Nobody on Aldridge Street ever throws the good life out
Dogwood skeletons checker parts of the common yards pink and the sun rides over F Building just right for an afternoon nap, but the apartments on Aldridge Street never have what Scotty is looking for. Nobody parts with big TV sets here, nobody parts with cigarettes.
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The apartment complex pushes Scotty and me together in the afternoon. The layout funnels B and C Buildings over to our dumpster and nobody around the place seems like they really get going until after lunch. We sit in the sun dangling like kids our legs through my deck rails or leaning back on the steps of his place’s side entrance.
Dogwood skeletons checker parts of the common yards pink and the sun rides over F Building just right for an afternoon nap, but the apartments on Aldridge Street never have what Scotty is looking for. Nobody parts with big TV sets here, nobody parts with cigarettes. People hurl white kitchen bags through the air like catapults and there are chunks of broken down furniture piled dumpsterside and Scotty, who’s been looking for a lamp since well before I moved in, taps on my window agitated and bored. He sways his legs side to side settling into the deck rails and looks at the parking lot, at the potholes filling like swimming pools, at the spiderweb strands tightroping the dumpster.
“There isn’t shit,” he says. “There isn’t fucking shit worth getting in for.”
“You can have one of my lamps, Scotty. I don’t need all my lamps.”
But he hardens up and tells me he doesn’t want any of my lamps, then tells me even harder he wants one all his own. “And when I find it,” he says, “the place’ll be dim when me and Tsu want it that way. I’ll light the kitchen table and when I’m finished eating each night we’ll move to the bedroom and get it right for falling asleep. Maybe I’ll even get one of those orange extension chords and light the steps of your deck when I come up them.”
It’s not all about lamps for him, though, so he pokes around in there anyways while the afternoon demands just the right amount of me. Before he grabs me I’m bound to my little apartment corner desk, to digging up cheap vacations and discounted laptops and other shit to break news articles about. But I make it through as easy as morning cereal and part afternoons with Scotty to lay around on my floor, to roll the whole living room over with the path of the sun, the sky waiting to drop curtains around me when evening arrives.
Down oranging streets I go looking for the Hunch Burger truck, dreaming of blowing twenty dollars on double cheeses and fries or else a hoagie-rolled pepper sausage and soda pop. Instead, I squat on the back curb of the Fresh & Go, eating extra crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from my backpack, trying to keep enough turn of the earth in front of me to hit the river before dark. I nod to anybody who looks my way between here and there and talk to strangers on 6th Street about any kind of this thing or that.
“Do you know the time?” or such I’m asked near a bus stop.
“It’s 6:55,” or such I say, and we get on into things until it’s the purpled edges of a nearby church steeple we’re talking about when the bus skwoops in.
I don’t need much more than that to stick to me, don’t feel like hurrying the way Scotty does. He keeps all kinds of busted up stuff down on his patio, a bunch of tossed out bicycles and broken-bulb string lights, and a giant pile of clothing management has sent him a note to move inside. Out in the neighborhood there’s more stuff like this for him to snap his head around for. I see him in distances popping trash can lids and farther north, nearing the river, is a drive-up donation bin I’ve heard some rummaging in. He rarely notices me away from the apartment complex, unless he’s in a pawn shop frenzy and then he’s got a thousand things under his arm he wants to tell me about. Most of it has to do with how much money the fucking shit will get, or the girl on the internet who will buy any old fucking shit, or how I must be crazy to pass on all this fucking shit again.
“It’s from J Building,” he pitches me about a coffee maker. “Probably from the Mexican family move-out. Only five dollars just for you.” When I get tired enough of this to say something, to say it’s just another junk ass thing on a counter, just another junk ass thing on sale any day of the week, Scotty only knows to push into me harder.
“Hey muchacho,” he says. “I found you a coffee maker for only four dollars.” □
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