Life and Love at the River

If you’ve got better things to do today than read this, do them. March against malathion, trim your trees or baptize the baby. I’ll tell you right now, you’ll get nothing of significance here.

Me and Jerry Moss are tired of significance. We reached that conclusion on Super Bowl Sunday, a day of transcendent divinity equaled only by Easter. He said to me, and I agreed, that there’s too damned much significance in the world.

Things have become significant, Jerry Moss said, that do not deserve to be significant. Eating is significant, he said, and sex is sometimes significant, but almost everything else is peanut butter.

I met Moss at a coin-operated laundry in Woodland Hills. Coin-ops are what the old pros call them. We used to call them laundromats, but we don’t anymore. I’m not sure the distinction is significant.

I was there because our washing machine had broken down and we’ve got to wait God knows how long for a replacement part to come from Ogden, Utah, or somewhere, before we can get it fixed.

So I told my wife I’d take the stuff to the Coin-op, and she said every once in awhile I stepped out of character and did something really nice. What the hell.

It was kind of like being at a river in the Old West, where the women gathered to wash clothes and the men to water their horses. People got to know each other at the river.

The Coin-op was full because the Super Bowl had just ended and everyone was out doing chores.

On such days, I’ve noticed, people talk to one another, the way they do when an earthquake hits and they’re clustered together in the street drawing comfort against the immensity of nature’s dark caprice.

A woman in a red running suit and a tall, lanky guy who looked like Henry Aldrich were especially chummy at the Coin-op.

She was a knockout . . . a blonde, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, who could make a Bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

Henry Aldrich? He was a television character years ago who was an eternal teen-ager and said things like gee and golly. His mother was always calling him from the front porch. Hennnnryyyy, Henry Aldrich!

He always came home.

The blonde and the Henry type began a conversation over a broken coin machine that gave only one dime, instead of two dimes and a nickle, when you put in a quarter. They left together when their washing was dry.

I like to think they paused in the parking lot behind the Coin-op and talked for awhile in a warm wind that brushed the Valley, and then dined in a cafe where music was as soft as a baby’s sigh.

Love blooms easily in the whispery Santa Anas.

Jerry Moss came in the back door, looking somehow liked he’d been in the snow, though the temperature outside was in the 70s. He was an old guy with a beard and carried a pack on his back and laundry in a plastic bag.

I noticed him because he resembled a hobo I’d seen in a Carl’s Jr. a few days before. The hobo had ordered a large coffee, drank it and then, when no one was looking, filled the empty Styrofoam cup with stuff from a salad bar. He must’ve gone back six times.

There’s a survivor, I thought. There’s a guy who knows the road.

The broken change machine took Jerry Moss’s money too, and he was raising so much hell about it I gave him the 85 cents it took to run a washer.

Moss didn’t say thanks or anything, but sat next to me later and told me his name and began talking about significance. I’m not sure that what he was saying was important, but I always listen. There’s poetry on the street if you’ve got an ear for it.

A logger who could barely spell his own name told me once he wanted to build a cabin someday in a corner of the forest where the wind hides. In a corner of the forest where the wind hides.

My God, the imagery.

Jerry Moss wasn’t that poetic. He talked about significance for the 20 minutes it took his clothes to wash. The least significant thing of all, he said, was time. The most significant thing was home. Then he packed his wet laundry back into the plastic bag. He’d dry ‘em in the sun.

All during the time we talked he kept tilting his head like he was listening for a voice on the wind. He finally heard what he wanted to hear, I guess, and hurried off.

I kept thinking maybe his memory heard someone calling, like Henry Aldrich had, and he was answering.

What saddened me was that Henry Aldrich always went home, but I’m sure Jerry Moss had no place to go. Maybe he’ll find one where the logger did, in that corner of the forest where the wind hides.

There’s peace there, and significance.