The first day of work is so much worse than the first day of school. At school there's friends and free food. At work its sitting in someone elses chair, paying for lunch, and meeting a new boss.

Ok, well it wasn't like that today when I came back to the Hartford Courant. Instead, it was old friends in the features department, free coffee cake (for the non-vegans) in the newsroom, and sitting in someone elses chair.

The thing about freelance (which, trust me, is thousands of times more glamorous sounding than it is in reality) is that I always have the desk of whomever is on vacation. Today I ended up sitting in someone's desk, only to find that there was already another freelance shit like me at the desk.

What's worse: some shit who isn't even writing stories got the only open desk because he came a week earlier. Remember my whole plan with getting in early to treat the intern like the new guy? Completely ruined.

Is this what my life has become?

Deskspotting?

Hey Dilbert, here's a memo.

In May of 1962 A minor fire at a trash-burning dump spread to a nearby coal seam, catching fire to the mine. The coal burned underground for miles under the nearby mining town of Centralia, PA.

At this time, pleasanted the nearby small towns as a sort of easern Pennsylvania Wobegone. It boasted a bank, a post office, a department store, elementary school, a grocer, and a small filling station on the corner of rt 61.

The fire burned underground for years, and popped out in 1969. Steam and smoke petered our of lawns all over town, like mist on a lake in the morning. That year, three families were evacuated from the town after suffering from smoke inhalation.

The falling price of coal and a continued dependence on oil had families leaving regularly the year before, as the population fell from 2,000 to 1,600.


Entire sections of the highway burst and cracked until they were undriveable.

The real trouble began in 1979 when the temperature in the underground tanks of Coddington's Service Station were measured at 197 degrees. Coddington closed, and was the first business to pull out because of the fire. A woman named Joan Girolami reported that her summer vegetables burnt to a crisp, officials measured temperatures of 746 degrees under her garden.

Neighbors reported that they no longer used a water heater to take showers.

Schools like this and other buildings began sinking in to the ground. This one was demolished in the late eighties.

This all sounded neat, but then I heard about little Todd.

Todd Domboski did not mean to alarm anyone when he played in his grandmothers backyard in 1981. The twelve year old stepped onto a softspot in the ground and steam eveloped him as a hole four feet in diameter began to swallow him. Confused, he held on to nearby tree roots and called for help. His cousin pulled him out and called for help.

When it arrived the hole piped dangerous levels of CO through the backyard and measured over 150 feet deep--the equivalent of a 15 story building.

Naturally, when we heard this story last week on our way home from vacation in Deleware, we headed straight there.

Centralia is no longer the town it used to be. The army corp of engineers evacuated the town beginning in 1981. Bulldozing houses and churches. Today there isn't even a ghost town left. Instead, it is a ghost town of a ghost town with a still intact main street, and dozens of sidestreets. All lined with faded yellow curbs.

Driveways turn off of roads for maybe thirty feet into nothing. Street signs, fire hydrants and rusted out stop signs are still up--left behind by the army in haste.

Signs like this still emplore non-existant residents to push a long removed button to walk, and telephone poles line the streets for no reason in particular.

Today only three buildings are left. Here a row house is reinforced with brick pillars to give the support once
provided by neighbors on either side.

Amanda and I walked the town for less than half an hour. The place scared the shit out of me. Everywhere I looked around and imagined my little home town of simbury without any houses or trees.

I suddenly experienced a moment of 'hey, maybe nothing really is permanent.' The idea scared me a bit. But at the time, I ran around in the smoke and steam that still comes out of the ground.

'Hey,' I shouted to my companion. 'These rocks are so hot I can't even pick them up.'

Amanda was the smart one who stayed in the car. 'You're going to get swallowed up," she warned as I peered into smokey pits of earth and abandoned bicycles.

We headed to the next town over, Mt Carmel, so that we could come back in the morning and look at things again. Nearby town of Ashland looked like a nice place to stay in, but there was not a hotel in the entire town.

Tall, pointy row houses lined the streets in Ashland as in Centralia, and at one time there must have been fierce inter-little league competition.

The only hotel in Mt. Carmel is Visintaners Motel, a place I had to get directions to more than once from sullen locals. I didn't bug them all too much, figuring that 40 years of smoke inhilation would make anyone kind of grumpy.

