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<–It’s so much simpler.

The sun rose over the dumpster’s rim and struck his face like a sulfur-plated splitting maul.  His entire body pumped with pain.  Opening his eyes slowly, cautiously, fearful of what he would see.  He tried to piece last night together.  He fluttered the fingers on his right hand, then his left, and then flexed his toes.  So, he thought, I’m not paralyzed.  He sat up and took a look around.  He was in a metal dumpster, on a thin nest of refuse, and his skin itched.  He touched a patch of crusted red on his arm, suspecting blood, but couldn’t find any cuts nearby.  Strange.  The red flaked off when he pinched his skin.  It smelled familiar.  He felt his hair and it too was matted with the stuff.  He hazarded a taste.  All at once vivid memories crowded into his consciousness.  It was ketchup.  He had been covered in ketchup and pitched into a trash dumpster.

The night had started off just fine.  They went out to a brewpub.  The beer was fantastic.  They went to another brewpub, and another.  Every hand-forged tap handle released a new marvelous flavor.  Eventually the beers pried open a pressing hunger.

“Poutine.”

“What?” asked Aaron.

“You don’t know poutine!”

“What is poutine?”

“Best to just experience poutine.  It’s a delicacy!  So good.”

They high-stepped through the leaf-strewn streets whistling at cars and singing at mailboxes, until the circus glow of Christmas lights blessed a corner up ahead.  Small trailers parked at every angle had windows open and awnings out.  People in black jeans and hooded sweatshirts milled around, holding red-checked cardboard cartons and paper plates.  The hearty smell of fry-oil and sausages and garlic and roasting vegetables sunk barbs into Aaron’s stomach, pulling him in.

A line twenty-strong snaked from the poutine trailer’s window.  Inside the trailer a cute girl stirred a mountain of French fries with a metal flipper while a skinny bearded guy took orders and dollars.  Steaming cartons of fries steeped in gravy emerged from the tiny kitchen.

“Get a double,” Aaron’s friend told him.  He did.

He shared a picnic table with a woman in a beaded scarf telling fortunes and reading irises, and a gaggle of Vermont transplants who couldn’t stop talking about the upcoming ski season.

Aaron took a plastic forkful of poutine and raised it to his lips.  It smelled like holy goulash and tasted like the drippings from a cheeseburger only thicker, smokier.

“Whoa!” said Aaron.  “Where’s the ketchup?”

The Vermonters gawked and the psychic dropped her tarot as he bounded off to fetch a squeeze bottle from the side-table.  He sat back down and covered the mound of squishy fries with sweet cool ketchup and resumed his eating.  It took him a few bites before he noticed that everyone under the lurid canopy watched him.  Whispers of “ketchup?” and “on poutine??” slowly crescendoed.  Word reached the mobile kitchen and the girl with the flipper burst through the flimsy door.  Bounding towards him, spatula held high, she yelled unintelligibly.  The troops were rallied and a lynch mob formed.  Aaron was swarmed by a hashy mess of beer-breathing hooligans.  They seized the ketchup and doused him thoroughly.  He cried out in shock but the mob pressed in.  Punches and kicks were punctuated by the clanging of the metal spatula resounding off his head.  Next thing he knew, he awoke in this dumpster.

Potato Champion

SE 12th Ave and Hawthorne Blvd, Portland OR

www.potatochampion.com

Madison’s feet black cat fire-worked on the barstool’s metal rung.  She kept sliding around and catching the ass of her tights on a rip in the vinyl stool-top but it didn’t bother her tonight.

Jules grinned and said, “To my champion!” and drank another drink of beer.

Madison broke her cocktail straw’s spine and now knotted it.  She blushed but the red light of the place from the candles in hurricane jars hid her color.  “I know.  I can’t believe I won,” she said.  She wasn’t used to the attention.

Jules scooped her head into Madison’s concentration and used a finger to hook her chin.  She looked through her best friend’s thick mod glasses, into her eyes, and smiled her cute chipped-tooth smile.  “Madison, I always told you you were good.”  Jules pulled out of the hearth of the bar’s redness and yanked at her pager.  “Shit, Maddie I have to go.”

