A one man expeditionary force...
Nov. 20th, 2006 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonSaturday:
There's a Numb sun in my eyes, grease on my fingers, a rattle on the chain, i'm down to my Fred Flintstone brakes with three drags left on the smoke between my lips and here I am gliding to a stop in front of the Ruins of Dekalb Avenue. I dismount my baby, chain her up on the down low behind some overgrowth. I check out the security. I'm looking at ten feet of fence topped with barbwire frosting. I spit out my smoke and light up another. I pace the perimeter like a tiger at the zoo. I'm losing the dusk shadows quick. The wind soaks my bones in Autumn but i'm too cold to shiver right now. I catch a squad car coming up left two blocks down. I turn around slow, drop to a squat, wrap my arms around my legs, bury my chin in my chest and hide my face between my knees.
I watch them pull right up to me and then slow down to a crawl. I look up from my huddle at them with wide empty eyes and a shoot them a desperate look of raw anquish. Through the window I see the passenger nod at me to the driver. This is it I figure: Questioned, frisked, requestioned, IDed, named and warned... and that's if I get my bullshit story straight the first time... but nope, they speed up with a rev of the engine, gun it hard down the block and vanish around the corner. This is something my friend Bud taught me a long time ago: That the most effective way to hide from the law is too look like you need the law like never before. In fact the more you look like you need them, the less likely they'll see you.
Still... like ceremonial magick and pick up lines at a bar, it always feels a little weird when it actually works.
I give it a few minutes and maintain my pose of desperation in case they circle on back. Satisfied I get back up and realize the cold concrete on my ass has shrunk my bladder down to the size of a pea. I march down to where I locked up my bike and as i'm hissing out a piss I catch something to my left. A sliding gate that's been smashed in and is being held on it's hinges with a single padlocked chain. I holster my piece and check it out. It looks like a car popped the curve here and hit the gate dead on.
I put a boot on the chain, test my weight, pull my self up, twist my body and slide-step up and over the lock. I land with a crunch of broken glass embedded in the frozen dirt. My heart is racing. I'm free-basing adrenalin. Any second the squad car will roll around again and there'll be no bullshiting my way out of this one. I debate doing a full 180 out of here but then, suddenly, there it is right in front of me. I realize that they look even bigger up close than when I pass over them on the MARTA ride West bound into downtown. I step back, having to crane my neck up in increments of inches to frame them fully in the lens of the eye: There on the corner of an abandoned building, painted white on a brick wall that glows red with the light of the dying sun, the silhouettes of two giant boxers locked in a perpetual dance of fists.
The building used to be some kind of a company back when they used to build factories next to the ghettos of America, back before it was cheaper to outsource our slave labor to countries that were in fact just one giagantic ghetto. I guesstimate the age of the building to be somewhere between the late 40's to the early 50's. The white paint on the Boxers has faded somewhat, giving the boxers a kind of scaled skin made of the bricks, but from a good distance away, they stand out fairly clear in what's left of the daylight. Think: Negative Hiroshima shadows. Think: A pair of ghosts that have found themselves fly trapped in a vanishing city. Think: The Raw Magick of chance that is any good art!
I rifle through my saddle bag, find my camera, kneel down, lock my eye into a measuring wink, size up the shot and fire.
****************
I got bit by the photobug with a wake up call from a friend of mine. She wanted to hip me to a shoot she was doing with a model. But it wasn't the who but rather the where that she thought would be of interest to me. She had gotten a window open to access a section of the rail line that runs parallel to Dekalb Avenue. There was a gate, a guard and somehow all i'd have to do is drop her name and i'd be in like Flynn with no questions asked.
Try to remember that the last time I took my camera to the rail lines, my buddy and I got pulled over by two rail bulls for being next to the CSX property. Not on it mind you, next to it! They made us for steady taggers, despite our age and gave us a good cop/bad cop routine not seen since the golden age of 70's TV! We were warned we'd be arrested if we were ever caught on CSX property again, despite our never having been on it in the first place!
So a hassle free pass into the steel arteries of Terminus was too good to pass up.
I called her back. Got the details. Got some batteries. Got some coffee and then got myself a flat tire three blocks into the trip. I limped my Baby back to the pad. Luckily for me I have a patch kit and a pump upstairs. Unfortunately I haven't patched up a tire since I was a kid. Normally I just buy a new tube and go from there.
Still how hard could it be?
**********
Two hours and some change later and I missed my opening.
