Laundry Delivery

Yo perreo sola, nadie aquí me controla. I twerk alone, no one here controls me. Alonsito jumped up the three slate-stone front stairs - chips and grooves from a hundred years carefully cleaned yesterday with new white pigeon blotches from today. The green track pants were made from a fabric that was light, breathable, and had the pristines of brand new clothing. They were his pride, the way how he made a good impression on his boss and the customers. He was always fast and never smoked on the job. The light pink laundry bag, puffy with neatly stacked fresh-smelling clothes inside, rested on his shoulder. He buzzed De Luca once and without waiting much a second time. He had to hit a quota. He shook his hips impatiently to the Bad Bunny song playing in his earbuds.

“¡Dale con cuea!” he cursed, quickly swallowing his words when he heard a crackle on the intercom. “Clean clothes!” he barked into the mid-century speaker, knowing that a lot of those old intercoms had bad reception. The door buzzed. He punched the door open with his free shoulder like a football player. Doing a double punch, he got the second door out of the way. These old buildings tended to have little foyers in between glass doors with the mail - usually dingy, dirty, and neglected spaces. He was right on the steep stairs of the tenement building - no elevator. He grabbed the wood-carved railing to pull himself up and set himself for a sprint taking three stairs at the same time with his strong legs. The golden Jesus cross bounced wildly on the chain against his chest. He was religious, but he had seen one like that on the chest of a muscular singer in a music video with two super hot scantily-clad girls on both arms. It looked really badass.

The stairs, hallways, and doors were narrow, barely enough to pass. That’s the way how New Yorkers made the most of the limited and expensive real estate. The common areas were clean but barren, no signs of luxury, decoration, or individualism. They were simply functional and cost a fortune. As soon as one tenant moved out, the next tenant moved in. The former wouldn’t leave behind any trace. That was a constant reminder that if you don’t make it and if you can’t keep up with paying, your not even forgotten. The act of forgetting isn’t bestowed on you. You are simply gone. Nobody cares. The environment reinforced to Alonsito constantly that he had to push himself that he couldn’t slip up. He couldn’t even afford a place here. He could only be a servant to the people who lived here.

The sixth-floor window had more sunlight because it wasn’t covered by the neighboring buildings. He felt euphoria setting in. Every time, he got a glimpse of the sun and what it felt like to be in its presence were everything is touched by its golden. It’s such an uplifting feeling of warmth and of having made it out. When he ran through the streets in the shadows of the tall buildings, he forgot that he lived in the shadow, but each time, he came across a moment that exposed him to the blinding sun, he remembered. He remembered how joyful it is to simply exist in the sun. He remembered growing up in the tall Chilean mountains, basking in the sun every day, feeling rich without a peso. In comparison, now he had plenty of dollars and felt poor. If he’d work hard for many years, one day, he might be able to live in the sun again and wake up with it blinding him as he blinked open his eyes. One day! If he worked hard!

The door to unit 6RW was already crapped open. At least, he didn’t have to wait. He tried to hold the air in his lungs. He had to present a calm, professional aura like the stairs had meant nothing to him. He slipped the laundry bag in his hands to pretend that he had cradled it this whole time like a fragile egg. Customer impression was important, his boss had explained to him.

Ms. De Luca stood leaning against the frame of the door. She had a sweater and pants on that were a mixture between workout sweats and pajamas. They had been really comfortable to lounge around in while she did her marketing writing from home, sitting on the living room floor's thick, white carpet. She hadn’t put on a bra, not feeling the need to impress delivery workers. But now she was a little surprised. She knew that the shape of her breasts was clearly enough outlined by the soft, moldable, and cuddle fabric. The shape was clearly too natural to be a bra. She stood there barefoot, having only thrown over the two pieces of clothing and put her smooth, blond hair into a ponytail to be out of her face.

She still felt in that intimate space of just having woken up because she had gotten started working at home leisurely, drafting a few lines, pruning her plants, making a coffee, and then taking all the inspiration to draft out a few more marketing slogan options. She hadn’t stepped a foot outside her apartment. So she had no need to put on her strong face and emotional armor. She was like a kitten - open and comfortable. Even her clothes were disheveled so that her belly button and slender, toned abs showed. Her belly was barely there - not even reaching out more than her hip bones. Her hip bones were clearly visible. She couldn’t pull her guard up fast enough. He had caught her in that space and pose like only a lover would have caught her in when waking up in the morning together.

