The navel of New York

Among the numerous bizarre tolls one pays for living in this city (some only reveal themselves when you arrive, and no one can warn you enough), there are three that any new resident of New York will recognize: the abundance of rats on the sidewalks, the lack of elevators in the buildings, and the fact that these same buildings (due to their age and the neglect of their owners) lack washing machines. Hence the laundromats, the communal laundromats on every corner.

From my sixth floor, I go up and down, juggling a mountain of laundry, which often falls down the stairs. But as with every diabolical journey, after the descent into hell, there is a reward. I can't explain why (and finding the answer would unravel the mystery), but in the laundry room, I've had the best ideas, discovered insights, and learned lessons that don't exist elsewhere, or in the city's places designed for epiphany, like museums or churches.

In the laundry, the language is sinuous, the communication cryptic and hidden.

On the surface, laundromats are a dark, mundane place of passage, but there's a reason they're an icon of American popular culture (and nowhere are they better portrayed than in the stories in Lucia Berlin's Manual for Cleaning Women , published by Alfaguara and L'Altra Editorial). Drunks and vagrants take refuge here from the summer heat. Women of various ages, almost always Latinas, wait for the wash cycle to finish. Their children, sitting on plastic chairs, are mesmerized by the tarot card channel, which is on twenty-four hours a day.

Some consider New York's laundromats a separate part of society, but they are its center, its navel, the incandescent womb of this city. And unlike the agora, where Greek citizens—the men—publicly and explicitly addressed the issues that concerned the city, in the laundromat the language is sinuous, communication cryptic and covert, and you can never know exactly what's going on, but something is happening: something is being decided. The homeless sleep and the children fight while the mothers do their work, but the work is different than it seems, and it has nothing to do with detergent.

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If official culture is debated in political assemblies and the country's newspapers, another culture is born and learned in laundromats, perhaps a greater one: coexistence, rather than the control of others. No one is a problem, the marginalized aren't a hindrance, and stories—secrets—proliferate. In a place as lonely as New York, in a country as individualistic as this one, being forced to go out to the laundromat is no longer an inconvenience, but a kind of miracle. Often an enlightenment.