bad places, real and imaginary

we heard gunshots from time to time.  there would be a brief pause in whatever task we were occupied with - typically me loading a bong and kyle tuning or re-stringing his bass - and one of us would ask:

"wattaya think?"

and the other would venture his opinion:

"hmm... four or five rapid shots, kind of a flat, hollow crack .... i'm gonna guess a low caliber auto, .22 or .25"

the other person would nod his head. but sometimes there were disagreements.

"check out that boom. i'm guessing a .357"

"dude, you don't know what you're talking about. that was a shotgun."

i still can't believe i was that nonchalant about how some of our neighbors frequently shot at each other over (most likely) crack deals gone bad. i'm older now. these days, if i heard gunshots that close to my house, i would hit the floor, call 911, and make plans to move. like, immediately.

but i haven't heard gunshots in a real long time. the above story was a typical scene when i lived near downtown houston in the late 1980's. i lived in a bad neighborhood for a variety of reasons, most of which i tend to cringe at now.

why did i want to live there? i grew up in a suburb of houston, miles and miles of urban sprawl between me and anything that might excite or interest me. there was no culture, high or low, where i grew up. no museums or art galleries, but also no live music venues, no eccentric or colorful characters, no independent media. i might have been nineteen before i bought a book or record at anyplace other than baybrook mall.

in my late teens, i began tagging along with friends when they would go to punk shows in houston. sometimes we would go during the daytime to check out a neighborhood called montrose. this part of town was known to most people as "the place where all the homosexuals lived". that didn't matter to me. i have always thought of myself as an outcast, so i  kind of liked the idea of a group of people marginalized by society-at-large taking over a part of town and creating their own little enclave. i was never uncomfortable seeing men with large mustaches or women walking arm in arm.

where you have a gay community, you tend to also have cool things like record stores where purple hared salesclerks could tell you off the top of their heads when the new nick cave album was due out or when black flag was coming to town. that was real important to me at the time. so was wanting to find the kind of place where i could be myself.

so i got the idea that i should move to oz rather than trying to bum rides there on the weekends. a couple of years later and i was living as an urban pioneer surrounded by hostile crackheads. i had seriously romanticized life in inner loop houston. yeah, there were a lot of cool things, but there was also drugs. lots of drugs. and prostitutes. and aids. and people partying their way through dead end lives, just like i was doing at the time. oh, and thanks to crack there was crime. lots of crime. i got mugged and assaulted once walking home from work. once the initial shock had worn off, i took a certain perverse pride in living in such a dangerous place.

but i never really became all that tough or street smart. that i never got hurt really bad was probably due more to dumb luck than anything else. after the mugging, i began seeing my neighborhood and my lifestyle as not being so much exciting or "bohemian", but rather just dirty and sleazy.

***********

nineteen years later and life is much more laid back. the dangerous places i lived in in houston have mostly been plowed under and turned in to condominiums. the last time i visited, i saw no obvious hookers or drug dealers. that is undoubtedly a good thing. i am realistic enough these days to know that the seamier side of life contains much misery and early death.

but i couldn't help myself, i felt a little let down that things were so clean and safe looking. i think my problem in my twenties was that i confused proximity to danger with the level of meaning in my life. what's life without risk?

i thought of living with danger and risk just before christmas. it was about midnight. i was getting ready for bed. mostly undressed. i had just turned the television off, leaving the house eerily silent, when suddenly there was a very loud, kind of scraping noise at the back of the house. this was followed by a loud thump coming from the roof. then there came what sounded like footsteps on my roof, someone walking the length of the house and back again. i wondered if i was imagining all of this, but i looked over at my cats. both of them were staring raptly at the ceiling.

someone is on my roof? all i could think was that it must be some idiot playing a joke who had gotten the wrong house. but i was also reminded of my years in h-town, when someone sneaking around your house was rarely a good thing. the steps were continuing as if the person was stomping in a circle. the house was actually shaking a little.

i thought about calling the cops, but i still have a macho streak in me. i wanted to confront this jerk and scare the hell out of him. i frantically threw on some jeans and work boots. as i was doing this, a loud scraping noise came from the front of the house, followed by an enormous thump on my front porch just feet from my door. it sounded like my unwelcome visitor had swung down off the roof by way of the front awning.

i grabbed a huge maglite flashlight, the kind police often use-in addition to being very bright, it's also heavy enough to hurt someone. my plan was that i would momentarily blind the perp with the light and tell him in no uncertain terms to leave and never come back. if he tried anything, i would hit him upside the head and then call the cops.

heart pounding and adrenaline coursing through me, i turned the locks and threw open the door, maglite at the ready.

there on my porch was the biggest damn raccoon i have ever seen. really, he was as big as a medium sized dog. he looked at me. i looked at him. i closed the door and went to bed.