When I was a wee child, I used to love going to the laundrymat....

When I was a wee child, I used to love going to the laundrymat. It was the only place I could sleep, and, apart from the oxygen tent and the shaving of my chest, my earliest memory.

I could never sleep as a child because I was devastatingly hyperactive. My parents had to get help from relatives and they all worked in shifts taking care of me. In those days I slept between four and six hours a week, which is why I used the adverb ‘devastatingly’. I nearly killed my caretakers, mere humans who required around eight hours of sleep a night.

One time, when all the adults had collapsed from fatigue, I mixed up all the flour in the house with water and put it in the washer and dryer. I then somehow managed to climb on top of them and turn them on (I was only 3).

They were both destroyed.

I don’t remember this episode. I only know about it because family members have told me, again and again, about it.

“Jesus fuck, were you a little hellion!”

I do remember the weekly visits to the laundrymat that soon followed, however, and like I said they are among my very earliest memories.

The hum of the place soothed me. The smell of the detergent soothed me. In fact, as I write this, it is bright and fresh in my nose, even though I am currently sitting at a metal desk in a large warehouse full of pumpkins.

I would climb in an empty basket and immediately fall asleep. My mom was delighted, and soon we were going to the laundrymat a couple times a day. I even understand that there were serious discussions about our family moving to a bigger town, one with an all night laundrymat just so I would, for the love of God, go to fucking sleep.

Eventually, the doctors started feeding me speed and I calmed down a little bit. Speed works backwards on freaks like me, apparently. How the hell did they discover that? I often wonder. I was able to sleep two or three hours a night and could even pay attention to one thing for up to 30 seconds. I still wasn’t able to read until the fourth grade, though.

To this day I love laundrymats and no matter how wide awake I am, they still make me sleepy. I am a grown man now, off speed, with more gray in my beard than in my childhood. I usually sleep between five and six hours a night, rarely longer. I simply don’t need it. I have a washer and dryer of my own, but I also have several pounds of flour.

Hmmm.