“But you promised you’d wait with me in case Rakes came!”

“I know, baby, but you’re a queen tonight.  Just be cool, be yourself.  And talk to him this time.  None of this too-shy-for-guys crap.”

With a whip wake of clove-smoke Jules left, a wet five dollar bill melting into the bar top.  Jules’ departure left a tender hole in Madison’s confidence.  Madison read her future in the ice cubes of her glass.

The DJ’s peroxide afro bounced to his b-side beats.  Conversations barb-wired the air.  Madison composed herself.  If you’re a winner then act like one, she thought.

The door flapped open and Rakes was there.  His left pant leg was cut short just below a knobby knee and hemmed with a six-pack’s plastic ringer.  He wore all black and looked like a burnt match.  Madison built a suspension bridge with her stare.  Rakes saw her and walked the span to take the vacated stool, his skinny black jeans rubbing Madison’s one-night tights.

Rakes said, “hey.”

Madison heard his capillaries hum.

Rakes said, “you’re the pinball contest winner.”

Madison felt her organs glow.  Her heart was a candle in a hurricane ribcage.  Rakes had lit her.  She sighed and her breath made the air between them shimmer.

Madison said, “hey.  Yeah.”  She pictured the pinball machine backdrop she’d designed.  A forest on fire.  A shark-finned Cadillac stampeding forward.  It was good.  And now here she was, talking to Rakes.  She’d won all right.

The Attic

3336 24th Street (b/t Bartlett & Osage), San Francisco

(415) 643-3376

There it was again.  At first he thought he was imagining it.  He was trying so hard to pay attention to her, trying to be present, repeating back little details so he would seem interested.  Concentration was vital on a first date.  It set up the foundation for trust, which set up the foundation for sex.  So he was very careful to listen.  But every few minutes it would happen.  He was definitely not imagining it; she had something the matter with her eye.

She was still talking about Boulder, like it was the Promised Land.  “…And he started this veg-oil business in Boulder, right?”  He waited for her eye to do that thing.  Now he was sure he wasn’t just making it up.

She said, “it was so, like, green movement, but like before there was a green movement,” come on, where was it?

She said, “he was like, a prophet?” and there!  Her eye!  As she sat there proud of herself for using the word prophet her eye popped out of the socket and went back in.

Oh man, this was crazy.  She’s talking about some hippy in Colorado and her eye is pumping in and out of its socket like a ping-pong ball in one of those Thailand shows that he saw three summers ago and how the hell could he go to bed with her now, with her eye like that?  It was too bad, really, because otherwise she was flawless.  Cover model flawless.  But man, this eye thing!  He tried to think of a way to take a picture of it in action.  Maybe fake a text message and snap one?  But how would he time it…?

She said, “So?  How do you feel about it?”

He said, “how do I feel about it?  You mean…” what the hell was she even talking about now?  “…I think biodeisel is terrific.  Put a lid on pollution, right?”  He’d just said lid.  I.  Lid.  I lid.

And then it popped out again!  How did it not fall out?  Maybe she’d been punched?  Or she had an accident?  And her skull cracked slightly.  Or a birth defect…

She said, “no, how do you feel about getting some ice cream after dinner?”

Ice.  Eyes.  Okay, concentrate on her.  Could he take a picture on the way to the bathroom?

He had to stop thinking about it.  He took another piece of pizza.

The pizza was good.  The pizza was very good.  He was surprised that she had suggested anchovies.  They were his favorite but he didn’t think many girls liked them, especially beautiful cover-model girls.  Well, she was almost a cover-model girl.  And really, as long as they took the pictures when her eye was in place, she could still be a cover-model.  As he brought the piece to his open mouth rich steam swirled towards his lips.  He looked down at the single plump anchovy set lovingly atop sauce and caramelized mozzarella.  It was white, shimmering, glassy with its sheen of Atlantic fat.  He paused.   The tip of the pizza slice pointed down slightly, sagging under the weight of the good thick tomato sauce, and he stared. That little bulbous globe of a belly on this salty fish looked just like her fucked up bulging pop-out eye!

