The guy, Isaac "Lew" Medequal ("Lew because my father wanted a Lew and couldn't stand my mother naming me Isaac") had walked into my life five minutes before. I was in the bookstore's bathroom, washing my hands as usual at the start of my hour lunch break. I heard the door squeak open, somebody come trundling in, then I heard the heaviest, most meaning-laden sigh I have ever heard in my life, an "Oy," to sever your will to live. Normally not being the employee-of-the-month type to offer a customer help in the bathroom, something about the sigh, even before I looked over at his general unkemptness, told me this guy was different. "Can I help you?" I said as I moved over to the towel dispenser.
"What makes you think you can help Old Lew when thousands before you haven't?"
"Because," rising to the challenge out of nothing but boredom, "I'm Dan the Man," I said cheerily, using the appellation I've hated my whole life.
"In lieu of other things," Old Lew chuckled to himself, "I need a cookie and some cold water."
"Come with me, then," I said, leading him out of the bathroom, figuring, what the hell, pay day's coming up, with my employee discount I can cover the cost of a cookie, and besides, this guy might be fun. As we walked (well, I walked, he kind of hobbled, though nimbly in a way, leaning on an old walking stick that reached to his shoulder) across the store to the cafe I detected a peculiar odor emanating from the man, not a make-you-gag old hobo stink, just a very well lived-in general musk.
"The ninth of September, 1752, seems like yesterday." I can't say I believed the guy at the start, as we settled down at a table and he began nibbling his cookie and taking big gulps of his water, but there was something so matter of fact about him, something so credible in his mien, that it wasn't like I sat there thinking, I'm listening to a madman here. "I had closed my cobbler shop as usual around four in the afternoon and was standing my regular two pints at Henley's Taverne, same as I had done for thirty-two years in the business. Naturally, as pints will do, I had to relieve myself, so I headed out back to Henley's outhouse, at the time one of the finest in London, a three-seater, with leg room. Room enough for some air to circulate, which on that day wasn't much.
"So I'm standing over the hole, doing my business like any gentleman, when I hear a strange noise coming from the corner. I look over and a fellow is bent over a bucket scrubbing clothes. Scrubbing clothes, in a bog, on the grimiest day of the year, September ninth, 1752. Now there's not much a man can do mid-stream, but I couldn't help my curiosity, so I call out, 'What the devil are ye doing man?'"
"'I'm washing my clothes, senor, what's it to you?'"
"'Senor,' I think. What's that? By this time I'm finished with my chore so I take a step over toward the man, wondering what kind of accent is this on these shores. I see he's got a couple pairs of pants and some shirts hanging on the wall, drying. 'What the bloody hell is this then?' I admit now, after years and years of contemplation of the pivotal, cursed moment of my life, that maybe the pints had roughened up the tone of my approach a wee bit."
"'I just need to wash my clothes, be ignorant of me.' As I got a closer look at him, I could tell he must have been from the Mediterranean, not that I really knew or had seen anybody from those parts, I just knew.
"'But in an outhouse man!?' I took a closer look at the clothes, which were nice, if a bit worn. On the tail of each shirt, in elaborate embroidery, was stitched, 'Jesus Algebueno.'
"'What is this Jesus stuff? You steal these shirts from a clergyman? How dare you!' Okay, so maybe on that day, September ninth, 1752, I had a few more than my usual two pints. It was a hot, grimy day."
"'Not Gee-zus, sir, but Hey Zeus, my name. My mother made me these shirts. She stitched my name in them. I am very proud of them. I wash them where I wash them.'"
"I tell you honestly, Dan the Man," Lew looked into my eyes with the saddest, oldest eyes I have ever seen, nibbled his last bit of chocolate chip cookie, and hung his head. "What I did next was horrible, inexcusable, not at all befitting a gentleman cobbler. Heat, grime, and my own xenophobia--it took me until the 1880s to discover that part of it--and pints all conspired within me and against me. I said to the man, who was sweating and just trying to wash his clothes, I said, 'Jesus, Zeus, get your deities straight you alien heathen. And never,' with this I took a drying shirt off the wall and flung it aimlessly; though long before basketball was ever invented, I made the first swish, right into a bog hole, 'never wash your clothes in an English loo again!'"
"He stared at the hole where one of his precious, and I do mean precious, I see that now, shirts had just disappeared down, and then he turned to me and hissed, a definite hiss, 'Sir, you have no idea what you have done. Because of how you have dishonored me and my mother's haberdashery skills, may you not rest until you find a loo, as you call it, a loo with laundering facilities. Bona fortuna!'"
After several minutes of silent sitting there, regarding this poor wretch, who just sat there with his head in his hands, all I could say was, "And..."
"Dan the Man, phooey! I knew you couldn't help me. Don't you know who you look upon with such a pitying, this-guy's-daft look? It is I, the legendary, tragic, mythic Wandering Lew, the three-hundred-year-old Wandering Lew who is doomed to walk the Earth until he finds the elusive, quite possibly non-existent Laundering Loo. I am the one who mocked Hey Zeus Algebueno, who was just trying to wash his clothes in an outhouse in London, England, on September ninth, 1752, and for my sin I have been walking the globe since, ever in search of a public restroom with clothes washing facilities. This is my twentieth pass through North America. I have been on all the continents, in every country, state, and province. Metropolises and villages, kingdoms and shanty towns. I know the historical evolution of plumbing in my bones. I have peed on dozens of iterations of the urinal cake. My tush is splintered and I have discovered ways to out-trick an automatic flusher sensor that would make your head spin. I have read more disgusting graffiti than your Library of Congress could ever catalog. Look at these hands: They've been scraped to rawness by forests of rough paper towels and been blown dry of any tenderness that once so lovingly made shoes. Take heed, Dan who calls himself a Man; be kind and respectful of your fellow man, from the boardroom to the bathroom, lest you end up like me, cursed to wander forever seeking redemption from, in my case, nothing more than a Sears Kenmore adjacent to a urinal."
With that he staggered to his feet and started walking away.
"But Lew, can't I buy you another cookie, at least?"
With that he lightened up a bit. "One for the road, perhaps. Those chocolate morsels are the best I've had since Siam, 1897. I'm heading over to Wal-Mart. For years now I've half-believed Sam Walton will be my savior. Sooner or later, I figure, he's gonna put some industrial-sized washer and dryers in his restrooms, don't you think?"
So I bought Lew another cookie and gave him my phone number. I told him to call me periodically. I also promised him that if I ever win Lotto, I'm going to start a chain of laundromats cum restrooms, Wash'n'Waste. It's the least I could do for the poor guy.
The Stanley Brothers-The Wandering Boy
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