chapter -2

chinatown Current mood: contemplative
why hellooo silent readerses....i'm back once more.
hm....gettin past the duct-tape footnote of my last writing effort....
okay, come with me to the early-AM streetcorners of Gay Village and boston's chinatown.....that's where i lived, you see, and plied my trade.....
chinatown's a colorful place, day or night, full of the exotic, the lurid and the illicit; also, the violent, the ugly and the generally seedy or corrupt; methadone clinic on the corner next to the slaughterhouse on a block with jewelry stores, fabric shop, ancient traditional chinese herbalist parlors, cafeteria-style asian dining-stands, religious paraphernalia boutiques, dirty movie theatres, massage parlor and aquarium hobby-shops.....a 24-hour restaurant where you can sit down and order "cold tea" anytime and get a ceramic pitcher filled with lukewarm beer for five bucks....brothels, sweat-shops, asian grocers, human-traffickers and bakeries; greasy pigeons drinking from squalid puddles stalked by elderly chinamen with nets....the earliest-opening, lowest-rent liquor-store in town whose customer base sits drinking from brown paper bags in a trash-strewn park beside a vacant lot down the block and sleeps 'neath the mass pike underpass that looms concrete gray to the east, weathered as the hands and faces of those it shelters.....humanity's intersection; with danger riding shotgun.....
i loved chinatown.....i'd sit on the old granite steps of a condemned brownstone, just watching all the people....i got to know their faces, where they worked, and yet many of them i never once spoke to....the language barrier, and cultural taboo, most likely.....i wonder how they lived, if life really is better for them here.....perhaps it is for some, but i wonder....