Everything in a room can be broken.
For over two hours I sat on the wall on the top floor of a five story parking garage, watching vehicles file in and occasionally file out. The runways revolved, from where I sat, in a two-lane spiral down to the bustling January afternoon sidewalks below, sucking up machinery and people and occasionally spitting them back out. It wasn’t quite four o’clock yet, so there was still at least half an hour before the rushes fled their occupations for a fast drive home to shower and a bed.
I think for the most part I’ve been feeling skeptical toward the genuine importance of any one person’s maddened flight from suit and tie to ripped up t-shirt. I wanted somebody to catch a foot at the edge of a curb and come crashing down onto the pavement. With an eagerness that made me feel a little cold, I pulled a sweater on and hibernated on the ledge, five stories up, watching the door at the far end of the lot, trying to hear the footsteps echoing before the knob rattled. When one of them popped and darted off away from my direction I’d call out to them and hope they’d turn about so carelessly abrupt as to cause an accident. One of them did trip over his own feet, but gained his balance again too soon before the fall I so wanted to experience at his expense.
When the man had stilled his run to a brisk walk he glared in my direction, patting his slick hair back down and swinging his briefcase as though having felt dainty instead of flustered. I don’t know what he must have been thinking, though, when our eyes met. Possibly it was embarrassment at having turned at a stranger’s call, thinking that he’d fallen prey to intercepting a communication never actually meant for him. And how lonely that does feel; to hear someone speak and involuntarily supposing the call is for you, only to find out you’re not being spoken to and you might as well be all alone forever following that.
The superintendent of the building has told me that I’ve lately been practicing the selfishness of being bitter. But what could I be so bitter about? He told me with a shrug of the shoulder that it’s because I was laid off last week from the job I’ve held down for five long years of my diminishing life as a single man. He told me it was only worse because I was let go one week prior to what would have been my five year anniversary with the company, an honor that not only would have earned me a sizeable pay increase but also a promotion out of the district to the Corton Road branch in Corton Road Peabody. In addition to all of this, my superintendent proposed, the so-called “bitterness” hanging over me like a beautiful hex was carrying along and advancing from the devastation of job security on to the next most likely disaster, which naturally would be the inability to forfeit the necessary funds to allow me the privilege of renting an apartment in his building.
He’s a nice fellow (odd for the part of town I lived in), and offered to hold back my rent until I landed a new job, promising that I didn’t have to worry about being evicted so long as I showed him the promise of an upcoming payment. Then with a smile he told me to get over myself and pick up the goddamned classifieds section.
Such honestly rare compassion might have made me return a smile with more heart had I not completely disagreed with him on the whole psychological evaluation thing. On the contrary, I hadn’t been worried about rent at all, because my bags have been packed since the day I was laid off and everyone knows there is no shortage of room on the highway to pull over and sleep if the 300-mile drive gets a person tired. I once ran away from home when I was thirteen and didn’t return for the whole duration of the summer. If I survived the streetlife as a fledgling teenager, reason suggested, then there’s no reason I couldn’t do it again. Especially since I had a car to sleep in and almost $950 to put toward motels should the car prove too cold a cradle at night. That sort of money should last me for more than one summer, especially considering how easy it is to break into a motel manager’s office and re-claim the night’s doss money.
I’d never been a burglar before, but there would be no sense in not trying to be one when the prospect arrived. I haven’t anything to hold me back from trying new things. By then, sitting alone in a parking garage, I should already have been well on the way to becoming a new man, but for some reason I’ve just felt too morose to get around much. What I needed was inspiration. Some fleeting ambiguous form of it, no matter how small or large; just some electricity in me to get the engines running.
I clearly wasn’t going to find that perched up on a ledge five stories up in the business district of the town I was ready to see retreating in the rearview mirror. “Good-bye Lolund Creek City?”
I could have been asking that to the bricks of Lord Street for all the advice I’ve been taking from what should’ve been just plain obvious from the moment I packed my luggage.
Thinking back on that one, incidentally, I couldn’t remember much of what I'd even packed. The essentials, of course; bathroom articles and fresh clothes. But I didn’t have that many changes of wardrobe, especially for work, and I knew I left all the casual clothes alone because I figured eventually the detectives would arrive and somebody would say into a recorder: “Clothes seem to be left untouched.” For some reason that still made me laugh a little, but the joke was wearing off. After all, who would investigate me? The superintendent of the building may be an agreeable gentleman, but when someone doesn’t pay rent when they’re supposed to, they are asked to leave…if nobody’s around to get asked, they get their stuff thrown out. It’s a no nonsense relationship, even if it is friendly. So I guess I had maybe two months before all those untouched t-shirts and corduroys got a taste of the sidewalk. And who knows how long after that before somebody reported me missing?
