Mag and I left a hood a few years ago,……. a hard core inner city hood, to live in a quiet fleck of suburbia in tropical Southwest Florida. In all honesty we were bowled over by the things we didn’t realize we would miss so badly. Maggie missed her Latino friends and the clubs belching out Salsa music and the Salsa dancing…I missed the endless rifle matches that were nearby and all the trout streams I frequented so often…and the action in the hood…. and…. I’ll get to that in a minute…
Having left the action we spent a couple of months getting used to the new environment. We discovered that this new environment was almost exclusively the domain of people from up north who trekked south every year for no other purpose than to spend the entire winter walking little dogs around the block. It never occurred to me in my life that any one could be so bored that they would walk their dog a dozen times a day.
Leonard across the street for instance. He would walk out the front door at 7:30 a.m. religiously…every day, little dog in tow. He would return in an hour and as he entered the front door his Misses would latch hold of the leash and take her hourly stroll only to return to find Leonard pacing up and down impatiently awaiting his next turn, and vice versa .
” That guy must really be friggin bored ” I mentioned to Mag while peering through the shades one day…. ” That’s the fifth time that guy has taken that poor dog for a walk today.” and her response was indeed well founded…………..
“Oh yeah ?…..what the hell are you doing that’s so exciting?….you’re standing there counting how many times he goes out.” and I realized how correct she was as I watched the poor little white dog be dragged across the lawn on its ass until it hit the painful pavement and was forced to rise up upon its exhausted little feet for yet again….another walk around the block.
” Remember when the guy next door shot his wife in the head ?”…..I asked Mag while thinking of where we left….
” Yeah ” she sighed longingly ” And the baseball bat fights in the drive way.” she added in reference to the bone crunching drug turf war we witnessed more than once. And she had to add, as if to rub salt in the wound…….” And the Dominican gang was afraid of us.”……and that was true, because as it would turn out , Mag and I were recognized as the most dangerous motherfuckers on the block and treated with the respect that that rightfully commanded . And with all that in mind we headed north again `for another eight months.
The weather…….bad weather, ultimately drove us south again and so now, many years later I find myself working some pussy job at H D. A sale on red bark mulch the other day however, taught me something really cool. It taught me that if you drop the price of bark mulch from $1.88 a bag to $1.07 a bag, gray haired old farts will jump from their vehicles with threats of violence to defend their place in the mulch line as fiercely as any Dominican will defend his drug turf from invading Puerto Ricans. It’s starting to appear that drugs can be just as dangerous a threat to society as garden supplies…..and damn close to being just as exciting.
I gotta hand the Ricans and Dominicans one thing though ……never met one that would ask me to attempt to cram 20 bags of mulch in their Toyota Corollas like endless gray hairs did the other day.
And the next sale…..I’m quiting my job and setting up a baseball bat sales kiosk out in the parking lot.
