I don't know why but this popped into my head the other day. Something I had written long ago, and in the many moves of my life the physical copy of it has been lost. However, I knew where I had stored a copy of it online. Enjoy



Im not sure why it starts, but I know what set it off. It was a simple name in a Led Zeppelin song, Jolene. The brain lies in wait, a storm waiting for a seed to set it off. Then all the old memories come rushing back like a river over run its banks. The name Jolene takes me back to the days of my youth in the industrial north. She was a girl that I went to school with. All the guys were crazy in lust for her. She had a sister named Jody. Not unimpressive looking, but not the kind of girl that you chased after with abandon. I dated Jody. I remember the first time I cut class to go hang out at her house and smoke cigarettes and reefer. The place was above an old office building. It kind of reminded me of the office of Philip Marlow and Sam Spade. The place of business downstairs was in disrepair and looked as if no one had worked there since the late fifties. Yellowing blinds hung in windows with cracking foil letters pasted on from the inside. I stood outside looking up at the place with a smoke hanging out of my mouth trying in vain to look as cool as James Dean. Jody called down to me from the top of the darkened stairs, beckoning me up. So, I went. The stairs were completely worn by time and the shuffle of tired feet. Dark and musty like an attic or an extremely old relatives house just before an impending death. Upward I climbed into an era lost in history.
By the time I got to the top of the stairs I felt as if I had gone back in time and I was someone else in a bad dime store novel. The little apartment was sparsely furnished with crap that looked like it came with the building. Old ass chairs, the arms worn through, showing filler from inside. Old dingy curtains hung motionless in windows too dirty to see out of. And in one corner of the only real room was an ancient looking army cot. We made ourselves at home. The place smacked of something that you would read out of a Kerouac novel, or perhaps a place that Saint Charles of Bukowski would have flopped in his heyday.
We lay on the cot for a few hours and made it in the afternoon sun that crept through the time worn apartment. No sound but our quiet breathing, the noise of the traffic below, and the sound of matches being struck as we smoked. In time, her father returned home with a paper bag under his arm filled with cold beer. He wandered in eyeing me up and down coolly. My guess was that Jody didnt bring many guys back to their squalor home. He came in and sat down on the cot next to us as if we werent even there. He asked quietly why we werent in school, and nodded in agreement when we said it was a drag. Yous kids wanna beer? he asked. We accepted kindly. Jodys father was a bartender in a small hole in the wall pub downtown somewhere. He, like many parents in the crew I hung around with, saw nothing wrong with the kids having a few beers now and again. His only warning was that we leave him a few, so hed have something to drink before he went to work in the solemn city night. He tipped his last beer of the afternoon, took off his shoes, and laid down on the cot and dozed off to somewhere better.
A graying man, in a graying apartment, in a cold city, next to an even colder lake. The industrial north in the late seventies was not by any means a happy place. To live on the shores of any of the Great Lakes took perseverance. The rust belt, as many called it in those days, was anything but warm and sunny. Urban decay had spread like cancer during the end of Carters era, and Reganomics was still several years away from starting any sort of reform in the old steel cities of the great industrial revolution. All we had to do was sit. Sit and wait. Wait for something to happen, and in our minds eye we could almost see the beginning. The beginning of a new dawn.
With cold feet and hands numb, we looked into the soul of America, hoping against hope for some warmth to come. Children of the steel cities. We roamed the empty streets, past the broken glass of the closed mills and factories, through the alleys of trash and dirty needles. Past the bums that used to be kings, the whores that used to be queens, and we were the children that were born to be princes and princesses. Where had our kingdom gone? Who had stolen our birth right? Could we ride the trains out to the prairies of wheat and sun? Would it still be there, or was it just a fairy tale told to us to keep us sane in the midst of all insanity?
Many of us never made it out. Crushed by the great machine, or lost to the waves of torment that swept through the city at night. Regressing into prehistoric tribal factions, claiming that which was never ours to be claimed. Running wild in the streets of the red night, like Burroughs prophesized, under streetlight centipedes that went on for miles and miles. We smoked, ate, drank, breathed, loved, hated, shot, bled, slashed, broke, and became life. We were life. We became death. We were birth. We were the beginning and the end. We were everything that ever was, and all that was to come. We were steel and stone. We were asphalt and glass, rust and paint. We were the burnt out tenements on the north side, south side, east side, and west side. We were the man in the street. We were the rat in the trap. We were the children of the steel cities.