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Here’s the latest red carpet news: Growth vs Change: Red Carpet Treatment – part 4 – Salon

     part 4       I drove my neighbor, the gsa gal who lived next door, in an apartment empty of just about everything like mine, except she had a deep red three inch thick shag carpet installed when she moved in. I was sleeping in a bag on hardwood. I met her when she was moving in just a few days after me. She was pretty industrious, having worked her way out of  the roughest section of the city, to the Red Lion district where I was learning how to sell instrumentation and navigate the city.

           I had a dodge colt, made in Japan. It was one of the littlest four doors you could imagine. It ran on almost no gas. I had driven back from texas in a ’52 suburban two months earlier. After I introduced the Chicago crew to the Austin crew, there was really no point in sticking around to see how that played out. I had no Idea who they really were, and my lack of curiousity for what was going on above me had not abated at all. I  hardly ever asked a question. I had been trained not to reason why, so I didn’t.

            The suburban did not to sixty miles per hour. It had spent most of its life as a City of Austin work truck. I had gone to the junk yard and picked up a new rear end for it, and  had the turn torque tranny working well enough to make it all the way to Buck’s County, where I was a not so welcome guest of my brother and his girlfriend, and as soon as I had the job, I was looking for a car and an apartment.

           So me and my neighbor are in the colt on 95 heading for her home turf in the deepest and darkest section of Philly. It didnt matter to me at all that she wasn’t white. I had lived with texans who were half as smart, and twice as mean to me in both Houston and  Austin. This gal knew what she wanted and knew how to get it. How could I refuse her?  I had never been in deep inner city environs. I don’t mean downtown, I mean the heart of  it. We stopped at her moms so she could drop somthing off for her son, that I didn’t know she had, and then on to the bar where she danced on weekends. I saw the place was directly across from a station, and so when she asked me to come in for a beer, I thought I could survive it.

             We walked in to the bar and I was immediately and steadily engaged by the patrons who were far more interested in me then I was in them. But there was no way I could not be a distraction. I  looked like a ghost in that bar.  I had been around a bit, but never have had so much attention paid to me. The guys kept coming up to me and asked me what I did, and they got impatient with me when I told them what I did actually do.” Can you dance? ” these guys wanted to know, and I said no…but I sing a little. After two beers and an hour of this I had enough, and quietly as possible, left.  

              I drove back to the apartment, and cooked up a can of beans in the free rever ware copper bottom frying pan the bank gave me for opening an account. I ate my beans out of the pan standing, as I had no chair, and looked out the large window into the parking lot below. I read for a bit and then fell asleep on top of my sleeping bag.

               Many hours later I awoke to hear my door being hit hard by a firm fist. I was a little worried as I cracked the door, only to see my neighbor looking back at me as if she had been mugged. She looked more pissed off then scared, with her hair and makeup in far from pristine condition, and one shoe in her hand – I think it was that shoe that was hitting my door.

               What could possibly be the matter?  I asked her, not being really sure that she was alone, and safe to let in, especially with the pus on her face. It took a while to get the story out of her. It seems that she had told the guys at the bar that I was a dancer, and that I would be dancing that night, just to bust balls, meaning mine, but what she did not expect was that the few women in the bar that afternoon when I dropped her off , had taken her at her word. Within a few hours after I had left, the bar was full of women expecting to see a white guy shake his groove thing. This was not a large bar. There was no way  a female dancer could work in a place jammed with half lit women expecting a male stripper. They nearly tore the place to shreds. She looked pretty beat up. She never asked me for a ride to work after that.

Read more:
Growth vs Change: Red Carpet Treatment – part 4 – Salon