The Case of the Missing Clothes

Yesterday was one of those days where the Universe was just screwy from start to finish. I woke up with my left eye irritated, which happens with abnormal frequency and usually leads to me dressing up like a pirate. I didn't have the time or materials to make an eyepatch before my housekeeping shift started, so I settled for putting one contact in the non-irritated eye and walking into a few walls on the way to breakfast.

I was three quarters of the way through my coffee when I remembered about some laundry I'd done the night before, and set out to find it. Living in a hostel, I often panic at the idea of wayward germs and bedbugs, and do my laundry at least three times as much as anyone else. Unfortunately, I am as spacey as I am paranoid, so 90% of the loads I do, I forget about until half a day later. By that time they've usually been dried twice, or moved to a back shelf somewhere, or even deposited on my bed by someone far more proactive than myself. So it's always somehow worked out, until yesterday, when I opened the dryer to find my clothes gone. Completely gone. Not in a back room, not in a shelf, not on my bed. Gone.

There had been several different forms of shenanigans going on the night before as I had embarked upon the load. Our laundryman was a little intoxicated, since it was around midnight, but I trusted him when he said that he had moved my clothes from a washer to dryer (after I, of course, forgot about them in the washer between the hours of 9 and 12am). Then I got distracted again with some canoodling, and that's how it got to be 9 am before I remembered to check for the clothes. My friend Josh at the front desk knows all about my canoodling behaviors, and so he was entirely unsympathetic to see me tacking a sign to the bulletin board at reception.

"I washed a load of clothes... and suddenly they were gone?" He sneered. "Yeah, right. If you hadn't been up all night doing dirty things, maybe you would gotten your clean clothes. At least be honest with the people. Tell them about the... and the...." whereupon he mimed some very lewd interpretations of my night's behavior, and I squealed, "Ew! JOSH!" And went off to call my parents in hopes my pitiful story would move them into funding a new and improved wardrobe.

The clothes hadn't turned up by noon, or three, or four thirty, when it was time for me to head to my other job. By that time everyone in the hostel was on alert. My manager, Nicola, said she would help me in looking; "That's odd..." she said, "I did a load of clothes last night, too. And there have been some sitting on top of the dryer since about 9pm. Are you sure it's not those?"

"No," I said, because I had checked them. "But thanks, anyway."

And so it was with a heavy heart that I headed off to my ballet job. I felt like I had barely had clothes already; how was I going to function with three quarters of THAT depleted? My parents had had sympathy, but not enough to offer so much as a new pair of leggings. I was on my own.

I garnered more sympathy and clothes offerings at my ballet job than from my parents, and I was already starting to feel better when I received the best text message of my life from my canoodling partner, Luke.

"We found your clothes!!!!!!!!!!" It read, "Nicola had them the whole time!"

Everyone in the office joined me in celebrating, and I decided I would wait until I got home to even press the question of how they ended up with Nicola. It was a good thing, since it turned out to be a long story. Nicola had been doing laundry for her girlfriend, whose clothes were the ones that had been sitting out on top of a dryer the entire time. Nicola had instead taken my clothes to be dried in the basement of our other hotel, the Dakota, and it was very dark in the basement of the Dakota and she hadn't really seen what she was folding. There were still a few items that gave her pause, such as my jester pants ("These are a little billowy," Nicola thought, "I'm sure I've never seen Tani wear these.") Whatever clothes our inebriated washerman had moved to the dryer had not been mine. And so the mystery was solved, and the clothes were waiting for me in a big pillowcase when I returned.

I poured myself a glass of wine to celebrate, and set about folding and putting away my clothes. I propped the glass on a scarf on my dresser directly above the basket. Not two minutes had passed before I had accidentally moved the scarf and there was red wine dripping directly into the drawer where I had just put the majority of my clean clothes.

My bunk neighbor, Pedro, is Colombian, and he doesn't know much English except for his oft-uttered phrase, "Oh, mann!"

He came in just in time to see me knock the wine over, and there was a moment of silence as Pedro and I watched it run down the dresser and into the drawer.

"Oh, mannnn," Pedro said.

And so I set off to do laundry for the second time in a twenty four hour period. I didn't answer anybody's questions about it. I'm pretty sure I got distracted canoodling again that night, too, but the important thing is that at some point I got my clothes and I still have them.

THE END

Typical. Absolutely.

I was so excited to attend the "Mythic Picnic," a monthly TRICKSTER ARTS SALON. YES. I KNOW. I'M OVERWHELMED BY THE SHEER PERFECTION AS WELL. I RSVP'ed online, quickly checked the general area of what it said was the location ("Hmm, Fisherman's Wharf... that's an odd place for an arts salon..." I thought), then quickly got in a Carmen Miranda-like outfit, packed up the freaksha hat for work, and spent the whole rest of the day telling everyone about my impending jester convention.

At 8:30 I set off in search of a cheap bus and cheap food and found neither... at 9 I was wandering through Chinatown (in the opposite direction of the wharf) and at 9:30 I was in Little Italy (also not very close to the wharf) ordering an avocado salad and wondering if I would ever make it to the other jesters. At 10 I was finishing the remnants of my salad as I plodded determinedly along the outskirts of the wharf toward a set of promising looking lights. I reached the Mechanical Museum, which, for some reason, was where I was convinced the convention was, but there was no sign of life.

I walked out on the piers but they were empty. I walked by some buildings; a lone Mexican busboy was rolling out some trash. I walked on some more piers and got excited when I heard noise and laughter, but it was people dressed up like sailors, not minstrels.

I finally came across some fishmongers and restrained myself from asking where the jester convention was; instead I asked if there were any hip bar slash clubs nearby. We were standing on a sidewalk soaked with dishwater and the air reeked of dead fish. The mongers exchanged a look.

"Rainforest Cafe?" They asked.

"Never mind," I said.

"Do you have a number for the place? A name? An address?" One of the men asked. He was obviously one of those irksome people who try to actually follow through and help you solve your problem once it's been presented.

"Kind of," I said. "No. I mean, I was just passing through and thought I would check out this place I thought was here. But it's not. Never mind," I said again.

Now the men looked really troubled, but I was already wandering off again. I saw the sign for Taylor Street, which meant it was only a good three miles over the hill before I was back safe on Isadora Duncan Lane.

I hadn't made it a block before I got the giggles over the sheer and glorious irony. Deep down I had had some reservations over attending a whole gathering of self-proclaimed tricksters and minstrels; I only call myself a jester because I don't want to be like anyone else... if I got cynical about trickstering, what would I have left? And thus, my subconscious (and sheer lack of organization and follow-through) manifested this situation, in which I wandered aimlessly around fisherman's wharf in my jester get-up and failed to find the minstrel convention.

The end!