I didn't want to call her up and interupt her shoot and by the time I made it down there it might be too late. But it was in me now. This need to capture something through the power of vision. The camera held the seductive power of a Hammer, a Pistol, a minature Toy Robot all at the same time.
Then I remembered going to work last Friday.
There I was cattle packed in a car with passengers looking both somnabulent and sad. The train was something like twenty minutes late. You could smell each bus just missed, each excuse to an unsympathetic boss, each docked paycheck, each hour that had to be made up, each appointment irreversibly lost forever reeking off everyone. I was pressed into the right hand doors so that if the train were to stop suddenly and the door were to slice open inexplicably I would be dropped a good three to four stories to my more than likely death.
But instead I saw them. The ghost white shadow boxers.
I know I had seen them a few hundred times in the course of my commute to the office. But I never really saw them. I knew. Right there and then I knew they'd be mine!
So here I am. Knee high in brambles, climbing up the hill, stepping over the broken bottles, making my way through the shells of brick buildings, the abandoned rooms that look like the sets from old 80's post-apocalyptic movies. The various tags. The moss colored stones. The day glow shrines built out of aerosol tags. The scurrying of rats. The sky the color of a burning Jack O'Lantern, beams of light that spike right out of the horizon and jab into the shadowed earth around me.
I am a one man expeditionary force. I imagine myself as the Richard Burton of Psychogeographers. I imagine an entire photographic society dedicated to capturing the pre-gentrified cities and it's natives with me acting as the founding chairman.
I keep firing the whole time. Some are measured. Some are shot off the hip. Some are the photographic equivalent of a spray and pray. But each step I take, each shift of my position, each moment that passes reveals a new masterpiece that turns to shit within the window frame of my Nikon. I can't stop though. I adjust settings. I go through batteries like ammo clips, dropping the empty shells into the ground and reloading before the crumbling walls eclipse the setting sun.
Then I see something else.
Something that doesn't belong there.
I see something moving inside one of the empty rooms, I squint through the darkness and make out that it's not something but rather someone. He (that much I could be sure of) is hunched down in a squat and peering through a hole in the wall. This creeps me out a bit and I make my way back to the fence, deciding to walk along the edge of it so i'm as visible as possible to any passing traffic until I can reach the gate.
The figure emerges from behind the wall, zombie shuffles a few steps into the light and yells out for me to 'stop'. Uh-huh. I decided that i'll stop when i'm a good three or four blocks away from him. I turn around and offer a shrug at him that indicates that while I can hear him, I can't hear what he's saying per se, so i'm just going to keep on going. That's when i've noticed that there are two more figures behind him now adding up for a total of three.
"Hold up... lemme ask you something real quick!"
Which in my experience means: "Your ass best run now mother fucker, because it is the only warning it's gonna get!".
And really who am I to argue with that logic. I'm only a two yards from the gate. I look over shake my head 'No' in gesticulated confusion and then suddenly I bolt for the gate. In a blur i'm up and over the chain. I catch a glance over the shoulder and see them running for me and running a lot faster than my nicotined damaged lungs will let me. But I have one advantage I move with Fear-Speed. The speed of rabbits. The speed of the gazelle. The speed of the hunted. I'm crouched next to my Baby dialing up the combination on the lock that snakes through the frame and the rear tire.
I get one.
I get two.
(a shadow grows over the shoulder)
I get three.
(dull thud of growing footsteps)
I get four.
(Chain link fence rattles)
I get fi...
"BOO!"
I jump up and scream from the shock. They're right behind me on the other side of the fence and rattling it with a steady snicker. I pull the lock apart, wrap it clumsily around my wrist and I mount her up even as I push her forward, so that i'm sort of riding Her side saddle. I burst out of the bushes, hit the sidewalk just when I see one of them stuck between the gate opening with one leg caught on the chain.
He hollers for me to 'Hold Up'.
Yeah Fuck you 'Hold Up'.
I take the curb with a hard drop but the tires hold, I throw my hip up over the seat and now i'm standing up on my pedals, pumping my legs with through the power invested in me by the very fear of God herself. I cover the distance of the block with the speed of the ancients (if the ancients rode 18 speed mountain bikes I suppose), when I allow myself the Orphic mistake of looking back over my shoulder.
There they are. Three black kids, in their early teens if that, each one doubled over in laughter. That's what I was so scared of: A couple of kids playing commando.
Suddenly i'm out breath. I slow down, giving what's left of my dignity a chance to catch up with me.
