March in Line, Please

2.

When I walked onto the elevator from the thirtieth floor for the last time, it was jam-packed as usual. After getting in, I immediately pushed the buttons for all twenty-nine floors below, prompting a chorus of sighs to erupt from the people within. “Fuck off,” I mumbled. Childish as the act was, I felt a surge of liberation pumping through my veins. These past five years I had been a zombie, and it felt good to give the corporate world my own version of the middle finger. When I got off the elevator and exited the revolving doors, I looked up into the sky. Free.

I was meeting Eric at a bar a few blocks from my now ex-office building. The great thing about having a housemate that doesn’t do shit all day is that he has no excuse for not wanting to drink.

Yur’s was our bar of choice. Right between Portland’s trendy Pearl District and Nob Hill, it was an unexpected dive next door to the yuppie cocktail lounges where pretentious people had their BMWs valeted. When I first moved to Portland and started to make some money, I was one of those people who frequented the trendy lounges and clubs, I have to admit. More than anything, I felt it was an escape from where I grew up— a small rural town littered with taverns with no windows and people drinking beer from their tailgates after work. I went to the clubs and spent ten bucks on a drink, hoping it would make me feel somehow more important, like I was part of something that was bigger. Every once in awhile I might bring a girl home and get laid, but only after I had spent two hundred dollars on drinks and convinced her that I made more money than I really did. After a couple of years, I ultimately found that I got greater satisfaction going to places like Yur’s, places that reeked of an authenticity you can’t quite describe— or maybe it just was puke and cigarettes.

Journey's “Don’t Stop Believin’,” was playing over the stereo as I walked in, and I could barely make out Eric sitting at the bar through the thick haze of smoke. At a muscular six foot five he was hard to miss, and had the chiseled good looks that made him seem out of place at a bar like Yur’s. I pulled up to the stool next to him, where he already had a Miller High Life waiting for me.

Eric lit up a cigarette, raised his High Life in a half-assed cheers motion, and said, “Here’s to fucking broken dreams and cheap beer.” We guzzled our beers in silence for the next ten minutes. The tension of despair in a place like Yur’s made people come here either out of irony, or because they really were down on their luck and needed a place where judgment wasn’t passed. As I sat there swigging at my champagne of beers, I realized that I had now changed from being an ironic bar patron to being someone who wanted to be around the loneliness that floated through the air in a place like this.

Yesterday she told me we were done. The reasons were simple and straightforward: she had been with me for two years and couldn’t stand my constant complaining about my dislike for my job, for my life. Inevitably she came to feel she was a part of my unhappiness. I remember staring in her eyes when she told me she was leaving, and feeling completely fucking numb, paralyzed by my inability to say anything that would resemble emotion. Inside, I was screaming for her not to go, but the words never made it out. She was moving to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to work in her brother’s surf shop.

“I am going after her” I said to Eric. I expected him to tell me to forget her and move on, just like he had told me a hundred times over the past ten years. “Well,” he said, “the 1965 Ford Mustang needs some attention anyway.”