“And it all depends,” says the radio, “on the nature of the day. Was it good?” A man’s voice, unpolished, but not unpleasant. “Then it’s all good, for one more day. Kick back. Relax. You’ve earned it. But if it was a bad day?” Groans from an unseen audience. Up behind the radio the wall’s been tiled with old album jackets, color photos of men with horns, or keyboards, muted duotones of women crooning into elaborately caged microphones. “One bad day,” the radio says. “Enough to take everything you’ve taken years to gather, and to build, to take it all and pull it down around you.”
Out in the middle of the room a big round table covered in green felt, surrounded by a motley herd of armchairs and recliners, one of them laid flat. Curled apparently asleep atop it an old man in a brown suit much too big. “Our prosperity,” the radio’s saying. “Our security. The walls around us, the roofs over our heads, the floors beneath the very shoes on our feet, how secure are they? When all it takes is one bad day to lock it all away from us. How real are they, if one bad day’s enough to make them disappear?”
One wall’s mostly free of albums, taken up instead by an overhead garage door, a smaller door beside it creaking open on sullen afternoon. Christian squeezes through, sagging brown jeans, grey-green hoodie, tugging the door shut as an afterthought. “In this,” says the radio, “the richest country in the history of the world that ever was.” He stoops, snagging empty cans from the floor, dropping them a-rattle into a blue tub. “Like many of you,” says the radio, “I had my bad day,” and murmurs swell, a general air of affirmation, “oh, indeed I did. I used to be an up-and-coming architect, what they call a starchitect, if you can believe it,” and a pause for almost laughter. “But I can’t show you any buildings I built, because I never built a one. Not while I was an architect. I told other people how to build them. And they’re all garbage.”
More empty cans, plastic cups, a bottle still a-slosh with dregs. Christian sets the blue tub down to pick his way through all those chairs toward the back wall, the shelf, the radio, “Everything,” it says, “that, before my one bad day? I would’ve considered my life’s work? Crap. All of it, I’m telling you, every building, not even crap. You see things differently, when it all comes crashing down.”
It’s old, the radio, sleekly rounded, a dignified brown overwhelmed by an ivory dial in the middle of its mattely translucent grille. Christian twists it, dissolving that voice in static, advertising yammer bent into woozy synths and a slapping pop, Nissan babes with the body burgundy, love my car same way I used to love key, “You turn that back!” snarls the old man from the recliner, and Christian jumps, knocking something over with a clatter on the shelf.
Pressure pressure pressure pressure pressure, from the radio.
“Now, goddammit,” from the old man on the recliner.
“Best do as he says,” from the man stepping through that smaller door, brown sack coat, grizzled cheeks, cream Kangol cap. “Yes sir, yes sir, what Duckie says,” from the man following after, ducking his head, chewed-up brim of his old straw hat. Christian, scowling, turns the dial back squawking through babble, spoke fenders and two-way sneeze-through, a pirouette of sitar, elect had this to say, a whine and then “a bad day of their own,” that voice.
“What on earth,” says the man in the Kangol cap. “What’s he going on about?” says the man in the straw hat. “What is this?”
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“Found a dead bum,” says the man sat up on the recliner. “Them tunnels, under the Ross Island Bridge. You know.” An eyelid, his cheeks, a smatter of spots across his high forehead palely pink against the seamed and wrinkled brown. “The only thing,” the radio’s saying, “ever does any damn good.”
Christian tips back enough to take in the rest of the clutter up there on the shelf, jars filled with nails and bolts and picture hooks, a loose tumble of wood screws and a gnawed nub of pencil, a long and slender copperly shining bullet that he sets back up on end.
“So he’s giving a speech?” says the man in the Kangol cap, sitting himself in a soft plaid armchair. “On the radio?” says the man taking off his straw hat, turning it over in his hands.
“Community radio,” says the man on the recliner, leaning down with a grunt to lever up the back of it.
Christian reaches past the bullet to a couple of fallen picture frames, lifting up the one, a scrap of paper behind the glass of it, a handwritten numeral four, we believe that if the white landlords will not give decent houseing, Christian sets it upright by the larger frame filled with patches pinned to a white ground, an upraised fist blocked out in black, the letters BPPSD, a stylized leaping panther, a flag of red and black and green and gold, “to take away from this,” the radio’s saying, “what I want you to keep in mind.”
“Who’s dealing,” says the man in the Kangol cap. “Who’s got the cards?” says the man who lets his straw hat fall to the felt.
“Never leave the table,” says the man on the recliner, leaning over the table to the middle of it, where there’s a tub that says Aunt Ruby’s Peanuts in faded letters, filled with flat washers and lock washers and nuts hexagonal and square, and beside it a greasy pack of cards he takes up in his suddenly nimble hands, clatter and ruffle. “Then who will do for us?” the radio says. Christian lifts the other toppled frame, a photograph within, blurred black and white on newsprint, dots of ink gone green on time-browned paper, kids at a table laughing over plates of food, two men, three, leaned over, stood behind them, a woman smiling with them, Breakfast, says the caption, at Highland United Church of, and the rest torn away. “That was Michael Lake,” a suddenly different voice is saying, “speaking yesterday at Chapman Square.”
“Where the hell is he?” says the man in the Kangol cap, leaning over to dig a handful of nuts and washers from Aunt Ruby’s tub, and “Why’s he always late?” says the man sitting himself in a wooden swivel chair before his battered straw hat, but even then the overhead door with a clanking grind has started rising. They look up, around, to see him, the boots, the denim overalls, the sharkskin coat, the broad smile and the laugh, “Ha ha!” he claps those big brown hands, and a generically jaunty funk vamp’s kicked off from the radio. “I can’t be late!” says Gordon, stepping into the garage. “It’s my game!”
“Has a point,” says the man scattering a handful of washers by his straw hat. The radio’s burbling something about a proud co-sponsor of the seventeenth annual Portland Zine Symposium. Cards spin over green felt with deft wrist-flicks, two face-down there, two there, two more, and again. Christian’s studying the scrap of newsprint, the men behind those happy kids, the one of them small and skinny, spots across his forehead clearly pale despite years-softened ink, grinning up at the man beside him, tight white T-shirt, big hands leaned on the backs of the chairs of the kids at the table before him, not yet bald, his hair a mighty round of tight black curls.
“Go on, boy,” growls Gordon, pulling a wing chair around to the table with a scrape. “Finish up and get on out of here.” Digging into the tub for his own handful, he lets four or five drop to the felt in the middle before spilling the rest by his cards. “Ante up, gentlemen! I’m here to take your nuts.”
Shoulders shake with muffled chortles, and the one man slaps the table by his straw hat with a yelp. Christian puts the frame back by the radio.