Aaron H. Gilbreath                                                                   

Eight Inches of Porcelain

            The thrill of sleeping in my truck ended the day I awoke in a Denny’s parking lot outside of Seattle.

            My childhood friend Ian and his fiancé Aiko had just flown in from New York City the previous day and were staying downtown at the W, a swank, twenty-six story hotel marketed to the hip, young, urban professional. The W played techno music twenty-four hours a day in the lobby and had a lounge with zebra-pattern seat cushions where, I am sure, they sold more apple martinis than beer. Not that I wouldn’t like to have stayed there myself. The carpet was so soft it massaged your feet as you walked, and all the room’s unusual amenities - high speed internet connections, faxes, printers, office supplies - were kind of cool; but still, the place was a bit yuppie for me.

            I’d driven the two hours up from Portland just to spend the day with Ian and Aiko. He and I hadn’t seen each other in what he calculated to be nine years, and although that number sounded a bit high, I trusted his assessment; he was the mathematician between us after all, the one who worked off Wall Street writing his own stock market investment computer programs - something about algorithms that automatically buy mistakenly priced stock or something. He knew I’d struggled with trig and algebra in school so he never made more than the broadest remarks about work in our emails or phone calls. Not that I discussed the mindless art of bookselling with him. Like me, Ian read a lot, both fiction and nonfiction, but I was embarrassed to discuss a job that so closely resembled a McDonald’s burger assembly with a guy in his tax bracket. So after years of cross-continent conversation, we knew a lot about each others’ personal lives - dating, favorite books, favorite wines - but little of work life. Frankly, the less he knew the better. What was there to say, I alphabetized three hundred used novels on a shelf today? Picked up abandoned coffee cups from some messy trench coat-wearing gamers? All he needed to know was where I worked and that it paid the bills. That’s all my parents knew.

            The grumbling pistons of idling semis roused me that morning. Apparently, this Denny’s let truckers spend the night in their lot, which made it safe for me but, with all the revving and sighing and coming and going, made for a very broken sleep. With an audible groan, I peeled back the wool blanket - foul from ten years of campfire smoke - and pulled on my clothes. My shorts and shoes, set for the night atop the hump of the wheel well, stung my skin with the night’s collected cold. I wiped condensation from the camper shell’s rear window and peered outside - parents walking children to the restaurant door, truckers checking wires, two old ladies in a long brown town car smoking cigarettes.

            As had become my standard practice after years of car camping, I drove to the closest, newest gas station, filled my French press with hot water from the station’s spigot, and showered in their bathroom. The trick to a thorough and trouble-free cleaning - what I call a “whore shower,” just the important parts - is speed and a deep sink. You need about eight inches of porcelain to really get your head under the faucet and wash off the suds, and you need to do everything - shampoo, shave, wash your face, brush your teeth - in the amount of time it takes for your average constipated, burger-eating American man to clear his bowels - about ten minutes - because when people start knocking and a line forms, the gas station attendants start rattling the handle and yelling to come out. I didn’t want to start trouble or even a conversation; I just wanted to smell like Calvin Klein and get the grease from my hair.

            After a quick Texaco whore shower, I sat on my tailgate in the Denny’s lot, poured myself a hot cup of coffee and read the paper somebody’d left in the bathroom. As wet as my ears still were, and as cold as the Washington wind felt on my damp hair, I was enjoying myself. I hadn’t car camped in years. I used to sleep in my little camper a lot in college; the ability to pull over and sleep anywhere I wanted was liberating on roadtrips, and I took trips all the time back then, sometimes just weekend ones outside town, other times for three or four weeks, alone, driving up and down the Pacific Coast or through the Rockies and hiking the wildest stretches of wilderness I could find. Big Sur. Glacier National Park. Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia - I saw some places; the danger of being harassed by residents keen to my freeloading or of getting robbed only added to the excitement. Now my neck was sore from the way I’d shoved it under my luggage to block the sun; the flatbed’s metal ridges had poked through the air mattress and scored my back with red marks; every passing semi and loud customer woke me, and I’m grumpy if I don’t get a solid seven hours sleep; plus, I missed having my morning news radio and Italian electric coffee pot.

