The Shay (Part One)
The wretched little city had begun to fade long before my 1980 arrival. Its rampant descent spiraled about me like the decay of a double DNA helix of some weak and fragmented urban genes. Like the snare of the double Dutch helix made by the young black girls on my street, jumping rope with big candy in their mouths. They’d size me up as I walked by, all of us thinking that a desperate little city like this can cross your eyes, buzz your ears, trip you up and make you sorry you ever landed here. I needed an oasis, and I found one in the otherwise arid center of the city.
The Chez Est occupied the forlorn corner storefront of an unstable four-story Hopperesque brick apartment building, the last of its kind in the downtown. The nearby cluster of venerable banks and insurance headquarters, sheathed in either pre-war granite or post-war glass, looked the other way, as did a deserted pre-cast concrete fortress-style elevated plaza erected in the 1960’s. This ghost town of a plaza, which had necessitated the plowing under of a vibrant Little Italy, had become a hulking emblemish of the stupidity of urban planners. Water no longer reached its slabby gray fountains that were annually decorated with twinkly white Christmas lights, now viewed by no one. This, and all other aspects of the city were an embarrassment, as would be the corpse of some sea behemoth washed up onto Main Street. Too large for the brooms of municipal cleansing, and well beyond the budget and brains of the city fathers, the limbs and organs of the city had begun a perpetual festering that simply drove folks away.
Had the concrete plaza succeeded, adjacent development would have caught on, and the shabby little home of our Chez Est would surely have been demolished. Instead, it held ground, close as it was to the interstate highway that cut the city off entirely from its riverfront, and, because of its nearness to the major entrance and exit ramps to that highway, there was often a long line of stalled traffic by the Chez’s front door during the five o’clock rush of office workers fleeing the city for the comfort of their wealthy suburbs. This made pre-dinner drinks dangerous for anyone closeted and not wishing to be observed through the windshield of a relative or neighbor. It meant that “Happy Hour” was an irony attended only by hustlers and carelessly retired men. The rest of us arrived via darkness, after 9PM on weeknights and after 10PM on weekends.
As the buildings around the Chez Est became abandoned and declared unsafe, the city razed them and replaced them with paved parking lots until finally our little bar stood alone at the center of a vast and tary patchwork demarcated by various brands of interlocked chain linkage. During the day, these lots were filled with the monitored cars of the suburbanites who came into the city begrudgingly to work in its offices. At night, the lots were empty, and the plywood and scratched plexiglass sentinel booths at the entrance to each lot were dark and abandoned by the takers of money, leaving literally thousands of free parking spots, all of them visible from the windows of the Chez. The short direct hop from car to bar meant almost no shoequisition of mud or snow, and, once inside, we enjoyed the convenience of using the bar’s pay phone to call the police while actually watching local desperados break into our cars.
Despite our heroic efforts at conviviality, the desolation of our evenings at the Chez took a toll far greater than what metered parking would have gotten. The same faces every night. The restless feeling that every breath you took contained the exhaust fumes of a bus leaving town for that shining place where dwelled the gorgeous men of sex and love. We drank feverishly and paced the place like those infamous cats on their hot tin roofs. And we kept coming back, consoling each other with music, gossip and endless rounds of Ms. Pac Man.
Looking out those windows at the moon-washed rows of our cars, we prayed for the eruption of a new Vesuvius right there before us, swallowing up the bar, the building and our dreams. Flash frozen and preserved, hopeful, beer in hand, beneath a merciful rush of lava.
And then, on a hot summer night, just before last call….
(Go here for Part 2)
The Chez Est occupied the forlorn corner storefront of an unstable four-story Hopperesque brick apartment building, the last of its kind in the downtown. The nearby cluster of venerable banks and insurance headquarters, sheathed in either pre-war granite or post-war glass, looked the other way, as did a deserted pre-cast concrete fortress-style elevated plaza erected in the 1960’s. This ghost town of a plaza, which had necessitated the plowing under of a vibrant Little Italy, had become a hulking emblemish of the stupidity of urban planners. Water no longer reached its slabby gray fountains that were annually decorated with twinkly white Christmas lights, now viewed by no one. This, and all other aspects of the city were an embarrassment, as would be the corpse of some sea behemoth washed up onto Main Street. Too large for the brooms of municipal cleansing, and well beyond the budget and brains of the city fathers, the limbs and organs of the city had begun a perpetual festering that simply drove folks away.
Had the concrete plaza succeeded, adjacent development would have caught on, and the shabby little home of our Chez Est would surely have been demolished. Instead, it held ground, close as it was to the interstate highway that cut the city off entirely from its riverfront, and, because of its nearness to the major entrance and exit ramps to that highway, there was often a long line of stalled traffic by the Chez’s front door during the five o’clock rush of office workers fleeing the city for the comfort of their wealthy suburbs. This made pre-dinner drinks dangerous for anyone closeted and not wishing to be observed through the windshield of a relative or neighbor. It meant that “Happy Hour” was an irony attended only by hustlers and carelessly retired men. The rest of us arrived via darkness, after 9PM on weeknights and after 10PM on weekends.
As the buildings around the Chez Est became abandoned and declared unsafe, the city razed them and replaced them with paved parking lots until finally our little bar stood alone at the center of a vast and tary patchwork demarcated by various brands of interlocked chain linkage. During the day, these lots were filled with the monitored cars of the suburbanites who came into the city begrudgingly to work in its offices. At night, the lots were empty, and the plywood and scratched plexiglass sentinel booths at the entrance to each lot were dark and abandoned by the takers of money, leaving literally thousands of free parking spots, all of them visible from the windows of the Chez. The short direct hop from car to bar meant almost no shoequisition of mud or snow, and, once inside, we enjoyed the convenience of using the bar’s pay phone to call the police while actually watching local desperados break into our cars.
Despite our heroic efforts at conviviality, the desolation of our evenings at the Chez took a toll far greater than what metered parking would have gotten. The same faces every night. The restless feeling that every breath you took contained the exhaust fumes of a bus leaving town for that shining place where dwelled the gorgeous men of sex and love. We drank feverishly and paced the place like those infamous cats on their hot tin roofs. And we kept coming back, consoling each other with music, gossip and endless rounds of Ms. Pac Man.
Looking out those windows at the moon-washed rows of our cars, we prayed for the eruption of a new Vesuvius right there before us, swallowing up the bar, the building and our dreams. Flash frozen and preserved, hopeful, beer in hand, beneath a merciful rush of lava.
And then, on a hot summer night, just before last call….
(Go here for Part 2)
posted by Father Tony of the Farmboyz at 9:34 PM
2 Comments:
Argh! I hate when you do this! I await with baited breath the next installment... please, please hurry!
- Kthea
Yay, more parts a coming, er cumming, er anyway. Shoequisition was a great portmanteau. And you describe the urban asphalt blight so well. (Assblight? Urbalight? I suck at this.)
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