Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

The sunlight off the apartment complex's pool was brilliant. Not so brilliant that it could blind the eye to the girl- no, not yet a woman but, oh, so close- reclining in the green and white lawn chair near enough in proximity to the water to catch its brilliance but far enough away not to be splashed by the random child's wild cannon ball. Tanning in such places is an art form. She was probably Fragonard. Or, rather, one of his paintings a couple of centuries later if tan rather than bleached-white had been the trend.

In the relative parlance of men, she was “Playboy Hot.” That's quite an accomplishment. Sans airbrush, there is Photoshop. Either way, a perfectly constructed woman can be hacked from a half-ass photograph. In real life it is so rare to actually see. Like lions mating the wild. Mary was it. She bypassed the tickets to the shows, the runways, and all the bullshit that you can only afford if you're way beyond the pool in an apartment complex built with the stipulations that it must house those qualifying for section 8.

And she was mean. And she was cool. Her divorced parents together might have qualified for section 8 housing, but her dad was loaded. It is entirely possible that she didn't even know her mom. I don't have that much back story. There was a ruthlessness in her that the devisers of Dynasty couldn't imagine. Calculation and emotional desperation worked in tandem to get her pretty much anything she wanted. Despite all of this she was a warm human- an unstable creature in a world that wanted more from her than she could possibly cough up. Unless she stood in front of a camera and did nothing else.

She used to set at my card table inside that apartment complex, throwing spades out like she knew what she was doing. There were two Irish people and a Jew there. My girlfriend and I could read and reread ourselves. Joseph and his bobby-pinned skullcap could play spades. It wasn't exactly prison, but we knew how to play cards. She was only 18. And so smart. So beautiful. Everything we wanted as we ate pepperoni pizza (except the Jew). She won sometimes, too. Between her Monroe blond laughs, deep drinks, and genuinely comfortable moments.

There are horrible ways to sully such beautifully sunlit creations. Tales of rock-stars, blow-jobs, buses, and men with hot heads and fast hands. Drugs. Booze. There are bruised eyes, peering tragically keenly from a battered face. But even bluish and hurt that face was too much. Perfect beneath the damage. As if the damage just skipped a step and went strait to her inner being as it must have. In that place everyone surrenders everything and wishes only to be closer. Closer.

Too much money and too much beauty create an unreconcilable situation. Her name is written cleverly with a black Sharpie on my black speakers in a place I would only see when I moved them- as she knew I eventually must. I buy expensive speakers and I keep speakers a long time. Every time they get moved, her name reflects back at me and there is a dazzle to that black on black. Locked into that loopy signature is the instant memory of dirty youth, beauty, and what must be lost as we grow older and move on.

I hope those speakers last until I die. In the sublime difference between the sheen on those letters and the finish on those speakers lies a clue to being hard and soft at the same time. Between the ruthless pursuit of love and the devastating consequences thereof is the innocent laugh of a girl so beautiful that her life becomes the manifestation of destruction and loss.

The sun provides the light, the painter chooses his moment, the model moves ever so slightly. As we strive so ridiculously toward perfection, our only consolation can be that occasionally we can see it first hand.

A clear blue Kansas City sky. Beside the pool. A Mexican boy mid-jump with his legs tucked under his chin and his fingers locked over his knees. The shadows on the concrete under the lawn-chair in a line by line underpinning. Mary is in between reaching forward and deciding whether or not to. This snap-shop memory is precious and dangerous like all the things that make life worth living.

Destroying Our Way to Happiness

I was on the phone when we took down the stripper pole. No, actually, someone else was on my phone when that happened. I'd had a few beers by then and destruction was the theme. Memory is more maleable when things are coming apart than it is when they are coming together.

Carly was sitting at the rickety card table, left by the owners of “Ruff House Private Club” when they vacated in an unwilling but probably timely fashion. The space was still cluttered with their left-overs in the same way that the foreclosed houses I normally work on are. Sometimes in business the ventures overlap in funny ways. She was reading a Christopher Moore book, drinking Jim Beam and Coke, and smoking a Kool cigarette. It was a sort of destruction aftermath. Had I been younger there would have been as many beer bottles and cigarette butts as there were piles of drywall and felt flooring. Strewn about. Discarded. Demolished in the moment. At this point, the place still looked like something was being accomplished amid the rubble.

I haphazardly tossed the stripper pole in with the 2X4s, drywall, and chipboard. Ben was fiddling with the remnants of what was once a cramped kitchen's wall. Joe was using a circular saw in some fashion or another. We were winding down for the evening. It was close to midnight. 1,100 square feet of raw retail space was covered with the evidence of man on building violence. We were happy and exhausted.

Under the felt there was black and white checkered tile. Behind the walls there was nothing. Most of the interest in destruction stems from curiosity. But, the journey is the reward. Anything of interest found is cream on the cake. We had it rich.

