Elliott’s finished his conversation with Marcus, headed outside into the early afternoon and doubled back toward the bar beneath the restaurant he cleans.

I walked outside and watched streetlights change for a minute. Everyone had somewhere to go and the ones that didn’t seemed content to walk around for the sake of moving. I wanted to head to my place and write but I told Anthony I’d meet him at Skratte’s. It was a good dark place in the daytime, always full of smoke and laughter and music. I took the main stairs down from the street, stood at the bar while my eyes adjusted to its underworld feel and ordered three shots of whiskey.

Anthony was alone in the middle of a mess of tables and chairs, lost in one of those moments Skratte’s could induce in mid-afternoon before people came down from campus. He had a paper folded in his hand, a cigarette burning in an ashtray and two half-empty pints in front of him. There’d be no chance for this once evening arrived, when your only choice would be to navigate through pockets or wade amongst the nooks until you found a spot to fall into a wall.

I set the shots down beside the pints. He nodded, picked up his ale and drank. I knew the other belonged to Blane. I didn’t want to see him and had been good at avoiding him for the last week, but Centre was too small to keep that up and besides you couldn’t get away from your oldest friends.

Anthony set his paper down and looked up in a soiled sort of way. He was well into a good drunk.

“Where’s Blane? I asked.

“Using the phone. What are we having?”

“Irish whiskey for the chill.”

“I haven’t noticed a chill. We’ve been at it since noon.” He looked at his watch. “Sit.”

“It’s always cold down here. The brick holds onto winter until August.”

“And you?”

“The same.” (more…)

Campers is a book in progress. Or process. Either will do right now. I’m sharing to share. Tomorrow these same pages may read differently. Or they may disappear. Enjoy.

I’d been working since before midnight and was about to fall over. Of course I couldn’t fall over unless I wanted to sleep in the gutter between buildings. Plus it would be good of me to clock out before I fell over. Not to mention that I had plans that didn’t include falling over. Later there would be time to fall over. First there were plans to keep.

I walked up the street to see Marcus, give him my story and tell him I quit, which was ironic since the writing gig didn’t pay. So it wasn’t like I was really quitting anything. Actually I was buying my time back, or taking it back. I tried to quit once before but Marcus kept me on with another story, or I kept myself on with another story. The problem was that I liked stories, or stories seemed to like me. They came out of nowhere and hit me in the face like a jackboot, which is how this one had come to be – a story of a Nazi who wanted to be mayor of his little bumpkin town about 15-miles outside of Centre, then decided mayor wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be governor. That’s where we were now.

Most people didn’t like Marcus. He was more toad than person, big round neck covered in hair that shot straight up his face like a beard growing from his chest toward his eyeballs and not the other way around. He was the kind of guy you couldn’t take too seriously, which was the only way I could tolerate him.

His office was a mess of dust and smells. All sorts of smells and none you wanted to take home with you. Occasionally a touch of citrus would waft through that was almost pleasant until you realized it was the aerosol he used to freshen his tattered loafers.

Marcus leaned over a dish of lo mein and grunted.

“What do you have?” he asked.

“About 1,200,” I said.

“Is it any good?”

“Here.”

He took my pages, thumbed through them briefly and flicked them back across the desk, then sucked hard lemonade through a straw.

“You usually start stronger than that,” he said. “You played baseball, right?”

“We’ve discussed this,” I said.

“We have?”

“Sure,” I said. He shrugged.

“I hate baseball. Bores me to spoons.” He leaned back in his chair, fanned his arms out to encompass the bare walls that made up the basement office of Centre’s last independent paper, a rag called The Null which had gone from a semi-proud weekly to a fledgling bi-weekly to a joke of a monthly within the last year. It would be dead soon. Marcus liked to brag that he’d already picked the urn.

He leaned forward, a mass of air and warts. “This isn’t very good,” he said. “In baseball terms, it’s a wounded duck.”

“It’s been tough with work,” I said.

“You’re not performing surgery, Elliott. You mop floors.”

“I’ve been working doubles.”

“That’s not my fault.” He tossed the pages at me. “I don’t have time for this.”

“I had a deadline.”

“Which you missed twice. Didn’t you ever have a deadline up on the hill?” He nodded in the direction of the university. He hated the university. Most locals hated the university. It didn’t matter how much money it brought back into Centre, how full the streets were on fall weekends when the fabled football team made everything seem pregnant and drunk at once.

I started to answer when his phone rang. He barked hello into the receiver made a few noises and hung up. (more…)