Chapter Five
Spin Cycle
It was two a.m., I couldn’t sleep, and all of my clothes were beginning to smell like ripened brie. I wanted to find a coin-op laundry where I wouldn’t have to use a credit card, but in techno-savvy Paris apparently there is no such thing. Here I was lugging a stuffed pillowcase around town in the middle of the night, stopping in kiosks to thumb the near-forgotten remnants of pre-Web phone directories, looking under “Laverie—Libre Service” in the commercial listings.
I finally found a place near Panthéon that used rechargeable cash cards or else somehow billed you through your cell phone. I wasn’t about to use my phone. The card thing seemed safe, but the machine that vended the cards (accepting coins, bills, or credit cards) refused to march, as the French so co
