Meeting David Berman at the Welfare Office

1 Minute Read Time

A dimly lit waiting room, with red chair, white walls, and old windows. — Photo by Adhitya Sibikumar on Unsplash

            After Jose Hernandez Diaz

What gave him away was we could both hear an American flag burning. David sat across, his take-a-number ticket poking out from his patch pocket. The blinds were open—we could see the particles sloping between us. He’d been polite enough to listen to all my record-crate schmaltz before asking where I was from. And I was stunned, because I knew that he knew that I held him in such high regard yet wasn’t into all that. “The armpit of California,” I said. “You mean the rust belt,” he replied. Suddenly, the telecom called a number like a drywall sander. We watched a guy get up and leave before resuming talks of truck-stop diners and his trip to Romania. He mentioned Cassie before clenching his cheeks. I thought about asking, as a joke, what brought us here. But he knew that I knew it was too on-the-nose to be funny. He put the gum he’d been working on back in its wrapper and into his shirt. Abatement was the only dignity within a county limit.

Gavin Garza

was raised in the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a Christian cult. Today he’s a Chicano poet and undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s the 2024 recipient of the Dean’s Medallion of the Humanities at Fresno City College. Garza stays rooted to Fresno, California.

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