By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
Halfway through every Vegas vacation my family and I go to a laundromat with a silhouette of a little girl on the sign. When I was a child, the place was a gathering spot for black lunged mothers with sleepy children nestled into their breasts and people down on their luck. The laundromat is a mile past the luster and infamous glitz of Las Vegas and a mile before the natural serenity of the vacant desert roads.
This time there were several shaggy looking homeless men lying on their backs, looking for meaning in the sky outside of the laundromat. The electronic doors no longer worked, so we had to push them open, hesitating for a moment to contemplate our safety. Casually, my father guarded the doors while my mother unzipped our suitcases and started loading up the beat-up machines, the ones that did not have “not working” written on them with ominous red ink. I walked around the semi-abandoned laundromat wondering how it became such a mess. The vending machines that I used to buy candy from with leftover quarters were empty and lined with cobwebs, and I could hear a lingering voice straining to moan the words, “I tried” in the air.
A man in an Adidas track suit walked out from the back room and aggressively shut the doors that we left open. “Let’s keep the heat in here, not outside,” he mumbled through his yellow teeth, and made his way back to the little room that defined his entire existence. At one time that man had ambitions to open a laundromat in Las Vegas, but with each year he found that he could no longer maintain his youthful dream. I wonder if he has tried to reason with the demons obliterating his soul, or if he is too tired from running a business to face himself.
We went out to breakfast while we waited for the clothes to spin out, and my mother insisted on getting donuts for the homeless men who talk to the clouds. My father and I are more reserved than her. We will not strike up conversations with people who we deem to be dangerous or a waste of time. As a New Yorker, I have acquired the bad habit of walking past homeless people without feeling remorseful. I could probably benefit from a moment searching the sky; maybe those grimy homeless men are on to something that even the wealthiest people cannot seem to answer.
While my mother was carefully folding clothes and putting them back in the suitcase, a nippy poodle ran out from the mysterious back room. “Rose, get back here you little bitch,” a hoarse voice yelled. The woman behind the gray voice walked out and threw her mini alcohol bottles and cigarette butts in the overflowing trash can. “Sorry about Rose, she don’t ever listen,” she said picking up the defiant poodle.
“It is all right, we love dogs,” my mother said petting Rose’s head.
“You all New Yorkers aren’t you? I am from Yonkers,” she said contorting her body and twisting her jaw. 
“Wow, I was born in Yonkers,” my mother said smiling. My father squeezed her shoulder signaling that it was time to go. “Merry Christmas.”
The woman reached into one of the broken washing machines and found words that meant nothing, but somehow, she jumbled them together to leave a lingering feeling of eeriness. She said, “Yonkers is a just a place,” and lit her cigarette before stumbling into the back room with Rose.
“She was a meth head,” my father said as he buckled his seatbelt.
“I know. I probably should not have talked to her.” A few minutes later, my mother lowered the radio and said, “I will not stop talking to people, ever,” and then turned it back up again.
Vegas is a place of sultriness, youth, success, and broken dreams; mostly broken dreams, really. Look at the empty pockets of the men and women sulking in the airport, and the broken-down neon signs on Fremont Street. We are all lusting over failure and poor decision making. I saw the rise and fall of the laundromat with the little girl on the sign. I don’t think it will be around next year, and I yearn to know where the man with the track suit, the woman with the meth addiction, and dog will go when those broken doors no longer open. Will they share a pint with the men on the sidewalk and toast to risks and damn good beer, or wander into another nowhere town in Nevada and latch on to another dream destined to fail? Wherever they go, they will be together, drinking shots for breakfast and blasting “American Pie.”
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