Imagination #9

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9.

Cue the music, something metallic, rising in volume, with a piercing scream. Skidrow's national anthem pipes in with a police call and sirens. It's another case for the fly by night lawyer, Amestic D'Buse, to get his greedy little paws on. She pulled a knife on him. Both ran out just as everything started crumbling and dissolving.

In a bed on the upper floor, our lady of the night stuffs towels in bed holes to soften the springs. They make an impact. She has a masked man who says strictly, "Do not look upon me in my heat." That's getting technical. What's he got to hide? He likes it blue.

Respectable citizens cruise the entrance to this foul district, peeking down, wondering what there might be to see. Give me one good case of staggering and something reprehensible and I'll be happy. Maybe a mad drunk throwing a chair through a window. How about that pizza place?

I've imagined myself in that one dive, the last one out. Even the lowlifes knew enough to get out. I'd be bellying up to the bar just in time to get the call. "It's for you," and I'm like, Who Knows I'm Here? Then I hear his accusing voice from before, "I know where you go, and I know what you do there." No, no, no, it's my first time!

The neon sign at the fly by night carpet store flickers. Get that sucker fixed! It's pollution. It's mental anguish. It'll give me a seizure if I look at it twice. I wouldn't buy carpet from you. I'd be afraid to sign the papers. I won't sign anything.

What about the pizza from down the street? He kneads the dough like a strangler. With persistence. He's angry. It's rotty. It's scuzzy. He laughs with mania -- that's M-A-N-I-A, so sexy. The oven is open and shut, open and shut, fanning the flames.

An Imaginary Trip To Skidrow

[The events and descriptions in this article about Skidrow are imaginary. None of my morals was violated in its writing.]

There is a place I never want to go, where I should never go. That is Skidrow, that section of our town, a block, mostly one side of the block, that is given over to derelicts, bars, and fly by night carpet stores.

I used to drive by the jail and look at the prisoners holding on to the barred window. That's another place I never want to go, except to look at prisoners in their misery. When it comes to Skidrow, even though I never want to go there, I still like to drive by and peek down that street to see if anyone's in the gutter.

In this particular trip [which did not really happen], I came toward it from the south and drove down that block. I might describe it like this: It is as though a film was slowed down and my pace became very slow, languid to the point of all noise and happenings in the vicinity being, respectively, like a low growl and only incrementally occurring. The only thing moving at normal speed was me personally, not in progress in my car, but in my mind and my eyes. I could look about rapidly, taking in each detail. I could process the information thus received with blazing speed.

First, I look at the buildings. It occurs to me that they must have been built by actual optimistic builders. Carpenters, bricklayers. Was it their dream to build what would later become such a scuzzy part of town? I doubt it. They would have been contracted to do the work based on the investments of one or more entrepreneurs at the time, who had their individual hopes for what the district would be.

The entrepreneurs' primary goal would surely have been to make money, either with their own businesses in the area or by renting and possibly selling the buildings to other merchants. Whether it would make a difference to them what the businesses were and what sort of place it became in time, of course I can't say entirely. But just as there are scumbags in our present generation, it's reasonable to assume that some of these entrepreneurs (and merchants) of that earlier time were also scumbags.

Let's just say it up front. Any man who wishes to open a brothel, just to mention one business, is a scuzzy guy. The same goes for plenty of these lowlife businesses that polite society wishes would go away and not exist. Bail bondsmen, bars, fly by night carpet stores, tattoo parlors, brothels, pool halls, very rundown pizza parlors, fences, drug runners -- it's enough to make my skin crawl. Vermin businesses. The buildings are shabby. There's a tipped over garbage can in the alley.

In this imaginary drive, I see some of the denizens of this district, coming out of bars, patting each other on the back. One guy has his right leg behind him, his foot on the building. He smokes.

I direct my eyes on this one bar and imagine myself going in. There's a cigarette setting on the side of a pool table. Smoke drifts up and confuses the light. Two lowlifes are busy smacking the balls. The bartender wipes glasses. He stands in front of many bottles of liquor. A loose woman with a low, husky voice sits at the other end. She looks up at the TV, sometimes paying attention to a professional wrestling show. Usually she's worrying that glass, almost drunk down to the ice cubes, and alternately puffing at a "ciggie." It's like she's waiting for someone, like she probably does several times a day. I notice the dress is rumpled and not clean. There are other patrons working through their paychecks, receiving liquor by the drink.

Down the block I see the scuzzy pizza parlor. A cook smacks the dough like he's mad at someone. He probably is. I'd guess he hates himself, at some level. This was my big chance at life, and I ended up on Skidrow, making pizzas for lowlifes, which I also happen to be. There are some very sad thoughts taking place down that block.

The Carpet Racket

It'd be interesting to know whatever happened to Sam. He took that job at the carpet store and shortly after that we lost contact with each other. He had me come over that one time, trying to get me to work there too. But all I had to do was look around once to know that such a life wasn't for me. When I see a seedy looking guy in the office, looking out the door, and nothing but pieces and rolls of carpet stacked around, I'm out of there.

