The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes (2 page)

Others have simply disappeared. I do not know what became of the composer. Some died when it was not their time. There were Pat and George, and not long ago, there was a young man, not a patron but a former counterman, remembered for his extraordinary smile, who was shot to death.

Life, as we know, is the more precious for its transitoriness. The land Burgermaster is built on is owned by Safeway. Several years ago, the Burg's owner informed his employees that Safeway had raised the rent, beginning January first of the coming year, and that the Burg would close on December 31. This particular restaurant was the flagship of a small chain—it had opened almost half a century before—but he
told his staff that he would not keep it open in order to lose money. Safeway was adamant. One of the staff told some of us regulars and the next I knew, there were copies of a petition beside the cash registers, beseeching Safeway not to kill our beloved Burg, that it was a needed part of our community. (For some of us, I am sure it was at or near the very center.) Among ourselves, some of us spoke of a boycott, but I do not believe any tone of threat found its way into the petition's introductory narrative. Safeway backed off and the Burg has remained open, its lease each year extended for one more.

It opened again, after the gale, on Tuesday, December 19, at five p.m. I wasn't there. The sign on the door earlier in the day said it would reopen at six-thirty Wednesday morning. I could see that the lights were on and there were staff working inside and I was heartened. But I had told myself I would not go by more than once a day and, because I did not return that day, I missed its reopening.

On Wednesday, seeing me approach the counter, Laura asked: “Chicken noodle?”

“A bowl,” I said. “And coffee. Are you glad to be back at work?”

“Indeed, I am,” she said. And as I lifted the tray to take it to my booth, she said, as she said every time, “Be careful. It's hot.”

Roy sat across the aisle from me. “Good morning, Roy,” I said, although it was mid-afternoon. It is a thing between us, my saying good morning to him when it is not morning. He laughs every time.

We talked about the Burg's having been closed and how surprised we both were to discover how integral to our lives it had become. In the year of the petition, I had signed it out of a sense of solidarity, but had not thought of myself as relying on the Burg's existence for my sense of completeness. Either I had not been as dependent then as I have since become, or I did not know myself as well then as I do now. The Burg's closure left a hole in my day that I could not fill. I remember Roy once asking me, “If this place ever closed, where would you go?” I had no idea then and I do not have one today.

“I really missed this place,” Roy said now.

After a while my wife came in and pointed out a balloon sculpture nestled beside a poinsettia in a pot on top of the pie case. It was about three feet high, purple and yellow and red balloons in the shape of a cartoonish human figure. Lettered on the three uppermost balloons were these words: “Missed U,” “Power Up,” “Welcome Back.” It had been sent to the Burg anonymously.

When I was in graduate school I worked for a time for University Housing. The University of Washington owned an apartment building at the corner of 15
^th
and 40
^th
Northeast called the Commodore-Duchess. I don't remember the details of the story of how the building got its name, but originally there were two buildings. And there was something about two brothers, one of which owned the Commodore, the other the Duchess, and they had a falling-out. Then they became brotherly again, and to symbolize their rapprochement, they joined the two buildings with brick so that they became the Commodore-Duchess.

But I may be remembering wrongly. It might have been that the two brothers had a falling-out and never reconciled, and the buildings were joined only after the university acquired the property. Or possibly after one brother died, the other felt so bad that, after somehow acquiring his dead brother's property, he joined the two buildings to symbolize the union brought by death. Or perhaps the one brother simply acquired his dead brother's building and connected it to his own in order to manage it more easily; maybe the connection of that building to his symbolized his ultimate dominance over his brother. He may even have gloated that his brother had surrendered to death before he himself had.

But all of this is by the by. It has nothing to do with my days on “the roach patrol.” Roach patrolling was the first
job I got when I went to work for the university. I was given a caulking gun, several tubes of caulk, some rags, a bucket and a flatbed cart to wheel the stuff from apartment to apartment. In each apartment I caulked the cracks and seams in the walls of the kitchen and bathroom. Sometimes I worked with a partner, sometimes I worked alone. Mostly I worked alone. In the Commodore-Duchess were more than one hundred apartments and I caulked almost all of them over a period of about seven months.

