You never cross the same tracks twice...
Aug. 6th, 2009 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThe highlight of yesterday was going down to Spring 4th to pick up my check.
Doors open. Squeeze out of the train. I arrive at the North Avenue station. On the platform three skate punks popping slides off the benches and fumbling practice kickflips good naturedly. Possessed of an impish exuberance for the moment, they curse and laugh with a careless grace. The station speakers broadcast Handel's The Arrival of Queen Sheba down the tunnel. Scrape and slap of plastic wheels against concrete. On the opposing platform a few commuters watch on listlessly while waiting for the next soutbound. North Avenue sits subterranean along the rail line, which burrows under and along West Peachtree until it bursts out over 85 before winding off into the wilds of Sprawlburbia. As such it provides a mixture of damp cool sanctuary from the baking city above... along with the necessary spark of novelty as an improvised obstacle course for young men to hone their skating skills on.
Down the escalator a corpulent MARTA cop heaves his way to the scene. He's shouting "Hey" over and over again so that it sounds as if a dog's barking got translated into English somehow.
"Hey... Hey.... Hey-Hey-Hey!"
The kids respond to this intrusion as if they've been drilling for it all summer. One by one they drop their boards and launch themselves down the tunnel. Gliding towards the escalators on the other end of the platform. The southbound finally arrives drowning out the closing strings on Queen Sheba in a Tokyo monster movie screech.
The complete helplessness in the cops face, before he resigns himself to having to haul his fat ass on down the tunnel in pursuit almost makes me feel sorry for him. He makes it a few yards before stopping to call it in. He catches me watching and gestures a hostile - 'What?' - to me. That's my cue to keep moving.
***
It's not even a five minute walk to work from here.
I cut across the street, turn right at the church, go down a block and cut through a parking lot onto Spring. Since I'm in the neighborhood I stop to pay my respects to 688. The old 'Outta Control' is a Concentra medical center now, a satellite office for one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country. There's a vicious poetry for you. Fitting for me in paticular, being in the heyday of my wild years Pussy Ground-Zero and now the office for a company whose bills I audited for the majority of my 30's.
One cannot help but wish angry ghosts will awaken here one day. The old built on an Indian graveyard routine. Belligerent phantasms of party junkies, pain queens, arrogant kabuki faced scenesters and ancient goth Tupelos hunting for barely legal strange rise up out of the buried memory embedded into the ground. Drifting from the pots of rancid coffee in the break room and wafting out of the toilets with an ear shattering banshee wail. Half naked savages will hang from hooks over the cubicles and Cleopatra Records greatest hits will linger subliminally in the ears of nerve wracked temps.
Sentimentally Handicapped I drift back. Death In June live - strange magick and white masks, dancing stupidly with Violet, having no idea of the accident that will hit us in a few hours. Early Nocturnia and Secret Room romps - me in a business suit and zipper bondage mask - checking ID's while creeping the fuck out of the passing pissbums and crack victims. Evil Jen putting the moves on me, throwing me up against the steel link cage around the dance floor and kissing me as if I was the last man on earth. Getting whipped for the first time by a drunk girl who missed my back and managed to wrap the whip around my neck. Out in the back, under the massive steel Olympic Torch, firing up with Sin and Tom and Crime... surveying the passing highway behind the club, divining our futures and fortunes from the passing head lights. Finger bang fireworks in the bathroom. Comp drinks. Drunk rousts. Stage shows and local art galleries. When the club finally closed we'd crawl off to Backstreets and I'd revel in the trannies who'd make a fuss over me while blowing what little money I made that night on a woman who by bluff and by luck decided to follow me home.
What happened to me, to us, to this city? Time seems too cheap of an answer to fully satisfy the question, even if it's true.
Come back to. I scan the side parking lot for a clue, a relic of those times. A casual archaelogical survey of the area hoping to unearth with a glance a stray flyer perhaps or even a broken beer bottle I can pretend has been sitting there since...?
Anyway... I need to pick up my check and put some money in the bank before soon.
***
A block away and a minute later I'm walking into work.
