Our House Burned Down

We decided to meet at the Hot Cake House, since it was in our neighborhood anyway and convenient for all of us to get to, even on foot. I walked from Celeste's apartment where I had spent the night tossing fitfully on the couch covered with thin handmade quilts, my guts knotted with concern over my poor cat Lupo, who had been stepped on by the firemen as they broke down our front door. Celeste did not come with me to the Hot Cake House, since their food was the kind of repulsive slop that only tastes good the morning after a major life catastrophe, when puddles of sausage grease and plastic cuplettes of "mixed fruit" jelly lend everything a comforting patina of America and home.

The Beautiful Kevin had found some other place to shack up for the night -- the Ark I think -- a place we would spend many future evenings scrounging from piles of vegan home cooking -- and he was there at the Hot Cake House already when I arrived. He already had a plate of muffin or biscuit or something else anonymously starchy and vegetarian and cheap. I got a hot cake and a side of ham and we both drank lots of coffee. We were buddies. The night before had seen us at the Reel 'm' Inn, sucking down $2 pitchers of Henry's Ale and playing pool. I beat him twice. I am not a very good pool player and the Beautiful Kevin excels at almost everything he touches, he has a mighty arm from playing violin, but the table was not his that night. We were new housemates and new friends and I defeated him at pool and didn't gloat overmuch. I thought about putting the same songs on the jukebox at the Hot Cake House as we'd listened to the night before at the Reel 'M Inn, but I was too tired.

I guess Kevin had left a note on the door of our house (my new place, I'd moved in four days earlier) for Andrew, the last itinerant member of the house, who had not come home the night before and who we couldn't get in touch with. Kevin left a terse informative note and then went to the Hot Cake House to meet me, a point agreed on the night before. At the precise moment when Kevin and I had finally relaxed and the coffee was well within us and I had experimented with "maple" syrup and ham and found it to my liking, Andrew BURST into the Hot Cake House with his eyes bugging out and the tail of his shirt untucked. "THE HOUSE BURNED DOWN?" he bellowed.

"The house burned down," I said. "I got you some coffee."

"Oh, OK," he said. He sat down. "Where's Lupo?"

I explained that he was at Celeste's in his pet taxi, suffering from smoke inhalation and a scratched cornea. The Beautiful Kevin explained that we'd been out getting shitty the night before, and we staggered up across the train tracks in the spitting soft rain and heard the fire trucks. And how we'd laughed and said "Gosh, somebody's house is on fire!" and then the trucks were parked right outside our place. My brand new Portland home, haven after the slings and arrows of San Fran, a charcoal husk with all my stuff decimated (except books, vinyl, computer, cat). And Kevin and Andrew's previous house, in the previous year, almost to the day, had also burned down.

Andrew agreed that it was funny. How you always think it's somebody else's.