The Circle K Vortex

The Sacred, well lit space

The Circle K Vortex

The whole thing started, as many important modern conversations do, with a photo on the internet that may or may not have been real.

It was a picture of John Cena and AJ Styles, two WWE superstars, standing in front of a Circle K. And immediately the argument broke in two.

One side said, “That’s fake. No way. Why would John Cena and AJ Styles be standing in front of a Circle K?”

The other side, which is the side of truth and light and all that is holy, said, “Why wouldn’t they be standing in front of a Circle K? That is exactly where strange things happen.”

These are my people. Circle K’s are exactly where reality gets a little sideways. That is exactly the kind of fluorescent-lit portal where two giant wrestlers might be found at an odd hour, buying a giant fountain drink, beef jerky, and maybe some weird little powdered donuts that should not still be on the shelf but somehow are.

Whether the photo was real did not matter to me. What mattered was the argument. Because if you grew up in Arizona, or really almost anywhere in America, but especially Arizona, then you understand that Circle K was never just a convenience store.

Circle K was a location. A beacon. A way station. A meet-up point. A poor man’s town square. A place for gas, a beverage, a quick bad snack decision, and sometimes a full on grocery shop if you live in an apartment at Ft. Lowell Rd. and Alvernon Ave. and your car is in the shop in 1987.

Circle K was open twenty-four hours a day, which meant it occupied a special place in the mythology of life. It was there when other things weren’t. When you needed aspirin, Coke, cigarettes, ice, gum, gas, directions, time to think, or just a place to delay going where you knew you had to go next. And sometimes it was there when you needed to meet somebody who had something to sell that was definitely not on the Circle K inventory sheet.

It had a gravitational pull. A mysterious vortex.

And for me, it has existed in at least three different forms.

The first Circle K I remember as part of my life was the one at Park Avenue and Irvington in Tucson. When we drove from California to visit my grandparents, that Circle K was one of the signs that we were close. If you were coming in, it would be on your left. You’d see it and know you were almost there.

That mattered to me as a kid.

Certain landmarks become emotional before you know what the word emotional means. They are not just places. They are signals and messages that tell your body something before your brain has time to form a sentence. That Circle K told me my grandparents were close. It told me Tucson was happening. It told me we had arrived in the geography of people I loved.

Later, when I got my driver’s license and was living in Tucson, I would drive across town to visit my grandparents on my own. And I remember stopping at that same Circle K even when I did not need anything, just to get a ThirstBuster, which I think was Circle K’s answer to the Big Gulp. Forty-four ounces of Coca-Cola in a Styrofoam cup packed with crushed ice. There are beverages, and then there are beverages that mark a moment in your life. That one hit exactly right. I would get one and head over to see Grandma and Grandpa, and that little stop made me feel grown up in the best way. Independent. Capable. On my way somewhere that mattered. It was an innocent feeling. A clean feeling.

And maybe that is why, after my grandparents were gone, I would still sometimes stop at that Circle K for gas or a drink or whatever excuse I had that day. I would walk inside, feel the blast of air-conditioning, smell that very specific Circle K smell, and for just a second, I would get the strange feeling that I was in a portal. Like if I stayed in there long enough, or if I got exactly the right drink and walked back out at exactly the right moment, Tucson might be the Tucson it used to be and my grandparents might still be a few blocks away and I could still drive over and see them. That Circle K became a time machine.

Not a very powerful one. Not one that ever actually worked. But enough of one that it let me stand still for a second and remember. That is one version of the Circle K vortex.

Another version arrived many years later, under much less wholesome circumstances.

I woke up one Sunday morning after a Saturday night that had clearly made some choices on my behalf. I was in my tiny apartment, and I badly needed a little hair of the dog. Badly. But I had none of the dog in the apartment. Not one strand of the hair. So, I did what instinct, experience, and probably bad character told me to do.

I went to Circle K.

Because that is where you go. That is where you always go. Circle K gets you through.

I walked in with the shaky confidence of a man who knows salvation is only a refrigerated door away. I went over to where the beer was kept. And there, in front of me, was horror.

Locked.

The refrigerator was locked.

I remember just staring at it, confused, betrayed, maybe even a little spiritually wounded. 24 hours open is 24 hours, right? I looked over at the counter, where a man stood holding what I can only describe as the keys to my kingdom. I asked him, in a sad and probably very familiar to him voice, “What happened?”

He looked back at me calmly and said, “It’s Sunday. It’s church day. No liquor until noon.”

Church day.

