DANDY IN ZULULAND

DANDY IN ZULULAND


The sight of blight...the noise of gunfire...and the smell of feces...sharing the broken sidewalk with a mongrel dog pack...glass shards...shell casings...hubcaps...used hypodermics...blood stains...and pigtailed children gleefully skipping rope around a tagless Chevy on cinderblocks...in front of boarded window houses covered in gang graffiti...made me stay alert to my surroundings like an English dandy in Zululand.

The bullet headed speculator took me into the gut of the ghetto...when the capital of America was also the murder capital of the world back during the stagflation of the seventies which bankrupted and put a dagger through the heart of once bustling communities...the heartless speculator escorted me into a dilapidated rowhouse...he had purchased for chump change at a H.U.D. auction.

Inside an obese woman of color slouched on a tattered sofa with six urchins in soiled clothes...their eyes glued to a color television set featuring hilarious cartoons...where drawn by the constant heat of the picture tube...a squatter colony comprising ten thousand or so cockroaches nested and foraged for what ever the rats had not consumed...the speculator walked between the watchers and the television...as if they didn't exist...I couldn't help feeling badly for the children...but they paid me no more notice than mummies in a mausoleum...in the dim light..the speculator pointed out to me which walls...doors...windows...and floors he wanted me to superficially repair...in the darkest areas...I had to feel my way...banging my shin on a radiator...while imagining these rooms could pass for tombs.

I never drove a car into the inner city where it would be a magnet for malcontents' mischief and stripped to the bone like a plucked duck...I clumsily carried my basic hand tools on the noxiously nauseating buses...I slung my hammer in my tool belt like a holstered gun though it was useless for defense of self...one morning two cyclists snuck up behind me and knocked me flat on my stomach...not robbing me...they whizzed on by...the knock down just an unfriendly notice of whose turf I was treading on.

The day after our visit with the color TV family...I returned alone to an empty shell...the woman and kids gone...in front of their slum dwelling..piled in a heap of discarded possessions was that sofa...a couple of lamps...a table..a mattress...clothing and garbage hard up against a telephone pole...they and their things had been evicted by U.S. Marshals...other than fresh no trespassing signs...the structure barely stood padlocked...boarded and bare...it was time for me to go to work.


by L DOUGLAS ST OURS
April 2011