If you read this blog with any sort of consistency you know that a few years ago we packed up our bags in the middle of night and high tailed it out of New York and moved to a Ghetto of Pittsburgh that would become our home, all completely by accident.
That is true, painfully so. A quick recount. I had started a business and at some point my business partner absconded with the profits, just like that, leaving me and my children damn close to penniless. Lucky for me, I was the part of the business that had the skills, so I was able to dance and sing and make some cash, which I quickly used to purchase a home for cash off the internet, sight unseen. Oh, sure, you must be thinking to yourself, with little cash what sort of home could someone purchase? Keep in mind, the phrase "sight unseen".
I wish I had taken the time to ask myself that very same question. The answer, is of course, a run down, no plumbing, funky home in a sketchy ghetto with the door barely hanging on and the neighbors proudly acting out their various drug and alcohol addictions. While the kids would stay weekends in New York I would drive countless miles to the ghetto home and do repairs and soon enough we had ourselves a livable, functional home.
Still, the entire downtown of our new little village was blighted. All these wonderful old classic brick buildings stood empty. Where once stood furniture stores and tuxedo rental shops, now stood empty store fronts, and a lone Chinese restaurant that served substandard fare for even a ghetto Chinese restaurant without a single cat or dog to be found for blocks, if you catch my drift.
In my life I have lived in some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. I lived in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles when it was me, Mexicans and coke addicted porn stars. My sideways move from there was the Lower East Side of Manhattan long before the hipsters and the frauds moved in and made it cool. No, when I lived there, the only way for me to get home late at night safely was to run down the middle of Rivington because if I was stupid enough to walk on a sidewalk I would get mugged. Honestly. The only good partt was William Burroughs would show up to score heroin every Thursday. For a while, when I first moved to Seattle, I lived in a warehouse across from the Kingdome. True, a warehouse, no walls, no bathroom, no shower, just a huge open space. For an artist it was grand, for a person who needs to shower to use a restroom from time to time, it was oppressive. Soon enough though, other artists, hipsters, musicians and assorted wanna be's moved in and everything got better.
There has been a constant in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. In all these places I have lived, in the dumps and the dives and the pissed in and on places I picked up for cheap, soon enough artists moved in, and then the thrift stores and the book stores and the coffee shops and then the yuppies and the guppies and the gentrified law firms seeking the exposed bricks and the cool atmosphere and by then I did not know what happened because I had moved on to a new slum.
Just now I was out on my afternoon speed walk and I decided to include a little jaunt through the downtown section of my rundown village and I was shocked to find not one, and certainly not two, but five new thrift stores. A flotilla of gays have arrived to reinvigorate the area and not a moment too soon. Now, generally, in my experience coffee shops are first, but I am not one to bicker, although to be honest, I could use a good cup of Joe. What I noticed is that some of these old storefronts are now beautifully filled with wonderfully strange thrift stores and older gay men prancing around, proud as a graying peacock, showing off their wares to the addicts and whores, the fierce and fleas and the fast walkers who took the time to smile, say hello and promise to be back.
I have seen this before. I know this story. It probably will not have the exact same ending, because we are not in Manhattan or Los Angeles or Seattle, but we are close to a major city, and the entire country is looking for ways to survive and reinvent and one way I have seen ailing economies awake from a self inflicted catastrophe is by allowing small, strange funky businesses to come in and prosper. Gay men with your thrifty stores - I salute you.
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