A loud black family- husband and wife and two kids- walked past the 10 windows facing the street. The fat mom made sure to elevate her voice as she walked by our door, which was propped open with a 5 gallon bucket of the slate grey paint that covered the poorly graffitied walls. This let out the dust we'd kicked up and the smoke we we'd blown out. We ignored both the family and the walls for the most part, though it was impossible to avoid wondering about the kids running wildly about at this time of night. Joe had earlier made the comment, “All those mutherfuckers and not one knows how to use a Sharpie.” It was true. Nothing of interest in black on grey beyond names and scribblings. Loud, but otherwise juvenile, ineffectual... kinda sad.

The Buzz Cocks buzzed from a CD alarm clock plugged in next to the 18V battery charger. Loud crashes interrupted it as we tore down bits and pieces of the building. There was a certain chemistry between us that ensured no one got hurt. Not because we were safe by any practical standards. No helmets. No masks. No knee pads, gloves, first aid kits, nor permits. It was guerilla and we all knew it. So, we just made sure it all stayed strait.

Ben took the sledge hammer to the framing of a wall. Carly looked up and said, “Swing it again. I just want to see you do it.” He obliged and piece of drywall sailed smoothly into the piled detritus. “Nice,” I said. Joe decided he'd had enough. We shook hands and he left on his Harley. Things were winding down.

A few more beers were drank. A few more things were destroyed. But, there is a moment following destruction that simply exists whether you clean things up or not. We didn't even bother. That'd happen tomorrow. It was late and we were talking. Talking about old times. New times. The future of this space. What might have happened at this space before. Ben picked up the stripper pole for a moment, then dropped it back into the rubble. I lit a cigarette and and sat down on a rickety folding chair.

“This is it,” I said. “This is it.”

Fleas

On the site of my first job as an independent contractor dealing with foreclosed properties yesterday, I ran into an old enemy. Fleas. Chris- the guy who's going to be feeding me jobs- and I drove to Mountain Lake, MN in the wee hours of the morning. We found the address, met with the sheriff to make things legal, then went to work. The house was abandoned, it's front door missing. There was detritus strewn about both inside and outside. After about twenty minutes of poking about to ensure the property was void of people and structural stable, a vaguely familiar itch began around my ankles. I ignored it at first, but it became steadily more insistent. Finally, I pulled up my pants legs, where fleas were swarming my socks. “God!” I said, “I've got fleas all over my ankles.” Chris frowned, “Really?” “Yeah, really,” I said, and began frantically picking them off. I muttered, “I haven't seen one of these damn things in years.” In fact, it had been over 16 years.

In the summer of 1993, Manhattan, KS flooded. Badly. National news badly. Half the town was under water. My family lived in what was once a vehicle service shop located right in the flood plane. We inhabited the office area, while the family business- a wood-working shop- occupied the garage area. By artists' standards of today, we were set up pretty cool. Great working space with a place to crash for you and 20 of your closest friends after a studio party. A rigged up kitchen, commercial grade bathroom with a rigged up shower, and two big garage doors providing fantastic access for moving large works in and out. At the time, it just felt ghetto to me. That's probably because we never had any over-the-top studio parties with 20 of our closest friends crashing after a night of wild artistic excess. Or, it could have been because we just didn't have enough money to have a real house and a business at the same time.

Either way, I hated it and wasn't there when folks seriously started to consider building arks. I was in OK, from whence we had moved directly after school ended that year. The family business had folded rather quickly when our biggest client backed out, so there was no longer sanding, cutting, and finishing to be done there. As I had no friends in my new hometown, hated my living situation with an impressive amount of teenage angst, and had a 1978 Toyota pick-up that could almost manage 55 MPH on the highway, I bailed out.

Which worked out best for everyone involved, since my whole family ended up living in somebody else's place for the rest of the summer. Somehow, the former garage we lived in had a basement, which filled to the top of the stairs with water. The water table had risen so high that nothing could be done about it until the floods receded.

I'm sure my family was in an uncomfortable state, but I couldn't have cared less. I was hanging out with my friends, making money cleaning a gynecologist's office, and reading comic books. I had new clothes, lived in a real house, and got to keep the money I made. Honestly, it was a great time. Then I had to come home.

I got back just as the flooding ended. Everyone in Manhattan was patting one another on the back for a great community effort. T-shirts were printed with sandbags and clever remarks on them (I can see the words in my memory, but cannot read them). The finer side of human nature had prevailed.

