Couch

COUCH

Band posters flutter in the wind, the tape fraying under the rough hands of the movers.  They're his friends, bribed into driving their second-hand sedans to this concrete-skinned basement apartment with a Belmont and beer in it for them.  Their jeans rasp around the tiny space.  Their swearing fills the halls on occasion.  Everything's heavy, and awkward, and the autumn chill is getting to their bones.  

His breath frosts up the window.  The Styrofoam keeps his gloved hands warm as he stares around home.  Rather, what was home.

It's a bare concrete floor without rugs or adornment. He could feel his way around every weathered inch of the place on heavy Sunday mornings, before the church bells down the road begin their wailing.  Even with the bottles and butts lying about, even with his eyes close and his head pounding from the whiskey, he could find the remote, the radio, the lamp beside his couch.

He slumps into it now, feeling the edge of cheap paper slash at his black hair and leather jacket, his neck rife with tattoos.  It crunches under his jeans.  

It's a dull green, tartan-striped with stains and patches covering its entire weathered surface.  It has seen asses, jocks, preppies, bad girls, good girls, (bad boys?) and all manner of academic riff-raff sprawled across its surface.  The legs are chipped and broken. Scotch bottles clink and tinkle underneath.

He stares across the room with its one tiny window.  Apart from the radio and the T.V, there's nothing.  There doesn't need to be anything more.  Across the dim cavern is a doorway, an open one.  Joe cusses on his way out.  He grins. They must be dragging the motorbike out the door.  Suckers.

He stands, lays the coffee down and pushes the broken wooden door aside.  It's stained with mould.

Inside is the barest of beds; an old military cot.  It's what he could afford when he showed up in the city with two bags, a bottle, his jacket, and an admission scholarship to college.  The mattress on top is a loaner from somebody.  He's not sure who.  The books across the single dusty shelves are also loaners, though he remembers whose they are.  However, they owe him a vast amount of alcohol for the notes he slipped them during the final exams last month.  Ergo, they aren't getting them back.

The couch still hasn't been moved.  Even on his last day, it's a focal point.  A rock.

His guitar is across his bed, the G-string frayed down to the wire.  Across the guitar is a note, the be-all reason why he's leaving his cavern of an apartment.

It's a job offer.  Electrical company downtown wants him working the grid as a supervisor.  There's good money in it.  He's good at it, though he hates wires and clamps and the ever-present danger of lethal voltage.  He'll be better off than many, getting a job worth more than minimum wage straight out of college.  He's lucky.

And, at the same time, he's not.

Going to work in a tie; coming home though rush hour, eating dinner at a table with the sports or the news on will grind him down.  It already chafes at his spirit, his youthful death-wish for something aside from the weekly grind, the nine to five, the same desk, same job, same gum-stained patch of sidewalk to work.

He doesn't want to live, work, eat, sleep, and die in the same six blocks of soiled brick and smoked glass.  He doesn't want to hear the same slogans, jokes, and guitar riffs all his days.

Heaven knows it could happen.

Or it might not. He could be a contender.  He could rise up to stand behind those pillars of smoked glass and observe his fief of customers from a vaunted office chair.  

He could.  But it wouldn't be as simple as this.  There would be trappings and board meetings and dullness; the life sucked out of even a cup of coffee, spontaneity, a moment of rebellion.

He takes in the dirty room one last time.  A drape hangs out; the only thing he's leaving.

"Joe!"

Or not.