Friday, October 13, 2006

Sidney opened the glass door and pushed his hands into the cold, damp darkness. It was a nice, clean damp as opposed to the musty rotting sort. Then again, it wasn't like he knew anything about those sort of things. He still frowned, nonetheless, upon realizing that he didn't have any dryer sheets. Not only that, but he had only brought enough change for the machines and the bus ride home.

"Damn." He muttered, shoving the damp amorphous mass into the glass door behind him. It was a nice setup since it didn't mean that he had to lug a basket (which he had forgotten to bring anyway) across the laundromat in search for a free dryer. Each aisle was set up so that there was one row of washing machines and one row of dryers facing the furniture.

Still, there was always his debit card. Then again, few places around here seemed to accept it without some sort of technological glitch. Maybe it was just his card since other people from the same bank back home didn't seem to have much trouble blowing their or their parents' money on this campus. It didn't help that there was the tempting smell of freshly-cooked food coming from the other room. It seemed that their "kitchen" merely consisted of a partition in the main lobby marked off by a curtain of red cloth. The only time he had ever had Indian food was when he was a little kid in New York. His parents had wanted to "try something different" and they took the subway to some odd end of Greenwich Village where they had gone to school. The only thing he could remember was how bad the guy next to him on the subway had smelled. His parents asserted that Sidney had made such a fuss in the restaurant about how much he didn't like the food even before taking a bite that they were explicitly told that they were not welcome there again.

It seemed that the finicky, temperamental leanings of his six-year-old self had left him. Besides that, he was hungry. The last thing he had eaten that day was a bowl of cereal before going to class and work for the rest of the day at the library. Whatever was behind those curtains in the other room seemed to filter into the main theater area. He wondered if there was a fan that blew it into the air system just like there were speakers hooked up to the projection rooms which played the electronic sitar music. He certainly couldn't make out any individual words being sung, let alone knew what the song could be about. He remembered Aimee telling him that sometimes they drew open the curtain to the theater to play Bollywood movies.

The Phoenix Grill and Laundromat was a brilliant idea. It seemed unfortunate to Sidney that the place was crawling with hipsters who were naturally drawn to original ideas, even if they couldn't come up with their own. He could appreciate the calming atmosphere, but the fact that there was so much posturing occurring around him threw him off and made him even more uneasy.

“Are you using this?” Aimee asked despite already tossing her clothes into the emptied washing machine.

“No, go ahead.” Sidney said, not looking directly at her, but at the clothes she was placing in the washing machine.

He noticed that most of her jeans had paint stains on them which most likely would not come out easily if at all. Granted, she was an art major, but Sidney couldn’t help but wonder how many of those splotches and stripes were intentional, thrown together in such an intentional way to appear unintentional. As if her fuchsia hair wasn’t enough to mark her out as the “artsy” type, she had to dress the part too. What if she wasn’t an art major? Would she have gone through the same process of vandalizing her jeans? Sidney hated to be so judgmental, but he had given Aimee a chance and followed her to this place. He was glad he did, but not for the reason he had originally intended.

Jesus. He thought. Even her underwear smacks of irony.

A faint rustling behind him drew his attention away from the bright pink, “Hello, Kitty” panties cut to look like little-boy briefs despite the feminine color. It was the strange girl with the broom. This time he could get a clear view of her face. She had to be no older than a high schooler, especially with the athletic t-shirt she was wearing. She looked like the sort who ran track anyway, a bit on the tall and skinny side. Her dark hair and eyes led Sidney to believe that she may have been the daughter of the owners or something. He wondered if maybe she was born in the States and developed a taste for loud rock music that way. He could hear it blaring in her headphones even though he was a good distance away.

Sidney couldn't help but smile at the hipsters around her frowning in distaste at this rather ordinary intruder with her obnoxious music harshing their multicultural buzz. Could it possibly be? Yes, it was. The girl was listening to metal. Perhaps this girl was just out-ironic-ing the hipsters to the point of out-hipping them. Or perhaps there was no irony in her seeming indifference to the screaming and loud electric guitars blaring in her ears.

