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other residents as they tramped along the hallway. I imagined he still looked a little homeless. jfk once stayed here, he told me. Elvis stayed here. But now the cage elevators were breaking down twice, three times a week and it was fourteen flights of stairs to the room that housed his unrefrigerated forties and his stolen desk.
    His two favourite topics of conversation were the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and a vending machine in Fremont that stood alone in the middle of a vacant block. The vending machine had an unlabelled mystery button underneath all of the labelled buttons for the usual drinks. He liked to speculate about what kind of soda would be dispensed if he were to push the mystery button. Would it be Tab or would it be Mr. Pibb? He rattled off a list of dead cola brands from his childhood, most of which I didn’t recognise because his childhood was eleven years earlier than mine, and on the other side of the world.
    I bet it’s Tab, he finally said. He had turned the vending machine into a time travelling device. He wanted a Tab summer. He wanted it to be 1982 in Atlanta, Georgia, before the methadone trips to Mexico and the minor prison stints for dui . He wanted to be on his uncle’s farm, raising Lesser Prairie Chickens. He wanted to be anywhere but Seattle, selling tickets for the opera.
    One night he called and told me he’d gone to Fremont. He’d pushed the mystery button on the vending machine at the end of the world.
    And you know what I got?
    What’d you get? I asked.
    Fucking Sprite.
    And Atlanta, Georgia in 1982 was bleached out and unreachable and he and I had one less thing to talk about.

Dixieland
    Friday night in a West Australian basement, and the six-man jazz band is playing Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans to sixty people who entered through a red phone box, ready to drink and dance like they were other people, and it was a different time and place. All the heat of the day is trapped in that room, and the place smells like sweat and brass. When the band introduce the numbers their accents are broad Australian, but when they sing it’s pure Dixieland.
    The elderly doorman is dancing slow swing with a young woman in a sequinned dress. Then the girl in the polka-dot dress, and the girl in the red lace dress. He switches girls after every song. All the girls are big-calved and soft-looking, and he moves them around the old floorboards with a sad grace.
    He still wears his wedding ring, and when the band plays Sweet Lorraine he stops dancing. He always sits out for Sweet Lorraine, and watches the band from a small table which he and his wife donated to the club in the eighties. The table once contained an antique sewing machine, but the sewing machine is gone and all that remains is the cast-iron foot pedal, and an iron wheel which is beautiful and useless. He presses the foot pedal in time with the music and the wheel spins around but it isn’t connected to anything. Sometimes he opens and closes the small drawers at the sides of the table, but there is nothing in the drawers now except for bottle caps and ticket stubs from the weekly raffle.
    When Sweet Lorraine is over he stands again and goes back to the dance floor to dance with Lana, who is twenty-three and moves with the same elegant sadness. The elegance is something she picked up recently, but she was born with that sadness. They dance together for Louisiana Fairytale and Mack the Knife. They go wild for Tiger Rag. When Lana comes back to your table she is flushed and breathless. She laughs and kicks off her cork wedge sandals and you wish you could take her to Miami, drag her into the early retirement you always threaten when she wears those tacky shoes. You wish you could take her anywhere, that she’d let you make her happy.
    The old tin signs on the walls advertise cigarettes and fountain pens that have been out of production for decades, and chewing gum and soft drinks that Australia got a