I was miserable. No friends. No money. No comics. Back to living in a garage. And, worst of all, fleas. While my family was away, the flood waters in the basement had bred a completely unrealistic number of the blood sucking parasites. We did not have fleas before the flood and I have no idea what the actual connection was. What did the fuckers eat before we got back? Fish? I didn't know, but this kind of infestation was almost supernatural in it's magnitude. Bombs didn't work. Spraying didn't work. Nothing worked. And we just lived in it.

I slept in the top portion of a bunk bed at the time. I created a world apart up there, replete with books, drawing pads, and a portable stereo. My time at home was spent there, in the company of Radio Head, Iron Maiden, and drawings of werewolves. Honestly, I don't have many memories of events happening outside that bed during this period of my life.

Whenever I had to come down, it was like descending into hell from purgatory. My legs would immediately become dotted with fleas and the itching would become maniacal. A typical bathroom run went like this: hop down off of bunk-bed, landing on feet; run in huge strides to the bathroom; use bathroom while resisting the urge to piss on my legs to stop the burning; run back to the bunk-bed; hop back onto bunk-bed; immediately begin picking fleas off of my legs; squash fleas one by one between my fingernails (those buggers are harder to kill than you'd think). I kept the bodies in a pile and counted them after every excursion. Following particularly bad runs, I would pick over 30 fleas from my legs. For about the next hour I'd kill off stragglers as they bit me.

At no time was it OK to scratch. If I did not scratch the bites, the itching would subside in about 20 minutes. Otherwise, I'd end up with huge welts that would torture me even in my sleep. I got good at resisting the urge to scratch, a skill I have thankfully retained to this day.

The flea epidemic of 1993 was never resolved. We simply moved. There was no heat in that building, so I truly hope that when winter arrived the fleas all froze to death. It brings me pleasure to think of the ones in Mountain Lake once the MN freezer turns on. We winterized that house, so it will go without heat for the duration. They don't have a chance.

Hush, Baby

The entrance of the apartment complex held itself off the ground by a flight of concrete stairs and was fronted by a pretty row of evergreen shrubs. At night, it looked nice enough that I didn't bother to roll up my car windows before grabbing the pizza bag and 2 liter of Mountain Dew and heading inside. Once I'd climbed those concrete stairs, though, things deteriorated fast.

The delivery ticket noted that this order was to be delivered to apartment number 2. A set of buzzers, neatly numbered 1 to 16, lined up just to the right of the glass door. I pushed number two and waited a minute for the door to make some sort of noise (which could range from a high pitched squeal to a steady hum) indicating that I could enter. When nothing happened, I took stock of my surroundings. What appeared nice from the parking lot withered under closer scrutiny. The paint was chipped from the trim, random trash was strewn both outside and- from what I could see- inside the building. The “pretty row of evergreen shrubs” desperately needed water. I glanced back at my car apologetically. Then I grabbed the door handle and pulled hard, since so many of these secure ghetto buildings generally yield to a bit of force. I needn't have bothered with the force. The door opened right up.

Once inside, I headed strait down the stairs. Public housing usually numbers from the bottom up, so number two would be down there. The carpet in the foyer was dirty and the grit of uncleanliness clung about. However, when I opened the fire door that led to the downstairs hallway, I no longer needed the sense of sight to figure out I'd entered a shit hole.

I'd like to think that the occupants of apartments numbered 1 through 4 were just inattentive pet owners. But, my gut told me that I was smelling human urine and human fecal matter. I've spent time in dialysis rooms, old folk's homes, and hospitals. This smell had less in common with the sofa my family's cat sprayed down and more with those places. The sad part is that my sense of smell is mostly deadened. Not only have I been a smoker for well over a decade, I spent too much time in the chlorine room while working at a water park in my early twenties. When someone farts, I'm always the last one to smell it (unless I dealt it). This smell was pretty bad even for my crippled senses.

I found apartment number 2 and rapped smartly on the door. From within an infant cried steadily. Becoming a father has made me a connoisseur of sorts concerning the noises babies make when they're unhappy. This was definitely a newer baby. More than likely under two months. She (all unsexed infants are “shes” to me since I have a daughter) didn't have the lungs to really make a ruckus, and she also didn't have the cognitive insistence to her wails that comes around month 3 or 4. For the second time, I received no response from apartment number two. I knocked again. Harder. Still no response.

By this point, I was almost ready to barf. The smell was intensifying as I stood there. I sat down the two liter of Mountain Dew, pulled out my phone, and called the number on the delivery ticket. A polite female voice told me the number was not currently in service. Plans began forming. This order was paid for by credit card. I could just abandon it in front of the door, bail out, and when they called the store to complain I could tell them it was waiting for them outside their door. I could also just bail out, take the pizza, and tell them to get fucked when they called back to complain about how long the delivery had taken. I am the General Manager. Both paths seemed a bit harsh and rushed. But, honestly, I was finding it difficult to breath at this point. So, I abandoned tact and banged on the door really hard.

