The coolness of that practical phrase repeated in my mind after I’d said goodbye to Linda and she’d gone off to Boulder, where her summer job was working in her parents’ cookie shop. I called her every Sunday from a pay phone at an Exxon Station on Indian School Road, and we’d fight and if you asked me what we fought about I couldn’t tell you. We both felt misunderstood. I knew I was misunderstood, because I didn’t understand myself. It was a glass booth, the standard phone booth, and at five in the afternoon on a late-June Sunday the sun torched the little space into a furnace. The steel tray was too hot to fry eggs on, you’d have ruined them. It gave me little burns along my forearms. I’d slump outside the door as far as the steel cord allowed, my skin running to chills in the heat, and we’d argue until the operator came on and then I’d dump eight dollars of quarters into the blistering mechanism and go home.
The radio that summer played a strange mix, “Little Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, over and over, along with songs by the Animals, even “Sky Pilot.” This was not great music and I knew it at the time, but it all set me on edge. After work I’d shower and throw myself on the couch in my parents’ dark and cool living room and read and sleep and watch the late movies, making a list of the titles eventually in the one notebook I was keeping.
About the third week of June, I burned myself. I’d graduated to the paint sprayer and was coating the caustic towers in the oxygen plant. These were two narrow, four-story tanks that stood beside the metal building where the oxygen was bottled. The towers were full of a viscous caustic material that air was forced through to remove nitrogen and other elements until the gas that emerged was 99 percent oxygen. I was forty feet up an extension ladder reaching right and left to spray the tops of the tanks. Beneath me was the pump station that ran the operation, a nasty tangle of motors, belts, and valving. The mistake I made was to spray where the ladder arms met the curved surface of the tank, and as I reached out then to hit the last and farthest spot, I felt the ladder slide in the new paint. Involuntarily I threw my arms straight out in a terrific hug against the superheated steel. Oddly I didn’t feel the burn at first nor did I drop the spray gun. I looked down at what seemed now to be the wicked machinery of my death. It certainly would have killed me to fall. After a moment, and that’s the right span here, a moment, seconds or a minute, long enough to stablilize my heartbeat and sear my cheekbone and the inside of both elbows, I slid one foot down one rung and began to descend.
All the burns were the shapes of little footballs, the one on my face a three-inch oval below my left eye, but after an hour with the doctor that afternoon, I didn’t miss a day of work. They’ve all healed extraordinarily well, though they darken first if I’m not careful with the sun. That summer I was proud of them, the way I was proud not to have dropped the spray gun, and proud of my growing strength, of the way I’d broken in my workshoes, and proud in a strange way of my loneliness.
Where does loneliness live in the body? How many kinds of loneliness are there? Mine was the loneliness of the college student in a summer job at once very far from and very close to the thing he will become. I thought my parents were hopelessly bourgeois, my girlfriend a separate race, my body a thing of wonder and terror, and as I went through the days, my loneliness built. Where? In my heart? It didn’t feel like my heart. The loneliness in me was a dryness in the back of my mouth that could not be slaked.
And what about lust, that thing that seemed to have defeated me that spring, undermined my sense of the good boy I’d been, and rinsed the sweetness from my relationship with Linda? Lust felt related to the loneliness, part of the dry, bittersweet taste in the lava-hot air. It went with me like an aura as I strode with my three burns across the paved yard of Ayr Oxygen Company, and I felt it as a certain tension in the tendons in my legs, behind the knees, a tight, wired feeling that I knew to be sexual.
THE LOADING DOCK at Ayr Oxygen was a huge rotting concrete slab under an old corrugated-metal roof. Mr. Mac Bonner ran the dock with two Hispanic guys that I got to know pretty well, Victor and Jesse, and they kept the place clean and well organized in a kind of military way. Industrial and medical trucks were always delivering full or empty cylinders or taking them away, and the tanks had to be lodged in neat squadrons which would not be in the way. Victor, who was the older man, taught me how to roll two cylinders at once while I walked, turning my hands on the caps and kick-turning the bottom of the rear one. As soon as I could do that, briskly moving two at a time, I was accepted there and fell into a week of work with them, loading and unloading trucks. They were quiet men who knew the code and didn’t have to speak or call instructions when a truck backed in. I followed their lead.