You wanted the Sun.

It’s 11:30 PM, September 8th, 2018, a Saturday, and you just finished your dish-washing shift at the P5 Center for the Arts. You take the elevator up, out of the stuffy concrete basement, and step out into the cool night of downtown Portland where the soft breeze dries the sweat from your sticky skin. The towering lights of Broadway greet you, the night life energizing your tired limbs, and filling you with the rare joy of simply being alive.

You float on this feeling, passing a restaurant full of financiers in button down shirts sipping their high-priced cocktails. From your coat pocket you pull out and unwrap one of your chef’s oatmeal bars made especially for the crew. It’s a small gesture of kindness far removed from the Troutdale farm you used to work at where they would yell at you so often, for no reason at all, and this fills you with a righteous gladness that feels so fierce it borders on vengeful. If they could see you now they’d hardly recognize you, so happy, so strangely confident, and taller, probably, because we’re all pretty small when we’re crawling around picking green beans. They tried to keep you down. Humbled you into the dirt.

You also kept yourself down, but there were friends, ready to offer a hand, who wouldn’t let you stay there, and your chef is undoubtedly one of those kinds of people. A part of the chain to pull you out of the muck, and then, lift you to a height beyond skyscrapers. 

A block later, you manage to catch the Yellow line train, saving yourself a half hour wait, and punctuating another perfect shift. Elated, you take your seat, and watch the bar hoppers and 20-something year old kids wander the chaotic streets of Burnside. There is no envy here, you’ve had that life, and it gave you nothing. Instead, you are filled with a deep satisfaction as you recall the day’s events, the sometimes corny but always funny jokes, that lovely smile like sunshine on your face, and, of course, the food. Food made with love. You’ve never eaten so well. You’ll recall these moments and more during the ride home, loop them in your head, over and over, until they are woven into your cortex. You hope to never forget this. You hope.

Then you recall your chef deftly cutting vegetables, laughing with the cooks, a fleeting smile, a simple joke, a furrowed brow, a kind hello, an encouraging phrase, anything, really, to get you spinning, and your thoughts start to lift off, higher and higher, into fanciful hoping, where you begin to wish for an impossible life, a partner to the Sun, and it is then you remember how miserable you can feel, wrapped up in delusional fantasy.

The words to tell her aren’t there yet, and won’t be for another ten months, but you don’t know that, only the pain of the present, the toss and turn of longing. Every dawn, the heartache renewed. How much pain you’d be spared if you only knew that you’d get to a place of perfect equilibrium free of any uncertainty, five unbelievable years later, not through words, but your drawing, in a frame, and finally seeing this, understand that, in the end, you got more than you ever hoped for. 

 

I drew this for a friend.

My friend told me to draw this. I was relieved when my friend expressed satisfaction with the final product.

For the foreseeable future, we will continue to be friends.

9-29-10

The Market

Five years of design school and this is where I end up on my Sundays -- in the rain, working at a farmer's market. It's not so bad really, it's just that Sunday is when my friend Tyler shows up to work, and Tyler makes everything worse. Tyler's an idiot, but I thought I'd do the nice thing and find the guy some gainful employment. Even Tyler could work at a place like this without fucking everything up -- or so I thought.
 

My boss, Ulysses, talked to me the other day about it, "If that fucking idiot screws everything up again, I'm going to fire him! I've never fired anyone! But I will fire him -- after I ask my dad." Uly, as I called him, technically wasn't the boss of anyone, but he acted like it, and I suppose he did have powers of termination if it came down to it.

The rain came down as it usually does when it's winter in Portland. Everything was wet, it was raining, this is rain. Clouds, cold, gray, gloom, dreary, depression, do you get it!?

I needed to get my shit together fast, because this farmer's market thing was balls. My shit being my graphic design portfolio. The job wasn't so bad really, but when it starts raining every morning, it's just not worth it anymore. I was meant for better things than this. I'm a genius dammit!