He could sense it. Not only was she hot and young. A special delight of his job was that he got to have fleeting contact with really hot women. However, he could feel the energy that she emanated - very vulnerable and inviting. He felt like leaning in, cuddling with her, falling over her to roll down on the floor beneath her to let his fingers slowly walk over her body like a lover. The way how she moved so slowly and with lethargy was so seductive. The way how her blue eyes looked at him with such intimacy and full of emotion, the pausing in them, the way how her eyes soaked him up, made him feel seen. He lost his breath for real. He forgot to breathe.

She instantly had that pang of guilt in her stomach when she looked at him. Her mother had instilled it in her. Every time she stole a cookie out of the cookie box at midnight her mother had caught her. Her mother had smacked her fingers until the little her ran crying upstairs to her bed and cried into her pillow until she fell asleep from exhaustion. Her mother had lived in a different time - a time full of poverty and self-discipline. That childhood treatment had deeply imprinted on her. Every time, she felt the desire for something guilty, he stomach balled up to try to throw up the cookie. She felt that guilt looking at him.

A Latin lover had been something that she had fantasized about. The big eyes and brown skin were one thing, but she really liked the exotic about them. How they spoke a hacked English, mixed in perro with every other sentence, and had different habits. She liked the foreign about it, the unfamiliar. She wanted to be surprised by a guy and treated like no other guy had treated her. She wanted to know how they were in bed. She wanted to know how the fought and argued. She wanted to know what it would be like to be the only Italian in the middle of his friends. Take me away! Take me out of this predictable and suffocating world!

Oh, and the hair on the back of his head had been shorn so close to his skin by the barber that it was little more than fuzz. She imagined her fingers running over that to feel the softness of the stubble of his head hair. The smoothness must be so delicious that she couldn’t get enough of running her fingers over it long past when he’d get annoyed and try to fight her fingers off and she would only laugh and enjoy how easily she could bug him so much.

“Ms. De Luca. Here is your laundry. Your card has already been charged,” he told her.

“Hey, what happened to the other guy?” she asked him.

“Oh, he found a better-paying job,” lied Alonsito. Joaquin had been caught stealing laundry and selling it in front of the F train station on Houston. He’d only steal one piece out of each bag to make it appear like normal losses that happen in busy laundry facilities. But in the street, he had laid out all the clothing for people to see and buy. It was right at the border of the neighborhood he was serving customers in. One of the customers saw her one-of-a-kind vintage Louis Vuitton black gala dress being offered for $5. She called the police. All the pieces were pretty unique and were traced back to the customers. His boss had warned him to lie about it because the story was bad for business.

When he sat in the delivery van, he was still shivering. His mind was blasted to pieces. The memory of the gentle slope of her cheeks underneath the eyes replayed. Her bone structure was gentle and young. The skin was light but no translucent. It had a shine to it. He remembered the way her eyes were lined by small eye lashes, but they looked so useful. And those blue eyes were so clear. He had watched her pupils draw together and relax open as she looked at him. The unique contour of her eyes mesmerized him.

The truth is that she was pretty but it wasn’t what really got to him. What really got to him was the heat standing in the air. The supposition that she was so ready for sex to let her sweater drop down to the floor and reveal her bare breast for him to cup like a bunch of grapes and eat from them in small like nipples that would send her moaning. He was shaking his head. All of this must have been in his head. He was simply horny. He had simply caught her in the relaxed privacy of his home. Oh, she was so hot. He sighed.

The next customer was a Jewish retired professor, who explained to Alonsito that they were using the wrong detergent. The professor held a brown sock with a checkered texture that looked like what a Harvard provost would wear to his own nose to demonstrate to Alonsito that the sock didn’t smell right. The old man grabbed Alonsito by the sleeve to instill on Alonsito: “No! You have to tell them. What they are doing is not okay!” After assuring the old man for the fifth time that he would tell his boss, the old man finally let him leave. All the while, Alonsito was looking into the worn, old apartment behind the old man with a clock tower and mahogany dining table for six that seemed perpetually set for supper simply to make a better appearance. The apartment emanated a musk smell out of it.

