Dynamo promo

MONDAY, JULY 4th
I was the one who burned down the Dynamo Diner.

This is how I did it:

I had the keys that Toni gave me to the delivery entrance in the back. I'm surprised that I got away with sneaking in, even though it was the first two hours after closing time and there must've been a million people across the street watching the July 4th fireworks though they weren't very flashy yet; they save the best for the last. It was a good thing. Arson was never legal and I was carrying enough matchsticks and kerosene on me to burn down the planet. I hoped that if someone caught me going in I could pass off as a bum though I don't know how I'd explain the can of kerosene under my jacket. I hadn't seen the inside of a bathroom for a couple of days and I'd been swigging enough mouthwash to smell drunk. My hair was so greasy it stuck to my hood. I smelled like I shoveled shit for a living.

The key took a little while to get into the lock but once the foreplay was over I stabbed it into the knob and the door opened into the kitchen, which still stunk of the old sauerkraut and the pickles Marie forgot to put away. I'm guessing that putting stuff back wasn't as important as some awful ten o'clock movie. Today it wouldn't matter. I'm sure Marie will enjoy these movies when she's unemployed.

The kitchen was larger than I was used to because there were always five hundred people in there, elbows bumping into each other cutting boxes and boxes of peppers and onions and the fat off of truckloads of steak. The smell was an echo of the afternoon down to Andrea's vomit from the first and last baby she should ever have. (My requirements aren't all that tough. The woman doesn't know her seven times tables.) Even the stench of puke wasn't so bad in the evening. I realized I felt bad for a place I didn't even know well. And hadn't burned down yet.

My feet killed me. My soles flapped around on the linoleum. I bumped into stacks of ketchup boxes, pots hanging like heads from the ceiling. The tray stacks rolled around on the floor because someone left the top window open. When I went to close it the pots clanged against the wall. It's one last satisfaction Javier will never have, telling Marie to close the door for the seventieth time that week.

There's another locked door between the kitchen and the rest of the place. I wondered if my key would work on that but it did, and the door sounded little less like old men getting up. It slammed into my face so I held it and came up behind the counter, crushing facial bones I didn't know I had. I was in front of the cash register and felt for the key taped under the second shelf from the bottom. After a few dust-bunnies settled in my nails I unstuck the thing and shoved it into the register.

It was a long time since I saw Ulysses, Lincoln, George and Andrew. (They didn't accept Benjamins, the Dynamo Diner was no Tavern on the Green.) I scooped them out and looked out the front windows. I could see the crowd jumping at the sight of fireworks. Wait until you see the Grand Finale, I wanted to say but that would have ruined everything and I'd have been drinking out of a coke can behind a two-way mirror, interrogated by the cops the same way it goes on TV.

Right in front of the counter was the broken stool Greg used while he ate his Grilled Cheeses with Ham toasted Just So with fries that he shoved into the melted cheese. The Dynamo isn't the only outfit in town that serves cheese fries. I was sure he'd eat somewhere else when the Diner was gone. Filthy pig.

The tables were made out of wood. Thick, sturdy, dry flammable wood. It gave the place a folksy look. Even the salt and pepper jars were made out of wood. So were the paneling and the frame for the picture schlepped from Cuba back when the fruit barons owned everything and carrying pictures of happy people stuffing their faces with sandwiches was more than just okay. Now you can't even bring a fart back from Cuba.

(I'm all for farts. They're flammable.)

The crowd still waited for the big blasts that were just about to start. It's quiet for awhile before that happens so they're checking watches, running after their stupid toddlers wandering in the streets, exploding when the fireworks burst. Almost everybody carried something in their free hands -- a hot dog, beefy bun, a carton of french fries. Their faces were covered in grease.

I wanted a burger, too.


I was back in the kitchen again, and because I couldn't see I was going to have spots all over my arms. I bruise like fruit. Pots and trays were my enemies. Boxes of knives sat ready to stab me by themselves. The jar of pickles wanted to kill me.

I turned on the gas and the grill flared up. I loved the smell but I turned it off anyway. That came last.

Somewhere in the corner was a can of old grease. Toni talked about keeping it a lock on the lid or something to discourage stealing. It's been done before, but not in this diner because nobody around here uses a car. There's nowhere to park on this street, not even illegally. Just to prove it my legs hurt from walking up the hill past Edgewood Place and then onto Laurel Avenue until it ended at a chain link fence. Beyond that there's weeds. Past the Dynamo Diner there's nothing. It's the end of the world. I didn't even have to watch a doomsday movie to see it either. There's nowhere to go, even if I did have a car.

So there's no lock on the grease cap. The barrel was made from tin and you could smell every rotten thing Maria and Andrea made with it this past week. There was bacon cooked with eggs and steak and six types of cheese. I tilted it onto the floor and let it go. I was afraid that it'd congeal and turn into a monster, something with a working brain and limbs and that was more than I could say for myself right now.

After a few seconds nothing happened. No grease monsters. I would've liked to meet one.

I took off my jacket and it stunk so much of myself that I gagged. My puke came up and went down my throat again until I coughed on it. All I could think was that my mother would kill me, my mother would kill me. Before burning a building, she'd always said, take a bath. Comb your hair. Be presentable and act like a lady.

I took the bottle of kerosene and a pair of gloves from the inside of my jeans. I poured the kerosene onto the jacket and took the million or so matchsticks, trying them out one at a time. Hiding them under my pits killed a fair few but finally I got one working. I've made a game of staring at matches until my nails feel like they're being melted off. I dropped the flame onto my jacket and soon it caught fire.

It was burning much more than I'd expected because within a few seconds the zippers were melting onto the floor, which was starting to turn black from white and orange.

When I turned around the fire was behind me and I was staring out the open door. Now was the time to make that last burger, before the kerosene met the grease.



Two seconds after I turned on the gas I jumped like the star athlete I never was and my face met the dirt. This was all right because I'd already managed to destroy my front teeth way before I knew I would burn down the diner or any other building. My left hand covered my bloody mouth, my right had one hell of a time trying to lock the back door by itself. I couldn't look. I couldn't smell because if I did I'd puke for real and I wasn't sure whether or not vomit was flammable.

When there was no way I could ever open that door again even if I wanted to I jumped the back fence just as the Chinese Dragon blasts ripped the atmosphere open (and when I closed my eyes on the other side I could still see them in my head). I had to run away into the weeds and away from civilization. I couldn't watch the Dynamo Diner burn down to hell, even if it had to.



(This is the why.)

MONDAY, JUNE 27
I was sitting outside with Toni while she got the call about her brother. He's dead? Toni asked but she couldn't get the sounds. I wanted to thump her back, to force the words out of her mouth so that the other person wouldn't go hello, hello on the other end like the Pathmark's tape deck sometimes does so that Britney repeats the word baby until my brain turns to ooze. The guy hung up and the dial tone brought us down to Earth. Toni's thighs touched mine as we sat on the steps and watched her knees which were nothing really to look at.