By David Sharpe, my brother.
17 December 1990:
Anyway, so my apartment burned down, well my apartment
didn't burn down really, the building burned, up the back and
across the top, right through the roof above my apartment,
and there I was on the street, at least when I wasn't in Tommy's
Donuts getting warm, looking up at this familiar brown‚brick
building with smoke pouring out if it, and my windows belching
smoke and the glass from my kitchen door falling in the cascades
of water from my balcony onto the heads of passing firemen and
those guys were amazing, really, because they went to the
trouble of moving my cello from my bedroom into the living room
and covering it up and that's what saved it, but I didn't know they'd
done that 'cause I couldn't get back into the building until after 4 o'clock
in the afternoon when the water had turned to slush and all the floors
even on the stairs were covered with gravel and shattered ceilings and
charcoal like old campfires and the posters on my wall were still there
though warped and black from the passing smoke and the crunch
of wood and splinters and ice forming in the slush and fallen cassette
tapes and every kind of trinket and personal belonging embedded in
the muck under your feet, but you couldn't stop to savour the weirdness
of the feeling because you were running out of daylight and the firemen
were telling you every time you came slowly out onto the front step with
another load of clothes or furniture that this had to be the last trip, and
it gradually turned from contrived cold methodical calmness into a kind
of panic as your breathing quickened and you had to decide which books
to keep and you almost forgotãright up to the last minuteãto take that
photo off the wall, the one of Kris taken more than five years agoãamazing
how it stayed there, alone on the stained white wall as the hoses burst
through the ceiling and brought down all that awful grey insulation and
washed all your letters around the floorãand like I was saying you
had to decideãor thought you did, because you thought you were
running out of timeãwhich books to take and which ones to keep,
and all the poetry you haven't read yet pleaded with you, "don't leave
me behind! don't leave me behind!" but your hands, like sodden clubs
in the wet woolen gloves you've been wearing to heave the muck away
in search of lost letters, pull at the bindingsãyes, you can see your
hands in front of you like tools, pulling at the booksãand the bookshelf
leans in protest and the books are wet and swollen and don't want to
move but you have to you have to you have to pull them out, at least
the ones you decide to take, and it begins to well up inside you and
the sludge around your feet sighs in sympathy and the air stands still
for a moment as you let the feelings out, the despair, the sense of
unfairness, the futility of ownership when you can be hit with circumstances
like these, but there's no use wasting time because the firemen don't know
how bad it feels and the daylight is going fast and the slush will turn to
ice and you'll never ever get your stuff out after that when everything
is frozen in and, besides, the landlord might not even open the place at
all in the morning, because you never can tell whether these buildings
are safe, and no one wants to take responsibility and get taken to court you know
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