A couple of weeks later, a cold fall gust blew the accumulation of freshly fallen tree leaves into a little mini-tornado swirl. Many of them clung to any wet surface they landed on from the drizzle on and off rain that had lasted all week. Alonsito pulled the brown wool jacket tighter. With his thin-gloved hands, he pulled the pickup instruction sheet out of his pocket. Jesus! There was a lot written in the special handling box.

“Hey! I had to leave on a trip to Milan this morning. The building code is 4510. My apartment door is unlocked. The laundry bag is right behind it. Please, be sure to turn the lock before you close the door behind you! You guys are the best! XOXO - Isabella”

Sure enough, the building door buzzed after he punched the code in. He could feel that something was off in his gut. He didn’t like the special instructions. They often didn’t work and came from super picky customers who easily burst into irate yelling. But what was he going to do? In moments like this, he often remembered the way his boss squeezed his biceps and told him with a big smile: “That’s why we are professionals!”

His boss was this short, gray-heard guy with a quick smile, earnest drive, and incessant motion. The thing Alonsito admired about his boss was that his boss had a clear idea of how things should be. Listening to him, one could feel that in his boss’s view, the world was a very well organized and predictable place. He had a word for everything. He had a saying for everything. He was never caught surprised by anything. He seemed to have run into everything before already. And some sage of a forebearer seemed to have explained to him how to handle everything.

Alonsito felt a lot of uncertainty in his life. He wasn’t sure if leaving his family in Chile was the right thing. He wasn’t sure if he was wasting his life delivering laundry. He didn’t know how to get a girlfriend. He wanted to study but aside from some vague ideas and college names that he had heard, he had no clue on how to go about it. Customers always seemed to complain for no reason at all. The only thing he was sure of was the he loved the Seventh Street Burgers with their fries and a Coke.

On the third floor, a fifty-year-old man blocked his way with a huge brown dog. The dog had a giant square head with a massive jaw. The dog quietly like it was determined kept pulling the leash taut to get to Alonsito. The men looked upset, angry, and threatening. His eyes were fierce and cold. The way how he clutched the leash towards his chest said that he wanted to impress on Alonsito both the power to restrain the strong dog from charging forward and his eagerness to set the dog loose on him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” thundered the man as a threat, like a last chance for Alonsito to speak before unleashing violence on him.

“Bro! Take it easy! I’m simply here to pick up laundry,” replied Alonsito, waving with his hands down for the guy and the dog to settle.

“Which apartment?” inquired the man with a tone of comeuppance because he intended to demonstrate that Alonsito was lying. The dog made some impatient huffs from not breathing right with the leash pressing on its throat from pulling forward. The sounds revealed the profound size of the dog’s chest cavity.

“6RW!” replied Alonsito pointed like this would settle the argument.

“What’s her name?” continued the man to find a way to trap Alonsito.

“C’mon! I can’t disclose customer information,” protested Alonsito. His boss had drilled him that ex-lovers and all kinds of people were snooping around customers and trying stuff. Breaking privacy was a big no-no.

The man felt satisfied by the outburst of indignity that Alonsito was for real. The two men passed each other uncomfortably rubbing their chests in the narrow hallway. The dog brushed against Alonsito’s knees. The thick fur actually felt good.

Upstairs, when he turned the doorknob the door actually opened. For a moment, he stood in the entryway to look inside. The combined living, dining room, and kitchen was sunfilled with some sunrays standing in the air. The windows were quaint ones with wood bars in the middle to cut each window into four panes. The paint was peeling off of it. Green spider plants were growing underneath it and sending baby shoots to grow little mini-spider plants hanging in the air. A few succulents followed. All this painted the room in a healthy and fresh atmosphere. The furniture was designed to be low to the floor, like a coffee table to sit around it on a many inches thick rug. There was a yoga mat for a little spiritual corner in the room.