It didn't do any good. The roaches still came out of the walls into the apartments through the cracks and holes I couldn't see to fill with caulk. It was an old building and while the structure was sound, the walls where the pipes came through and under the sinks and inside the cabinets were like sieves.

Once a month an exterminator came out and fumigated a portion of the building. One month it would be floors one through four of the Commodore, the next it would be five through seven of the Duchess. A clerk who worked at the small grocery where I bought my coffee across the alley from the building told me that he always knew when we were fumigating because the roaches would cross the alley and come into his store on those days. After two or three days they would cross the alley the other way and go back into the Commodore-Duchess.

The worst apartments were the stacks of 28s—128, 228, 328 and so on—and 29s. We could fumigate 128 through 428 and the roaches would flood into 528 through 728. The same with the 29s. When the effects of the chemical wore off, the roaches returned to their original habitations. There was no
help for them.

One-twenty-nine was a kind of bachelor pad. Where every other apartment in the building looked dingy and barren no matter how its occupants furnished it—new paint and tile seemed to attract another coating of dirt within days after application—129 had paneled walls, an orange shag carpet, a wet bar and light dim enough to obscure whatever dirt had been absorbed into its walls. One-twenty-nine had been the residence of a maintenance man whom the university had permitted to renovate the flat according to his tastes. Eventually he went on to a job with Boeing, leaving the orange carpet and fake oak bar to the next tenant.

The next tenant was a nice enough kid who was enchanted by the unit as soon as he saw it. I could see the fantasies of liquor and women leaping in his eyes as he took in the décor. When he asked what the rent was and I told him and he said he'd take it, I thought: You idiot, can't you see beyond the color of the carpet? I had finished my work on the roach patrol a week earlier and was now an assistant to the assistant manager and one of my duties was to show apartments. The assistant manager had warned me off mentioning roaches to prospective tenants and so I did not say anything about them to the kid.

A couple of days later the kid came into the office. I knew before he said anything what it was about. He wanted something done about the roaches. Steve, the assistant manager, told him I would take care of it. When the kid had gone I said I had already caulked the place; there was nothing more I could do. Steve told me to look at it anyway.

The kid had mentioned roaches in the bathroom. I
couldn't see where they would have come from. I checked the kitchen. One zipped across the floor and into a crack under the cabinet below the sink. I caulked the crack. Then I returned to the office.

Two days later the kid was back. He wanted to move, the roaches were everywhere, could he get a refund on his rent? Steve explained the university policy against refunding rent money. Then he told me to get a caulking gun and caulk the guy's bathroom again. I objected, saying there was no place in the bathroom left to caulk. Steve said to do it anyway. I got a caulk gun and walked back with the kid to his apartment. In the bathroom I laid caulk over the caulk I had put down a month before. When I tried to smooth it with my finger it all came off; there were no cracks or abraded surfaces for it to adhere to. I wiped my hand on a paper towel. The kid seemed content.

Until the next day when he came into the office during the lunch break while Steve was gone. He put his fists together on the counter separating us, then put his forehead on his fists and said: “If I had known it was going to be like this, I never would have rented it.”

This was too much. This job was supposed to help me get through graduate school. It was supposed to allow me to use the bulk of my time to think through and write my dissertation. That was the plan when I applied for work with Housing. It was only a half-time job, for God's sake. I wasn't supposed to go home in the afternoon with a bad conscience from a lousy part-time job. I called the main office, told somebody about the kid and the apartment and asked if they couldn't make an exception to the rule. The kid
was going to move out in any case and needed the money to find another apartment. I told her that the kid was the son of an important political figure in the state.

