Ghost Town

Specters of the Past

Smoke Shop

It reeks like Nag Champa in here. It’s always reeked like Nag Champa in here. The smell brings me back to being fifteen years old and running up tabs on packs of Newports with the Iraqi shop owner.

That one time we talked Ian into stealing a pack of cigarettes off the spinning cigarette rack they had while the rest of us distracted the owner with questions about the “water pipes” in the glass case, the shop owner turning his head the moment Ian grabbed that pack and Ian saying “I really wish I had the money to buy these.” before putting them back.

We got high that night and made jokes about the store owner torturing and beating Ian in the back of the shop for the crime of attempted theft. We laughed at the thought of him showing up, pistol in hand with a roll of duct tape and some handcuffs and demanding to know where Ian was in broken English and then we smoked another blunt and laughed some more until our sides hurt and tears were streaming down our face.

Ian is gone now. So is the old owner, replaced by what may very well be another Iraqi. But the smoke shop and the smell of Nag Champa remains. Life goes on in its eternal dance. It always does.

I’m not buying Newports today. Today I’m buying a roll of ZYN. I’m standing at the counter complaining about the new taxes on them while still buying them anyway because I’m an addict and that’s what addicts do. The door chime goes off. A dude wearing big sunglasses and a dirty pair of Air Force Ones enters my peripheral vision and gets to the other counter and I overhear him complaining about the price of one single Swisher Sweet. I glance over, he happens to turn his head my way and it hits me. I know him. I knew him. He looks at me but somehow doesn’t see me. I’m staring at the past through one-sided glass and catch my own reflection in a pair of knock-off Dolce & Gabbana shades.

This is the man that sold me my first bag of crank. The man that sold us MDMA for the first time, back when drugs were still fun and innocent and had yet to reveal both their consequences and their headaches. The man that I last saw outside of a corner store when he ran up, shook my hand but told me he was rolling in a stolen car and had to dip. Then prison happened. He got out and I never saw him but I heard the stories. He was moving major weight, got set up by his own people, fell hard and adopted the lifestyle of urban camping.

There’s a moment when I consider saying something to him.

But what?

The door chime goes off as I leave and I’m greeted by a warm and sunny day. There are voices behind me, maybe calling out to me, but there’s just nothing there to say.

Family-Owned Business

The Greek restaurant I grew up with is gone. Now they’ve got a food truck parked out in front of a bar. I still want to support them and so I’m standing at the intersection and I’m waiting for the light to turn green. The moments between things are when my imagination takes over and it takes me to other places.

The Greek restaurant, with its faded old photos of the home country and the sun-bleached advertisements for gyros and coca-cola and the old woman that sat at the counter and her son that ran the restaurant and the Ouzo they sold and the baklava and the Garlic Greek Fries and how you just couldn’t get the smell of them off your breath no matter how many times you brushed your teeth. Road construction happened. Parking was impossible. A fire did the rest. Its ashes will regenerate in the form of overpriced condos with retail space.

I can feel the eyes on me. I turn my head and there’s a moment of recognition between us. He averts his stare, readjusts his hoodie and limps down the street towards the section of the neighborhood where the RVs are parked and the sidewalks are always trashed.

Memories of house parties and Mickey’s Grenades and the man standing in front of me beating people down and running through their pockets and robbing (redacted) for his bullet proof vest. Forcing tough guys to strip at gun point and then making them walk down the boardwalk wearing nothing on warm summer nights, and for what? Warm summer nights full of drinking and chest-pounding and altercations at the park and him being shot in the chest and (redacted) giving him a ride to the hospital while (redacted) kept pressure on his gunshot wound in the backseat and he bled all over the place. Scenes from warm summer nights whose locations still exist but not in the way I remember them. Never in the way I remember them.

The light turns green. The walk sign comes on.

Evictions

A friend sends me a news clip. Another problem encampment about to be swept. Why is he sending me this? Why is this news? He tells me to watch the whole thing. I hate watching short-form video content. Especially when people send them to me and tell me to watch them. They’re interviewing the people at the encampment. First a homeless woman with way too much makeup. Then some Cuban guy who has more or less built a house and is complaining about how it’s going to be demolished. The third interviewee, I know him. He’s complaining about there not being enough time to find housing. All he’s ever had is time. They show a video of them attempting to stop the impending sweeps by throwing down a bunch of trash cans and my friend that sent it to me points out that it’s the hardest he’s ever seen (redacted) work in his god-damned life.

The dilapidated old house carved into studio apartments. Drano leaking through the ceiling because the upstairs neighbor’s pipe burst, leaking through the ceiling and eating holes in a pile of clothes in the walk-in closet. A walk-in closet full of chairs and a TV and a Playstation. The walk-in closet where I would sit and wait because I never had anything more than five bucks in my pocket and I’d wait because I knew the dope would arrive at some point and that (redacted) would hook me up because he was always cool like that. Now he’s being interviewed in homeless encampments and can hardly string a sentence together because he fried his brain on wet and never bounced back from it. I remember the street in front of that dilapidated old house. The apartments across the street are still there. The crazy apartment manager is still there, the one that screamed at us and called us dope dealers and called the cops on us. The time (redacted)’s plug came by and the K-9 unit was circling the block and he told us to do as much as we could before he flushed the rest down the toilet. Armed stand-offs because (redacted) got his ass knocked out when he pulled up to the block, knocked out behind the wheel because he got distracted by talking to someone on his passenger side window. Armed standoffs because he came back and (redacted) was pointing a rifle at him from inside the house with the lights out while he was standing in the middle of the street with his hand in his coat pocket but somehow everybody talked it out and went home. Yeah, everybody went home.

That home no longer exists, transformed into condos that cost far too much for roughly the same space those studios were sans drano, sans dope dealers, sans me and sans everybody else that haunted those walls.

But I know that where one thing ends another thing begins. And those condos will be the basis for someone else’s first memories. The basis for their own stories. Everything I see around me both the fruition and seed of a story, all at the same time. And on and on it goes.

And what a blessing to be a part of it all.