They say that someone’s home reveals their inside. He found all kinds of signs about Isabella’s personality in the room. The way how she loved bright, green leafy plants and kept them alife. How, she liked to be close to the ground and comfortable. Every detail of the room seemed setup to be comfortable and glowed with beauty. A forgotten coffee cup was made from porcelain with a cat cuddling on it. The theme was Japanese with carefully created textures. The lines and dots had a tactile feel, not simply thing paint. There were many little adornments like a little monkey hanging off the saucer for the keys.

She seemed like an admirer of beauty. She seemed to have good self-esteem the way how she took care of creating herself a nice space. She seemed very healthy based on the yoga mat, pink dumbbells littered on the floor, and a small library of books about breath meditation, talking with difficult people, and finding happiness in little things. She also had mesh baskets for storing fresh vegetables hanging in the kitchen corner. There was also a beautiful fresh smell in the air, like she cleaned really well.

Alonsito was sufficiently impressed. He had seen the messes that people live in. Isabella seemed to have things really together. He had been to the homes of a few Chilean girls. They were messes. They had empty boxes of pizza and McDonald’s wrappers. There was no decoration. He knew that this was not all Chilean women, but the ones that he met in his circles, they had half their clothes lying on the floor. The lightbulb would be dark and orange. He had a lot of respect for the woman who lived here.

For a moment, he considered going on and exploring. He started looking around for a kitsch toy to be in a conspicuous place. Those usually had nanny cameras hidden in them. The table was clear. The only draw had the saucer for the keys and a lavender scent therapy candle. The window ledges seemed to be all plants. He carefully looked around. Only missing one camera was enough to get fired. But there the apartment lay wide open in front of him. If there wasn’t a camera, she wouldn’t be the wiser. He was curious to see the bed she slept in at night. It was like a miracle and mystery that he wanted to uncover.

He heard the dog snub air in the distance. The guy was still waiting downstairs. He turned the lock on the inside, pulled the door shut, and yanked on it to make sure that it was locked. He jumped down the stairs. When he passed the unpleasant guy with his dog heeling at the side, he waved the laundry bag in his face to show him that simply because he was Latin didn’t mean he was a thief. He was hard-working, upstanding citizen!

She was sitting in London at the airport lounge, running her fingers along the most glass of her cocktail served in a flute. She liked collecting the little water pearls on the glass into big ones with her fingertips. There was something tactilely satisfying about how the water snapped to each other. A couple more hours of layover until she would meet the client in Milan. She knew that the laundry guy had snooped through her apartment. It bothered her.

She hated herself. She should have anticipated the pitch meeting for the ad campaign. She should not have stretched out her laundry until almost the very last piece of clothing was worn and smelly. That left her with no option but to beg the laundry people to pick up the dirty laundry while she was gone to have it ready when she’d fly home wearing her last clean pair of panties, desperately dependent on the freshly cleaned laundry waiting on her.

When a real estate agent had given her a tour when she had moved to NYC, she had seen the way how those people operate. The agent had walked her from apartment to apartment. She had cautiously stepped into the place to avoid disturbing anything. He had strutted right in, throwing the closet doors wide open to show her the shoes the current tenant was owning. “Oh, she has a ton of shoes. Wait until I show you the ones under the bathroom sink. You’ll love those!” he had joyfully announced to her, completely untouched by the notion that she might be abhorred by the lack of privacy given to the current tenant. The agent had apparently gone through everything and memorized what was where so that he could parade the current tenant's possessions to prospective tenant after tenant.

She was sure that the laundry people were going through everything in her place, even pulling out the utensil draw to see what kind of spoons and forks she had. So despicable! They would be judgy about her. They’d probably find her passport at the bottom of her bedside drawer. They’d find her vibrator in the bathroom. C’mon, is there no decency in this world? She thought herself into a frenzy.

Then she remembered that it would be the new guy who would go through her stuff. He was handsome. She pictured him running his fingertips all over her bedsheets to feel if they were soft enough for his taste. She remembered how he was at least five years younger than her. He was probably a little bit juvenile, like a baby. He’d for sure giggle at finding her pink vibrator and make some lewd comments about the size. He wouldn’t be able to look with his eyes. Young man like him had a way of always looking with their eyes - fondling the things, moving them from one hand to the other. His slime and sent would spread all over her things. The towels in the bathroom were no longer clean after he wandered through them but had his scent on them.