Sayn’t Loo-Way

I collect scorned cities like I collect scorned men. Take for instance one of my favorite towns in the world, St. Louis.

Caught somewhere between north and south, east and west, in some ways it's the biggest little town in America, in others ways, it's the smallest big city in the world. Oh, it has its slices of newly gentrified charm, of course, mainly crowded around vast Forest Park, once home to the 1904 World's Fair, back in the day when St. Louis was a contender.

These days most of the city totters at the crumbling edges of the grave, both literally and figuratively, a gritty urban ruin made up of long abandoned 19^th Century row houses, way past their prime. Any way you approach it, St. Louis is a rough town and a perennial contender for the FBI's "most violent city" statistic. In the so-called "gateway" city, the corpses pile up like garbage bags on a Saturday night.

I was introduced to the mean streets of St. Louis a few years ago and fell in and out of love. For a while I planned to marry a guy from the north side, but long distance romances never quite work out, and we drifted apart. No telling what ever happened to the guy. The last I heard he wound up haunting the campus of the Missouri State Penitentiary. Too bad, really, he was so good at the long stroke, if you know what I mean. Sweet chocolate bone, with a creamy ending! But I digress.

These days I confine my St. Louis relationships to about forty five minutes, just long enough for everybody to get that feeling that they came for.

And so I spent the early New Year's hours in St. Louis, with a lanky man named Demetrius, or Darnell, or something that started with a "D." Whatever his name was, he had a big "D" and asked me to throw that "P" and wound up "diggin' in my guts," you know, fucking me up the ass, in a little apartment in a red brick corner apartment up over an empty storefront that used to sell "Deli Meats" sometime during the last Century before the neighborhood stores left town.

… And it was brewt-ee-ful!