Eastern Market burned yesterday

Yesterday...

I found out when I got home this evening that Eastern Market burned last night, or early this morning. Quite a blow. An electrical fire I guess. Everything destroyed. Every chicken wing, spider mum and block of aged Irish cheddar, every rat turd and mouse hair and beautifully painted, perfectly aged sign. In other words, everything that made the market look and feel timeless, everything that made it feel worthy of the products it carried, all gone. Anyway…I am glad my father Larry didn’t have to see this happen.

I’m not sure what he would have felt but I can’t help but see him running from the house in Fresno when Bongo died. That bizarre, high-pitched wail, “Bongo, oh Bongo no, no.” No, seriously, it was really high-pitched. It was kind of creepy to tell you the truth. If Larry were here I would tell him that. I would tell him that I kind of wondered what the hell was up with that. If there were an element of the put-on, of the I-am-not-sure-what-to-do-or-to-say so, I am going to over-act my role. I don’t know. It seems like a lousy thing to accuse a guy of, but it is not as if I think that he wasn’t really upset by what happened to Bongo, it is more that—and as I said, I would kid him about this if here were alive—shit, I understand, I accuse, and maybe only myself, because there is something in that defensive, self-conscious action I know too well. I can relate to that bullshitter. My beautiful dead dad.

But how can you claim that someone is full of shit at the scene of traumatic death. Bongo’s death was awful. There was the burning asphalt, the blond with the cat eyes, the one I loved at the time. There was the blood, but not so much, coming from his still mouth. There was the collapsing bubble of the school bus’s passing. There in the hot sun, in that awkward space between normal and seriously fucked up—and one day we really have to get used to the idea that seriously fucked up is normal—or maybe we don’t…But there the blond and the suddenly motionless, suddenly-without-light Bongo and I knelt in the road and here comes running Larry with that silly cry.

I have mentioned before, though I doubt you would have heard or read, but I have mentioned before the elaborate burial this dog received. So, I won’t elaborate much now. There was the six foot hole in the orange orchard and there was the royal red blanket of his and there was the burning of pine needles in the cool, sandy hole. There was the self-conscious, self-indulgent self-importance of the living overdoing it for the dead. And there was Larry, Larry of the peculiarly effeminate cry, going to a meeting and missing the burial altogether. Of course Bongo wouldn’t have minded. He was a dog. And, he was dead.

So somehow when I imagine Larry hearing the news about Eastern Market, I see him running across the lawn in Fresno these eleven or twelve years ago crying out, “No!” But then I imagine how pissed off and worried he would be. Where would he sell his photos? And I am so glad he didn’t have to know this. I feel horrible for the vendors, and for the employees of Market Lunch and the various inside businesses. They are just screwed for a while.

This is a horseshit effort at explaining even a fraction of what that market has meant to me, of the central role those worn bricks and silly pigeons have played in my life. But honestly, the first thing to mind when I heard was the image of my dad squealing strangely.