I'm trying to just start out by writing something, anything really, even if its crapola. So here it goes, and Ill add more in chunks:
Some things don’t start from a beginning. Sometimes they don’t even have a real end. They exist only through our existence, and flit along like lone scraps on a street corner, always there, but not noticed. It was like that, sort of. It’s too easy for anyone to blame what happened on a singular event, and anyone who tells you different is blowing his mouth. Everybody is talking, but they’re not saying anything. Nobody knows anything to say, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know what the hell to talk about anyway. And me, I don’t know any better than most of them, but for this, sure, I have something to say. This, I can talk about.
The year was 1943, heyday of my life. Seventeen years old, but I didn’t look any younger than twenty. My mother, rest her soul, always said I was a quick grower. A lot smarter than I looked, she said. Smart, I sure was, if only that.
Looking older is a hell of a lot better than looking too young, I’ll tell you that. Nobody second-guesses who you are, what your business is being here. At some point, you go from being a kid to being a real person, and for whatever reason, that goes a long way in this world. I had my freedom, and I had my time. Two most important things a man could have, I’ll say. To be in charge of yourself, that’s real big, and years to do it. When you’re young, time is on your side, until you wake up with a grey beard and no one to trim it. Then, you’re shit out of luck. But hell, that’s the now, and for back then, luck was on my side.
I was a tiger child. Or so my mother said. She was an actress, the great Renee de Flamee, vaudeville performer. Or so she said. Me, I never saw her act except to get her way with the landlord, Mr. Jenkins, every second Friday of the month. Hell, she could bat her eyes and smile and suddenly the whole world was singing. Real enchanting, that woman was. Batshit crazy, maybe, but for a kid, your mother is the most holy thing in the world, maybe even more than Jesus. She came home once with a Chinese calendar from some fortuneteller who’d gone out of business. It was a year past, but still had a real nice cover all in red. We looked up everybody’s year in that calendar, until we couldn’t think of anyone else and that Calendar became our placemats for the next week.
Living downtown was the best thing for a kid like me. You can say all you want, but I would’ve taken our one-bedroom over the Taj Mahal any day. It overlooked the Rockefeller Theater, which was just about the crummiest name I ever heard, since no Rockefeller had anything to do with that joint. Some immigrant opened it up in the 20’s to play silent films, but when that went out the window, the theater didn’t adapt too well. So it became rundown, and the bums came in, but every night the sign outside still lit up like Broadway, almost some sort of practical joke from Rockefeller himself.
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