I work in a bookstore. It's cool enough - not a huge point of pride, perhaps - but a job with benefits, reliable, and usually stable enough to keep me from totally losing my mind. Totally losing my mind, it might be said, is something for which I am an adept. Yearly I compete at the Panicked Assholes convention in Park City, Utah, and like clockwork I take home the grand prize. That, on the other hand, is a great point of pride.
At my work, which consists of my working in a giant cave of a room with one other guy, I take a small number of trips outside every day in order to take out the trash and recycling, shoo bums, pick up crack pipes, shovel human feces from around the dumpster, call the cops and have loiterers arrested, and, once in a blue moon, help the homicide detectives at HPD solve a missing persons case and then nervously talk about it to reporters from Inside Edition.
I stay busy.
But here is the story. The building I work in is laid out in an enormous rectangle, easily the size of a football field. The sales floor is 40,000 square feet. The place is gigantic. It sits sideways, its right flank butted up against Westheimer, which is also known as Houston's all-purpose Vegas Strip, street of Dreams, Road to Nowhere, and Hades River all rolled into one. If you are facing my building, the area to your immediate right is where the magic happens. This is the spot where we get deliveries, dump trash, etc ... It might help to know that the parking lot in our shopping center is gargantuan, so big in fact that it makes our store look downright quaint (something it most assuredly is not). And again, facing the building and looking right you will see the row of businesses that comprise the bulk of the center. The first spot to your left was taken up by a high-end home decor outlet, but that place folded years ago, and since, the building has remained empty, another victim of the failing economy.
Lining the back fence leading from the back of our store to the abandoned spot is a long grassy strip of land. This is the place where the neighbors from the heavily Muslim apartments behind the back strip bring their dogs to take their large, untended shits. It's also the spot where homeless people frolic at night, leaving empty boxes and debris on the ground for someone else to deal with. Often, I will see people parked in this area, making out, fighting, sleeping, or working on their cars. There are always shopping carts sadly sitting about, unused, pathetically taking up a fraction of the vast cement expanse.
But, here's the rub. There are places. There are places in the urban landscape that defy description. I would venture to guess that every village, every town, every city has these places. These are the places where the air blows the other direction, where it's always a couple degrees hotter in the summer, a few percentage points more humid, slightly uncomfortable, out of balance, indescribably - off. These are the places that make you feel uneasy, that exist out of time. Every city has them, thousands of them perhaps. This particular spot, like all the rest, is a mere stone's throw from the constant, everyday flow of normal life. Despite its being intentionally created, literally planned by a real person in a real office, this little spot is wrong on so many levels. And yet the effect is so subtle it's like you imagined the whole thing. I'm telling you because I know. There will be death here, if there hasn't already. There is a bridge here between what we know and what knows us.
To literally walk just around the corner from this spot of mine, to enter the main parking area in front of my store, the spell would be broken, all would return to normal. The beggars would appear to be human again, the birds somehow less robotic. The weirdness more the manageable sort that one might grow in their garden. All would be back in its place, and you would move on.Truth be told, I love to stand out there at the end of my shift, when nobody is left in my cave. I love to just stand out there and soak in the other-ness of the place. It's filthy. It's unsettling. It's a magnet for something bad. It robs you of your self-congratulatory smugness, and for some reason that's what makes me happy in this predictably fucked-up wasteland of a life - the unpredictable madness of these ambiguous, autonomous psychic zones, stamped over the veneer of normal urban life.
Some of us know better. You should know that I am one of them.
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4 Comments:
Great post. I really got the feel for that place. and i do love places like that. places that look like magical gateways to other worlds. i used to live in such a house in Aspen CO, totally out of sync with the rest of the upscale, cocaine-disco feel of the town. In NYC, it seemed like every other street in my neighborhood of long island city was a transplant from a different world. The whole of Mexico City seemed like a bizarre transplant from another planet. Houston was also always good for places like that. i always sort of thought it was the result of no zoning combined with too-rapid growth. This little town i live in now is a little more homogenous, but you can still find the spots. I consider these places a necessity, sort of a well needed clash of realities, without which we'd just be living in some sort of cardboard cutout of a world.
Nice observation and I concur with Roberto. I used to live in a cool old bungalow off of Cavalcade and 45 about two blocks from the Astro Inn motel. Apart from the ceaseless traffic from Cavalcade, there were always two bit pimps following and arguing with their whores up and down the street. Truckers stopping in to the motel at all hours. Gangs and graffiti. Inbred Chow/Rottie strays combing the streets. Drunks burning out their V8 pickups st 4am. Unkept yards with houses of varying decay and occupancy. To provide some cultural balance, there lived a retired ex-narcotics cop/bigot/AC repairman in the hood as well. He liked to get blowjobs from crack whores as well. When people asked me where I lived, I just told them, "the Heights". Needless to say, I moved but it was a weird scene sometimes.
Baleen, that sounds so very Houston. i love this town more with each passing day. And Roberto, I need to get to Mexico City and experience directly what you are talking about. I agree that these are places we need.
This does make me think of suburban areas. Not all, of course, but hell maybe most.
Whenever I hear too much from someone about how great their town is - be it Austin or New York or even Chicago. I think of the sprawling ugly hot and humid swill that surrounds the city.
Was once in a beautiful very remote area of Mexico, walking along a river. Came upon a boy hurling old rayovac batteries into the water. For some reason this made me think of that too.
Very nice post even though I'm not quite sure what lesson I am hopefully to know better. Don't swim in the water?
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