The lone inhabitant of nowhere.

As I sit at my keyboard and type I am surrounded by the place in the story. The people I'm writing about stand about me in the room or gaze out the window while they wait for me to write their next bit of reality. They're as much caught in my web and I'm in theirs.  Everything changes in my portion of the office as I write. My thoughts are so caught up in the paragraphs that I imagine that my emotions are contained in the sentences I write, no, in the words that make up the sentence.

I paused in the writing to shift a load of towels to the dryer and start another load. My writing space/office shares a room with the washer and dryer. I don't mind that, I like mechanical background noise. To keep my mind out of the office I listening to noise that could be anywhere. My favorite sound is a mechanical background made up of a jet aircraft cabin overlaid with the sound of a laundromat. I was just sitting here getting ready to start back into another paragraph, surrounded by this lovely comfortable, cocoon of sound and I pulled up the browser with the noise application and added the "laundromat" background and I found myself thinking, "I love this." I mean, I actually felt "Love" for this little environment. Maybe Love isn't the right word for the familiar comfort that I long for and enjoy beyond anything else at the moment, but goddam if that doesn't sound like Love when you say it.

I'm not sure if it's the same Love that people mean when they say, I love that song or movie or smell. Maybe it is, I have no idea what people mean when they say things. But for me, it's a flash of serious emotion. It is not a figure of speech, it's a feeling and one that I don't speak of very often. There's something that doesn't sound quite right about it, but it's there and it is profound when I feel it. I would miss it if I didn't encounter it regularly and when it comes to me, it reinforces me, strengthens me and gives me hope that there's more of it out there, somewhere.

When I think about it, my favorite working background reminds me of sitting next to the furnace in my father's cinderblock bunker of a business when I was small, waiting for him to finish his work so we can go home. It's dark and cold and he's working at the big workbench in the back room and I'm sitting on the removable back seat from his VW van. The vinyl bench seat has been taken out of the VW van to make more room for parts and console TVs. It sits in the corner of the front of the shop, next to the large gas furnace in the corner. It is the early 1960's.

There are stacks and stacks of televisions and record players and radios that have been abandoned in the shop. The stacks reach heights above my head and there are pathways between them. People bring them in to get an estimate of how much they'd cost to repair and my father checks them out to find out what's wrong. Then he calls the people and tells them how much repairing them would cost and they do the math in their heads and decide that for a few bucks more they can buy a new one that's fancier and better. The next calculation they make is why should they drive down to the shop to pick up a four-foot long, three-foot-tall television or console radio that doesn't work. They'd have to dispose of it and that would cost something so they just leave it there, at the shop, for my father to dispose of. This is why my father charges for repair estimates.

There's a sign on the wall that gives 10 Reasons Why We Charge for Estimates. I know because he had me do it as a project. I still remember most of it. I was about 10 years old.He gave me a piece of white poster board about 12" by 24", a black marker and a red marker, and a yellow pad with the copy written on it. I took it very seriously.

I had learned to block print and that's what he wanted. He wanted the letters to be an inch tall. I drew light pencil lines an inch apart on the sign board and did the whole thing in pencil over and over until I got the spacing right and he OK'd it. Then, and only then, did I fill in the penciled letters with marker.  It took several days.

The surface of the poster board was in pretty bad shape because of the amount of erasing and re-writing I'd done and the roughness of the eraser I used but when I was finished it went up on the wall next to all the other signs he had there.

There were a lot of signs. I think my father's TV repair business was an economic success for the simple fact that guys came by all the time selling business signs or some piece or bric-a-brac shit for business and my dad would buy it. Every peddler in town made a living off my dad.

A couple of signs that I remember were:

"We work for money, not for fun. We want our money when our work is done." 

(See the rhyme there, that was important.)

"It's Nice to be Important, but it's Important to be Nice."

(That might have been my dad's attempt at self-improvement.)

and of course,

"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

I think my father had a TV repair business to give him someplace to go during the day and to give himself a place that he could throw people out of.  I don't think the place ever turned a profit. It was a place he could go to smoke cigarettes and bullshit with his old friends or anyone who wandered in.

Anyway, the sign said the reason he charged for estimates was because estimating took time, diagnosing what was wrong was the biggest part of the repair, diagnosing wore out equipment as fast as repairing, stuff like that. But the real reason he charged for estimates was to cover the cost of taking all those abandoned cabinets and electronics to the dump every once in a while.

So, if my mom had some place to go in the evening and didn't want me tagging along, she would drop me off at my father's TV repair shop and I'd wait for him to finish working on stuff then he'd take me home. Sometimes it got to be very late and I was always bored. I was an impatient kid.

I would whine and complain until he'd get pissed off and yell at me and tell me to go sit the hell down and shut up. That's when I would squeeze through the crooked path between the stacks of abandoned electronics to the old vinyl bench seat from the VW in the corner by the furnace. I'd clear off a small space on the end of the seat and lean against the warm noisy wall of the gas furnace in the cold dark corner of the shop. I would listen to the rumble of the fan and the burners in the big steel furnace cabinet.

A giant rumble and roar that covered all the frequencies, a brown noise that was warm and surrounded me. I would close my eyes and imagine I was anywhere else I wanted to be. I imagined I was nowhere. That was a good place to be too. Time could pass quickly when you were nowhere. One side of my body would be warm from the furnace, it was just uncomfortable enough to be a promise that I could turn around if it came to that. Sometimes I fell asleep, but most of the time, I couldn't and I would just wait out the dragging punishment of time, leaning against that steel wall, thinking of nothing.

I hated it.

More later,