So, here are a couple of scraps from the desktop. Ok, the first one could be called a flash, but, I don’t think I was planning on it ending there. The second one is definitely a scrap. I was going to get into the changes made in the area and how I got lost but found my way through half shrouded memories, opaque at best but accurate. I’m not going to use a contrivance to separate this intro, the flash or the scrap, it shouldn’t be that difficult to discern one for t’other.
“He said he wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire.”
“Jesus he must have been really mad at you.”
“Mad? Oh no. I’m sorry. The man was dull, didactic. I was trying to get a rise out of him.”
“Sounds like you succeeded.”
“Heh, I didn’t mean to confuse you, but I see the humor in it now. Oh shit, he’s contagious. I was trying to get passion out of him and I said ‘What if I were on fire?’”
“He said he had overheard the boys at the station saying they wouldn’t piss on the captain if he were on fire and he explained to them how limited a flow urine was and unreliable and it would be much better, as they had access to fire engines, to use a hose.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. So I said ‘Oooo, use your hose on me big boy’ and he explained pounds of pressure, my eyes glazed over, and when I came back he was explaining BMI and how he was of average build.”
“So, you’re short for your size, I teased.”
“He went into how BMI is calculated.”
“So, what? You kicked him to the curb, right?”
“Well yeah. After I fucked him. He was technically proficient, I’d even say good but I think half my pleasure was that he shuts up when fucking. I would have asked why but I’m afraid he would have told me.”
A couple thousand years ago I worked in South Lansing at a disco bar. Not a hard corp disco bar, I mean, not hard corp disco, it was trying to be a club and disco was club music at the time, the live band wasn’t exactly into it, so it was disco with a butt rock hard edge to it. To call south Lansing the bad part of town would be closer to accurate than calling it the ‘hood, which, I always assumed was a name coined of necessity to stop using the Yiddish word ghetto. I don’t know what happened to word slum. ‘Hood sort of encompasses all that except that it almost exclusively means where poor black folks live. Ghetto actually means where folks of a type live, or, to take all the blood and life from the word, an area of a homogenous population. Because in Eastern Europe Jews were regulated to sectors, often the poorest sectors, it came to mean in the states a bad neighborhood where poor people live abysmal lives.
Yeah, South Lansing wasn’t quite like that. I have no idea what the racial mix was but it was pretty standard to any city the size of Lansing in mid-Michigan in the seventies. It was more of a rough neighborhood, the kind where nice people or meek people don’t play after the sun sets. It doesn’t look like that anymore or act like that. I found myself out there with construction blocking my regular route, meaning the route I’ve come to adopt as a reluctant born again Michigander. I didn’t use the GPS fro the same reason I’ve been ignoring spell check. I’m a mouses pubic hair away from giving up speed dialing too. I need to constantly test my memory even if it’s just to tread water because otherwise it’s the instrument you use to tell whether the instrument is working and … that’s bad.
South Lansing was a bad neighborhood because it’s where the factory rats who hadn’t collected wives and kids and mortgages went to play, it’s where bike gangs were most comfortable in Lansing. Oh, as a side note, two months after I arrived here, Michigan repealed it’s helmet law. For motorcycles. I think there’s a law for minors and bicycles regarding helmets but who the fuck cares. I had a lot of bike accidents as a kid, Christ I wished I had landed on my head, there’s a big fucking bone up there, everywhere else had skin and scabs and gravel.
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