Pizzetta 211

211 23rd Ave (at California), San Francisco

http://www.pizzetta211.com/

(415) 379-9880

Zander stared at the wall of laptop backs and held his cup of tea.  Each laptop was a slightly different color on the grayscale, which kept in theme with the sealed concrete floor and the steel and brushed aluminum throughout the lofty café.  Behind each laptop was some stupid info miner, toiling away in the fragmented muck of code and data, gumming binary coal dust under virtual fingernails.  Zander sniffed and arched his eyebrows.  All these people,  stuck at the limits of their own ability, and nobody could help them.  He was at their level once—in fifth grade.  He spotted a chink in the laptop wall and went to fill it.

He sat on a blocky bench at the upstairs bar between two women.  The first had a half-finished iced coffee with a straw in it.  The ice had all melted and she wouldn’t touch it again for the rest of the afternoon.  She wouldn’t finish her organic donut either.  Zander knew this the moment he saw her and he knew the staling coffee and donut would, for the next hours, irk him like an unfinished movie.  The second woman wore four different dresses all layered and she had a kid’s lunch box open and inside it were ten different types of scotch tape.  Designers.  They were even worse than amateur coders.  At least she was hot.  DesignGirl, he thought.  LunchBox HeteroFag.  DesignGirl moved her sketchbook over to make room for Zander’s laptop, which he set down reverently.  As he sat he noticed she had an intricate tattoo of a dragon with a death’s head on her shoulder.  She didn’t see him looking at it, and he reached back to touch his shoulder blade where his own fresh tattoo still itched just a bit.  He wanted her to know about it but he couldn’t figure out a way to bring it up so he didn’t.

Once his computer was running his mind focused.  It cleared.  Though his eyes moved over the rough-hewn concrete walls and many faces these steady images fizzled and fluoresced like tracers in his brain.  The café’s jumbled voices were a steady buzz; he thought of all the packets of information zinging around the infinite web of the internet.  He fluttered his fingers over the keyboard, ready to show them all.  He could leave a message in DesignGirl’s inbox.  He could make it so she didn’t even know where it came from.  He could reprogram the streaming audio in the café too, hack it, change it from this Emo crap to something with a pulse, something metal-studded, get some lulz, some snaps.  PandoraFail.  He could do anything he wanted, really, with his laptop and his talent.

Coffee Bar

1890 Bryant Street (at Mariposa & Florida), San Francisco

www.coffeebar-usa.com

(415) 551-8100

They sat across from one another with their dark pink stationery spread out everywhere and they didn’t even notice when the waiter stood there in his t-shirt and apron for half a minute holding their salad and pizzetta.  Finally he said “scuse me” in his Guatemalan accent and they looked up, startled.  The boy shuffled some pages into a stack to make space on the wooden tabletop.  The girl finished copying an address from a text message on her phone to the front of an envelope.  The waiter set the food down and left.

“We’ll definitely get a response to most of these,” she said as she wrote the last digit of the zip code.

“Well, at least a few,” said the boy while aggressively shaking salt on the salad.  He noticed that the design they had stamped on one of the pages was smudged a little.  He thought about crumpling it up and the word ‘decommission’ occurred to him.

She said, “oh I think most.”  She licked and sealed the envelope and put in the done pile.

He said, “well, I was reading this ‘zine this morning.  And they had this letter-writing campaign.  Not the ‘zine.  These other people did.  And they sort of did what we’re doing, only it was about embarrassing things, and nobody wrote back.  They even put like prizes in their letters.  Like Cracker Jack prizes.  Anyway, the article was about how nobody writes anymore.  How it’s a lost art.  Decommissioned, you know?”

“What do you mean nobody writes?  I write!”  She jutted her lower lip out in what could have been a pout but turned out to be a jet that she used to blow her bangs out of her eyes.  “Anyways, they can send a picture if they don’t want to write.  It’s…  I mean, do you think it’s a stupid idea?”