            The two old ladies snubbed out their cigs and shuffled their slow way toward the restaurant. I told friends back in Portland that I’d reserved a hotel room. I told myself it would be exciting to sleep in the truck again, get a taste of the old days, and as much as I needed some excitement to shock my slumbering brain out of my rut of boredom and constraint, I knew this time was different. It was just a way of saving money.

- - -

            With a black reflective shell that caught the blue light of Puget Sound in its gloss, the W looked like a giant iPod. I waited in the lobby, seated on a couch beside a man in a shiny dark suit reading a newspaper in Japanese.

            “Cameron,” a voice called out, “hey buddy.” Ian stepped out of the elevator hand in hand with a gorgeous, smiling Aiko. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and, squeezing my old friend like I had the air mattress that morning to deflate it, I patted his back. “So good to see you.”

            “You too my man.”

            He looked like he always had - leather shoes, brown leather belt, white Oxford tucked into tailored jeans - except his jaw was harder, skin drier, speech more measured.

            Aiko, her eyes deep and probing, dark hair as shiny as an otter’s fur, took my hand and introduced herself. “It’s great to finally meet you.”

            Ian had told me so many things about her: she was funny, well-read, had majored in mathematics and now worked as a computer programmer; she even beat him regularly at poker, which, as anyone close to him knew, was the quickest way outside of binary code to his heart. My joy for the happy couple overwhelmed my envy and I gave her a firm familial hug. Her sweet perfume reminded me of my ex-girlfriend Maya’s - Chanel No. 5. We’d just broken up weeks before. She’d grown tired of working retail in hip but hopeless Portland and moved to San Francisco to try to get into the stable, paying world of banking. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be so lucky as to meet a woman who I wanted to marry and who wanted to marry me, someone who saw retail work as a suitable career rather than a dead end and with whom my tastes matched as well as Ian and Aiko’s. Then again, I never believed in luck. Only hard work and laziness.

            Ian led us out onto the busy street into the noise of passing cars and revving buses. “So where are you staying?”

            “Me?” I scratched my nose. “The Motel 6 south of town.”

            “Still got the truck?”

            “You know it.” I pointed up the hill to the dented red chassis shining amid the charcoal gray sedans. “Big Red’s a part of the family now. He’s seen more of the US than a sailor has the inside of a whore house.”

            Aiko smiled at me and squeezed Ian’s hand. “I don’t even know how to drive. You have to be either rich or crazy to have a car in New York City. Tokyo too.”

            We took a cab to a nouveau seafood restaurant in the affluent Belltown neighborhood. In their three years together, Ian and Aiko had visited wineries in Napa, attended symphonies in San Francisco, spent a week in Key West, stayed with her family three times in Tokyo. This trip they’d seen the permanent Native American Art exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, visited the new city library - a gorgeous, bizarrely shaped piece of functional art - and eaten at some of Zagat’s highest rated sushi restaurants. I’d done four of those six things, only over the course of ten years rather than three, all alone or with women I no longer talked to. Ian spread his napkin over his leg and Aiko sampled his wine. Plus, I doubted they’d ever breathed in the moist nectar of Redwoods National Park when the rhododendrons were in bloom, or seen fog roll through the narrow glacial valleys of Mount Rainer.

            “Had a chance to visit the famous Elliot Bay Bookstore?” I asked, knowing the speed with which he devoured books.

            “Not yet,” he said, “but we will.”

            Every year for his birthday I sent him nice, hardcover copies of favorite Japanese novelists - first editions when I could find them, all wrapped in crisp protective Mylar; I never told him that I hadn’t paid for one. I did that with all my Christmas presents: readers like my parents and cousins and friends in Portland got books, all of them stolen. If I had a therapist, and I was beginning to think I may need one, I would have been too ashamed to even tell this. But now, having desires and financial responsibilities greater than my means, I knew what people meant when they said they “had to steal,” that it was eat or be eaten.

            We ate salmon and oysters until our stomachs bulged then talked over dessert. It was great to hear how much Ian loved his job. “It’s like gambling,” he said, “when you’re up you feel like the king of the world and are smiling all the time, and when you’re down, your sleep’s broken and you guzzle Pepto. Lots of anxiety.”