I pulled into the parking lot and a sudden fear came over me. This is the only Hotel for miles for a good reason. No one wants to go here. No one moves to these towns, and they will die because all the children in the town can't wait to get out.

The teen agers (yeah, I can say that now: I'm 20) in both gas stations worked hard to separate themselves from the workboots and the wranger jeans of their town mates.

They were the kind of kids that would not exist in remote areas of Pennsylvania were it not for MTV. The girl at the counter had shoulder length hair died a deep brown color. She obviously spent a great deal of time plucking and pencilling her eyebrows. She wore an exorbitant amount of make up, and an "Aeropostale" shirt, both of which must have come from Philadelphia.

The kid she confirmed directions with for me wore roughly three pounds of gel in his bleach blonde hair. His Backstreet Boyesque chains hung from his neck, and he was very suprised that anyone wanted to stay in Mount Carmel on purpose.

I'm from the suburbs, but I to them I was city folk. The kids seemed happy to see me, but a certain hatred followed from the adults.

They hated my freedom. No, not like the terrorists. They hated the cultural agency I have, not only to come to their hometown like it was Disney land, but to leave whenever the hell I wanted to.

They hated that I saw houses where hundreds of people lived and took pictures of them because they were "quaint."

They hated that I tool around on a Sunday night in my Japanese car. They hate that they still wear fatigues on weekends and I have the gall to drive around in a Japanese car with: "Join the Army, travel to exotic lands, meet interesting and unusual people, and kill them" on the bumper.

They hated that and they hated that I used words like "cultural agency."

Unstable people stared at my foreign car and bumper stickers as they entered their hotel rooms. Some of these people, Amanda noted, lived in these hotel rooms and had devoted their lives to the minor drug culture and prostituion of Mt. Carmel, PA.

I shut and locked the car door and I drove the hell out of town. The quaint little tour on the backroads of Pennsylvania was over.

These towns were convulsively not cute after dark.

I wanted highways. I wanted lights. I wanted parking lots and capitalism. I wanted a hotel whose name was a registered trademark and whose slogan was copywrited.

I wanted to to be across the street from a McDonalds. And a minimum of a dozen other brightly lit places.

Suddenly, I wasn't interested in rock climbing and 'adventure' oriented sports. As of that night, life had become scary enough for me.

I calmed down inside of a Best Western, and with the chain on the door, Centralia, PA became suddenly really cool to me again.

And it's still on fire.

Not to be missed interview at on Sander Hicks.com with the immaculate bigot David Horwitz by the famed 'punk of publishing' Sander Hicks. Sander is in the middle of writing Kingmaker a book about Karl Rove.

The new tupperware mailbox stared at me as I pulled into my driveway today. The semester ended yesterday, and today I got home. Apparently, a plow truck came by one morning during a minor snowstorm and decided to save the mailman the trip.
It has a separate spot for newspapers and mail. Only when you go to the box in the afternoon, you can open it from the back and save the trouble of walking to the front of the mailbox.
It's changes like this that make home that muh harder to get used to. Also, an early morning truck towed away the car that once hefted on blocks without tires in the garage. There's still the carparts everywhere, but life isn't the same when you don't have to step through an engine block to take out the trash.

And for yet one more time in my life I have no idea what the hell I am going to do.

I didn't get the internship at the Hartford Courant, but I could always work the part time like last summer.

"Part-time" is newspapertalk for "bad pay." The glamor word for it is "freelance", but it really just means that what I make per week depends on how many stories I write and where they go in the paper.
The worst part is that they gave the job to some Cornell kid who writes for his campus humor magazine.

"He's kind of an older version of you," my old editor said on the phone after delivering the news. "But if he makes it in journalism, it'll only be for two or three years before he's off writing for Letterman."

When I was externing at the Onion, they all separately complained about how they worked the magazine from its roots at UMadison, and Ivy League kids who have been in improv groups get jobs writing for comedy shows straight out of college.

They said I could come back and work part time, which really means full time only I would get paid by the story.

Really the only reason to do that would be so when the Cornell kid takes the desk next to me I could treat him like the newguy:
"Brendan, could you tell me again--"

"Jesus, again? Hey boss, I thought you were supposed to show this kid around. Alright sport, anyone show you where the bathroom is yet?"

