Very Dirty Clothes

Allen is concerned with my ability to find work. In asking around, he learned that I, not being twenty-one until the fall, can still enter Sands - the restaurants, shops and bathrooms. Maybe a few hallways. Maybe Emeril's new place. No gambling floor. No breathing orange walls or pulsing slot machines. No made up girls or their liquored men in cream slacks and Hawaiian print shirts.

"But you know, I don't want you to be depressed or anything," he said on the phone. I stuck my finger in my ear to hear him more clearly. Standing at the gate between the iron foundry and the road, I imagined him pacing the shack around the corner. He'd be wearing the orange security vest with a clean shirt stuffed in his pants pocket. "It's nice to hear your voice again, that's all," he said.

My white t-shirt was rubbed with thick dirt and my jeans bore grayish sand stains against black denim.


I learned how to get into Steel. After loitering in the parking lot downwind from the security checkpoint and after noticing the very obvious police car by yesterday's train tracks, I walked back up Polk Street towards Third Avenue hoping to find a break in the fence.

The fence would not break. The frame only bowed a bit where foliage and weeds stubbornly grew through the holes. I tossed a blanket onto a main gate and hesitated. I pulled the blanket down. The blanket snagged. I thought of Allen walking around the corner and shaking his head, bald spot glinting in the sun. "Nahhh, you're not authorized to do that," he'd lisp.

I took the blanket along Third Avenue and approached a corroded red painted gate. A teller booth sagged between two twin pairs of bars. Two enormous dumpsters blocked the view to the street. Blanket tossed atop the gate, I considered the height. Too tall. Fuck. I pulled the blanket down and let it pool around my feet.

As I was about to leave, I turned back to the gate and looked down. Could I squeeze beneath? I pressed my face to the ground, right cheek into the gravel and scuttled under like a lanky crab. Then I pulled my backpack under the fence. I stood up, dizzily, on the other side.

I wandered through the iron foundry and what remained of the No. 4 shop. Flora here is competitively sprawling and enormous compared to the buildings. Bushes and weeds reached the roof of the foundry, an aching and empty warehouse three stories high. The brick walls of the No. 4 shop look like forcefully straightened edges of the Coliseum. Standing beneath an arch, arguably seven times my height, I listened to the cars bump through the checkpoint and the birds scamper through the bushes. Two rolls of film, done.