..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
078 Summer in the City
The July heat started early, by seven it was 92 degrees and 92% humidity. I was on top of my bed with just my jockeys. The sheets were damp as usual and I could taste stale beer from the night before in my mouth. I loved Saturday mornings, a whole two days before I had to go back to that boring school where everyone just hung out. Shashana made life worth living but her father said I was a loser and had to see at school only. I could hear my mother snoring in the next room, her and some guy that went by PJ, I assume because that's all I ever saw him in was his pajamas. I'm told he looks a lot like my real dad, some fast talking smoothie that got her pregnant 15 years ago. I've seen a couple of pictures in her top dresser drawer, went off to sea as she tells it, I just think he went off period.
The sweat slowly crawled down my forehead and joined a pool of sweat already forming around my eyes. I'd wipe my eyes but they would just as wet in a couple of minutes. The old, tired window air-conditioner droned on in the distance, a kind of rattling stutter announcing how hard it was working. I suppose it dropped the temperature in the two bedroom apartment by two or three degrees in the hot part of the day, but it didn't seem to matter if it was on or not for the most part. I liked the sweat trickling down my head, it tickled in a nuisance sort of way. My brother, Aaron, was only ten and looked up to me. I had to run fast to lose him to be alone in the city, my favorite pastime. The city was source of endless pleasure for me on the weekends. I couldn't see my girl so I was free to walk the streets until well after dark and see what there was to see.
Enough for tickle sweat, it was time to get out there before anyone else got up. The shower was slow to get hot and I was shocked into wakefulness by cold pipes which I could not imagine where they ran that they would be cold in July. As I pulled up my best dirty jeans, I had to smile at what a handsome devil I was. One final check on the do and I was off. Early in the morning was a completely different world than the one at night. Only early risers were up, you know the type, the "Isn't it a great morning?", cheerful, up-beat, smiling greeters that make you respond in kind and by doing lift your spirits as well. I like the mornings the best because of them, no other time of the day do people put themselves out there like that.
The store fronts form a line of wrought iron that if it were in a different location would make as fine a fence as any mansion has as adornment on its perimeter. But with cigarette ads and hand-written daily specials it reminds you that the neighborhood is rough and night time is the time of opportunity for thieves. I'm always looking at the sidewalk when I walk, not only to avoid uneven sections that can make the coolest guy trip and look stupid, but to find what others drop. Since I was a small boy I have found enough stuff to fill the average apartment to the ceiling. Of course I didn't keep all the "treasures", usually trading or giving them away to my brother or friends. I include alleys when I say sidewalks, really anywhere I walk, in buildings, elevators, hall ways, stores, banks, busses, taxis, anywhere really. People lose or drop all kinds of things. Wallets had proved to be the biggest disappointment of all. It seems that either the wallet had practically nothing in it except photos and a driver's license, hardly worth the time and trouble in returning it, or I got a nice thank you after handing over hundreds of dollars. I never thought once about keeping the money and tossing the wallet, guess mine is too important to me to keep someone else's.
Everything besides a wallet was fair game though and I have made plenty of money selling off the treasures or better yet trading for something I really wanted for a long time. Jimmy "payday" Booker had a tigers skull I wanted since I was eight years old, so when I found a box of old baseball cards behind an apartment building with at least six cards he didn't have the trade was on. I even managed to hold back many of the best ones for later deals in the neighborhood. I know I could have asked around the block about losing a box of baseball cards, but I didn't and I've never felt guilty about it. Mom wants me to get rid of it, says it creeps her out but I insist it has a role in my future and bad luck will follow me the rest of my life if I let go of it. She knows I just make things up to get my way, but is proud of how elaborate the stories are I come up with.
Yes, I've found money. Lots of it, almost everywhere I go I see pennies dropped or thrown down because of their uselessness. But three five gallon water bottles in my closet would argue they do have value. I counted one once, $367.21 was inside. The third is three fourths full and some day I'm going to use the thousand for a special purpose. I'd put it in the bank to earn interest but as we all know numbers on paper spend much easier than hundreds of pounds of copper colored zinc. Then there are the nickels, dimes, and quarters, that's in another bottle that I spend when it's full, there are all kinds of rainy days between it getting full. Bills too, I don't know why anyone would let a twenty or even a dollar bill blow down the street but it'll never get past me no matter how much soot has accumulated on top of it, or debris on top. I pride myself on being able to spot money green if all I have is a sixteenth inch square spot to see.
The sun wasn't in the sky yet just its effects. My T-shirt was already soaked under my arm pits. So was everyone else's so it didn't seem to matter much. There were plenty of times growing up that I swore I would leave ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Kansas City and move to Anchorage when I got old enough. The Fourth was last weekend and I had plenty firecrackers with fizzled fuses to collect as I walked along. Later I would re-roll the powder into one inch diameter Kraft paper kegs for my steel pipe cannon. The cannon had been welded onto a twenty pound base and have a hole on one end for lighting. I kept it hidden deep in my closet to ensure Aaron didn't find and kill himself. The tiny fuses were put in a soup can and lit causing all kinds of miniature rocket firings that Aaron could watch.
