Burn Collector by Al Burian

Author:Al Burian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2010-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

5.

My ex-girlfriend Elizabeth is in town. She is interviewing at a graduate school in Seattle. There’s nothing like the evocation of grad school to dampen the joy de vivre implicit in your story of how you almost got that job at the copy store but then hit and run a car instead.

“Yeah, so that’s pretty much what I’m up to these days,” I squirm over dinner, having just recited the hit and run story anyway. What else am I going to talk about?

“Hmmm,” Elizabeth says, non-plussed.

It’s pretty embarrassing. But then, her rationales for grad school leave me staring back at her just as blankly. All we really crave in this day and age is for someone to be self-assured, for someone to display a directional motivation and some sense of comfort in the security of knowing where they are going. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, but you don’t find many people who deliver. The muttered excuses and dismissals with which we preface our lives put all involved on edge.

Leaving the restaurant, she has to get up early to drive up to Seattle, I’m telling her that I was glad to see her and it’s awkward in a way I’ve never really experienced before, not just over as in I-used-to-be-with-you-but-now-it’s-over; this is alien and absurd, the feeling of watching a chasm grow between the tips of your toes and her toes. She’s not like me at all, and I. try to kiss her and get her to hang around with me some more, but she has to get up early and besides— she’s staying at her other ex-boyfriends’ house and where would we hang out, anyway? On Tedra’s porch? Good night, Al. Good night. See you later. Good luck with everything.

Walking home. I never really felt stupid for not having a car or a house or any money…. those are worries which have always seemed universes away to me. Lower Southeast is dismal, empty, run down with burnt-out industrial buildings and the kind of brain-deadening nine-to-five office supply warehouses which exist only to provide daily exercises in ritual torture for people who have done something wrong in another life. Certainly not this one; certainly none of us have done anything to deserve this lot right now. I won’t be able to sleep, once again. I’ll walk around all night. I just keep getting dumber, it seems.

Portland could not really be described as a twenty-four hour town by any stretch of the imagination. There’s a bowling alley, various convenience stores, and the hot-cake house, which is where I find myself hanging out instead of ending up back at home. Two drunks yell at each other across the table in the booth across from mine-”Jeff! You are lovin’ those eggs, huh! What the fuck! Sit down, man! Pass me the Catsup!!!” They crack themselves up.

One of the drunks gets up from the table and stumbles over to the jukebox. He returns with a mischievous grin plastered over his face underneath dried up egg-yolk.

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