            “At least you’re doing it in New York.” I turned to Aiko. “In high school he used to talk about that city like it was the greatest thing on earth.”

            Ian reached across the half-eaten chocolate torte and clinked my wine glass with his. “I could never live anywhere else. If I believed in spirits, I’d say NYC is my spiritual home.” He looked at me and snickered. “But I save that kind of hippie talk for you.”

            I flicked a piece of salmon off the table and onto his lap.

            “That reminds me,” Ian said, brushing off the food, “did you hear about Warren Bailey? Lost all his savings in some real estate scheme and wound up back living with his parents.” He explained to Aiko how Warren had been the A-1 jock at our private Catholic high school, alpha male in the predatory wolf pack of rich, beer-chugging meatheads with new jeeps and Daddy’s vintage Mustangs. Ian released a unabashed laugh. “He’s thirty years old.”

            My stomach flooded with adrenalin. What a nightmare I thought; not that Warren didn’t deserve it for all the racist comments he made and all the women he secretly filmed in bed. But still, moving back with his parents, that’s rough. I let the torte melt in my mouth. “That guy was a prick and deserves it.” I told Aiko how Ian and I stopped sitting in the back row of Spanish class because Warren was always fanning farts at people seated around him. Apparently, Ian said, two of Warren’s old football buddies had become full-blown, all day long alcoholics - beer from breakfast ’til bedtime. One guy, Chuck Demorier, had checked himself into rehab about the same time I’d landed the bookstore gig.

            Aiko clinked her glass with mine and looked into my eyes. “Have you tried some of the Zinfandels coming out of Lodi? Ian and I tried some while we were in Napa, and they were just as good as any of those.”

            I scribbled some brand names down on a sugar packet and hoped they were available at Trader Joe’s. I’d started at the bookstore because I was an English major and loved literature and wanted to be a writer; six years later I was just earning my same shitty pay and maintaining my status as an aging dude with no marketable skills but cashiering. My résumé was as uncluttered as a high school senior’s, but I wasn’t the only one suffering. My cat Simile used to get the healthy, hippie, dry food fortified with seaweed and brewer’s yeast but now only got the generic stuff with all the ground up, bloated road kill and dead pigeons that people said went into it. Poor kitty. Plus, I hadn’t written anything in years.

            “Remember those clunky leather hiking boots in high school you used to wear?” Ian peered under the table and sat back up grinning. “You still do.”

            “Remember how your mom used to cook us grilled cheese sandwiches all the time?” I said. “Really buttery and crisp with the crusts cut off.” Ian looked red-faced over at Aiko, who sat smiling with a quiet, elegant relish. “Ian wuved his wittle cwusts cut off his sammies didn’t he.”

            Aiko cupped his hand and let out a soft, breathy laugh. “Wittle Ianry doesn’t wike his cwusts?”

            He squinted at me and swirled his glass of Cabernet. “You suck.”

            When the check came I slapped Ian’s hand as he reached for the receipt. “You are not paying.”

            “It’s too late,” he said with a grin, “I already did.” From behind the bar counter the waiter waved. “Got it when I went to the john.”

            As much as I wanted to treat my friends to lunch, I was secretly glad he’d beaten me to it. Every year, it seemed, I had to cancel another magazine subscription. Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review - resubscription forms would arrive in the mail, touting discounted rates for current subscribers, and with my fingertips sliding over the magazines’ glossy, colorful covers, I would drop the forms in the recycle bin and try not to mourn. Then I would steal copies from work. Like a thief. Like a poor person.

            “You know I use that tip trick you taught me all the time,” I said, “the one where you move the decimal point over one place in the final price.” I laughed, more at the trick’s simplicity than at the fact that I needed it. “Saves me the embarrassment of always pulling that cheat sheet from my wallet.”

            Ian turned to Aiko. “He abhors math.”

            I shook my head. “My mind just doesn’t work that linear way.”

            “Geez,” Aiko said, “what did you guys talk about in high school? That must have been during his Pink Floyd phase.” She kissed his cheek and it blushed pink. “He told me all about that.”

