I'm twenty-three laying in bed smoking a very thin, tightly rolled joint and listening to Buddy Holly. It's after noon, but not much, and the light coming in from the window is thick and warm and falls across my chest and thighs like a blanket.
My mind is thin and tumbling with images of horn rimmed glasses, ex girlfriends and ex drug dealers. They're very much alike I think. It's all commerce of one form or another, and I'd be just as likely to call one or another for a night out.
I live in Detroit, a very poor, very violent part of Detroit. I like it here. I like being the only white person. I like the way my hands shake when I'm checking out at the grocery store and I know there are pairs and pairs of eyes on my back and sides, curious and resentful. I like the walk back, the hostile stares, sidelong glances eyeing up my short stature and bags laden with canned ravioli, soda cans and corn.
I like my neighbors who come over and bum cigarettes at two in the morning, and the way they smile when they realize it's menthol. I like Rosa, and her office stacked to the ceiling with ledgers of curling yellow paper and church pamphlets. I make sure to send her poinsettias every Christmas. She likes me because I pay my rent on time and says I look sharp in my pea coat.
I think about killing myself often. There's an old building next to mine, twenty stories tall and boarded up. I will learn much later in my life that it was where black performers would stay during the thirties and forties since they were not allowed downtown. The history is thick around me, but I am twenty three and self absorbed and do not see it. I drunkenly stumble home past Motown Records often, and never realize the significance of the place. I just think it looks funny with it's white walls and gaudy blue trim.
I don't know why I think about dying, or why one fall afternoon I'm hanging off of the side of that tall building next door. My fingers hold my weight easily, they are short and thick, strong fingers. I flex them, my chest and thighs pressed against the slant of the roof, my feet hundreds of feet above overgrown lot, long abandoned and uncared for. I am dirty and tired from prying open boarded windows and ascending ruined stairways. I think about the fall, and the sliding first, like when I was a kid. I wonder when the last time I enjoyed a slide was.
I pull myself up and sit on the edge, I can see Canada. It's getting dim, orange and sickly red and the wind is much colder than on the ground. I sit there and smoke opium from a pop-can pipe and it is dense and sweet and feels like pretentiousness as it curls from my nostrils and around the collar of my sharp pea coat. The city is ugly, and I am beautiful -a gorgeous stone grotesque just waiting to topple.
