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Jet Quality Cleaners

David Sapp

    The obvious was always there hanging about: Dad’s business was cleaning other people’s dirty clothes. In the mid-1960s he was the reluctant boss, he owned Jet Quality Cleaners. You know the place: it’s now Down to Earth, the health food store on West Gambier Street. Though he had a spartan office at the plant, a desk, chair, and half-empty file cabinet, he found reasons to be elsewhere, fleeing the lives of his employees.
    On many mornings he’d bring me along for a leisurely breakfast at the Ohio Restaurant downtown across from the five and ten. The waitresses called me “Daddy’s little helper.” I beamed. He would walk to the bank, happily waylaid by the conversations of several acquaintances and distant cousins. I’d ride with him on the delivery route. (Always with us, the van was converted on the weekends for camping along the Mohican River.) I’d wait and wait as Dad listened to the shut-ins, old gentlemen who had no place to go, no reason to get a suit cleaned and pressed.
    Aunt Evelyn’s new husband taught her how to drive his Ford Thunderbird which got her off the farm. Dad’s little sister just out of high school starched, pressed, folded, pinned, buttoned, and boxed men’s white shirts all day with my mother. Dad didn’t let her work the front filling out tickets as her spelling was atrocious though entertaining for all.
    Maggie, she’d admit, a hillbilly cliché from West Virginia, made terrible selections in men who knocked her around, but she seemed not to know anything different, considering it an integral requirement of love. She was grateful for her simple world flattening men’s trousers and nice ladies’ gowns, the press all hers all day, the heat, the steam, the staticky, barely audible radio playing her favorite pop hits. She pumped the press pedal in bare feet, and her hair fell loose, below her waist, a mane as present as a twin sister. When it caught in her boyfriend’s motorcycle spokes, she lost her seat and part of her scalp on Martinsburg Road.
    There was what’s-his-name, the young man who swept the floors and cleaned the toilet. I suppose I’m the only one now who remembers when he was drafted and brought home horror stories of driving a truck over the precarious roads of Vietnam, of booby trapped sunglasses set by his pals for fun – and tales of Tet.
    Ralph the sad bachelor lived above an empty store just down the alley from the cleaners. He was frequently drunk, and Dad bailed him out of jail more than once. I recall a sober conversation sitting with Dad at Ralph’s kitchen table, his tiny apartment too drab, too bleak. Ralph operated the dry-cleaning machine and he’d let me paw through the collection of trinkets from people’s pockets. He gave me the brass insignia separated from boys’ uniforms – those who either would not or could not claim their jackets. Ralph simply didn’t come to work one day. This was just as well as the cleaning chemicals were cancerous and ate out the guts and brains of many other dry-cleaner colleagues – possibly Uncle Wayne who took over for Ralph for a while.
    Gillis, heavy around the jowls, careworn around the eyes, who chain-smoked through the days but dressed impeccably – her hair always up, waited on customers out front. She was perceived as thinking she was better than those who worked in the back, and so seemed rather lonely. With no children of her own, she was nervous when I played among the rows of plastic sheathed clothes – like immaculate personalities ready for retrieval – afraid I’d get wrapped up and suffocate or get an eye taken out with a coat hanger. Her husband, laid off from work, closed the garage door, started his engine, and rolled down the windows. I remember a call after supper and Mom and Dad whispering in the kitchen.
    And Uncle Stan, Dad’s brother, was there just across the street at Pond’s Tire Shop: like clothes, all day, every day, old tires off, new tires on. For a decade, not much changed on Gambier Street.
    Though he attended the Columbus Business School, determined not to be a poor farmer like his father, Dad didn’t know what to do for these lives he fell into shepherding. And Dad was never satisfied with what he had, but he was never very good at anything else: failed ventures in real estate, insurance, and commodities: silver, timber, and popcorn. About the same time Uncle Stan got a better job with the gas company, it all ended with polyester wash and wear and bankruptcy. Uncle Wayne would have pizzas; Uncle Stan had tires and propane; Dad had clothes. Though not so glamorous, these were good businesses that paid mortgages and taxes. It all ended when Dad grew weary. No, impatient, really. Looking back, I realize Dad didn’t want me to be the son of the man who cleaned other people’s clothes.

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