            Back at the hotel, we found a fifty dollar parking ticket shoved under my windshield wiper - expired meter. My insurance had lapsed because I could no longer afford the rate, so I was driving around Portland and Seattle with more caution than a fugitive: signaling to switch lanes, stopping at yellow lights, obeying the speed limit. There was the very real possibility that I may need to sell Big Red and start taking the bus; either that or get a roommate and find a better job.

            We walked down the long, carpeted hallways, past maid carts loaded with expensive salon shampoos, triple-ply toilet paper and French-milled soap. I used their bathroom and marveled at the marble counters and silver fixtures and an electric razor with no security cord on it. Ian slid his feet into a pair of free cotton slippers and tossed a copy of The Wall Street Journal onto the bed. All the fixtures were black wood with white trim, very modern, very Scandinavian. The bed had goose down duvets and faced a window which looked west over other buildings out onto the Sound.

            “It’s a really great spread you got here,” I said.

            Aiko smiled. “For what you get it’s not really that expensive.”

            After a lengthy conversation about how Aiko had moved to the States from Japan after college and met Ian at a jazz concert, I excused myself. “I’m gonna run to the car real quick to get your gift.” I wandered down the hall and snuck up on the maid cart like a hunter stalking a sleeping deer. Peering into the empty rooms for the maid’s position, and making sure there were no security cameras aimed my way, I started stuffing toilet paper rolls into my backpack. One by one I filled my backpack with toilet paper, dropping them in like a mother sparrow filling her babies’ greedy mouths. It was the fluffy kind, a brand with three layers, not that translucent sandpaper grit I stole from work that disintegrated at crucial moments, leaving my fingers in places I spent my whole life trying to avoid. With a feline swiftness, I swiped stacks of face and body soap - olive castile the label said - tiny bottles of blue mouthwash, pens, fluffy washcloths - which I had no more of at home - a pair of those fancy fuzzy slippers, and some plastic garbage bags.

            Somewhere a bolt clicked and Ian’s voice followed. “What the hell are you doing?” I spun around, dropping two more tiny shampoo bottles into my pockets, and faced him. “You degenerate,” he said. He was laughing.

            I tiptoed to him to whisper my explanation. “Hey, free toilet paper. I couldn’t resist.” Even at a whisper there was desperation in my voice, an ominous intensity. I felt so ashamed.

            Back in his room, Ian took me into the bathroom. “Everything all right?” He eyed me with a frank suspicion. “You turn into a kleptomaniac while I’ve been gone? Some adrenalin-junkie bungijumping type?”

            “No,” I said, my voice hushed so Aiko wouldn’t hear, “just stocking up on free stuff.”

            He tried to smile, but his eyes revealed a seriousness that his white teeth could not conceal. “You still have the book job right?”

            “Sure. Going on six years.” I shouldered the pack like a hiker about to start down a trail. “It’s just--” I didn’t want to say it, not at my age, not leaning against that cold marble countertop, but like tides in the Sound, the words kept rolling. “On my salary I need to take what I can get.” My brows lifted. My cheeks puffed. “Sad but true.”

            Seated on the polished tan toilet, Ian stroked his chin, catching light in his engagement ring. It looked very handsome on him, the gold a natural match with his light skin. Even holding a backpack full of hotel toiletries, I was proud of him.

            “Move to New York,” Ian said. “Aiko knows lots of people at magazines, she could get you a job in publishing or copyediting or babying needy authors on book tours.”

            My sensitivity took his assistance as pity, so I blurted, “I hate New York City.”

            “You’ve never been there.”

            “I know it’d be too crowded and noisy for me. You know I like small and quiet.” I stared at him a while, the senseless resistance in my eyes relaxing to a soft vulnerability. “Even if I tried I couldn’t afford it.”

            “You could if you were earning four-thou a month.”

            He had a point, but I didn’t tell him so. Copyediting sounded great, the publishing industry exciting, and a fresh start couldn’t hurt. But I was settled in Portland. Settled and in a six-month lease and used to my routine and work that didn’t burden me with anything more complicated than the alphabet and pushing cash register keys. Although I couldn’t calculate it, there was a definite value to a job that never followed me home once my shift ended. And I still hated New York. “No,” I said, “that’s alright.” His cheek pinched into a sad smile, a copout like my copout of an answer. “Maybe sometime in the future. But know I appreciate the offer.” As great as more money sounded, what I really wanted was to be back in college, drunk and paid for and filled with a delusional hope.