There's a Numb sun in my eyes, grease on my fingers, a rattle on the chain, i'm down to my Fred Flintstone brakes with three drags left on the smoke between my lips and here I am gliding to a stop in front of the Ruins of Dekalb Avenue. I dismount my baby, chain her up on the down low behind some overgrowth. I check out the security. I'm looking at ten feet of fence topped with barbwire frosting. I spit out my smoke and light up another. I pace the perimeter like a tiger at the zoo. I'm losing the dusk shadows quick. The wind soaks my bones in Autumn but i'm too cold to shiver right now. I catch a squad car coming up left two blocks down. I turn around slow, drop to a squat, wrap my arms around my legs, bury my chin in my chest and hide my face between my knees.
I watch them pull right up to me and then slow down to a crawl. I look up from my huddle at them with wide empty eyes and a shoot them a desperate look of raw anquish. Through the window I see the passenger nod at me to the driver. This is it I figure: Questioned, frisked, requestioned, IDed, named and warned... and that's if I get my bullshit story straight the first time... but nope, they speed up with a rev of the engine, gun it hard down the block and vanish around the corner. This is something my friend Bud taught me a long time ago: That the most effective way to hide from the law is too look like you need the law like never before. In fact the more you look like you need them, the less likely they'll see you.
Still... like ceremonial magick and pick up lines at a bar, it always feels a little weird when it actually works.
I give it a few minutes and maintain my pose of desperation in case they circle on back. Satisfied I get back up and realize the cold concrete on my ass has shrunk my bladder down to the size of a pea. I march down to where I locked up my bike and as i'm hissing out a piss I catch something to my left. A sliding gate that's been smashed in and is being held on it's hinges with a single padlocked chain. I holster my piece and check it out. It looks like a car popped the curve here and hit the gate dead on.
I put a boot on the chain, test my weight, pull my self up, twist my body and slide-step up and over the lock. I land with a crunch of broken glass embedded in the frozen dirt. My heart is racing. I'm free-basing adrenalin. Any second the squad car will roll around again and there'll be no bullshiting my way out of this one. I debate doing a full 180 out of here but then, suddenly, there it is right in front of me. I realize that they look even bigger up close than when I pass over them on the MARTA ride West bound into downtown. I step back, having to crane my neck up in increments of inches to frame them fully in the lens of the eye: There on the corner of an abandoned building, painted white on a brick wall that glows red with the light of the dying sun, the silhouettes of two giant boxers locked in a perpetual dance of fists.
The building used to be some kind of a company back when they used to build factories next to the ghettos of America, back before it was cheaper to outsource our slave labor to countries that were in fact just one giagantic ghetto. I guesstimate the age of the building to be somewhere between the late 40's to the early 50's. The white paint on the Boxers has faded somewhat, giving the boxers a kind of scaled skin made of the bricks, but from a good distance away, they stand out fairly clear in what's left of the daylight. Think: Negative Hiroshima shadows. Think: A pair of ghosts that have found themselves fly trapped in a vanishing city. Think: The Raw Magick of chance that is any good art!
I rifle through my saddle bag, find my camera, kneel down, lock my eye into a measuring wink, size up the shot and fire.
I got bit by the photobug with a wake up call from a friend of mine. She wanted to hip me to a shoot she was doing with a model. But it wasn't the who but rather the where that she thought would be of interest to me. She had gotten a window open to access a section of the rail line that runs parallel to Dekalb Avenue. There was a gate, a guard and somehow all i'd have to do is drop her name and i'd be in like Flynn with no questions asked.
Try to remember that the last time I took my camera to the rail lines, my buddy and I got pulled over by two rail bulls for being next to the CSX property. Not on it mind you, next to it! They made us for steady taggers, despite our age and gave us a good cop/bad cop routine not seen since the golden age of 70's TV! We were warned we'd be arrested if we were ever caught on CSX property again, despite our never having been on it in the first place!
So a hassle free pass into the steel arteries of Terminus was too good to pass up.
I called her back. Got the details. Got some batteries. Got some coffee and then got myself a flat tire three blocks into the trip. I limped my Baby back to the pad. Luckily for me I have a patch kit and a pump upstairs. Unfortunately I haven't patched up a tire since I was a kid. Normally I just buy a new tube and go from there.
Still how hard could it be?
Two hours and some change later and I missed my opening.
I didn't want to call her up and interupt her shoot and by the time I made it down there it might be too late. But it was in me now. This need to capture something through the power of vision. The camera held the seductive power of a Hammer, a Pistol, a minature Toy Robot all at the same time.
