Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
Valor 1 Valor 2 Valor 3 Valor 4
Damico and the prostitutes. There are some places in this town where you know what you're walking through. Moral or immoral as whoever decide it was such, clean friendly little neighborhoods with elm trees and the only violence in a given day either on the lawns between a few boys that haven't yet figured out how to humiliate someone with an argument, or behind drawn shutters between a wife and her husband who never learned that particular skill. Or maybe it's downtown, you walk by an alley or a stoop and whatever vice there is to be had is right out front for you, might as well have a neon sign.
A man doesn't just stand on a corner in a cream-colored suit spinning a chain for hours on end because he couldn't think of anything better to do. That's the neighborhood I was born into. Five story walk up apartments and summers that'd leave your sheets soaked whether you pissed them, fucked in them, or just lay there with a noisy fan stuck next to your head. Women walked around the streets that offended my mother's sensibilities, and there were men that would seal my father's lips when they passed. My father, who my mother said would speak enough in his life to compensate for ten mutes that never uttered a word, wouldn't make a sound, he'd just study his shoes and squeeze my hand a little tighter.
Mom would begin every meal, just after grace of course, by saying that this was no kind of place to raise a family and my father would solemnly nod his head and then launch into a story that'd happened to him during his day driving the truck. Most people would just straight out agree with her, anywhere had to be preferable to our neighborhood. In retrospect I don't really know anymore, sure there was seedy stuff going on down there, and bad things happened. The thing is, there were rules you could follow to make sure that nothing happened to you and yours. The neighborhood was full of petty thugs, but they didn't own the neighborhood, a group of business men owned the neighborhood, and they regulated crime far more effectively than any police force ever has. So you keep your mouth shut, you keep your head down, and you do your best not to end up owing one of these business men anything, and in return they won't bother you, and their presence will ensure that no one else bothers you either.
It didn't end up mattering in the end. My father delivered furniture for ten years, put away as much as he could, and with a bit of a lone he opened himself a restaurant, in a different neighborhood. Damico's was probably the first Italian restaurant that that neighborhood had ever seen, chances are we were the first Italian's that neighborhood had ever seen. I always wondered why my mother was so happy to be moving into a neighborhood where people looked at us funny. Whatever they thought of Italians, they liked Italian food, my father paid off his loan fast, and told me never to go into debt if I could avoid it.
This turned out to be one of those clean friendly little neighborhoods. I had a little trouble in school, but while these suburban kids had their own field and an armory of ready made insults to launch at me, none of them had the training I'd picked up on the streets downtown. Just like my old man I could outtalk any one of those toe-headed little fucks. Of course once I had them outdone then they'd revert to the tried and true just like anyone will. We've got better training for that downtown, too. I didn't have much trouble after I sent Joey Lawrence home with a broken nose, he had me by twenty pounds at least, but he didn't know how to keep his guard up.
So I was safe, according to Mom, and happy, according to Dad. I wasn't unhappy, but ten is tough age to move into a new school. Kids are too old to immediately accept someone, and too young to be graceful with newcomers. Slowly I found my crowd. I was the tough guy, that went unquestioned into high school, I was never that big, but everyone thought I was dangerous, everyone thought I carried a knife. My circle of friends had a lot more going for them in terms of loyalty than intelligence, but we did fine for ourselves.
Girls were a problem for me, every movie I saw where some cute blond girl fell for the dangerous outsider made me spit. I never wanted to be a fucking outsider, that was decided for me. Stereotypes and shit, they just stuck me with it. The problem was that they only applied the aspects of the stereotype that suited them. I lost out on all the benefits that were supposed to come with being an outcast. This made the summer of my sixteenth birthday particular important to me.
Vice can be curtailed, through inhuman enforcement of unnatural laws. If you put enough cops on the street, you'll stop people from being shot on the street, and if you cut off every man's cock you will put a big dent in rape. You can force people to follow rules, but you can't make them like them. Not if they run counter to their most natural instincts.
Everyone wants sex. Even people that don't enjoy sex still want sex, and when they find that sex isn't working for them that desire submerges and comes back as something else, usually something even less desirable. As long as there is a desire for something, a desire strong enough that people will pay for it, then there is going to be someone else who is going to be willing to profit off of it. I was under the impression that the great moral majority out in the suburbs had effectively driven the vice that I was willing to pay for away. I figured if I was going to give up and break down and pay for sex, then I was going to have hop on a bus and head back to the land of my birth. As it turns out, even white protestants in wool suits still get a hard-on when they see a girl with a great body.