I do not know why this had never happened to me before. Maybe because on mornings like that I usually slept until noon and accidentally timed my sins better. Perhaps I had stayed out all night. Or more likely, I had been awakened early by some inherited family instinct that says you get up and function no matter what poor choices you made the night before. Whatever the reason, this was my first encounter with the great moral limit of Circle K.

The first dawning for me, that even Circle K has rules.

Even this glowing all-night sanctuary of poor judgment has some hours on Sunday where it looks at you and says, “Not yet, my son.”

It was terrible.

I am not proud to tell you that for one brief moment, the thought crossed my mind that if I went to church, I might be able to get some communion wine. Not enough wine, probably, but still. That was where my mind was.

Circle K as a reminder that the state of Arizona occasionally wants your soul to catch up with your habits.

And then there is my favorite version of the Circle K vortex, though favorite may not be the right word. Maybe formative. Maybe humiliating. Maybe deliciously tragic.

When I was a teenager, I had a 1966 VW Bug. My first car. It had many peculiarities, which is a nice way of saying it was held together by hope, family engineering, and a handshake agreement with God. One of those peculiarities was that the key in the ignition was worn down and sometimes would not turn over. No problem, because there was a workaround. You could take off the silver metal horn ring on the steering wheel with a couple of screws, expose the ignition wire, touch it to the metal on the horn, and start the car that way.

I do not remember if this was a clever little workaround my dad devised or if every 1966 VW Bug in America could be started by what was essentially charming auto theft. Either way, that was the system.

And like all young men, I made the fatal mistake of thinking a workaround equals character.

One night I took a girl I had a crush on to Spring Fling, a university carnival. I was a high school student. The whole thing felt sophisticated and exciting. I was with a girl I liked. We were at a college event. The world was full of possibility

Then we got on a ride called the Zipper.

If you have never been on the Zipper, it is basically what happens when someone looks at a Ferris wheel and says, “Yes, but what if the Ferris wheel also hated you?” You are constantly tumbling, flipping, swinging around, and at one point, upside down, I watched in slow motion as my car keys flew out of my pocket, drifted past me in the air, and vanished into the crowd below.

Gone. Not misplaced. Gone.

We looked for them after the ride. Of course we did. But they were never going to be found. So now I am a teenager, on a date, under curfew, with no keys, and I have to make a decision. And I made the exact wrong one.

I thought my date would be impressed by my ability to break into my own car through the wing vent and start it without keys. I thought she would see me do this and think, “Wow, Peter is resourceful. Peter is cool under pressure. Peter is basically an action hero.”

She did not think that. She thought I was a problem. Not to be trusted. Not to date again. A problem who is currently hotwiring his own car in a parking lot.

And I could feel that all the way through the drive home. Teenagers do not hide their feelings well. We do not have polish yet. We are all exposed wiring.

I dropped her off at home, drove away in my sad little stolen-by-me Bug, and ended up at Circle K. Of course I did.

I bought a Thirst Buster and three vanilla Zingers, which I think came in a package and were like Twinkies with a little more chaos in them. And I sat in my car in the Circle K parking lot, eating my shame and drinking my fountain soda, because not only had I just had a terrible date, I also knew I still had to go home and tell my dad I had lost the keys.

Circle K, in that moment, became something more than a store again.

It was a place where time paused. A location between failure and consequence.

A liminal space where I did not yet have to be the son who lost the keys or the boy who blew the date. I could just be a person sitting with a giant drink and some snack cakes, in the fluorescent mercy of a parking lot, postponing the next version of myself for another ten minutes.

That is what Circle K was. It’s what Circle K still is.

A place where weirdness feels normal.

A place where strangers, wrestlers, teenagers, drunks, grandparents, travelers, lost people, and people trying not to go home yet all pass through the same bright rectangle of air-conditioning and artificial light.

So yes, maybe John Cena and AJ Styles were standing in front of a Circle K.

Why wouldn’t they be?

Circle K is where the world goes when it is between things.

Between day and night.

Between one choice and another. Between WWE retirement and some movie set.

Between who you were five minutes ago and who you are going to have to be when you get back in the car.

It is not glamorous.

It is not holy.

It is not even all that nice, if we are being honest.

But it is real.

And sometimes real places become sacred not because they are beautiful, but because they keep showing up in the moments when your life is changing and you do not know it yet.

That is the Circle K vortex.

And if you know, you know.

THE MOST IMPORTANT CHICANO IN HOLLYWOOD THAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT

PS: Some of you will consider 7-11’s to be the same. They are not.