It does not click intuitively.

As a young man of half-Protestant and half-Jewish extraction, perhaps I will never grasp the full flower of the St. Louis experience--that fetid, loamy, humid, catfish stink of a river town where the breeze carried the hint of limestone, the smell of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, and the huddled resignation of working-class Catholic grubbiness that gave its all, dropped, and died.

The city's best days were behind it, the population had mostly emptied out, and those that stayed were like neighborhoods of Franks and Vandals living in the ruins of Rome and warming their hands around rubbish fires as the night pressed in. Was that sound of wolf-headed Negroes howling to the north-- like wildly break-dancing, hooting, jiving lycanthropes stalking the superstitions of Western Europeans, the tepid brow of Baldur-- blue-eyed ape-man of the North?

Folks shudder and watch the 10 'o clock news behind barred doors. . . . . guarding against "The Grendal" of the city "blowing up" like King Kong vs. Mothra, when usually the skittery insectoid of "white flight" loses the battle and "gets the hell out" as the heart of Africa does it's victory dance like a running back in the end zone at "The Super Bowl". The twisting vines on the French gates is hardly enough to defer the dark howl of the jungle.

On Sundays inside the domed Basicalla you had the flowing robes of "Mother Church" clasping her hands in holy beatitude beneath the gothic stone archways. . . . .  and then "sleeping in" you had "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" sinners putting their palms up to their cheeks and making farting noises as the Archbishop scowled like a snapping turtle poked with a stick. Why, he even sets his staff in the ground and wards them off with threat of excommunication like a magician casting a spell that only half-works. On this side of rock n' roll, Roe vs. Wade, and the crumbling authority since the 1960's, they don't take it too seriously. . . . . or maybe a little part of them does as they scurry off, not to take chances with the wrath of the ceremonial vestments.

But don't forget their ceremony. . . . .

That 1975 rock opera featuring a very chaste, very Catholic Susan Sarandon prancing around in her underwear as a transsexual mad scientist bludgeoned "Igor" with a guitar in "fabulous" gay glam with "Meatloaf" figuring somewhere in there. You had to be there, or be from St. Louis in the early '80s when it was an underground cult phenomenon with the lines forming outside the theatre on the stark, windswept streets of autumn as Ronald Reagan sternly cut revitalization monies to the cities and left a bunch of hopefuls in the lurch with old properties that were often little more than a pile of bricks and crushed leaves like the skeletal, burnt-out hand of debt pulling them into a money pit. . . . . not so different than a collapsing house in an Edgar Allan Poe story swallowing the miserable inhabitants in an epileptic shudder.

He was from Baltimore and it depressed the shit out of him, laying there in an alcoholic puddle with a bottle of booze at his side-- his hair mopping up the cigarette butts on a lily-pad of a bordello's table. St. Louis has oftentimes been told that if it played its hand right, it could compete on even footing with this fetid Maryland swamp-- another Catholic ghetto of rot and guilt.

(Much like Meatloaf's gnarled, nebbish songs of "fat boy backseat confidential" and twirling, poodle-haired women in black-strap dresses singing a duet while shedding a tear for big city memories and 1975 cocaine bloatedness. Steven Sondheim it ain't)

Oh, well. . . . . that was another good ole' St. Louis story, like so much underwhelming nostalgia and local lore that may have never put us on the map, but was something to enliven the conversation like a snake-owner shaking around a dead rat to make it more interesting for the lugubrious reptile.

(Or buying another round of beers and looking back up at the Cardinals game, "Death to Disco" for sure with riderless police mounts stampeding around in a circle as the stadium burned and handle-bar mustached blue-collar guys with beer bellies rioted so hard the game had to be delayed)

But that is mere digression. . . . .

As the clock approaches midnight on a Sabbath Eve, behold the Rocky Horror revelers streaming down to "The Fabulous" Fox Theater in droves, a grimoire of drooping figures in pancake make-up and leather mini-skirts; the stray pickings of Wicca earth charms and "Kiss" figurines set on the fireplace mantle like caped heavy metal demons-- the underground and unsightly world of fandom left to burble over like hanging flab-- a distant collective imprint of banned books, Medieval guilds, forbidden indulgence & whispered secrets, terror & flame, hangings, bear-baitings, minstrels, carnivals, hunchbacks, the image of a witch/astrologer/diviner dragged out of the thatched hovel with a scatter of cats as peasants stared down helplessly at the straw in flea-bitten sack-cloth.

A big "FUCK YOU!" to the church and organized religion, apparently.

Yet it was still fealty to "Pope & King" in reverse here at this sumptuous downtown movie palace, refurbished like a 1920's ode to the Indian rajas, the modern version of a pleasure cathedral which was a throwback to the clattering cogs of progress and the speed of the machine that devoured their forefathers in blood sacrifice through the mechanical maw and gave rise to these times when there were no standards, just a slow descent into oblivion when no one knew what to do. . . . . but pray.

It is said that every Catholic, no matter how irreligious, calls for a priest when they find themselves on their death-bed. To comfort them, to administer last rites, to absolve them of their sins and prepare them for the next world. Not even the poster for the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" movie can curl its lip at that. . . . . and the nihilism ceases.

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")