"--the name of that website of yours."

"Listen I gotta go, I'm gonna go swim laps on the pool on the roof. Why don't you come up there later?"

"You already made both of those jokes this morning, and yesterday. Can't you work on new material?"

"Oh, look you got something on your shirt"

"Brendan, I'm not falling for--"

"Whoop! Don't be so gullible, McFly!"

You get the picture.

But the good news is my new job for next year. No more making coffee for minimum wage and little tips.

Starting in august I am the John L. Hubbard research assistant. It's named after the rich guy who donated the money. I will be working with my Native American Lit. professor organizing a conference of Native Women Writers, bringing speakers, designing advertisements--basically all the same things I do for Activists United only I get paid a rediculous amount of money for it.

But that is next year, and this is not.

My older brother Jay said he could get me a job at his garage changing oil, which would be nice...but.

I am still finishing a book of stories for a small press in ohio. Times like this I wish I were an academic who could get grants to write for an entire summer. I wish I had a benefactor. A patron. Someone to have me write all day and pay me very little for it.

What about a month? One month of straight writing and editting all day.

Of course, if it were that easy, then I would be exactly what all my stories are against. Privledge.

Working.

The scumbag behind me just go his third cell phone call since I've been here. Each time his phone rings--not vibrates--twice before he can be bothered to stop playing computer games and answer it. The worst part is that he answers the phone and is not doing anything cell-productive like drug dealing or stock trading. Instead he sits here in the computer lab during finals week talking to a friend of his on the other side of campus.
'What's up man? Nah, nah, just chillin. Yeah, shit is mad a'ight.'
This man is also the whitest kid in the room.
The girl to my right will not be satisfied until the boy she is flirting with closes his eyes.
'What is that?'
'Close your eyes.'
'No, what are you going to do?'
'Just close your eyes and open your mouth.'
'Why?'
'Just--come on!'
I have to step in. 'Close your eyes.'
'Sorry are we bothering you?'
'No,' I say, 'I just can't handle the anticipation.'
She offers me the shock tart that was to be the surprise, and that makes everything ok.

The man at the computer across from me hasn't even logged in. He is just sitting in a chair talking loudly about how great the beach is going to be this summer and how she can't beleive she has to hang around until saturday when his daddy comes.

I am sitting at my computer deconstructing the hell out of a Henry James novel and hating everyone who coughs. Everytime someone laughs or scores high on an internet solitair game I wonder:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

What's more, was it for this the clay grew tall and worked its ass off so that its children could go to college?

Or was it for this the clay grew tall and worked its ass off and gave to scholarship fund that made it possible for me to go to college here and in turn write blogs about the idiots who resemble other brown soil piles?

Modern dance is why I don't write fiction.
Sure, that's lame and all, but I've found it is true.
I don't get modern dance, and I don't think I should because I don't know anything about it. That's fair, right? I also know nothing about sitar music, and no one expects me to choose a good sitar player from a bad one.
But still, I try.
At a show tonight, a dancer would piroute and faint into the arms of another and I would think, "Is this a commentary on the status of women in America?"
Other dances I watched and thought the message was too sharp. The way I see it: if I get it, it's too obvious.
Such is why I don't write fiction. If I wrote a story about four women starting a indie-glam band called "The Status of Women in America" and how they couldn't get the respect of club promoters, you would see through it.
If I wrote a story about a mechanic who gets along fine with everyone at the garage and wakes up dead one morning and no one understand why his computer wouldn't stop playing old Richard Pryer MP3s, you would all think it was either vacuous, esoteric, or modern dance.

An email from Punk Planet today kindly informed me that they were not interested in a story I sent them.
I read it over, of course, and realized that I hadn't turned in such a hot draft. Why? I guess if I send them a crappy draft then the problem with the story is not that I am a bad writer, but that I didn't send them the right opening, right?

Ok, so I sent it to fiction, and it was actually the ending of an actual story I wrote. Let me know what you think.

p.s. Honestly, who names a character "Cass" in a road story?

