The Neon Jungle

The Neighborhood

You can find people who will tell you about the neighborhood. Each will have his special vision. All those visions can never be added together, for perhaps, like a raddled and lusty woman reaching the weary end of middle age, the neighborhood has been all things to all men.

But there is still violence in her.

Ask that pair of college kids who came to sample the factory wenches last year, and broke their faces against stone Polack fists.

There is still money in her.

The numbers operators will tell you that. And those who get high rents for certain shabby houses near the Saegar Mill. And those Monday loan sharks, the six-for-five boys, who make a fine art of collection.

She is still colorful.

Down the narrow streets marches the neon. A fizzing and sputter and crackle of BAR GRILL LOUNGE INN and ROOMS APTS HOTEL and POOL BILLARDS BOWLING and TRIPLE FEATURE GIRLS BALLOOM CLUB FLOOR SHOW.

But here the feathers hang tired on the rumps of the floor-show ponies, and there is no self-conscious reading of Proust in satined dressing rooms. These are weary bitter-mouthed dollies, who take a percentage on the drinks you buy them.

The neon is green and red and blue, and there are always a few dead letters, though not usually as spectacular as the night the Essex Tavern lost its first two letters.

Do not think that the neighborhood is linked to downtown. It is a separate country, and there are many dingy unlighted streets between that minor neon jungle and the richer flavors of downtown.

And do not think that it is the abode, the stomping ground, of only the pimp, sharpie, and floozy set. There are the residential streets and they are narrow and poorly laid out, leading the visitor in infuriating circles. There are caste distinctions between the streets. There are churches and schools and many, many children.

There are gaunt bleak-faced textile mills, rumbling, clattering on the hot summer days, going abruptly silent at five to disgorge the slack-clad girls who make crow noises and clown with each other as they walk home into the narrow streets, passing the asphalted playgrounds of the schools they so recently attended, some of them already swelling with the fruit that will become a new shrillness on those same playgrounds.

There are empty mills with broken windows, like eyes that accuse.

Once upon a time it was all land that belonged to Abraham Townsend, and he and his eight strong sons farmed it well.

Later a grandson of Abraham started a general store, and that store became the nucleus of a village. There was another village two miles away, and they were of equal size. The new village was called, of course, Townsend, and it grew quickly. It became a gabled town of peasant houses. But the other village grew more quickly. Both of them, after the Civil War, became sprinkled with Victorian horrors, all gingerbread and turrets. Then Townsend was absorbed, and it became a part of the city, and the name was lost, and it became simply the neighborhood.

It is all in the old ledgers down in City Hall.

Children grow up quickly in the neighborhood.

At night the lace-eared toms yell of love and passion in the narrow alleys, and the wagon picks up the broken-shoe bums from their newspaper nests. By day the sun bakes the narrow yards and not much wind gets in to stir the curtains, and milk sours quickly. A brave and wheelless Pierce Arrow sits window-deep in weeds in a vacant lot, and the rat-gnawed back seat is a place of juvenile assignation when dusk comes blue down the streets.

In the look of the narrow houses at night on the residential streets there is a flavor of violence. Not the sort of violence of the neon jungle, but a violence that is more quiet, and desperate.

It is a place of neighborhood stores and few chains. It is said that you can buy anything in the neighborhood. If you know where to look. Whom to see. When to see him.

When the hot weather starts, the police know that one of the quiet narrow houses will erupt. On the slow warm evenings a street will come alive to the screams of that final terror. And always the neighbors know which house it will be. They run out and they look toward the house. They sit a cautious time before the tentative investigation. Usually the screams stop quickly. There is something ultimate about the homely weapons of the quiet streets. A hammer, a hatchet, a butcher knife, a piece of pipe. They are decisive. After the violence there is the dumb weeping.

At night the only light in the Varaki Quality Market, a boxlike cinder-block structure, is the red neon around the clock. The family lives in the big shabby frame house adjoining the market. City houses stop on the nearby corner. A stranger to the neighborhood, anyone who had just moved onto the same block, for example, would perhaps not have sensed the drifting threat of violence that is like the trembling of the air before the first crash of thunder.

But the others had been there a long time. And so, on that warm night, when the screaming started, they knew with neighborhood instinct precisely where to look. And the old women compressed their pale lips and nodded and nodded and waited silently for the end of the screaming...