Laundry or dinner? As grim a Sophie's choice as we've ever had to make. What if there were another way? Welcome to Mary's Coin Laundry. Materials: two loads of dirty laundry, lots of quarters, spare cash, ravenous appetite, preferably spurred by misguided late-Sunday-night marathon of Dazed and Confused. Instructions: Panic. The workday begins in a couple of hours, and there are exactly zero clean pants. Begin a sartorial search party. Socks should be under the bed; boxers inside the oven; pants, T-shirts, and ties in the bat-infested cave that is the closet. With duds in basket, drive to Mary's Coin Laundry. Inside the cramped 24-hour Laundromat-slash-cafeteria, take a minute to enjoy the aroma — ah, nothing like detergent and butter in the morning. Drop $2.75 into adjoining Speed Queen machines. Choose heavily soiled or normal wash? Heavily soiled. Add detergent, push Start, and let the Queen do its business. Order a choripan, $4.50. Ten minutes to go. Mamey milkshake, $3.50. Watch the clothes spin as hypnotically as the shake swirls. Extract wet load, deposit four quarters into the dryer. This is the last stretch. Get a cortadito, 75 cents. Some things aren't meant to go together. Watching television in the bathtub, sex and pastrami, dinner and laundry. Somehow you're doing it. The dryer trills. Load finished. Laundry: $6.50. Dinner: $8.75. Getting it all done in less than an hour: priceless.