Breakfast Any Time By Brendan Sullivan

A retired woman rang three cherries at the slot machine behind me. The hungry part of me hoped she would keel over in excitement so I could step in to fill her second bucket of half-dollars. I jumped as jackpot lights flashed across the sign: ‘All Persons Under 21 Will Be Escorted off the Premises.’

A man with a red sport coat and a nametag that said ‘Fred Ungers, Circus Circus Ring Leader’ came over and gave the woman a free hotel room for the night. ‘We have buffet all night, donchaknowit? Now you take these tickets and you can have all the pancakes, sausage, and orange juice you want, Mrs. Jansmith.’ This guy’s whole job is to make sure that her money never leaves the free parking lot. ‘Will your husband be staying with you tonight?’ he grinned through old baked-bean teeth.

My stomach growled thinking about all the buffet she was going to eat tonight. If I could just get in there I’d fill every one of my pockets with bananas and home fries after I had eaten inches and inches of pancakes. A smoky woman with a tray came over to my machine and asked me if I would like a drink.

‘No thank you, ma’am.’ A minute later a man in a maroon blazer demanded my ID.

‘Uh.’ Where the hell was Cass? ‘I left it in the car.’

He slammed his big, hairy hand on the ‘Cancel Bet’ button and told me to leave.

‘Uh… I…uh…have to go get my friend.’

I lost seven dollars in the machines.

‘Luck of the Irish,’ I said understanding the irony for the first time, as I crumpled up my paper cup with three dollars in quarters.

Somewhere in Circus Circus, Cass had all of our gas money in his pocket, or worse in video Black Jack machines. Either way, we would be stuck in this desert for till Elvis’ second coming.

I walked around the maze of the casino for an hour. Every room looked the same, ever floor had the same ugly pattern. Half an hour and maybe four laps around the casino, three more blazers asked for my ID, ‘we’ve been looking for you, you’d better get outta here before you get in trouble.’

‘Alright, I just gotta find my friend.’

‘Well you better get him outta here too.’ He took my crumpled change cup, and my last three dollars. ‘Now.’

*

Cass came around the corner on the high rollers floor carrying a bucket the size of a medium movie theater popcorn. Between his scraggly beard and the raggedy bandana that tied down his greasy hair, the kid looked menacing. He had some wide open look in his eyes as he drove from machine to machine.

‘Dude!’ he smiled, eyes getting even wider. ‘Our problems are solved.’

‘Listen, dude, I’ve been getting thrown out for an hour and a half, stay away from me and go cash in your…chips… what the fuck is that?’

‘It’s three hundred and fourty-five dollars.’

My stomach growled. I blinked and stared at two hundred and forty five Circus Circus Golden Coins, two yellow ten dollar chips, one orange five dollar token, and a big blue seventy-five dollar saucer.

‘Alright, we can go,’ he said. ‘But just lemme play like twenty bucks in chips, then we can go.’

‘Cass, cash it in before they card us both and take your money.’ I wanted to say our money, but I also wanted to get the hell out of there.

Three video black jack machines down, I ducked around a corner and Fred Ungers, Ring Leader signaled to three maroon sport coats. ‘I’m leaving,’ I surrendered, my hands raised in front of my chest. ‘I’m leaving right now, I am on my way to the parking lot to get in my car right now.’ I said it robust enough that Cass would know where to meet me.

*

He got away with every cent, and drove us to a diner off the strip and bought me the best breakfast anytime I ever had.

‘I take back everything I’ve ever said about money.’ I told him as I poured on the pancake syrup and sipped orange juice and dark coffee. ‘It can’t buy happiness, I mean just look at your sister, she is miserable fourty to sixty hours a week at the bank,’ I began. ‘But it can buy the best breakfast anytime in Las Vegas County.’

We clinked small diner coffee mugs and toasted to Las Vegas, to Circus Circus, to the rest of the trip that we decided there could now be.

Packs of tired gamblers came in and out of the diner with bloodshot, five AM eyes and rumpled, half undone ties. They seated themselves and tried their luck with blueberry pancakes, orange juice, and meatloaf cut to look like dice. The waitresses called us any number of pet names, and brought us more juice, more coffee, more syrup. Traffic moved to and from the strip behind us, and a drunken gambler tottered to the register and fell on to counter, then the floor.

Breakfast?