I didn’t stop to take the snapshot and now I can’t: the gas station’s mansard roof has been peeled off as part of a renovation and gone are the letters, painted over in the same yellow the roof was painted, spelling out RESTAURANT. Once the letters had been red, maybe blue, maybe green, and I’d never noticed them, their normalcy making them invisible, but when the roof and the sign were sprayed the same primary color last year, suddenly the letters drew my eye every time I drove past. Everywhere we are witnessing the disappearance of the shitty—the pay phone with its receiver torn off vanishes one day from the Chinese restaurant’s parking lot, the hand-lettered sign in the window of the tailor’s is replaced with a generic placard, the Quonset hut where they fixed old Mustangs is razed to make way for the mixed-use development. Losing worn things makes them dear, no matter how tattered and useless they’ve become. In thrift stores I sort through piles of 45s. Not too long ago I came across a stack pulled from a jukebox in 1986: Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, David Lee Roth. I was seventeen that summer, the summer between high school and college. Almost four decades later I stood in Last Chance fondling the past and heard again those songs playing in my memory.
Josh Russell’s essays have appeared in Seneca Review, Epoch, Electric Literature, Centaur, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. The most recent of his four books of fiction is King of the Animals: Stories (LSU Press). At Georgia State University, he’s Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program.