I felt sort of shitty about abandoning the superintendent like this. Offering me an extension on the rent surely held its weight with me, and I did wholly appreciate it, and I knew I always would. But that’s life, isn’t it? They tell you to go when they’re ready. I wasn’t ready, but I was certainly leaving anyway.
After the sitting at the parking garage I went for a drink at Pill’s Haberdashery, where I ran into two ex-coworkers, Paulson Cole and Winthrop Lime, both from Floor C, where all the noise came from. They were having what the office always referred to as “overtime hours in a bottle.” This was because drinking at a bar straight off of work, still dressed in your office fatigues, was not really considered true personal time. Once someone gets out of the shower right after work, out of their suits and ties and dress shoes, smoke from the breakroom washed off…only then could a person be truly free and on his/her own personal time.
So here was Winthrop and Paulson, having their overtime hours in a bottle. The crappy poetry of this made me cringe. Office humor is the worst.
They felt bad for my having lost my job and, just as I would have suspected, picked up the tab. That’s why I drank so fucking much. Lew the barkeep knows me, so he kept them coming. I was going to miss both Lew and Winthrop, but not Paulson Cole, who was an asshole.
The last time I checked the alarm clock the number said 3:01. In the morning. I showered, dressed in dark blue slacks, a white, slightly ruffled button-up shirt with buttoned collar, and a dark blue jacket. No tie.
Except for the absence of a tie, I looked ready for work.
Seven long hours on the road, squinting against the sunrise, and I'd started to wonder whether I had traveled in a straight line or not. I knew I must have taken at least four ramps, not really knowing if those ramps were pushing me off onto the next road or really just bringing me back to the city I'd finally left.
You see, it wasn’t until I was nineteen that I ever set foot outside of Lolund Creek City-a fairly large city, yes, but an experience worth keeping solely to itself in itself? No.
Since that time when I was nineteen, I’ve been to just two more cities outside of the southern region. Tallied up, my travels have amounted to no more than three scattered months total spent outside of my birth city. Corton Branch Peabody was on the opposite side of the state. When my request for a transfer had been approved, that night had been the biggest celebration of my life.
In the end I was still leaving Lolund Creek City, but in a much different way. In a lost way. I had become a drifter.
And like all drifters I was forgotten.
I think for the most part I’ve been feeling skeptical toward the genuine importance of any one person’s maddened flight from suit and tie to ripped up t-shirt. I wanted somebody to catch a foot at the edge of a curb and come crashing down onto the pavement. With an eagerness that made me feel a little cold, I pulled a sweater on and hibernated on the ledge, five stories up, watching the door at the far end of the lot, trying to hear the footsteps echoing before the knob rattled. When one of them popped and darted off away from my direction I’d call out to them and hope they’d turn about so carelessly abrupt as to cause an accident. One of them did trip over his own feet, but gained his balance again too soon before the fall I so wanted to experience at his expense.
When the man had stilled his run to a brisk walk he glared in my direction, patting his slick hair back down and swinging his briefcase as though having felt dainty instead of flustered. I don’t know what he must have been thinking, though, when our eyes met. Possibly it was embarrassment at having turned at a stranger’s call, thinking that he’d fallen prey to intercepting a communication never actually meant for him. And how lonely that does feel; to hear someone speak and involuntarily supposing the call is for you, only to find out you’re not being spoken to and you might as well be all alone forever following that.
The superintendent of the building has told me that I’ve lately been practicing the selfishness of being bitter. But what could I be so bitter about? He told me with a shrug of the shoulder that it’s because I was laid off last week from the job I’ve held down for five long years of my diminishing life as a single man. He told me it was only worse because I was let go one week prior to what would have been my five year anniversary with the company, an honor that not only would have earned me a sizeable pay increase but also a promotion out of the district to the Corton Road branch in Corton Road Peabody. In addition to all of this, my superintendent proposed, the so-called “bitterness” hanging over me like a beautiful hex was carrying along and advancing from the devastation of job security on to the next most likely disaster, which naturally would be the inability to forfeit the necessary funds to allow me the privilege of renting an apartment in his building.
He’s a nice fellow (odd for the part of town I lived in), and offered to hold back my rent until I landed a new job, promising that I didn’t have to worry about being evicted so long as I showed him the promise of an upcoming payment. Then with a smile he told me to get over myself and pick up the goddamned classifieds section.
