Exodus

This a photo of one of the punks next door, moving out. I believe this is the one Marc and Maria have been stalking (much to my chagrin) via the movie theater where she rips tickets. When I first moved in, the punks next door (let's not kid ourselves, people, they are punks in the most perfunctory of ways--I mean, come on, they have cell phones? And remote keyless entry?) would sit out on their roof, which put them about two feet from the edge of my bed. On the roof, they would proceed to yell "FUCK YA" and "SHIT YA" out into the empty street until two, three in the morning. It was a tad annoying. The culmination came when some gutter punks unaffiliated with the punk house were dropped off on my corner with a keg of beer on a Sunday night. They proceeded to rant on my doorstep because the punk house wouldn't let them in to drink the beer. "Fuck," said one leathery old punk-lady, "if someone showed up at my place on a Sunday with a keg of beer I would fuckin' LICK THEIR ANUS." "So much for hardcore Minneapolis," her companion said dismissively as they stole a pink kid's skateboard from a neighbor's yard to haul their keg the twenty blocks south to the next punk house. Soon after they left, my punks huddled on their porch. "They said we weren't hardcore," one said. "We are so hardcore," the other replied.

But now they are moving out, piecemeal. Often at midnight or one in the morning, but they are moving out. A set of parents arrived yesterday. He had a paunch and dirty gray hair and blue polyester pants. She was fat with an xxx-large shirt emblazoned with the American flag. Their son was sporting a black utilikilt, a shaved head, and a nose ring. They moved in silence.

What will I do now? I need something to focus my anxieties on. B says my new neighbors will undoubtedly own a parakeet (do you mind being reduced to a capital letter, B?). This of course would serve as the focus of my general malcontent.

Ah, there are always harpies in Jason's head. I've been waylaid with a cold lately. There's another exodus--sputum from my body (We're running with a theme tonight in the sultry midnight eighty degrees that only two vodka tonics can temper). As I got better, I needed to get out of the apartment, so I took the bus down to the Mall of America because I needed some new shoes. I'm horrible with shoes. Or, at least I was until I realized that all I wanted was a nice pair of skate shoes. I went back to the mall today, returned my generic New Balance trainers, and bought a pair of DVS street shoes. Much better.

My trips to the mall are of the meditative kind. The 180 glides through traffic riding the shoulder and catapulting us past the nastiest of traffic snarls. I stare into cars and watch people talk on their cell phones and my mind grows wide toward the long car journeys I've had the fortune to take in my life. Tonight I was dreaming of Montréal Jason and our trip to that fabled city. How long ago was that? Shit, I was only twenty. He was twenty-four. I had only known him for a week and a half when I suggested we take a trip over spring break. Thus, a twenty-four hour drive to Montreal, across the U.P. of Michigan and the dark piney expanse of Ontario (a meteor shower falling in front of us, running out of gas near the Sault, the nice Mountie who filled up our tank) and the days we spent in the sleaziest, most real, most beautiful city in North America, fucking several times a day, often in quick succession, winning our dinner money at the casino, sitting in on incomprehensible films in French, fighting as well, the kind of fighting that gets public and makes you cry at each other's feet, the kind of fighting where everything is at stake.

That's gone; I own those memories now. I wonder about the voice in my head as I wandered the hallowed halls of the Mall of America--will this bee fade as well? What sort of harpie has it become? Trying to tell me that a skaterboy street shoe is uncool? What is that all about? Ah, my own insecurities, taking on a familiar nagging voice, that's all.

I promptly came home, stripped the sick bed, washed the bedclothes, and shaved my face and assorted unmentionables. Another exodus, of a sort. Preparing the body for it's next journey. But where am I going?