Doing laundry

I'm not sure how my parents financed this, but growing up, six of us went to Catholic school. I remember checks coming from the church we went to in Sleazeside, supposedly to pay my mom for doing sign language every Mass, but the money might've also been for blowjobs.

Father Flynn: "Hey, seven kids, might be willing to give it up? Whaddya say, Father Brennan Joseph?"
Father Brennan Joseph: "No, I like boys."
Father Flynn: "Okay, how about you, Monsignor Donovan? Wanna proposition Mrs. Fisher?" And Monsignor Donovan said, "Fuck yeah, she has a nice rack."

I went the longest, from first grade to eighth. After I finished eighth grade, Mom decided that was the last year of parochial school. It might've had something to do with the Fisher kids always getting their bus privileges revoked, but the reason we stopped attending St. Joseph's Grade School has yet to be verified.

My mom wanted us in private school for several reasons. She was thrilled that St. Joe's was traditional, in that we had to go to Mass on holy days of obligation and the first Friday of every month. And Catholic school also had the added benefit of savings: by requiring uniforms, St. Joe's saved my parents money, money that would otherwise have been spent on clothes for public school. Also, as my mother was quick to point out every single time our neighbors, the Huba boys, fired B.B. guns at our trash cans or lit bonfires in their back yards, "kids who went to Catholic school were better-behaved."

We each had about three sets of uniforms that we had to go buy the summer before from a uniform wholesale store in north Jersey. It took most of the morning getting up there, and by the time we'd rifled through piles of piss-yellow shirts, hunter green pullovers and cardigans, making sure to snatch up the ugly-ass green, gray & yellow plaid skirts that I always rolled up to make them shorter (they wanted the hem to read our knees! psh!). By the time we'd grabbed our respective sizes, it was dinner time, so we'd pile into the Suburban and pick up a pie for the drive home.

In calculating the frequency with which we did laundry in our house, my mom figured that three sets would be enough--they didn't need to be washed every day as long as we kept them clean. This was one aspect she neglected to factor in--that as kids between the ages of 14 and 6, shit was bound to get dirty. Another situation she forgot to think of was that we (mostly Evan, Ryan, and Kyle) had a tendency to lose things. Knee socks, for example, were always getting lost in the back of drawers and behind the pile of shoes in the closets.

The week would play out like this: if Mom did the laundry over the weekend, she made sure to get all our dirty uniforms into the wash so that they'd be clean for the week. However, if we didn't do the laundry, or couldn't find all of the dirty uniforms, etc, we would run out of clean clothes as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. This sometimes led to stealing our more responsible siblings' clothes, ahem, Ryan and Kyle (which led to us writing our names on the tags). More often, however, it led to us rifling through the laundry to do emergency wash with our uniforms.

Emergency laundry was a messy process to begin with. All of the dirty laundry was [supposed to be] dropped down the makeshift chute in the bathroom closet to the laundry room below. My dad had cut a hole in the closet floor and cut the bottom out of a plastic garbage can, stuffing the trash can in the hole to make a chute--which deposited the clothes into a larger garbage can--an outdoor, industrial-sized garbage can that was constantly overflowing. When we needed to do laundry, we'd open the door to the laundry room/Dad's workshop and dump the garbage can over, throwing clothes left and right in a mad dash to find a shirt or sweater.

After finding herself for the thousandth time wading knee-deep in clothes that she couldn't tell whether they were dirty or clean--on a MONDAY, the day after she'd worked the night shift and was supposed to be sleeping--my mom brought the video camera down to the laundry room.

"What is this?" she screeched, holding up a towel. "Is it dirty? Is it clean? I DON'T KNOW!"

We watched the video when we came home from school that day. She explained how, from then on, the laundry room door had a lock on it and only she had the key. We would have to ask permission to enter form that point on. Also, every Sunday evening before she left for work, we were required to present our complete uniform sets for the whole week (my dad couldn't be relied upon to oversee that we were ready for school the next day; my mom had come home Monday morning to find us waiting at home because we didn't have our clothes ready the night before, and we missed the bus as a result).

We couldn't follow through with this simple task of "being prepared," of course. Mom sometimes had to leave for work before we showed our clothes to her, and the next morning Evan/Ryan/Kyle would be racing around to find a sock or a tie. How would all of us catch the bus on time if we didn't have our clothes, and the laundry room door was locked?

These moments mark the early development of my problem-solving skills. I evaluated the situation; it seemed that Evan/Ryan/Kyle could either miss the bus and be punished for not having his shit together the night before, and we would ALL be subjected to the lecture, OR we could send Maggie down the laundry chute to unlock the door. Sometimes she'd get stuck and start crying, so one of us had to stay upstairs to push her head down just in case. Evan/Ryan/Kyle would be waiting at the laundry room door for Maggie to "land," and then he'd grab his clothes--no time to wash them at this point--and shove the pile of dirty laundry back into the garbage can.

If we still happened to be late, either Bridget or I would run out to flag the bus and hold it until Evan/Ryan/Kyle got out the door, sometimes running barefoot with a toothbrush in his mouth.

Mom only began to catch on to our plan when she noticed the cracks in the chute trash can, and that our clothes smelled like feet, but there wasn't shit she could do about it at that point, except take us out of Catholic school for good.

That was one of the reasons we left, I think. The other reasons--how we almost got kicked off the bus a million times and the bimonthly conventions in the principal's office with Mom and the Fisher children--will have to wait for another Family CUNT.

The next year, we all went to public school.