Main St. Blues, Pt.1

A short story of mine completed recently.

Main St. Blues

The violence in this town can be hysterically absurd at times. Like right now, when Benson’s fist comes flying at me in slow motion – vuuuuup – and the scent of beer from the mouth tries to blot out whatever the nose is picking up –







Crack.







It’s surely not the end of my world. Perhaps it’s the beginning, damn right, of a momentous awakening of the beast we all try to cage. Shuddering, my nose, squinting, broke, squirting a warm flow of red mixed with hops, I’m laughing, cracking up involuntarily while pinching my nose hard, as if that’ll stop the bleeding. No time deferred, something signals to the beast as my right arm swings out mechanically – with joy, at Benson’s small, rectangular French fry of a nose. Here goes another night at the Selmer’s into the shithole, and a friendship possibly. But at this moment I don’t care. My oversized fist collides with that French f-f-fry glurk.

Some say it’s just small town drama. Nothing compared to the metropolitan anxiety, glamour and grotesque that unfolds there constantly. Deep down I know it’s not. It’s a center of gravity, a singular compression of blackness, sucking you down, down, down; though I won’t deny that it’s a vicariously lived TV show. Beverley Hills 2000 formatted to Southampton, Sex and The City acted out with Abercrombie and Obesity instead of Gucci, Prada and Barbie like physique. Same industrialized, flat, monolithic shopping mall that serves as the teenage Mecca – Gamestop, Hot Topic, Sears, and oh, Macy’s is for the elderly. No one goes downtown because it’s a pretty skeleton, deserted by the gods of capitalism, rusting in its nostalgia, crawling with down-trodden flesh-bags we call homo sapiens. Some business owners stay there to duke out their perseverance, hoping to “restore the pride”, as written on the city pamphlet for tourists. For every wage-slaving, back-breaking baby boomer, there’s a drug dealer born in the post-Vietnam generation operating in a run-down house with shoes tied to the streetlights.

Oh, and don’t forget the small Chinese restaurants with permutations of a vocabulary pool for their names – Red Dragon, China Magic, Kung-Food, it’s the same difference, like the General Tso’s Chicken they serve, those mutated McNuggets drenched in sweet n’ sour sauce. I’m old enough to remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the green radioactive goo they sold with the toys; you know, the ICRT gel that transformed them into humanoids? Dip some deep-fried, gluten-wrapped chicken in that and you get General Tso’s. It’s all-American food. And I’m lovin’ it. What’s better than the food are the clerks. They’re likely to be gloomy women in their late twenties to early to mid-thirties – always sporting a weary look, loudly yelling in Mandarin or Cantonese or Thai or whatever to the chefs in the kitchen. From their accented English, they’re probably immigrants (legal or not) that arrived recently. Uprooted, longing for a distant home despite all the hardships that drove them here, where the sole asset lies in relative economic stability – something constantly put on knife’s edge. If you’re lucky, when you dine at these joints, you’ll be greeted at the counter by someone trying so hard to smile, trying desperately to combat a gnarling homesickness, material lacks and the insecurity of being in a nation with a long history of racism that it breaks the pumping thing called a heart, given how sensitive you are. Too bad, the lady at the place I frequent is the grumpiest thing alive: put her in a trash can and you have the Grouch in Sesame St. What I literally thrown into the trash once were the dumplings (or were they pot-stickers?) they made – unapologetic nuclear waste. Good thing it happened at home, otherwise the Grouch would’ve screamed at me.