms of actual use-value, wiping-value, to a twelve pack of rolls of the third level of density? How does one begin to make pricing comparisons when presented with this situation?

I end up paying seven dollars for twenty-four of the least-dense rolls of toilet paper. It seems to be the best solution to the problem because the regular price of such an item is eleven dollars, whereas seven dollars is the club card price. I am not a member of the club but one of my old roommates is and I continue to enter her phone number as evidence of membership when I go to Ralph's.

Of course, such a deep discount usually means the item is going to be discontinued, or already has been discontinued and so the store is just trying to rid itself of the excess stock.

I decide to risk finger penetration: that's what soap is for, or something like that.

*

At the Laundromat, my whites and darks have finished washing, and now I am going to enter them into the great melting pot of the drier. My bathmat, in the meantime, sits jilted in a brown bag left over from some ancient trip to Ralph's, but in the interim one of the $1.00 USD washing machines has opened up. I decide to wash the bathmat while my clothes dry. I will pick it up when I pick up the dry clothes and I will not dry it, because a bathmat can go without a drying. The spin cycle on the washing machine squeezes out most of the drippy water and a bathmat sits moist on the floor for most of its life cycle, anyway, so why not just proceed directly there without passing dry? This is the logic. My clothes dry for forty-five minutes. The washing cycle on the $1.00 USD machines lasts thirty-two minutes, a full seven minutes longer than the cycle on -- or in -- the larger machines, but so be it. I come back for my things over an hour later. I had work to do, I think, or the big game was on, any big game -- the magic of sports is that there's always a big game to be watched. My clothes, whites and darks alike, embrace each other in the drier. I pull them forward into my laundry bag. A pair of black underwear falls on the floor. A dilemma: do I want that which has touched the floor of the Laundromat I use near the intersection of Pico and La Brea in Los Angeles to now touch my genital area without a washing. No, but on the other hand, this is why I like buying dark underwear: what you don't know can't hurt you. There are so many other pairs of underwear like this pair of underwear. When I mix them together, there will be no way for me to determine which pair touched the floor, for I will not be able to find some telltale streak of dirt or anything like that. Out of sight, out of mind or what you don't know can't hurt you: I don't know which is the case in this case, but the difference between the two strikes me as important.

I place my bet on the latter, toss the underwear into the bag and give it a shake for good measure.

Something has gone wrong with the bathmat. When I go to take it out of the machine, the machine is running, with twenty-eight minutes left on its cycle. This is not possible.

Unless...

I open the machine. Somebody else's clothes. The bathmat is lost. Something catches the corner of my eye.

I close the machine.

But wait.

Open it again: somebody else's clothes, yes, only four minutes into the cycle, in that soupy swill of soapy water and their own filth, but also my bathmat. My bathmat has been joined to these other clothes. It has joined their community. Is there a racial element to this? What happens next, of course, is inevitable. I am in a Laundromat in Los Angeles near the corner of Pico and La Brea, and anyway, Laundromats are spaces of vulnerability and humiliation, or, one might say, Laundromats function quite well allegorically or metonymically as representative of the experience of poverty, in general, or perform quite deftly the imperative of the experience of poverty: that the poor person exist in a state of vulnerability and humiliation. Humiliation because, simply, your presence at the Laundromat indicates that you do not have your own washing and drying capabilities. This in and of itself is not humiliating, or in any event not particularly so. It is an indication of poverty, or at least more poverty in relation to an identifiable less poverty, but to be poor is not in and of itself humiliating: it performs humiliating, and the Laundromat is a perfect case in point. Because you do not have your own washing and drying capabilities -- and it is assumed that if you are at the Laundromat you do not, and I think for the most part fairly assumed -- you must waste time and waste money doing your laundry at the Laundromat. In other words, the humiliation occurs in the form of an irony: doing your laundry at a Laundromat costs you more money than buying and using your own washer and dryer would cost, in terms of time and the cost of the purchase and the energy-cost of use. However, it does not cost nearly as much money all at once, which is to say that you must have a fair amount of cash-on-hand or credit in order to be able to spend less money by owning your own washer and dryer. One gets to the point of having more cash-on-hand or credit by, I suppose, accumulating money, and yet to the extent that it is more expensive than having your own washer and dryer and using them, having to do your laundry at Laundromat actually turns the experience of doing your laundry into not simply a symptom of what you don't have but also an executor of it. Or, in other words, one of the reasons that you are not accumulating or will not accumulate money is that you are wasting money, and as well wasting time that in some sense will be an equivalent to money, doing your laundry in this temporally and economically inefficient fashion at the Laundromat.

And so to be at the Laundromat is a frustrating experience, the experience of poverty performing itself upon those who have it, or are in it, or are victims of it -- who stand in whatever strange relation links human beings and poverty: one that is humiliating, and also one that is vulnerable, because when you are the Laundromat, your clothes, the very assets you have come to care for, to take care of in order to preserve them, to some extent, are at risk. If you do not want to waste the time you leave, as I do, while your clothes wash and again while they dry, and during that time, it is clear, anybody could steal those clothes. The fact that nobody ever has stolen mine never ceases to amaze me. And anyway, even if you stay, it is nearly impossible to gaze in an uninterrupted fashion at the machine that is operating itself on your clothes, and any time that gaze wanders, the moment that it wanders, they become vulnerable again, and what could be more hideously economically inefficient -- and, therefore, because poverty subjects you to its own propagation, humiliating -- than actually having your clothes stolen at the Laundromat, losing that entire investment?

So:

There she comes. Here she comes. Yelling and screaming. Of course yelling and screaming. There is a man standing over her clothes, the lid of the machine open, peering into the soupy swill of soap and filth. There is no reason to do be doing that other than the wrong reason. So there she comes, here she comes: She is black and, yes, she is poor. Of course she is poor because if she was not poor she would not be at the Laundromat. And she is not poor the way that I am poor: she is not young, and unmarried, with no children, highly educated, intentionally under-employed -- so I can write, of course -- or even, simply, white. Not even a man. She is a black woman and she is an adult -- I am twenty-nine and perhaps she is no more than ten years older than I am, perhaps older than that, but she feels older. Her poverty is an intensification of my poverty to the nth degree, and so if my own trips to the Laundromat -- because I am too poor to have my own laundry facilities -- render me vulnerable and humiliate me to the extent that they are an example of poverty propagating itself, building upon itself -- then I can only assume that, if her poverty is more, she is more vulnerable, and more humiliated. Is there a choice, here? Does she stand, in this place of greater poverty, in place of me?

Tune in next week when Mr. Evans speaks. Or maybe he kills.

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