“No, no.  I think… Let’s do a few more and then go to that show you were talking about.”  He ate three mushrooms off the top of the pizzetta one after another and then picked up his pen.

He wrote: ‘Dear sir or madam, we respectfully request your help with our book about true love…” Then he noticed that his fingers had left a mark on the page from the mushrooms.  He wadded it up and reached for a new sheet.  He kept thinking about her saying ‘it has to be perfect or they won’t take it seriously!’  He concentrated on making this letter a perfect one.

Atlas Cafe

3049 20th Street (at Harrison), San Francisco

http://www.atlascafe.net/

(415) 648-1047

Outside it was just getting dim while inside the neon running the length of the white banquet cycled through its rainbow hues.  Maybe that’s why she liked this place.  It was so glitzy.  So clean.  Glitzy and clean like a limousine.  She’d have to write that in her blog.

She went into the bathroom, under the Magritte painting (or was it Dali?  She’d look it up), locked the door, and studied herself in the mirror.  Okay.  Okay.  A little lip gloss, and perfect.  She pulled down on her loose t-shirt to show more clavicle and adjusted the collar of her jacket.  Then she went back into the black and white dining room and sat at her table to wait for her French fries with truffle ketchup and her glass of sauvignon blanc.

Why weren’t there more people here?  Nobody would see her!  It was too early.  She’d let her appetite interfere with her style again.  So she wouldn’t look like a complete loser she took out her Moleskine notebook and her lacquered pen.  In her notebook she wrote the date and then, “What I Wore,” and underlined it.  Then she wrote: “Motorcycle Jacket by Super Luscious.  Skinny Jeans by Coast of Spain.  Ex-boyfriend’s T by my ex-boyfriend.”

She stopped.  He would probably never see it because he thought her blog was stupid.  In fact, he’d always thought it was stupid.  But her followers would love it.  She tapped her chin with the back of her pen then took her digital camera out of her purse to take some self-portraits.  Ex-boyfriend’s T.  She should start a boutique.

She turned to a new page in her notebook.

She wrote: “Movie Date Jeans, by ex-boyfriend.”  She wrote: “Picnic Tank, by ex-boyfriend.”  She wrote: “First Time Panties, by ex-boyfriend.”  She’d have to go through her closet piece by piece; she couldn’t remember it all off the top of her head.  She’d sell her whole fucked up relationship to the world.  When it was gone she’d buy everything new, and all of it black.

Frjtz

590 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA

www.frjtzfries.com

(415) 863-8272

The tiny doses of wine from tasting at different wineries had added up to a sum that caused the day to seem too bright and she squinted as they made their way to the line at the burger stand.  After reading the magazine review they felt obligated to come here even though breakfast still hadn’t worn off.

“Is it always this crowded?” She asked.

“How should I know?”  He had that tone again, implying she’d asked another stupid question.  “I’ve never been here before either.”

“Oh,” she said, and tugged again at her sticking dress.

When another couple got behind them in line she felt a little better.  Being the last in a long line was so much worse than being even second-to-last.  She took her husband’s hand in hers.  They stood holding hands for just a moment before sweat formed between their palms and she let go.

The smell of hamburgers and frying potatoes was strong.  She stood dizzy from the wine and thirsty from the dry California heat and blind from the glowering sun.  Her new ring felt too tight and she touched it with her thumb.  All of a sudden she wanted very badly to run back to the rental car alone and speed off.  She wanted to be out of this line, out of this ring, out of this dress, and gone.  Maybe she could make it to Canada before nightfall; she wasn’t sure.  She had never been to Canada, but it sounded very nice right now.  It sounded like a cold river.

Taylor’s Automatic Refresher

933 Main Street, St. Helena

(also in the Ferry Building, San Francisco)

http://taylorsautomaticrefresher.com/

(707) 963-3486, (415) 318-3424

When Daniel arrived Romeo already had his fancy phone out, tilting and shaking it as he played the video game he always played (probably the only one he was any good at, thought Daniel).  The other boys were crowded behind him, watching as he set a new high score while the girls sat across from them giggling.  The cutest girl, Justine, used her fingertips to pull apart a Hong Kong waffle and she shared the chewy pieces with the other girls as they eyed the boys.