I had a ball of string in our room that was higher than my mattress off the floor. I keep it sprayed with coatings of watered down Lysol to fight its natural tendency to smell like gym socks and sewer water. I've no idea what use in the future the Ball of Mystery will play in my life but still I add new pieces after almost every walk, and today is no exception as I pick up a waded up piece with dirt and an old straw tangled up with it. I once tried to think of how I could collect straws, but gave up after I found there was a limit to how many times you could one inside the other. Gum wrappers are quite another story. They can be folded so they form interlocking chains and our bedroom has one that covers almost the entire ceiling, held up in place by push tacks. The last time I estimated the length, since there is no way I'd take it down to accurately measure it, it was over a half mile, somewhere around 2800 feet. I haven't added to it since I was 12. I figure Aaron is old enough to take over where I left off and have already shown him how to fold the wrappers. He hasn't been bit by the bug yet, but I still have hopes for him.
After a few blocks I had both my front pockets full with bottle caps, at least the ones without cork inside, those I had snapped as I found them. Snapping was an art form and if you put your hand just behind your ear and snapped your thumb and middle finger just right, you can make a cap sail twenty sometimes thirty feet through the air. My record is 46 feet but that was with a wind in my back. Six pack plastic holders, a pencil with a point, a rain- soaked grass-stained hard ball, A KC A's baseball cap that reeked of beer, a quarter and six pennies, a losing raffle ticket stub from April, various washers and nuts mostly quarter and three eights inch, and the handle of a broken baseball bat.
I used to pick up unidentifiable pieces of plastic but after a large box had been filled I just couldn't think of a single use for all the colored pieces so I threw it in the dumpster. There were other collections that died off from disinterest. Rocks, pitch and tar chunks, empty beer cans, roofing fragments, chipped pieces of brick, and broken glass but not until I was convinced I couldn't heat them up enough to reform them into works of art.
By noon I was hungry and returned to hide from the afternoon heat waves. You know, the ones that make people and cars look like fun house mirrors of wavy, distorted versions of themselves. When I was younger I actually got two eggs to fry on the sidewalk outside our house after I scrubbed the cement to get the grit off. They were overt easy and were delicious with a little salt. But mostly on the weekend afternoons we all spent the those hours in mom's room, hoping some of that tepid air dribbling out of the window AC would somehow roll far enough to touch one of us on the floor. The only other place was in the basement where the storage bins were. The air was stale and smelled like rancid water but slightly cooler than mom's bedroom floor. Definitely where Aaron and I disappeared to when PJ was in a romantic mood, icky.
The worst was over by six as the braver of the residents came out to get errands run before dark. Darkness was the world of the bad men and boys that would grow up to be bad men. I knew who they were and had always declined their invitation to join their gang. That had its down sides, because if they didn't have anyone else to torture they looked me up. I ran track at school and had developed one of the biggest sets of lungs in the mid-west, when combined with long powerful legs you have the perfect get away. I guess breaking past the iron bars wasn't good exercise for chasing me down the street. Either way I never got caught even though I was cornered plenty of times. I think they just didn't try that hard or I'd have bruises all over all the time. I had talked to them one on one at various times and we had much in common, but when they got together it was like we had never talked.
I would walk the streets at night occasionally and see a whole world that never shown itself in the daytime. The gang leaning on the cars along the sidewalk making for an uneasy passage for everyone except the bad men carrying guns and back slapping any of the gang that looked at them. The men walking their wives to the laundry mat carrying the huge baskets. The loners drifting down the street, avoiding all confrontations and were unusual enough that everyone let them be. I wanted to grow and be one of them, they had complete freedom of the night without being targeted. The older women with the rouge and red-red lipstick calling out to men passing by wanting to know if they had the time or asking if they wanted a good time. The younger girls with the short skirts leaning over talking to the guys that never got out of their fancy cars. And me the skinny kid no one bothered with as I slipped through the underbrush of city streets, stopping to pick something up that reflected light of the dingy street lights.
But most nights I was on the roof, a safe place where the gangs were too bored to hang out among the vents and still warm pitch of the flat roofs. Up high I could feel whatever wind there was, unblocked by brick and cement canyons below. There the faint star would flicker its message of hope for a better life. There I would test my bravery by walking along the six inch wide wall that formed the outside of the building façade. My manhood was proved over and over again as a rush of adrenaline raced through my body each time I lost my balance and nearly fell to my death. I never told anyone about my passages to manhood, especially Aaron, I would never forgive myself if he died at what I almost died from.
Midnight on a Saturday night I got down off the wall and returned to the sweltering apartment where Aaron was sleeping, a radio played soft music in mom's bedroom where I heard her soft voice giggle from time to time, a lullaby I'd fall asleep to soaked in my own sweat on top of the bed in my jockeys.