Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 156

no air conditioning, with preferred outdoor seating on little plastic step stools, well worth the asking price.

I decided to go to Town Center, which houses a big Westfield style suburban mall, if it were piled on each other rather than spread out, seven stories plus an office tower. Tons of food and lots of American stores, like “Coach,” “Nike,” and an MLB store. I went to the basement food court and ended up at McDonald’s as a goof, not sure who that goof was on.

Again outside, I was inundated with mopeds inches away, some carrying groceries, dog and cat lunchables, that bendy lumber endemic to Home Depot, a month of chopsticks in crates, Crumb comics in protective bags long after the damage had been done, whatever. I started at a muslim mosque, which was low light, but had the requisite Jacob’s Ladder effect from holes in the ceiling letting in some light, then candles and tons of incense smoke swirling around. I spent most of my time in ‘the maze.’ This was a sort of night market and residential area, which I normally never would have ventured or even found. It was like an entire city block of tube houses where each unit was roughly nine by nine feet, and four stories tall, like Grabbin Nuisanstein’s vision of California. At street level, they had open doors like garage doors, and the rows of houses were maybe six feet apart, with a narrow alley that was used for walking,