Neighborhood Watch

2/3/91

It looks so much different
than it feels.

Down the hall a man is banging with a club.

Somewhere else, there’s a corpse of an angel rotting on a pedestal. I’m responsible. It’s not a crime. Down the hall that smells frantically like Lysol - or ammonia - a fresh coat everyday. And every day down the drain, drowning the roots of things up from the soil and growing in the sun and wetted with rain. We can’t see, but they've been through it all down there - been touched, effected - they shine for a time --may end up in dumps or sewers under the city again - because of us. It’s not a crime.

Something simple and good, still is that. Even if it’s covered in shit. Right? Under the city, along with the black ammonia water that’s left to make this hall smell yellow and harsh - too clean to be clean at all. It’s a cover up - and besides, I can feel the grubs in the walls.

Freshly scrubbed, I leave this place and go and go away from here - I think: I live in a Spark. Funny - it doesn’t always filter down. Above the art gallery, that’s where I live. Above the catered parties. I am going now - to unpack books or stand for artists - and the trains listen to me while they pass and

I am ok .

He’s been at it for a long time now. Down the hall … banging. I didn’t know anyone lived behind that old door. 4 big locks on it. The fragile staircase leading to it doesn‘t even look safe to walk on. It may be what holds this building up though.

He’s been at it for a long time. Whatever he’s trapped in has us both. Minutes and minutes and he‘s fallen into a steady harmless deadly rhythm - it seems to have forgotten why or doesn’t care anymore. He will never stop because he isn‘t even doing it. It’s just become part of the architecture. Sound waves - a continuum - you do not stop the thing: Habit. It’s lifeless, so it can not get tired. I wait after every bang for it to be the last. It is always just the first and there will be another. I hold my breath and open my door just a little. Shut it again, shaking. I’ll wait. He’ll quit. But he doesn’t. Someone else will do something. No one will. So I find him.

Locked in an apartment down the dark part of the hall - not even Lysol down here: “I’m not flipping out they were here 4 of them I had to get your attention somehow this our home sweetie I just want to protect it couldn’t quit til someone heard me they been out there I seen um through my peephole I been watchin I ain’t freakin I work all day I make 50 dollars an hour I ain’t freakin.”

There was no one there. No one had been there. But I knew what he meant and still believed him. I knew what he meant and I knew what he did. And, after the police came and left upon deciding he was a strung out nut (within less than 5 minutes), I knew why he went back to his apartment, locked the door, stared out his peephole, and picked up the club again.