l i f e
the world was
all before them
all before them
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
Other times I'll just sit on a wooden flat tapping a stick on a five gallon drum. There's always plently lying around. Paint drums, oil drums, mineral spirits, tar. Run off from the construction going on in the warehouse district. Someone's trying to bring it back to life. I can't imagine why. The ragweed and briars are enough to keep anyone off the track down that way. They run the length of the track like a Norman hedgerow. What the ragweed and briars don't control the kudzu does. Haven to nothing but garbage. The wooden flats on which I perch are the only way up and over the natural barrier.
There's a massage parlor a hundred yards or so up the rail line. It's next door to where the band used to practice. We used to sweat like hell in the summer and freeze in the winter. The only insulation, pieces of carpet we found, also helped to deaden the sound. We thought ourselves lucky to have the space. Lucky to have bars on the windows, broken and boarded up. Lucky to have one outlet for all our equipment. On the hottest days of summer I remember sitting outside on those wooden flats drinking beer, no shirt, watching the Asian girls tend their garden behind the parlor. I heard once they were working off their passage to America buy selling themselves in the parlors that line Lee Street. I can believe it.
The girls would come outside in nothing but a g-string and maybe a small top and pick tomatoes, squash, okra, whatever. I'd sit there and watch them. More often than not I had a six string Guild with me. Wrote some of my better songs behind the warehouse next to the trains and prostitutes. Every once in a while a car would pull around the eight foot high fence blocking the view from Lee Street and park next to the garden. A man would get out, invariably look around, see me, and duck inside the yellow door next to the staked up tomato plants. The door had a porthole in it with one-way glass and as soon as the man got close it would open and suck him inside. Usually I was still in my spot when he left, at most a half an hour later. They never looked my way again when they were leaving.
Those were the hot summer days. And like some modern Michael I sat there
and watched the blessed evicted tend and leave their garden while delivering
messages with a coarse voice and six string guitar. And like Michael I saw,
"they, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
through Eden took their solitary way."
goodnight 3.2.98
