John Stadelman

Hair-Drying the Laundry

            It was sometime after graduation when I worked nights at a bar and applied full-time to jobs that interviewed me then ghosted. Hating my bank account, summing purchases to the cent. Ramen spiced with tabasco sauce to get it down. Nights off ran cheap in our apartment, splitting the cost of a fifth of anything with my roommates so we could afford the mixers. We went on vacation through Instagram, scrolling feeds of Malay resorts.

            Improvisation. That’s how we did it. Resourcefulness, bordering on trashiness. The drier left laundry damp and we didn’t have the quarters for extra loads, so we hung it on the shower rod and blasted it with the hair-drier. Pirating everything because Netflix? At that subscription rate? Binging those shows in an ongoing feedback to distract ourselves from the silence between frantic shifts, from the static tingle in the backs of our eyes when we wrote and rewrote cover letters to companies that didn’t seem to exist.

            My other job was at a college bookstore. Textbook rentals, shelving listless rows of used books that sold for three-fourths the price of the laminate-smelling new copies. All these kids, the end-of-semester stress wilding their eyes and the beginning-of-semester freshness reinvigorating a hopeful youth that at twenty-five I didn’t feel anymore.

            They gave away so much money. At the register I measured transactions in bills: I could pay rent with the cost of these three books, this one was enough CTA fare to get me to O’Hare on a one-way flight to another life, this one could feed me tonight. The worst part of me hated them because they didn’t know, and I wanted to shout at them to drop out, take the loan money and run.

            That job and the time I had to give it stood in the way of everything I was supposed to be, but it was all that any of us could get. The degrees didn’t matter or how stridently we’d followed the rules. Like the world had gotten what it needed from us and now determined our that usefulness was a thing of diminishing returns, giving more and more time for less and less compensation. The hourly work took away from career-application time, and as bills mounted and loan payments came due more and more of that time was claimed by whatever could give us what little money we deserved, rather than the time spent on those interviews and their shrinking promise. I had a Master’s Degree and internship experience and shelved textbooks at minimum wage. This was all that the world thought we deserved and we were starting to hate all the world for it.

            Before my shift I’d sit on a bench out front, cupping my cigarette against the February wind. I rolled them now, clumsy and trembling, because a pouch of Bugler had enough for thirty smokes for five dollars, against a pack of twenty Pall Malls for twelve. A stand for spent filters stood next to me, a basin of gravelly material that sucked the filters, yellowed and twisted and used, down and out of sight.

            Sometimes non-students passed by, and sometimes they sat on the bench. One morning in the icy thickness, I smelled him before he arrived. Ragged, face scowled in a dementia that was either preexisting or brought on by all of this, sanity weathered by hunger and the Chicago winter and the crystal phantoms he yelled at, invisible to everybody but him… avatars to a past personal and envenomed. The hate he spewed against their plot to hold him down and keep him there was a furnace. I was coming to know its warmth.

            I dropped my filter, roughhewn and limp with the others, onto the stand and walked to the back door. It was locked. I banged on it, shivering. The man knelt over and grabbed my cigarette, put it to his lips and heaved inward, pulling with all his might with the same strength I sledged into that door.

John Stadelman is a writer from North Carolina now based in Chicago. He holds an MFA from Columbia College and his fiction has appeared in Airgonaut, FULL METAL HORROR, Hair Trigger 39 (from which he is the recipient of the 2017 David Friedman Memorial Award), and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @edgy_ashtray.