Then I remembered going to work last Friday.
There I was cattle packed in a car with passengers looking both somnabulent and sad. The train was something like twenty minutes late. You could smell each bus just missed, each excuse to an unsympathetic boss, each docked paycheck, each hour that had to be made up, each appointment irreversibly lost forever reeking off everyone. I was pressed into the right hand doors so that if the train were to stop suddenly and the door were to slice open inexplicably I would be dropped a good three to four stories to my more than likely death.
But instead I saw them. The ghost white shadow boxers.
I know I had seen them a few hundred times in the course of my commute to the office. But I never really saw them. I knew. Right there and then I knew they'd be mine!
So here I am. Knee high in brambles, climbing up the hill, stepping over the broken bottles, making my way through the shells of brick buildings, the abandoned rooms that look like the sets from old 80's post-apocalyptic movies. The various tags. The moss colored stones. The day glow shrines built out of aerosol tags. The scurrying of rats. The sky the color of a burning Jack O'Lantern, beams of light that spike right out of the horizon and jab into the shadowed earth around me.
I am a one man expeditionary force. I imagine myself as the Richard Burton of Psychogeographers. I imagine an entire photographic society dedicated to capturing the pre-gentrified cities and it's natives with me acting as the founding chairman.
I keep firing the whole time. Some are measured. Some are shot off the hip. Some are the photographic equivalent of a spray and pray. But each step I take, each shift of my position, each moment that passes reveals a new masterpiece that turns to shit within the window frame of my Nikon. I can't stop though. I adjust settings. I go through batteries like ammo clips, dropping the empty shells into the ground and reloading before the crumbling walls eclipse the setting sun.
Then I see something else.
Something that doesn't belong there.
I see something moving inside one of the empty rooms, I squint through the darkness and make out that it's not something but rather someone. He (that much I could be sure of) is hunched down in a squat and peering through a hole in the wall. This creeps me out a bit and I make my way back to the fence, deciding to walk along the edge of it so i'm as visible as possible to any passing traffic until I can reach the gate.
The figure emerges from behind the wall, zombie shuffles a few steps into the light and yells out for me to 'stop'. Uh-huh. I decided that i'll stop when i'm a good three or four blocks away from him. I turn around and offer a shrug at him that indicates that while I can hear him, I can't hear what he's saying per se, so i'm just going to keep on going. That's when i've noticed that there are two more figures behind him now adding up for a total of three.
"Hold up... lemme ask you something real quick!"
Which in my experience means: "Your ass best run now mother fucker, because it is the only warning it's gonna get!".
And really who am I to argue with that logic. I'm only a two yards from the gate. I look over shake my head 'No' in gesticulated confusion and then suddenly I bolt for the gate. In a blur i'm up and over the chain. I catch a glance over the shoulder and see them running for me and running a lot faster than my nicotined damaged lungs will let me. But I have one advantage I move with Fear-Speed. The speed of rabbits. The speed of the gazelle. The speed of the hunted. I'm crouched next to my Baby dialing up the combination on the lock that snakes through the frame and the rear tire.
I get one.
I get two.
(a shadow grows over the shoulder)
I get three.
(dull thud of growing footsteps)
I get four.
(Chain link fence rattles)
I get fi...
"BOO!"
I jump up and scream from the shock. They're right behind me on the other side of the fence and rattling it with a steady snicker. I pull the lock apart, wrap it clumsily around my wrist and I mount her up even as I push her forward, so that i'm sort of riding Her side saddle. I burst out of the bushes, hit the sidewalk just when I see one of them stuck between the gate opening with one leg caught on the chain.
He hollers for me to 'Hold Up'.
Yeah Fuck you 'Hold Up'.
I take the curb with a hard drop but the tires hold, I throw my hip up over the seat and now i'm standing up on my pedals, pumping my legs with through the power invested in me by the very fear of God herself. I cover the distance of the block with the speed of the ancients (if the ancients rode 18 speed mountain bikes I suppose), when I allow myself the Orphic mistake of looking back over my shoulder.
There they are. Three black kids, in their early teens if that, each one doubled over in laughter. That's what I was so scared of: A couple of kids playing commando.
Suddenly i'm out breath. I slow down, giving what's left of my dignity a chance to catch up with me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2006-11-20 11:46 pm (UTC)When do we get to view these pictures? Gonna leave us hanging on in expectation for long?
no subject
on 2006-11-20 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-11-21 03:17 pm (UTC)Be careful... it could be real the next time.
xxx