First thing I see is a beautiful, mahogany skinned woman in a lace teddy, black panties and matching stockings. She's standing in a doorway off to the side of the entrance hall. It takes me a few drawn out and well savored seconds to realize we're not alone. Two more models, fully dressed are standing to my left arching curious eyebrows at me and crouching before the Lingere Princess a young brother man snaps shots off an expensive camera.
Clearing my throat I ask if my boss is in.
He comes around the corner of my eye (still looked on the young lady) and I will up some decorum around the ladies. We head off into the back office. He hands me two envelopes. One for the hours and another for a tip. "We're family here" he explains and with no arguement I slip both envelopes into my back. He gives me my schedule - I'll be working a party I was going to attend ironically enough. The good news I won't have to worry about making the guest list. The bad news... this will be my first time at the event sober. Still I need the money and what the hell, working Masquerade was fun enough if for nothing else, just from a people watching stand point. I'm told I might be working the door. Checking ID's and what not. I cannot help but smile.
I've come full circle on old Uncle Neitzche's Eternal Recurrence Merry Go Round.
Stepping out of the back office I try to sneak a peek at the model and end up walking straight into a coat rack that pops me in the head. A karma back handed smack for forgetting my manners.
Yep... things definetly haven't changed much for me.
On the way out I pass 688 again. For a Proustian moment there I can see myself - thinner and smoother of face - with arms folded against puffed out chest - desperately trying to play the hard man. There's a grin on his face that he lets slip when no one's looking. He believes that his life is just one big story and this is the start of some fantastically weird and dangerously sexy new chapter. He has no idea what will happen next... and it is on this open playing field of random chance that he will encounter love and tragedy, loss and indulgence and when he's lucky brief glimpses of inspiration.
He has no idea what will happen next...
...while I have far too many of what has passed.
Still they say you never cross the same river twice. I don't have a river though, just the tracks of the trains that weave through old Terminus. They'll have to do I guess.
Doors open. Squeeze out of the train. I arrive at the North Avenue station. On the platform three skate punks popping slides off the benches and fumbling practice kickflips good naturedly. Possessed of an impish exuberance for the moment, they curse and laugh with a careless grace. The station speakers broadcast Handel's The Arrival of Queen Sheba down the tunnel. Scrape and slap of plastic wheels against concrete. On the opposing platform a few commuters watch on listlessly while waiting for the next soutbound. North Avenue sits subterranean along the rail line, which burrows under and along West Peachtree until it bursts out over 85 before winding off into the wilds of Sprawlburbia. As such it provides a mixture of damp cool sanctuary from the baking city above... along with the necessary spark of novelty as an improvised obstacle course for young men to hone their skating skills on.
Down the escalator a corpulent MARTA cop heaves his way to the scene. He's shouting "Hey" over and over again so that it sounds as if a dog's barking got translated into English somehow.
"Hey... Hey.... Hey-Hey-Hey!"
The kids respond to this intrusion as if they've been drilling for it all summer. One by one they drop their boards and launch themselves down the tunnel. Gliding towards the escalators on the other end of the platform. The southbound finally arrives drowning out the closing strings on Queen Sheba in a Tokyo monster movie screech.
The complete helplessness in the cops face, before he resigns himself to having to haul his fat ass on down the tunnel in pursuit almost makes me feel sorry for him. He makes it a few yards before stopping to call it in. He catches me watching and gestures a hostile - 'What?' - to me. That's my cue to keep moving.
It's not even a five minute walk to work from here.
I cut across the street, turn right at the church, go down a block and cut through a parking lot onto Spring. Since I'm in the neighborhood I stop to pay my respects to 688. The old 'Outta Control' is a Concentra medical center now, a satellite office for one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country. There's a vicious poetry for you. Fitting for me in paticular, being in the heyday of my wild years Pussy Ground-Zero and now the office for a company whose bills I audited for the majority of my 30's.
One cannot help but wish angry ghosts will awaken here one day. The old built on an Indian graveyard routine. Belligerent phantasms of party junkies, pain queens, arrogant kabuki faced scenesters and ancient goth Tupelos hunting for barely legal strange rise up out of the buried memory embedded into the ground. Drifting from the pots of rancid coffee in the break room and wafting out of the toilets with an ear shattering banshee wail. Half naked savages will hang from hooks over the cubicles and Cleopatra Records greatest hits will linger subliminally in the ears of nerve wracked temps.