Thankfully, an older black woman with few teeth opened the door a moment later. I handed her the pizza, the two liter, and her ticket, smiled with genuine gratitude, then ran away. Usually, the customer needs to fill out the credit card slip. But, I figured I wasn't getting tipped anyway and I was damn lucky someone actually came to the door. Time to cut my losses and run. As I fled, I heard a soft, beautiful voice from inside the apartment saying, “Hush, baby. Hush, baby. Hush, baby.”

Frogtown

I want to write about Frogtown, but I always feel like a failure when I do. The reason behind that is messy. I can't quite get to their level. It's dangerous. It's evil. It's bad. Going down to that point is so ludicrous from my position. I've got a great deal to lose at this point. It's all bitterness and judgementalism from my position. My superior point versus their inferior point. Their continuing pain versus my overcome pain. I came up from some shit, sure. My childhood was a catastrophe in many ways. However, to try to compare it to the ghetto is kinda silly. Trailer parks and relative poverty for a white military kid in OK and KS is far removed from the drugs and gangs of Frogtown. They've all got more money than I ever had during that phase of my childhood. They've got way more financial, educational and social support. But, there is a willful rejection to any form of stability that defies reason present in Frogtown that was never present in my own situation.
In my own childhood, there was always a cause and effect mandate that dictated our daily actions. Dad screamed and broke things because he had a severe “head injury”. He was excepted from the norm due to a factor beyond his control and any situation he caused was a result of factors beyond his control. Specifically, he had problems that were not my own and should not be carried forward by myself. My mother cried and vanished because she had a “chemical imbalance”. She was excepted from the norm due to factors beyond her control and any situation she caused was a result of factors beyond her control. Specifically, she had problems that were not my own...
As an adult, I've accepted and rejected both of my parents' substantial failings on my own terms and in my own ways. Those failings are the circumstances of my childhood and nothing to get too worried about. I believe that is because as a child I believed their actions to be outside myself. Even my mother and father excepted their own actions as inappropriate. When shit went wrong, there was no impetus for me to continue driving in that direction. In fact, I had the luxury of dissecting their actions to such a degree that I could reject not only their direct actions, but also the circumstances leading up to those actions. So, as an adult I work from a relatively fresh slate. I've got my own failings as a husband, father and man to deal with. What my parents failed to do twenty years ago is no longer of great consequence.
For those in Frogtown, the failings of their parents are never made transparent in any way whatsoever. Fathers abandon children systematically to engage in behavior they do not feel is inappropriate in any way. Mothers melt down and descend into neurotic rages without any apology given. For example, I watched a fat woman walk down the street in Frogtown with three children the other day. The kids were all running ahead of her. She continually screamed (and I mean screamed), “You little fuckers! I say get back here! Gonna fuckin' smash yo' heads in if you don't get back here! Little fuckers!” They paid her no mind. As far as the male side of that equation goes, I have to get more personal because the lack of a father is not a public display. Rather, it is an attitude among most men (if that noun can decently apply) in the ghetto. The most descriptive quote I've heard, directly from the mouth of an aforementioned father as it related to the mother of his children, goes like this, “That bitch don' need my money. Fuck it. I need that money. Fuckin' bitch can make her own damn money.”
Growing up in such an environment is just flat damaging. Despite my considerable ability to overcome adversity, I cannot imagine doing so in those circumstances. Generation after generation is lost in a swirling abyss of tragic, self-absorbed self-destruction. It may or may not be fair to blame society. It may or may not be fair to blame racial, ethnic, or class inequality. But, no matter where the blame falls, this is the drama that unfolds continually in Frogtown.
So, there are guns. There are gangs. There are welfare cons, stolen cars, stolen home goods, and stolen lives. There are angry young men and young women angry at those men. Half the boys (literally) don't graduate from high school. The prisons are teeming with the youth of Frogtown. The girls don't bother to marry. They have multiple children with multiple men who are only present on the 1st and 15th. They spend their welfare money on drugs and bad food. They live in public housing that defeats any sense of self-worth and reinforces a sense of reliance on factors way beyond their own control. They pass on defeatist attitudes to their children, who perpetuate those attitudes.
I cannot connect with them. It just seems so damn stupid to me. For me to truly understand the mentality of Frogtown, I'd have to literally engage in it directly. Willfully. I cannot, for the sake of my wife and daughter, do so. I deal with Fogtown daily from my- admittedly- superior vantage point. I look down on them in glowering contempt. I'd like to resolve this matter. I'd like to find a position from which I could approach them as equals and make peace with their very existence. But I cannot, at this point, do that. It's dangerous. It's evil. It's bad. And I'm not willing to risk that for which I've worked so very hard just to make a few friends in a world that knows only enemies. So, I figure, fuck 'em.