Hooligans

SIGHTSEEING

It was only a few blocks back to the hotel but I saw enough through the windshield wipers and rain to

tell me what twenty years had done to Dunetown. These were not the wrinkles of time; this was a

beautiful woman turned whore. Tagliani‟s death had started the worms nibbling at my stomach. One

look -at downtown Dunetown turned the worms to writhing, hissing snakes, striking at my insides.

Twenty years ago Ocean Avenue was a dark, romantic, two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias

dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered From Dunetown to the sea, six miles away. Now it was

Ocean Boulevard, a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar.

Neither tree nor hush broke up the eerie green glow, but a string of hotel billboards did, their flashing

neon fingers beckoning tourists to the beach.

Front Street was worse. I was so shocked by what had happened here that I stopped the car, got out,

and stood in the rain, staring at a street gone mad. It was so far from the Front Street in my freeze

frame, I couldn‟t relate to it.

The Front Street I remembered was like the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were

two old movie houses that showed double features. There was Bucky‟s drugstore, which had a

marble-top soda fountain where you could still get a milkshake made out of real ice cream and sit in

an old-fashioned wire-back chair to enjoy it. And there was the town landmark, Blame‟s Department

Store, which filled an entire block. The people of Dunetown once got everything from their diapers to

their funeral clothes at Blames.

Gone. No more Bucky‟s, no more Blame‟s, and the two theatres were twenty-four-hour porno houses.

A neon blight had settled over the heart of the town like a garish cloud. Hookers peddled their bodies

from under marquees to keep out of the rain, hawkers lured out-of-towners and footloose horseplayers

into all-nudie revues, and “bottomless” and “topless” signs glittered everywhere. The blaring and

oppressive beat of disco music was the street‟s theme song.

I had been there before, along Hollywood‟s strip and in the Boston combat zone. The scenario was

always the same. You couldn‟t buy a drink in any bar on the street without staring at a naked bosom

or getting propositioned by a waitress—or a waiter, depending on your inclination.

My God, I thought, what‟s happened here? How could Chief and Titan have let this happen to a town

they had once treated like a new bride?

The neon blight held the next six blocks in its fist.

And then, as if some medieval architect had built an invisible wall right through the middle of the

city, the neon vanished and Dunetown turned suddenly elegant. It was as if time had tiptoed past this

part of town with its finger to its lips. Old trees embraced mansions and two-hundred-year-old

townhouses. The section had been restored to Revolutionary grandeur with spartan and painstaking

accuracy. Gas lamps flickered on the corners, the streets were mostly window-lit, and there were

flower-laced squares every three or four blocks, fountained oases that added a sense of symmetry and

beauty to the place.

My reaction was simple.

The town was schizo to the core.

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