The clothesline was a telegraph that broadcast the private life of every tenant to the airshaft. The sheets told you who slept alone. The tiny shirts told you who had children. The work pants told you who dug ditches. The dress told you who had somewhere to go on Saturday night. The clothesline was the social media of the tenement and everybody was posting and nobody had a password.

The clothesline ran from window to window across the airshaft on a pulley system that had been installed before the war. Not the last war. The war before the last war. The pulley squeaked when you pulled it and the squeak echoed off the bricks of the airshaft and the airshaft turned the squeak into a sound that was louder than the squeak deserved. Everything in the airshaft was louder than it deserved. The airshaft was an amplifier built by accident by an architect who had never stood at the bottom of one.

The clothesline sagged in the middle when it was full. The sag was a measurement of laundry and laundry was a measurement of life. A heavy line meant a full house. Sheets and towels and jeans and shirts and socks that had lost their partners. A light line meant somebody was traveling or somebody had moved out or somebody had died and nobody had taken down the line yet. The empty clothesline was the saddest thing in the airshaft. A rope with nothing on it connecting two windows that used to have a conversation.

I did not have a clothesline. I had a laundromat on Avenue C that charged a dollar twenty-five per load and had a television bolted to the wall that played the same channel for twenty years. I sat in the laundromat and played guitar while my clothes spun and the other customers either listened or did not listen and either way the clothes got clean. The laundromat was my recording studio. The acoustics were terrible. The dryers provided a rhythm section. The spin cycle was a drummer who could not keep time. I played there for thirty years and nobody ever asked me to stop and nobody ever asked me to play and that was the perfect contract between a musician and a laundromat.