Now Sidney was beyond mere curiosity. He absolutely had to talk to this girl. It had nothing to do with any particular interest in heavy metal, nor did this have anything to do with romantic interest or physical attraction, although she was quite lovely in an ordinary way despite her seemingly exotic parentage.

"Sid? Have you been paying attention to a word I said?" Ugh. Aimee had called him by the abbreviated form of his name. Sidney remembered punching a guy in the face for doing that at a party, drunkenly asking if it was "Sid, like Sid Vicious." Sidney never liked the Sex Pistols although he did like the movie "Sid and Nancy" with Gary Oldman acting in it.

"Something about postmodernism?" Aimee scowled at him as if he was the girl with the broom and the blaring music. No. Punching her in the face was definitely out of the question.

"You know, I thought you were cool, Sid." The last syllable of that sentence jarred him more than the penultimate one.

What the hell did "being cool" have anything to do with paying attention to a conversation? Sidney took Aimee's nonchalant jab as his cue to leave her company. He looked at his watch and realized that he had a good half an hour left before his clothes would be dry. He cringed when he realized how toasted and crunchy his jeans would be. Granted, hipsters seemed to "dig" that sort of thing, along with pre-ripped and pre-dirtied denims. As for his own skin, it seemed to have a preference for not being sanded down or "exfoliated" by his own jeans.

When he turned around again, he noticed that the girl with the broom was gone. This was getting ridiculous. Maybe he had just been imagining things, but then again, everyone else seemed to notice her. It was hard not to. In her ordinary-ness, she managed to stand out from all the wannabe individuals.

Each aisle Sidney wandered through seemed to be nothing but guys wearing girl's jeans and girls wearing guy's blazers. If there was one thing nice about the whole hipster thing, it would probably have to be the blurring of gender lines. Sidney remembered being annoyed at one of his girlfriends in high school who wouldn't join him playing video games just because she "was a girl." He had known quite a few girl gamers who could frag with the best of them in first-person shooters. Then again, this was back in the days before people became "too cool" to kick back in boxers and a t-shirt on the couch with the sweat and junk-food clogged controller.

It wasn’t like he was bitter or anything.

This was hopeless. Sidney slumped on one of the circular lobby couches over by the snack counter. He did not sink into it considering how surprisingly firm the red velvet cushions were. Of course, like with the other chair he had sat in, the cloth-covered buttons poked him in the back. He glanced at his watch again and realized that he only had a few minutes before his clothes would be done. He really was not looking forward to going back over there and seeing Aimee again. Undoubtably, she would most likely have found a flock of her own kind with whom she could safely deride him. For people who seemed to make an active play at appearing to not care what other people thought, it seemed that hipsters usually like believing that other people value their opinions.

Sidney closed his eyes and opened them again, staring at the ceiling. He couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could dust all the nooks and crannies in the wood paneling and molding along the walls, much less paint up there. He had a rather distinct image like that of Michaelangelo lying on his back on a scaffolding while painting the Sistine Chapel. Granted, he often claimed that he was an architecture major, but rather, he was more of a structural engineering major. This was obviously not “artsy” sounding enough for the crowds he found himself running with these days. Nonetheless, he enjoyed what he did. He only did the big things like figure out the best way to construct a building so it wouldn’t topple over in an earthquake, but figured that there was a certain amount of grace to that as well. In all truth, he wanted nothing more than to create something beautiful, but he was never really the “artsy” sort. Maybe that was why he ended up falling in with the hipsters in the first place. But they weren’t creating anything beautiful either. All they were capable of was perpetuating that which someone had arbitrarily ordained to be beautiful or “cool.”

Soon enough, he’d have to go back over there. He slid down, letting his ass nearly hit the floor as his back formed a flying buttress against the couch cushions.

“Having a rough night, eh?”

Sidney completely fell to the floor at this point.