I sat in my girlfriend's four door, waiting for the boss to show. I listened to a CD of Vivaldi. It was not my music, it was my girlfriend's. I had forgotten my iPod, but that didn't matter really, because that POS never worked in the first place. Fuckin' Apple, ruining countries, foisting crap on white rich brats. No, I'm just kidding, I love Apple. This is the kind of shit Tyler would say between crying and moaning over his book.

I saw him, Tyler, he was headed toward my car. He wore a newspaper on his head to stop the rain. I don't know why he didn't have an umbrella. I rolled down the window and said to him, "Why don't you have an umbrella?"

He looked at me for a moment like I was stupid, "I have a newspaper."

"Okay."

"Are you listening to Vivaldi? I didn't know you liked Vivaldi."

"I don't, it's my girlfriends."

"Oh."

He stood there for a few moments, alone, in the rain, saying nothing. He sniffled. That crappy green coat he wore all the time was soaked through, but only in the front strangely enough. He flipped the newspaper to the drier side. I rolled the window up and leaned back in the seat. I had an awful head ache and a sore throat, possibly a cold. It just goes to figure I'd feel like shit on a day like this. I opened the glove box and grabbed a flask from inside. I twisted off the cap and took a few gulps of high quality liquor. This helped, somewhat.

There was a rapping on the window. It was Tyler again. I took a moment to stare at him with open disgust, then rolled the window down and said, "What do you want Tyrone?"

"Who's Tyrone?"

"Nothing. What do you want Tyler?"

"Can I come in?"

"I guess."

He came around to the passenger's side and struggled for a moment to open the door. I waited for him to stop tugging on the handle long enough for me to unlock the passenger door. He flopped into the seat and tossed the wet newspaper behind him.

"It smells in here," he said, pinching his nose.

"Fuck you."

He picked up a Taco Bell wrapper (which was mine) and said, "Your girlfriend needs to clean her car."

"You want to go back outside?"

"No," he said, then stared out the window and became quiet.

We sat that way for a while, waiting for Uly to arrive with his enormous truck packed with fresh vegetables. Vivaldi entertained us with Four Seasons. I asked Tyler how his book was going, no just kidding, I didn't do that, fuck his book. He closed his eyes and pressed his face against the window.

"Don't press your oily face against the window like that," I said, as though this wasn't common knowledge to him.

He moaned like a fucking baby and said, "I am so fucking tired."

"Huh."

He took his face off the window, wiped his drippy nose with the back of his hand, and said, "Been writing my book."

"Okay."

I saw Uly's truck pull into the parking lot. I grabbed the flask for one last dose then tossed it back in and slammed the glove box shut.

"Can I have some?" said Tyler as if on cue. Fucking mooch.

"No, I'm sick," I told him.

"I don't care."

"It's not mine, it's my girlfriend's."

"I still want some."

"Get out of the car."

He grabbed the flask and chugged several gulps, spilling some down his chin.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Tyler looked at me hurtfully and said, "I thought you said I could have some?"

Tyler always made my headaches worse. I rubbed my forehead, I didn't have time for this. I gave his shoulder a shove and said, "Just get out of the car."

"But it's raining."

"Yeah, I know."

"Maybe we should wait."

"No, get out."

"I read the weather reports, it said it would be sunny. So we could probably wait a few minutes."

"The sun is never going to come out, not today."

"How do you know? Let's wait. Ulysses can handle unloading by himself."

I stared at him for a moment. There was nothing to say to this. This was just Tyler being difficult. If he wasn't going to get out, then I was, because I was here to do my damn job, and I did just that. He followed shortly after. Tyler hated to be alone.

"I thought you were going to wait?" I asked him.

"The car smells," he told me, holding a new, dry, newspaper above his head.

Uly stepped out of the truck. He was an enormous man. Nearly seven feet tall and three feet wide, he could probably break your neck with one hand. He took a moment to hitch his pants, then looked at us and said, "I hate both of you and wish you were dead." Uly was a real nice guy (ha, ha).

"Good morning," I said.

"Hi Ulysses," said Tyler.

Uly looked at Tyler, shook his head, and said, "What are you doing with that fucking newspaper? You can't work holding a fucking newspaper above your head."

Tyler stared back, with much the same look he gave me earlier, and explained, quite simply, that it was raining.