It was the acerbic, yellow grass of the south side. . . . . like a stein of beer gone bad with the loam of the earth. Torn rags, Catholic guilt, and the sharp bones of a fish fry stuck in your craw like the broken promise of a wish-bone in the belly of the St. Louis beast. The Monsanto chemical factory belched out fumes for pimple cream, of all things-- like a boil on the face of a meager existence where greasiness was all-pervasive and the toads croaked from the culverts like one's chance for picking up the gum-snapping waitress in this curio of a charming bottle-cap of a restaurant. Her eyes were tiny and dark brown, like dribbling creek rocks as a popular "cheerleader type" who knew nothing about the travails & trepidations of moving 6000 books of well-cultured futility, gasping like a guppy of soft-living smacked into a wall like a warm ham.

There was nothing "to push against", but for the exhausted fumes of entropy that tore at the joints, tugged at the soul like hard-scrabble reality. . . . . of civilization's insistence, of life. Existence had turned into an aged, pitted little kernel like the debris left over from the floods of the conservative backlash as the economy was sacked by corporate looters and true believin' "New Economy" pep rally types who went down like ignominiously-grunting seals with the collapse of an ice shelf into poverty-infested waters of mortgage-lending despair.

The lie was no worse. . . . . no less heavy-handed, than "That Greatest Generation's" hoary old belief in "American Exceptionalism" like a religion of glaring moth-eatenness that would make folks "slink off" for a bit until a profitable fiction lulled them back into the fantasy of eternal happiness, if not easy money and liberty without the bonds of servitude to foreman or supervisor.

A wild-catter like Lee Iacocca, the drudge's ugly, magical "everyman", telling the waiter to send back his overcooked steak "because he's the boss" like a bat-caggle of American ingenuity. Catch a cab, see "The Statue of Liberty", find that "you're out of money", wear a hole in your shoe-leather hoofin' back to your flop-house, drink yourself into oblivion. Where "the girl in the red sports car" would throw her cigarette butt out the side, and you'd bend down and smoke it because that's the closest you'd ever get to her lips or butt, much less "sitting in a red sports car".

Die in broken defeat as the Mississippi flooded and took away everything you owned. . . . .

Stagnant rot and sewage and Negro-lipped catfish staring on like some kind of crazed, low-fi caricature of flat-boats and men passing over sacks of flour and sugar and barrels of rum. Of organized crime, and feldspar, and police-beat corruption that stunk like bad pussy and had a heart "as black as coal" and a chance of salvation just as ashcan and hopeless. . . . . like the whirling of atoms in a materialist universe, the record taken down in the chambers "of some city ward" that would crumble with the death of civilization, the outward rushing fires of a dying sun. Emptiness, the void of a squalling mouth that howled from a crib.

It was the pathos of the 20th century, caught in an ice-lock with titanic national and international forces as men were forced to deal with the harshness, sternness, cruelty, and bitterness of history on the local level where there would be no politically-correct "tissue boxes" or heart-shaped frosting of "cupcake politics" where your only answer would be the hack of whiskey laughter if not a slug in the face as you were thrown out the swinging barroom doors. Plug-uglies and ward-heelers and local strongmen of the political machine who looked like a bit more what the traditional underworld of the comic books sketched for young readers used to be.

But one was told to believe in God and the correctness of America with a voice that came out of the radio, sounding like "the voice of God" and all that was unassailable about mid-century authority, like "The United Monolith of Mashed, Smothering White Pillow Imperium" known broadly as "The Establishment". The cop, the judge, the teacher, the preacher, the scientist, the bureaucrat. "the man in the gray flannel suit".

The ultimate "no-no" was a gang of "bad girls" smoking in the boy's room and defacing school property, picking a globe up over their head and smashing it against the chalk board. Then the gunning of motors from an outlaw motorcycle gang from California "roooaaaar" down the hall like uncaged beasts, pent-up postwar energies, "and a threat to all that was good and decent".

Remember, for every finger pointed outward in anxiety. . . . . there are three crooked back at you when perhaps you are not quite sure "of what one believes" as they think they do, and need the safety of crowds as a wave of antsiness shivers through the mass like a school of fish worried about "some kind of lurking predator" that snaps out from the darkness.

The monsters are on "Main Street". . . . . and they are us.

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