Daniel stood alone near the bill-changing machine.  In his pocket he rubbed his hoarded dollar bills that had softened from weeks of over-handling.  His heart fluttered as he counted the girls: seven, perfect.

The commotion of the bill changer drew a few glances, including Romeo’s.  “Poor Danny’s rich!  Hey, look at Poor Danny!”  All the boys laughed, and Romeo laughed the loudest while he kept right on with his video game.

Daniel took his quarters straight to the crane game.  This was it.  It was all or nothing.  Maybe his mom couldn’t afford a phone for him, but it wouldn’t matter after this.  He put four quarters into the red plastic slot and grabbed the joystick with his tremoring hand.

The first animal was easy.  It was a giraffe that sat upright amidst the other animals so it’s head basically placed itself in the claw.  Daniel maneuvered it to the exit chute and his nerves steadied a bit.  The next one was harder—an elephant with huge plastic disks for eyes.  The claw tilted wildly when it fell and Daniel thought the angle might be too severe, but when the three claw arms closed the elephant was locked in.  By the third animal the other kids had noticed.  By the fourth they were rapt.

And so it went, one by one, as Daniel silently thinned the plush herd, filling the exit chute with seven different creatures, each more vibrant than the last.  When he was done he bowed his head with relief.  Then he pulled all seven animals from the machine and cradled them back to the table.

Romeo was still playing the silly game on his phone and was making even more frantic gestures than normal, but nobody was paying attention.  Daniel solemnly gave one prize to each girl, saving the best and the last for Justine.  It was a toucan, and her eyes brightened when he gave it to her.

Eggettes

2810 Diamond Street, San Francisco

http://www.eggettessf.com/

(415) 839-5282

She would lean her head into his shoulder and wonder how she could ever feel safer.  The dusky amber light of the place made the line of his jaw particularly handsome, and she would smile as he tapped out the tricky rhythms frantically with his feet.  “Do you think we’ll still be coming here when we’re seventy?” he asked her one time.

Then the color left their lives.  They stopped coming to the club.  They stopped going out anywhere.  He had been diagnosed with something horrible and terminal.  Instead of raw and virile jazz a grainy white noise became their soundtrack.  It was punctuated by bleak hospital visits and dry, indifferent doctor opinions, and the waiting and the worry were a steady drone.  His brain was quickly dying and there was nothing that anybody could do about it.  She loved him so much, but she began to untangle her feelings from him.  Like a stop-motion sequence of roots plunging into the earth, only played in reverse, she took back her attachments.

She knew he would die.  He knew it too.  And she prepared herself the only way she could.  By the time he finally passed she had frozen up all her feelings and she was a silent, barren, immobile glacier.  For a while she remained that way.  But now, for the first time in two years, she was back at the club.  The neon bar lights painted her face in inappropriately joyous hues, but they also highlighted a new slackness in her mouth and around her eyes.  For so long she had held a singular tension there.  Now, after all the waiting, he had died.  Finally she could hear the music again and the wild notes twined ivylike into her chilly longing, stretching tiny shoots into the walls of her solitude.

She took her cocktail to a booth and let the scruffy musicians fill her up with their screeching glisses and lock tight melodies.  She watched a chain draped over the drummer’s cymbal vibrate like a rattlesnake tail.  She saw the staccato tapping of the piano’s hammers against exposed strings.  She eyed the bassist as he dipped his instrument and fluttered black fingers in a blind trance.  Alone in her booth she leaned her head against the sturdy faux leather and for the first time in a long time she shook with something other than despair.

There was something new, something dangerous in this place, and she was giddy with it.  Even as the paisano murals dated the walls and the glass behind the bar fogged with age, this small club housed a hot spark of regeneration.  She closed her eyes and brimmed over with brassy cascades of legitimate and irrepeatable improvisation.

Club Deluxe

1511 Haight Street (at Ashbury)

www.liveatdeluxe.com

(415) 552-6949