            “Come on.” He pushed open the door, gave me a push. “All that stuff in your backpack’s starting to smell like a giant tampon.”

            Aiko sat in the small window nook, her hands folded, staring at the Sound. “You two playing kissy face in there?” She threw a sock at Ian and laughed. “I was starting to worry my engagement ring might be more appropriate on you, Cameron.”

            Ian shot me a look, like ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’ You could see the discord in his eyes. Instead of holding him to secrecy, making him carry that burden, I told her everything: the low-paying job, the offer of an eastward move, the toiletries. Everything but the sleeping in my truck; that was just too over-the-top for anyone to understand. Especially them.

            With a touch as gentle as an owl feather settling on the forest floor, Aiko rested her hand on my shoulder and stared past the embarrassment and shame in my eyes. “Well, I’d be happy to make some calls if you ever wanted to move out. Pull some strings.” She smiled. “You might really like New York.”

            I forced a smile through my embarrassment. “That’s incredibly generous, Aiko.” It was too big of a change, too great of what my dad always called a “calculated leap.” I liked the leap part, but not the calculation.

            Ian said, “You still writing?” I felt my shoulders sag. Defeated. Like a deer in the crosshairs awaiting the lethal shot. I could see the disappointment on Ian’s face, a tinge of pity in his green eyes that wondered why, but he didn’t say a word.

            “You could write travel narratives,” Aiko said. “Ian said you’ve been all over the place. Turn all that experience into something saleable.”

            Ian flicked his brows and squeezed her thigh. “See why I follow her around like a lost dog? She’s the one who got me on Wall Street. That job was her idea.”

            “That reminds me.” I reached into my backpack, sinking my hand into the tight, cushioned mess of toilet paper and shampoo bottles, and pulled out a heavy brick of a novel. “For you.” Two soap bars fell on the floor. “Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. It’s a signed first edition.”

            Ian ran his hands over it like a cocoa farmer gauging the quality of his beans. “Wow. Did you get this at your store?”

            “I found it at Elliot Bay yesterday.” I’d actually paid for that one.

- - -

            Open space to be filled with my camper, that’s how I used to view big empty parking lots - vouchers for free rent waiting to be cashed in. Every morning on the road, like the day of my visit with Ian and Aiko, I dumped the morning’s cold coffee into some bushes and laid my bags on a gum-spackled curb to dig out a change of clothes. The cramped quarters and cold temperatures and uppity hotel security guards could be trying, but waking up in the mountains, by the beach, on the shores of a blue glacial lake amid fragrant spruce and fir, that more than made up for it. As did the freedom, as fleeting and illusory as it was. Also, with a well-chosen spot and the proper camouflage, I could sleep in the wealthiest residential neighborhoods beside Beamers and Mercedes, in places where the nation’s richest and most elite paid big bucks to live. I’d done it before - in San Jose, in Malibu, in Bel Air.

            After Ian and Aiko and I parted ways, I drove the I-5 south, past downtown, past the Denny’s and the Texaco station I’d showered at, and rented a room at Motel 6. The sheets stunk of bleach and itched like army canvas on my skin, and paying fifty bucks for twelve hours in a room covered with other peoples’ stains seemed ridiculous considering I could get the same basic amenities in my truck for free. I crunched some numbers on the inside of the phonebook: that’s 4.6 dollars per hour, if my math was correct, or 7.2 cents a minute, and most of that’s for time spent asleep. Asleep, not even able to enjoy the free HBO that suffered from a bad case of static. It seemed like such a waste. But my neck didn’t hurt the next day from being bent, and the bed didn’t leave any marks on my back; plus, when I woke up, I brewed coffee in my room instead of on my tailgate, brushed my teeth in the sink. With my feet dripping shower water and a tiny towel around me, I measured the sink with my hands. Eight inches deep. Just deep enough.