I sat in the diner and stared at the plate. The meatloaf and mashed potatoes lay there, side by side, utterly uninspiring. I shouldn’t have eaten out. I couldn’t afford it. I had just been let go from my job. They explained that because it was a ‘right to work’ state, they had the right to stop me working for any reason or no reason at all. I wasn’t fired, I was ‘let go.’ No hard feelings. I came on board, created systems and wrote a new schedule that maximized efficiency. I built something streamlined, now they would get to drive it. Nothing hard about that.
What was going to be hard was telling my wife. I had told her how well I was doing at work and when I was asked into the manager’s office this morning, I honestly thought that I was about to be promoted, but they just decided to keep the silk and throw away the silkworm.
A fellow with tore-up boots and a frayed straw hat, a real cowboy, kept pumping quarters into the antique jukebox, where hundreds of tragedies were scratched into vinyl and stacked side by side to provide the perfect soundtrack for circling the drain. My phone rang.
“Hey, honey, where are you? I was getting worried.”
“I just stopped to get something to eat. Let me settle up and take the Posey tube home to you.”
“Eating out? Did you get some extra money? I remember you saying you thought you might get a bonus.”
“No, I’m afraid not. I’ll tell you more when I get home. See you in a little while.”
I got in my car and then turned onto Webster Street to take the tunnel back to the Island of Alameda. The Webster Tunnel was built back in the sixties and was laid side by side with the old Posey Tube that was built back in 1928 so that traffic in each direction would have its own tunnel to drive under the Oakland Estuary. Locals called it the Autobahn because many people acted as if speed limits do not apply when traversing it.
I entered the tunnel, trying to avoid traffic that was merging in from the other lane, when suddenly my car started to shake and shimmy. Had I blown a tire? Then I saw that every vehicle in the tunnel was having difficulty maintaining their lane. Some skimmed the walls with screeching sparks while others scuffed and dented one another. Ceramic tiles rained down from the walls and ceiling and the tunnel lights dimmed. As soon as I cleared the tunnel exit, I went to the gas station to check the damage to my car. The attendant came out with an excited look on his face.
“The Posey tube collapsed. Anybody in there is either crushed or drowned. It was a 6.0 on the Hayward fault.”
When I got home, my wife didn’t care about the job. She sobbed as we lay side by side.
Literature in Small Doses 