After banging my funny bone on the coin slot, I didn’t say a word of ‘ow’—out of respect for the other washers. Biting my lip through the pain, I loaded one machine, soap and everything, dumped in the clothes, selected my temperature settings of choice. Pushing the coin slot in and pulling it out, I started the machine. The washer to my left started up instead of the one I loaded.

Sighing, I pulled every stinky article out as fast as I could, this time pouring in the soap first. The correct order was soap first and then clothes for these machines, though I preferred dripping the milky blue liquid onto smelly loads like raspberry vinaigrette dressing onto leafy greens.

A whistle just went off over there. It wasn’t the radio but Justin, the man in a gray ponytail sitting on a blue chair, waiting for his load to finish. His sunglasses weren’t much use in there but still he wore them to compliment his white tee shirt, blue jeans and black pager on his hip. Justin was a trucker and enjoyed looking the part. He was also a musician who never got big. He was also a bartender and a cabdriver. The ultimate choice of his occupation depended on the month.

We’d come to the Laundromat together, to keep each other company, but Justin stayed deeply curled over a book. He looked collegiately athletic that afternoon, wearing black thongs snug on his feet. The yellow bound paperback was something he needed to feel smarter. He did not understand all the references, but made note of them all to look up online later. Whenever he didn’t get lost in the lofty language, he loved the imagery. I didn’t try to interrupt. A girl he was after, Selena, loved that book. She had suggested it to him.

When it came to wisdom, Justin was smarter than Selena. She was smarter in a more popular way, a hip way that was new and fresh—the way that reevaluates everybody’s stereotypes, hopes, aims and choices and mixes them up to make them the same. Also, she was smart in a tough way and sometimes in a mean way. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta be mean, baby. That was the lesson Selena was learning, the girl Justin was after, the lesson about being cruel to be kind. The moment she heard it, Selena immediately started living by that rule in everything she did. You gotta be mean.