Our new street is noisy.
This is not a complaint. The noise is friendly and human-scaled: cats crying from windows, children calling back and forth, bits of conversation from smokers on balconies. Couple of cars now and then. Elm leaves rubbing against each other in their masses.
At our old place, the noise had a distinctly different quality. Cars were parking and departing constantly on our street, so that the sounds we heard were stacatto and abrupt. A door slam, an engine cough, a drunken yell at night. The empty insect-ridden prairie that lurks behind the image of our city was particularly close to the surface there, always rising up and stealing the calm and lightness of the day. Not so here, though, where the trees are older and the peak-roofed houses crowd together. Most of the people on our block are members of young families who get tax breaks for settling down in the neighbourhood. It's part of the city's plan to rid the area of its prostitutes, skinheads and meth labs.
So it turns out the house directly across from us is a meth lab. Apparently no one opens up crack houses any more. The place is a striking sky-blue with an unpainted wooden door that makes it look condemned. People come and go at all hours, announcing their presence with sharp whistles or strangled yells. The whistling is so commonplace that I thought a strange bird had settled in the area. A displaced kookabura. When you whistle a skinny girl in cutoffs pulls open the door and lets you in.
According to the former tenant of the apartment, she once saw somebody fall out a window on the second story into the alley. Fortunately the gang of skinheads next door came out and took care of the guy.
I absolutely fucking love our new place. With a meth lab and skinheads across the street, I'm going to forget the theatre and haul a tub of popcorn onto the balconey.
12 comments:
Photographs, at some point, would be greatly appreciated.
of course, not all skinheads are "bad"
Oh indeed they are, all skinheads are bad people, very bad, and they need to stand still while I throw things at them, and they should learn manners when me and my pals kick in their door and hit them with bats, and not run off screaming and going to the police like they did, those bad skinheads.
I'm with Palinode on this one. Then again, I have a lot of unexplored rage I need to get out. Skinheads would help me achieve that. You guys are so lucky to have this opportunity!
skinheads, hookers and meth labs. Sounds like a Hughes movie to me LOL
I am just going to take a moment to be know-it-all here and make it clear that not all skinheads are white supremicists. Some follow a different movement and call themselves SHARPs, SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice. I happen to know one who is very nice and working on an English degree.
Fine. SHARPs are allowed to live.
SHARPs are allowed a ten-second head start before I come after them. Their peace-loving egalitarian ways must be stopped before they spread to the bad skinheads.
Now I'm trying to decide how short of a haircut I can get...
Like the swastika, a noble, spiritual symbol reminiscent of the spinning of the universe, still in peaceful use in eastern religions after being co-opted and perverted by an angry little failed painter, so too did the "Skinhead" have humble beginnings. "Bootboys" who wore jeans and workboots because that's all they had, whose short haircuts were a matter of necessity because of the drunken violence in their working class neighbourhoods, had no racist leanings. They loved their music, which was mostly being being produced by people of colour(pc?) and were marginalized due to their progressive beliefs.
That being said, anyone who thinks little Adolf had the right idea should have their fool heads stomped on a curb. Oi!
I recently saw a documentary about Klan members on TV. Sometimes, I love to hate.
Hatred, like bitter coffee, smooth and dark and jitter-making.
I lived in a little apartment community in Virginia for a while and there was a crash pad where the local prostitutes met their clients across the parking lot from our apartment. It was hard not to spy incessantly on who was coming and going! I also felt sort of protective of the women, and was glad they had a safe place to do business. Eventually someone ratted them out and they were forced to leave. Poor things...
Post a Comment