poster 28- geodesic cave

april 6th, originally uploaded by rebecca ann rakstad.

My First Fireside Bowl by Grant Reynolds

I’d been living in Chicago for about a year before my friend Jared took me with him to a Fireside show. It was my first time and really I was pretty disinterested in the bands on stage, most of which I had probably never heard of at the time. I was, however, thrilled by the building itself. Still young to the city I was a fresh receptor to its varied stimuli, its mysteries shedding themselves to me daily and by the minute. Walking into the Fireside Bowl that night was the urban equivalent of repelling down into some long lost geodesic cave. There was no way any band could have competed with the experience.
After spending some time checking the place out I came across an abandoned box of zines at a merch table in the back. I dug through to the bottom for something good, but the only thing to hold my attention was a tattered copy of something called Burn Collector by someone named Al Burian. It was the eighth issue, particularly thick, with a nice weight to it. The yellow cover had been softened from use and held the blanket texture of long circulated dollar bills or paper having been run through the washing machine. The dog-eared pages were already starting to let go of the staples binding them together, giving off a wafting history of many good reads. I knew I had to have it, but I’d already spent the last of my money at the door. Surveying the room I noted everyone else’s interest was being funneled toward the stage opposite me. I casually slipped the zine into my back pocket and walked away, rejoining the crowd to watch the rest of the show.
It wasn’t until a few months later that I actually opened and read my stolen find. With my first year of art school coming to a close I saw myself returning home to Peoria, where my dad had already secured me a summertime job working the cash register at some dismal little drug store. It was a miserable existence and the absence of Chicago in me was almost greater than its presence when I’d lived there. It seemed that nothing in the world could be as terrible as the circumstances befalling me. But when I began to read those first few pages of Burn Collector #8 I not only recognized the author as he toiled at his own terrible job, but also realized things could certainly always get much, much worse. Still years away from my own experiences of living on other people’s couches, of joblessness and hopelessness fueled only by coffee and handfuls of the other roommates’ food, Al’s words gave off an exoticism, something I would only later understand as the residue of biting humor left from hard times. Like a byproduct leftover from processing the natural resource of menial labor, the best stories have always come from the worst positions in life.
Soon after that Al and I became pen pals, trading zines and comics throughout the years, until he, too, moved to Chicago. Then working together on The Skeleton News, a local underground paper, we became friends and eventually collaborators on our own sci-fi comic, Singularity. The comic brought us closer still, and unfurled into long meandering walks around the city. We had both been butting our heads against something dreadful in our lives, a dead end or maybe a fork in the road, but neither had an answer as to what it might be, much less how to get around it. All that mattered was that there was someone else who understood.
And then, just like that, Al moved away again, back to North Carolina. There wasn’t much in the way of planning, he just made up his mind and left the next day. I guess he’d found a way to get around that something blocking his path. The last time I saw him we were sitting across from each other in a coffee shop, mostly not talking, as he waited for his ride to Chapel Hill to pick him up.
Now, of course, there are no shows at the Fireside Bowl, only bowling. And much like before, when I’d left Chicago that first time for a summer to go back to Peoria, I can feel his absence as I sit alone in the coffee shop, across the table from me, slouched in the booth: an Al Burian-shaped hole.