Sentimentally Handicapped I drift back. Death In June live - strange magick and white masks, dancing stupidly with Violet, having no idea of the accident that will hit us in a few hours. Early Nocturnia and Secret Room romps - me in a business suit and zipper bondage mask - checking ID's while creeping the fuck out of the passing pissbums and crack victims. Evil Jen putting the moves on me, throwing me up against the steel link cage around the dance floor and kissing me as if I was the last man on earth. Getting whipped for the first time by a drunk girl who missed my back and managed to wrap the whip around my neck. Out in the back, under the massive steel Olympic Torch, firing up with Sin and Tom and Crime... surveying the passing highway behind the club, divining our futures and fortunes from the passing head lights. Finger bang fireworks in the bathroom. Comp drinks. Drunk rousts. Stage shows and local art galleries. When the club finally closed we'd crawl off to Backstreets and I'd revel in the trannies who'd make a fuss over me while blowing what little money I made that night on a woman who by bluff and by luck decided to follow me home.
What happened to me, to us, to this city? Time seems too cheap of an answer to fully satisfy the question, even if it's true.
Come back to. I scan the side parking lot for a clue, a relic of those times. A casual archaelogical survey of the area hoping to unearth with a glance a stray flyer perhaps or even a broken beer bottle I can pretend has been sitting there since...?
Anyway... I need to pick up my check and put some money in the bank before soon.
A block away and a minute later I'm walking into work.
First thing I see is a beautiful, mahogany skinned woman in a lace teddy, black panties and matching stockings. She's standing in a doorway off to the side of the entrance hall. It takes me a few drawn out and well savored seconds to realize we're not alone. Two more models, fully dressed are standing to my left arching curious eyebrows at me and crouching before the Lingere Princess a young brother man snaps shots off an expensive camera.
Clearing my throat I ask if my boss is in.
He comes around the corner of my eye (still looked on the young lady) and I will up some decorum around the ladies. We head off into the back office. He hands me two envelopes. One for the hours and another for a tip. "We're family here" he explains and with no arguement I slip both envelopes into my back. He gives me my schedule - I'll be working a party I was going to attend ironically enough. The good news I won't have to worry about making the guest list. The bad news... this will be my first time at the event sober. Still I need the money and what the hell, working Masquerade was fun enough if for nothing else, just from a people watching stand point. I'm told I might be working the door. Checking ID's and what not. I cannot help but smile.
I've come full circle on old Uncle Neitzche's Eternal Recurrence Merry Go Round.
Stepping out of the back office I try to sneak a peek at the model and end up walking straight into a coat rack that pops me in the head. A karma back handed smack for forgetting my manners.
Yep... things definetly haven't changed much for me.
On the way out I pass 688 again. For a Proustian moment there I can see myself - thinner and smoother of face - with arms folded against puffed out chest - desperately trying to play the hard man. There's a grin on his face that he lets slip when no one's looking. He believes that his life is just one big story and this is the start of some fantastically weird and dangerously sexy new chapter. He has no idea what will happen next... and it is on this open playing field of random chance that he will encounter love and tragedy, loss and indulgence and when he's lucky brief glimpses of inspiration.
He has no idea what will happen next...
...while I have far too many of what has passed.
Still they say you never cross the same river twice. I don't have a river though, just the tracks of the trains that weave through old Terminus. They'll have to do I guess.
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no subject
on 2009-08-06 11:19 pm (UTC)One of the things I like most about your writing is its grit - the word choices, the way a moment can narrow into a sort of 3-D icon that does quite a few things at one, the simultaneous surgical precision and magical realism of your language... I like that it hurts, and that it sometimes hurts with blades and sometimes with asphalt across twenty-something knees.
no subject
on 2009-08-09 10:27 pm (UTC)So anyway, didn't mean to babble. Sorry for the delayed response, I've recently picked up some night shifts and have been offline getting my head together. My thanks again.