Such honestly rare compassion might have made me return a smile with more heart had I not completely disagreed with him on the whole psychological evaluation thing. On the contrary, I hadn’t been worried about rent at all, because my bags have been packed since the day I was laid off and everyone knows there is no shortage of room on the highway to pull over and sleep if the 300-mile drive gets a person tired. I once ran away from home when I was thirteen and didn’t return for the whole duration of the summer. If I survived the streetlife as a fledgling teenager, reason suggested, then there’s no reason I couldn’t do it again. Especially since I had a car to sleep in and almost $950 to put toward motels should the car prove too cold a cradle at night. That sort of money should last me for more than one summer, especially considering how easy it is to break into a motel manager’s office and re-claim the night’s doss money.
I’d never been a burglar before, but there would be no sense in not trying to be one when the prospect arrived. I haven’t anything to hold me back from trying new things. By then, sitting alone in a parking garage, I should already have been well on the way to becoming a new man, but for some reason I’ve just felt too morose to get around much. What I needed was inspiration. Some fleeting ambiguous form of it, no matter how small or large; just some electricity in me to get the engines running.
I clearly wasn’t going to find that perched up on a ledge five stories up in the business district of the town I was ready to see retreating in the rearview mirror. “Good-bye Lolund Creek City?”
I could have been asking that to the bricks of Lord Street for all the advice I’ve been taking from what should’ve been just plain obvious from the moment I packed my luggage.
Thinking back on that one, incidentally, I couldn’t remember much of what I'd even packed. The essentials, of course; bathroom articles and fresh clothes. But I didn’t have that many changes of wardrobe, especially for work, and I knew I left all the casual clothes alone because I figured eventually the detectives would arrive and somebody would say into a recorder: “Clothes seem to be left untouched.” For some reason that still made me laugh a little, but the joke was wearing off. After all, who would investigate me? The superintendent of the building may be an agreeable gentleman, but when someone doesn’t pay rent when they’re supposed to, they are asked to leave…if nobody’s around to get asked, they get their stuff thrown out. It’s a no nonsense relationship, even if it is friendly. So I guess I had maybe two months before all those untouched t-shirts and corduroys got a taste of the sidewalk. And who knows how long after that before somebody reported me missing?
I felt sort of shitty about abandoning the superintendent like this. Offering me an extension on the rent surely held its weight with me, and I did wholly appreciate it, and I knew I always would. But that’s life, isn’t it? They tell you to go when they’re ready. I wasn’t ready, but I was certainly leaving anyway.
After the sitting at the parking garage I went for a drink at Pill’s Haberdashery, where I ran into two ex-coworkers, Paulson Cole and Winthrop Lime, both from Floor C, where all the noise came from. They were having what the office always referred to as “overtime hours in a bottle.” This was because drinking at a bar straight off of work, still dressed in your office fatigues, was not really considered true personal time. Once someone gets out of the shower right after work, out of their suits and ties and dress shoes, smoke from the breakroom washed off…only then could a person be truly free and on his/her own personal time.
So here was Winthrop and Paulson, having their overtime hours in a bottle. The crappy poetry of this made me cringe. Office humor is the worst.
They felt bad for my having lost my job and, just as I would have suspected, picked up the tab. That’s why I drank so fucking much. Lew the barkeep knows me, so he kept them coming. I was going to miss both Lew and Winthrop, but not Paulson Cole, who was an asshole.
The last time I checked the alarm clock the number said 3:01. In the morning. I showered, dressed in dark blue slacks, a white, slightly ruffled button-up shirt with buttoned collar, and a dark blue jacket. No tie.
Except for the absence of a tie, I looked ready for work.
Seven long hours on the road, squinting against the sunrise, and I'd started to wonder whether I had traveled in a straight line or not. I knew I must have taken at least four ramps, not really knowing if those ramps were pushing me off onto the next road or really just bringing me back to the city I'd finally left.
You see, it wasn’t until I was nineteen that I ever set foot outside of Lolund Creek City-a fairly large city, yes, but an experience worth keeping solely to itself in itself? No.
Since that time when I was nineteen, I’ve been to just two more cities outside of the southern region. Tallied up, my travels have amounted to no more than three scattered months total spent outside of my birth city. Corton Branch Peabody was on the opposite side of the state. When my request for a transfer had been approved, that night had been the biggest celebration of my life.
In the end I was still leaving Lolund Creek City, but in a much different way. In a lost way. I had become a drifter.
And like all drifters I was forgotten.