In retrospect I must say that I really couldn’t have picked a better fashion choice than Farmer Zombie for the street fight.

A little background, perhaps?

I live on the Downtown EastSide, an area where the average life expectancy has been estimated as low as 33 years, thanks to AIDS, Hep-A, Hep-B, Hep-C, tuburculosis, and a whole epidemiology text of diseases that were thought to belong to Victorian novels about impoverished chambermaids, not to mention the street fighting.

A 76-year-old man died last year when he was stabbed in an argument about a spot in line at the Food Bank a block from my house.

People on the things people are on down here are touchy.

But they are, as a rule, paranoid about people who look respectable. They know damn well you’ll call the cops on them and the cops will pay attention to you, so the violence is pretty much street-on-street, not street-on-norm, if you know what I mean, and if you don’t, perhaps I’ve lived down here too long.

But I was on the West Side. That’s the thing: the West Side is where we keep the Yuppies, the Preppies, and the Really Rich People From Hong Kong.

I’m never going west of Carrall Street again!

So, there I was on the West Side, minding, very much, my own business, as one does when one has a lot to think about at ten o’clock at night, Continue reading →