Friday October 13, 7:55 p.m.

Sidney watched the soapy liquid cover his soiled garments as they spun around in the glass tank. He wondered what the point of it was, having one’s undergarments plastered against a glass wall for the world to see. Boxers or briefs? In this case, it was a pair of blue plaid boxers, but that was hardly anyone else’s business but his. Then again, he felt just as exposed when he got on the bus and walked through the lobby/restaurant area of the building. He was standing inside an Indian restaurant/laundromat inside of a former movie theater, who could have possibly dreamed that possible?

On the way in, he saw a few people at their nice tables, all engaging in mundane conversation, all except for one woman sitting alone at the center table. Granted, there was an entrance around the back, but he felt a sense of righteous indignation which dictated that he had the same rights as anyone else to go in through the front door. After all, he wasn’t just some teenager sneaking in through the back exit to catch a free movie. He was a college student with a sack of laundry and a pocket full of quarters. Besides, he did not know about the back entrance and felt that going in the front end anyway would be appropriate, despite the somewhat well-dressed patrons staring at him in his long-sleeved t-shirt and wrinkled cargo pants.

When Sidney first walked into the main theater area, he dropped his bag of laundry. When Aimee told him to meet her at the downtown Laundromat, he just expected a dingy, tile-covered floor and the whirr of machines. Instead, he was greeted with sitar music over electronic loops and sparse rows of machines with rather nice and comfortable-looking furniture. After wandering through the rows to find that Aimee was not there as she had promised, he settled down and figured he could at least get his laundry done even if his date ditched him.

Then again, was this a date? Doing laundry together could hardly be considered to be an exciting or particularly romantic activity. Aimee was a bit off, but that was what drew him to her that one day in the dorm cafeteria. She was covering her fried chicken with an odd-looking green paste, which prompted him to ask her what it was. Sidney made the mistake of accepting a proffered bite of the concoction before Aimee explained that it was wasabi. After downing three glasses of water and a glass of milk, Sidney finally got around to small talk, the usual “What’s your major?” fodder. He was an architecture major. She was into photography. After they had both finished their respective meals, he made a suggestion to “do this again sometime.”

That was what got him into this “mess.” As he plonked his bag down in front of the machine and surveyed his fellow clothes-washers. A guy with curly dirty-blond hair capped with a porkpie hat shook out what appeared to be a pair of girl’s flared jeans. A girl transferred her wet clothes into a dryer wearing sunglasses despite the fact that a) she as indoors and b) it was dark outside anyway.

Dear God, Sidney thought, I’m surrounded by fucking hipsters.

Not only was he outside the borders of campus which he had so fondly grown familiar with over the past year and a half, he was surrounded by the very population of youth culture he had sought to avoid. Goddamn hipsters. It was at the point he couldn’t even go to a party anymore without hearing the words “post-modern” and “irony” swapped about like so many vintage-store scarves while people passed around cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon for a sense of blue-collar chic. This was a small Midwestern town, damnit. How the hell did this place get so infested with these assholes? What made it worse was that not one of them was from a large city. Most of them were from towns and suburbs in the surrounding area.

Sidney himself was actually born and raised in New York. His family lived in Westchester for awhile, but moved to a small Midwestern town before Sidney’s sophomore year of high school. By then, he had already grown sick of the pretension of his friends. He honestly didn’t give a fuck what music he should listen to or how he should dress. In all truth, what would have been a social death knell for most teenagers turned out to be a boon to him. He got “normal” friends who just hung out and drank cheap beer under overpasses without any sense of “postmodern irony” and had house parties with playing music he could actually understand.

But sadly, Sidney’s friends distanced themselves from him, not because they “converted’ to the unholy church of hipsterism, but because he went to college a couple of hours away. Some of them stuck around town working for their parents’ businesses or went to college elsewhere. Either way, geography severed what had been a comfortable, albeit loose, social connection.

The rustle of a corncob broom against tiling alerted Sidney to something outside of his lamenting for “the old days” and prompted him to lift his feet upon the maroon lobby-style couch. It wasn’t as comfortable as it looked from a distance, with its firm foam cushions and cloth-covered buttons poking into him whenever he leaned against the back. Leaning on his side as his feet kicked up in the air to avoid being swept, he had an easy view of everyone’s shoes. If he never saw a pair of odd-colored Chuck Taylors or Pumas again, he could die a happy man.

As he watched the broom seem to sweep itself away, a pair of beat-up, non-brand name sneakers trailed behind it. The shoes seemed to be attached to a pair of carpenter jeans and a high school team t-shirt which did not look like it had been manufactured to appear “vintage.” Instead of wearing an iPod, the girl had a Sony Walkman CD player clipped to the hammer-loop of her jeans.

Sidney failed to hear the ever-familiar buzz of the washer completing its task and followed this strange creature through the aisles as she swept. She had black hair and swayed her hips as if dancing with her skinny “blond” partner. He was about to turn the corner when a voice interrupted his quest.

“Hey, you done over here?” Aimee, fully “decked” in her faded flares and thrift-store blazer and ironic-phrase t-shirt looked at him with a raised eyebrow, as if really asking “Hey, am I fashionably late enough to be cool?”

“Uh, yeah.” Sheepish, with his hands in his pockets, Sidney walked over to the washer and tossed its contents into his basket. Crap. He forgot to put in fabric softener. Oh well, it wasn’t like it would have made much of a difference anyway.

“Sorry I’m late. Damn Blue line never gets anywhere on time.” Sidney knew this was complete bullshit. Even though he rarely took the Blue line, it had always been reliable when he had taken it. “Anyway, don’t you love this place? Isn’t it so much better than the dorm machines?”

“I guess.” Sidney shrugged and leaned against the dryer and did his parody of the hipster’s usual “homage” to the James Dean stance. “Then again, it’s nice to be able to do laundry in your pajamas as opposed to getting dressed up to do it.”

“Come on, there’s Bhangra music and an Indian snack food counter by the door. What more could you ask for?”

He was tempted to say “a date who was actually on time or who could actually come up with an interesting or original idea for a date as opposed to trying too hard to be quirky and whimsical,” but thought better of it. In all truth, he would have rather had Aimee not show up at all, especially now that he completely lost visual on the mysterious floor-sweeper.