A Street With No Name

As I walk, this languishing day of summer, moist, hot and brown-green, casts my body in a slimy sheen of salty sweat. It seems hard to fathom doing much of anything once the temperature peaks, late afternoon where I come from. A straw hat and light-colored, long-sleeved shirt help to stave off the burning of the sun and the burning of brain cells.

They say home is where the heart is, but one would be hard pressed to define this particular sun-drenched street as heartening. The street is long, twice that of a normal residential street. Each day as I round the corner, feeling elated at being almost home, the road ahead stretches nearly a quarter mile yet and my house, not two thirds down, proves to be still a long way off.

One side of the street is residential while the other side starts off commercial, transitioning about half way down to more homes stretching westward toward a dead end. The houses are dilapidated, bedraggled and in dire need of some of that heart mentioned earlier. Each house in turn has its own charm. The first being a sort of annex for the business across the street, as such, it happens to be the best kept. Following that house is a sequence of homes in varying states of disrepair all dating from the 1970’s, built of cinder block and with small porches mounted on their faces. Some have garages while others do not and not one has a roof younger than 30 years.

I’ve come to appreciate this street even as it slowly comes to a boil and is reduced to sticky sludge. Each house, as mentioned, has its own charm and each family their own eccentricities. We are all poor, but don’t tell my mother. She always said to be poor is to be low, or lesser than others. I can hear her words as I put the beer in a cooler bag and head back outside to the porch, “We aren’t poor, we’re fiscally challenged. Just ‘cause we got no money don’t mean we’re lesser than anyone else.” From my porch I watch the sunset while slowly getting drunk.

Time stands still while I reminisce, though time is but an abstraction of this moment, our eternity. These people, they moan about the past and the promise of an uncertain future, but we all live in a fleeting moment and must learn to accept each other in that moment.

“Hey, Phil.” It’s Alonzo across the street pouring gasoline from a plastic cup into his fire pit and waving. He and his roommate are Vietnam vets and they fly two flags in front of their house, POW and the Stars and Stripes.

I nod, not really knowing anyone, but ‘knowing’ everyone, I choose to remain quiet. Over the years I’ve found it easier to keep my distance than to actively engage the residents of this lonely place.

Do any of us really know the other? Most people find it difficult to look through the eyes of another, which, as is happens, is where empathy is born. Is it for this reason we garner such disrespect for those who are different from us? They say, to truly love someone else, one must first learn to love oneself. I try to love my street, take possession of it, own it. I try to love my neighbors. They are all of a different bent, such is the world, though we tend to view it through a biased lens.

Down the street is an old black man named Leslie who harbors a moonshine still in his backyard. His yard is filled with garbage; each year as the hurricanes come twirling through it floods with rainwater. To the right of his house is a young Latina and her dog. The dog, a pit bull - the favorite breed of the neighborhood - escapes each day when she arrives home and terrorizes the street with its guttural growling and bass-heavy barking. Across the street there live a couple of twenty-something white-boys with the audacity to fly the Confederate flag from a pole in their front yard. One of them drives a beat up old jeep, tricked out for torque and power and also sporting a Confederate flag. Next door to these young ruffians is a black man in his fifties, Darnell and his wife. Darnell keeps strange company and one might suspect him of dealing drugs. His wife spends a great deal of her day laboring to hold her white, bulbous frame steady in the front yard while yelling at the neighbors for no reason in particular. There is even a house full of Mexican immigrants, all roofers, who put down a couple of cases of beer a night. There has to be at least six of them in there and only two bedrooms. To the left of my house are three worn out white guys, cooks, if my memory serves, who smoke at least a short ton of weed per year and wander the street drunk in the middle of the night, unsure the next day if they spoke to you or not.

I don’t write these words to stereotype, but to show our disparities are not so dissimilar. We all are of different cultural backgrounds and people tend to be influenced by their immediate surroundings. Not all of a type will take on the same characteristics, but many do and it often brings them together in common purpose.

As I sit there in thought sipping my beer the orange hues of a Florida sunset deepen. The tumult of another day sets the pace for evening. As I watch the sunset I can hear Alonzo arguing with his roommate. “How much did you put in,” his roommate asked. “Just two cups worth,” said Alonzo while approaching the fire pit with his lighter. “You’re fucking crazy, man. Yer gonna blow yourself up!” “I told you to pick up lighter fluid, but you didn’t, so what am I supposed to do?” Alonzo said as he reach fully into the pit and started clicking his lighter.

Down the street Darnell’s wife staggered toward the street calling for one of the stray cats in the neighborhood. “Here, Mr Fat!” she yelled. “Mr Fat! If you don’t come home right now, Mr Fat, you’re not getting anything until daddy gets home!” Just then I heard the revving of a supercharged jeep as it came flying down the street. As it passed my house I heard the desperate cries of a cat in pain and saw poor Mr Fat flopping in the street, blood spurting in a windmill pattern as he twisted and writhed, then lay still in the gutter taking strained breaths.

Darnell’s wife looked medicated as she sedately marched over to where the jeep had just parked. Then she snapped and began hammering on the hood and yelling unintelligible obscenities at the jeep’s inhabitants.

“Get off my truck, lady!” It was one of the two white guys with the Confederate flag. I never did learn their names. As I said, I find it easier to not engage these people. “Fuck you! You killed my cat you piece of trash! When Darnell gets home he’s gonna mess you up!” Bang! Slam! She pounded fist-sized dents into the hood of the jeep and continued her obscene ravings.

Leslie wandered across the street and handed her a mason jar, she took a huge swill and gave a wheezing cough, choking back tears as the clear liquid threatened to burn holes in her esophagus. “Dude, fuck off! She just banged up my jeep and you give her moonshine?” “It calms her down. Would you rather I let her stay mad?” Leslie had tact and all parties began to mellow. For such a diverse group of bigoted individuals, everyone seemed to some how get along. I guess it’s hard to remain staunch in your beliefs when you stand alone in a group of adversaries.

An explosion ripped through the dusk of the fading sun. Orange, white and red flashed briefly and subsided, leaving behind a fifteen foot flame licking at the power lines above. I couldn’t see anyone across the street, only the fire pit and the flames. Then Alonzo’s roommate poked out from the carport, laughing and looking around for his buddy.

Alonzo had been thrown ten feet across the yard and was laying in a pile of chopped wood. He got to his feet, smiling and staggered over toward the fire pit. A site to see, his hair was on fire and he didn’t notice. He just laughed and grinned. “Did you see that? That was some fireball.” His arm was clearly burnt, but he didn’t seem to notice that. “You’re an idiot,” his roommate exclaimed, then put out the fire in Alonzo’s hair with a dish towel and handed him another beer.

The explosion seemed to get everyone’s attention and the fighting stopped down the road. Darnell came walking down the street, just home from work and stopped at the fire and motioned for his wife to come down and join them. He cracked open a beer, proffered him by Alonzo and flicked his cigarette into the giant flames. Darnell’s wife never even mentioned the cat, which lay dead and forgotten in the gutter close by.

Despite having enough wood for multiple bonfires, Alonzo and his roommate started feeding the fire with old furniture, broken electronics and other odds and ends. The smoke lit up in luminescent, green light as the chemicals in the treated particle board and plastics from the electronics caught fire, sending noxious vapors into the atmosphere. Leslie, Darnell and his wife and the two Vietnam vets sat around the fire, passing a joint and chewing the fat.

So we pass our days, on a street with no name, with each our own gripes and grievances. We drag our living corpses out into the callous winds of the world and try not to cry in the face of them. Broken, but not defeated, our hearts beat out a message to those who dare read the language, that we all live, love, hate and die and we do it all together.