“Roshi’s Laundromat Blues,” the last short story I wrote in the spring of 1980, had a simple premise. What if you were at a laundromat, waiting for your clothes to finish the wash cycle, when you heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot and was dead?
The idea was at this emotional moment, Roshi, which was the main character’s nickname, would want to be someplace else: perhaps with people he loved, perhaps alone, perhaps in one of the places he went to when he needed solace. But he was stuck at a laundromat in Berkeley where it was improper and unwise to leave a pile of wet clothes in a washing machine. So he was forced to process the momentous news in an instant community comprised of others who were in the same situation.
I wrote the story for a legendary fiction-writing class taught by Franklin Reeve, who ripped it to shreds when we discussed it. The story turned out to be the last time I wrote fiction (deliberately) because although I had gone back to college in fall 1979 with the idea of becoming a fiction writer, that spring I had stumbled into journalism and decided the world is much more interesting and bizarre than my imagination. (This says something about the world and about me). And I should note that while I gave up trying to write fiction, I’m sure more than a few people have read what I thought was non-fiction and decided it was, in fact, a work of fiction.)
My recollection is Reeve hated the premise, arguing that the main character could have received any piece of bad news. I pushed back, saying the point was the collective experience of Kennedy assassination (which occurred on November 22, 1963 and is marked by today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued on May 29, 1964, which would have been Kennedy’s 47th birthday).
Reflecting on that argument now, I think Reeve correctly thought the story was contrived. But I’m also struck that for people of my generation, the Kennedy assassination is one of the few “where were you when you heard events?”
While many amazing and terrible things have happened over the past six decades, only three have regularly stimulated the “where were you question” in my circles—JFK’s assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and the announcement earlier this month that networks had just declared that Joe Biden was the president-elect.
For the record, I think my first-grade teacher told us about JFK. On 9/11, I heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center when I called Robert Levers, a graphic designer, to discuss a project we were doing together. And I was in a hardware store when the presidential race was declared, so I heard about on the car radio as I was driving home.
Thinking about the “where were you” question, I find myself wondering why other significant events – notably the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – haven’t spurred the same conversations (at least in my circles).
Today, as I remember my three “where were you” moments, and think about Roshi, the character in my short story, I’m also struck by the question that doesn’t get asked, which is “what did you do after you heard?”
After the JFK killing, I think I went home but I don’t remember talking about it with my parents. I do remember not really understanding why my family was watching television (which at the time was in the basement) during the day on Monday, November 25, 1963, the day of Kennedy’s riveting funeral. I also remember not understanding why we couldn’t watch something more interesting.
On 9/11, I know I turned on the TV after I talked with Robert. I can’t remember if we tried to do the work we needed to do. I do recall going to a therapy appointment that afternoon and talking about what I would tell my daughters, who had just had their second full day of middle school. I remember picking them up and realizing that since the school’s leaders had made not told the students what had happened, that task fell to me. And I’m pretty sure, I looked at pie chart showing the share of people who were followers of different religions in their world civilization textbook and being struck by the fact that it didn’t include Muslims.
The day Biden’s victory was announced, my wife and I decided our neighborhood was too quiet; so we stood on our front steps banging some pots and pans. (I banged so hard that I broke a wooden spoon.). We didn’t get much of an immediate response but later in the afternoon, we did chat with neighbors who also were happy (little did we know of the bizarre events that have followed the announcement). And then we went back to chores and cooking for planned socially distanced, outdoor dinner with friends, a dinner that turned into a celebratory outdoor meal that included watching Biden’s victory speech on a monitor we rigged up on our patio.
I suppose that Roshi, who played guitar while his clothes were being washed, probably did put his clothes in the dryer. At some point, I assume he folded them and maybe he even put them away when he got back to wherever he lived. But he was a free spirit who might have eschewed both those acts. And since I gave up fiction writing, I don’t know for sure.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, remember where you were and what you did, and work for peace.