I'm sure this was a dishonest racket, and I'd rather keep my life clean, free of these kinds of entanglements. Maybe the owner looks seedy because he's in it for something on the side. One guy and Sam together in the store. Sam was just an innocent kid. The guy showed up in town from nowhere, supposedly there to sell carpet, but where'd he come from? What was the real story? What'd he have to hide?

You need to establish a reputation to do an honest business in one of these small towns. And you don't get a good reputation by just showing up, especially with a fly by night racket. Then trying to bring every fresh-faced kid in on your scheme and acting suspicious. My instincts have always been pretty much right on when looking at people and knowing they're up to no good. There's more going on in that office than meets the eye. Sam fell for it, but I never would.

Now, we know carpet stores are like an extensive pyramid scheme. Stores in other towns are on the lookout for vacant buildings in other towns. They split their inventory and even if they have to spread it super thin, they're willing to put up a sign, stack up a few rolls, and call it a store. It takes about 10 minutes to talk a desperate landlord into giving you a month's lease and another 10 minutes to get a local kid in there as your go-between with the public. Now you're sitting in your office, looking out at the kid's friends -- hoping they're as clueless as he -- so you can snare them as well, either for your own store or the store you hope to split off to tomorrow. Once you've got them in the door, a little fast talking does the trick. And certainly once you've got them in the car on the road to another town, they're trapped.

Sam and I grew apart. I never thought he was happy with that job but he either couldn't come back or his pride kept him from it. Or maybe they "disappeared" him. The evidence is long gone by now. It's one of the many forgotten cold cases. Poor kid, they dangled "something better" in front of his face, and like a fool he went for it. He should have held back, but the fact of the matter is he didn't. That store literally wasn't there for three days and they were angling for him.

I've never forgotten and I never will, what it was like seeing Sam stand there, the sad sight. He was waiting for people to come in and buy carpet, waiting for a commission. He had the best of intentions. And all the time that other guy was sitting back there in his office, looking out. Like a crook.

Seedy Bars, Tattoo Shops, and Carpet Stores

When they put in the shopping center, downtown suffered. Businessmen lost so much money they either had to pull out completely or build near the shopping center. All the choice spots were taken inside before they got there. But that left the buildings downtown as ripe pickings for what we might call Grade B or C businesses, even D or F.

These inferior businesses are the bane of civilization everywhere. Bail bondsmen, tattoo shops, skidrow bars, and carpet stores. There actually was a street just off the square that we called skidrow even before the shopping center came in. I knew better than to ever go there. It wasn't like the skidrow the traveling preachers talked about in the big cities but it was definitely a wanna-be. Guys standing on one leg, their other foot against the building, smoking a cigarette. Nothing you want to see.

Sure enough, the seedy bars were down that street, luring in the hopeless riff raff that every town is known for, or at least has a few of. Some crooked lawyer's going to be in the vicinity, probably running a legal scam on behalf of the troubled. A tattoo shop carves out a filthy living when their clientele gets roaring drunk. And there's a carpet store, always right there, foolishly thinking you're going to buy carpet.

But it happened just like I said it did: The shopping center was built, the exodus of remaining businesses of diminishing hopes followed, then the downtown area became known for this seedier stuff.

When I see a carpet store to this day it makes me feel sick. Have I ever been in one? Yes, actually, I have. So I know exactly what they're like. I'm in a position to judge.

There's several things you can say about a carpet store. It's as fly by night as any business can be. One day there's nothing, the next there's a carpet store. They didn't come from anywhere, they're not there for any obvious purpose. They sprout up like a poisonous mushroom. All they have is big pieces of carpet, so they can move in on a moment's notice. Usually what you have is this: Another carpet store in another town hears of a vacant building, they split their inventory, and they move in in the middle of the night.

I knew a guy named Sam who worked at a carpet store. He and I worked at the same place next door. Everything was going great, until one day we got up (this is true) and suddenly there was a carpet store next door. No one saw them move in, no one heard of it in advance. The place was vacant, as the pattern always seems to go, then BOOM, there's a full fledged carpet store. We didn't know the guy who ran it, but he looked seedy.

Next thing I knew Sam was working there, like within two weeks of the guy's opening it. I still saw him on breaks and at lunch, that sort of thing, and he acted happy. But I never really believed it. After all, what could be more boring, even more discouraging than looking at big rolls of carpet all day? In fact, I saw the whole thing, for this was the time I was in a carpet store. Sam thought it'd be a good idea if I came to work there too. But my path wasn't meant to go downhill.

Looking back at it now, of course it worked out exactly as I predicted. The business we both worked for is still there -- almost 40 years later -- but the carpet store is long gone. Long gone. I don't know what happened, but I suppose people got wise to the whole thing. Either that or they split off once too often with vacant buildings in other towns. Whatever happened, I haven't heard from Sam since, and that's the real story.