Centers

The need for a toilet seat, as the inherited one had broken through the ring, a vagina dentata chewing white thighs as we read Vanity Fair and Vogue. Being out on a busy holiday Saturday, a Halloween weekend. Burbank, full of obtuse angles, lost anger, slow bourgeois egresses, signs monumental like headstones read from the transcendental passage of the interstate. The nerves of shaved teenagers and glutted federal spending, places to eat meat and salt and caffeine.

Once inside the home center, I fell under its bureaucratic spell of aimless reconstruction, its smooth concrete floors, the long rows of practical and potential necessity, the strange dull pomp of the associates, goateed in available denim and hybrid boots, the women a sexual real in hazel, names like monica or liza, soft flanks and small parcels of jewelry beneath the collar of shirts to wear to work. Cut dowels, bum couples, the everywhere infinity of improvement, the factor of some plan to be. It is taken at a languid pace, for no one really wants to leave here and go back. I wait at the counter alone as a tall man, who happened to be covering the register, goes back through aisles 34-37 to find a price tag. The small print on his own tag read delivery services since 2003. The girl across the way spoke up slightly and told me there was coffee. I said I had had too much already. There’s chocolate, she offered. Deferred. Hot chocolate, too, is what I mean. No thank you.

As I return to echo park along the interstate, a car lies dead and reversed at the freeway's end. The state troopers stand in boots and put on black latex gloves. Down Alvarado and Glendale, where traffic snarls at this arthritic pinion, small buckeyed men sell baggies of spiced and sugared fruit from coolers set in the shade of scrub pines rawboned with odd bleached trash. We all wait there like bulls with any pedestrians to not be noticed. On Saturday, the division of wealth begins to feel ever more abstract and dangerous. Left alone with anything but our own errands and children, there is no one else to see. No one but this immediate group of friends to share this afternoon. There will never be anything but what we can afford, or some worse maintenance. No sudden bird come to the window brightly and breathing the violence of something entirely desired.