The woman I spoke with said she would get back to me, then before I could take the phone from my ear told me to wait, she was going to put me on hold. Two or three minutes later she came back on the line. She said she could prorate the rent and refund what remained. Was that acceptable?

I asked the kid. He said fine. I said “Fine” into the mouthpiece. The woman said the kid could come over to the office this afternoon and she would write him a check. She asked me if I thought the kid might be willing to move into another unit somewhere else in Housing. I said I doubted it. That ended the conversation.

I told the kid to give them an hour, then go over to the main office and get his refund. The kid said he hadn't thought they would give him back his money. I said I hadn't thought so either.

The following day the kid came into the office about the same time, having left his suitcases in the hall outside the door. He had come to fill out what paperwork was necessary to put an end to this experience. He had gotten his money yesterday, no problem. Yes, he had found another apartment, definitely not in University Housing. As we talked, my eye caught movement on the kid's shoulder. There I saw, against the brown and tan check of the shirt, brown of another shape. The kid was talking. I nodded and said uh-huh as though I were paying attention. The cockroach on the kid's shirt moved again, a fraction of a fraction of an inch, then—I swear this is true—it looked up at me and
made a waving motion with its tiny antennae, the one on the right moving forward as the one on the left moved back, then the one on the left moving up while the one on the right moved back, as if it were signaling goodbye.

I considered swatting it off the kid's shoulder but I did not do it. I did not think I would be able to rush around the counter to squash it before it found a place to hide, and I did not want it in my office. I didn't say anything about it, not a word, and the kid walked out with it on his shoulder to his next apartment.

I watched her as she talked with the people ahead of me. She spoke so fast it was like listening to a jackhammer breaking up pavement. I could see how her mind worked, rather, I could hear it, and it worked by association, jumping from one subject to another, from taxes to a book she wanted to write to Hollywood celebrities, the direction of its flow determined by the sound of a word, by color, by an intruding memory. It also worked linearly, proceeding from A to B to C, though only in short bursts. And I was delighted because I could follow her thinking exactly, down to the last curve and comma.

When it was my turn I ordered a bowl of chili. I wanted soup but somehow I said “Chili” and then it sounded all right so I didn't say anything, but ordered coffee with it. Handing me my change, she rattled on as though I were the man who had just left, or the woman before him, her words punctuated first by her own laughter, then by mine.

As we talked I puzzled over who she reminded me of. My eyes kept going back to the small widow's peak and smoothed her hair as though sight were touch. And then I saw the face of my first love on hers, my high school sweetheart's, I hadn't thought of her in so long. But then as she went on—she was talking about misdiagnoses, how ADHD has been confused with bipolar disorder and how drugs affected her the opposite from the way they affected you or me or most people, and how now she was on an anti-seizure med and a couple of others, and she could function though
she could not live in Los Angeles any more, its distractions, its horrors, another damaged child she is, but her loneliness up here, and then the depression that follows, so she has this job and then she has this other little job in this odd little shop that has no theme, or has so many you can't tell one from another, you don't know what's a novelty and what's to be worn seriously, what you can eat and what will break your teeth if you try to bite into it—she began not to look like Erlea but like that crazy woman I knew in Brazil, or was it Venezuela? and I thought, Oh no, not another one.

And then after awhile she said, “We ought to get together sometime,” and someone in one part of my mind said to someone in another part, Don't do this, Don't do this, Don't do this, and I said, “How about Saturday?”

That settled, I took my chili and my coffee and scooted into my favorite booth.

After my second or third cup of coffee I went into the bathroom and peed in the urinal, then went to the sink. I want to be sure you understand I peed in the urinal because once when I was in the army I was working in the motor pool and I went to the latrine and peed in that circular thing like a small round shower they have where the mechanics scrub their hands. It was a mistake, I had never seen one of those things before, and I wasn't caught, but I was afraid I would be. I just want you to know that I know enough now not to pee in the sink.