Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 157

motorcycles, storage, cooking, work, slaughtering animals, and everything else. The ground floors were all random businesses; rice wholesalers, variety stores, knife collector’s emporiums, kiddie porn retailers, salons, print shops, motorcycle repair shops, fish mongers, purveyors of banned, old Disney films replete with ‘Song of the South,’ or just someone’s ‘living’ room with Big Pun’s ‘That Nigger Shit’ blaring for the majority who weren’t fully conversant in Old English.

So a walk down an alley would be something like:

Older woman on the ground in the alley, cooking a hundred eggs over medium on a small gas grill to ship off on a moped to a hotel. Note to moi; don’t eat eggs for the rest of the trip.

Ten feet away, a teenager drenching parts of a 50cc engine with brake cleaner and letting it run into the drain in the middle of the alley.

Someone laying on the mat on the floor watching the lottery numbers on a fifty inch Samsung hooked up to someone’s outdoor meter.

Four shirtless guys with lots of bad tattoos playing pool under a harsh single bulb like the interrogation room in a war movie.