I have a way of finding myself on the wrong side of the tracks. Not only in a vehicle, but often in relationships.
Some of my friends envy me for my many adventures. I don’t really know why. More often than not, the most memorable adventures happen in my life because I checked a brain at the door and led with my second head instead.
Yes, there’s a difference. Just in case you haven’t slogged down enough coffee this morning, I’m talking about the lust in my heart that often leads me down the primrose path of adventure, all because I want a little nookie.
It’s happened more times than I can really count. And I’ve ended up in some really strange places. Even my own abode has been pretty strange at times, largely because it too has ended up on the wrong side of the tracks.
How do I know this? For anyone here in Seattle, all I have to say is that I once lived in Rat City. Yes, White Center. The bowels of the west part of town, a slight improvement over the Rainier District, but not by much.
I moved there because the rent was cheap, the apartment spacious and it was right around the corner from Taco Time and just behind White Center Pizza. These may seem like strange reasons, but when you’re a single guy, food within walking distance can be a life saver.
I couldn’t afford to live in West Seattle at the time. I didn’t even have a job. I had just returned from being on the wrong side of the tracks in San Francisco, having moved back after my month with Psycho.
What is it with women in my life and bad locales? It’s not that she lived in a bad part of San Francisco; she didn’t. She didn’t even live in the city by the bay, she lived in San Mateo, about a half hour south. It was a fairly nice apartment, except for one problem. It was built on pilings on a hillside above a valley. When the inevitable quakes came, it shook like a bowl full of jelly. It was scary.
Even Rat City seemed like a better place to live, even though on more than one occasion I would see police with K-9 dogs skulking in the front yard and I had to call the cops on the drug dealers who lived in the apartment across from me in the fourplex.
Even on vacation I had a knack for finding my way into the less desirable parts of town. Sharon and I ventured off to New Orleans one time for a Parrothead convention. That is a story in itself, one to be saved for another time.
Sharon was really into Anne Rice at the time, you know the author of vampire books. She lived in the Garden District. What I didn’t know then was that the Garden District had two distinct sides that were literally on one side of the tracks or the other. The Green Line separated the two. Go on one side, and there are beautiful Victorians and antebellum homes. Go on the other side of the street, and it was, well ghetto.
We had a good idea where Anne’s house was, so we went up and down the streets looking for it. We would drive through the beautiful side, then across the tracks. My rental car became a real standout in an instant, as did the two very white people inside it.
I felt as if I was driving through one of those drive through zoos, but this time we were the exhibits. People would stop dead in their tracks, no matter what they were doing, and just stare at the two lost whiteys driving down their block, bobbing their heads from one side to another, looking for a home that couldn’t possibly be on this side of the tracks.
It’s not like I have the smarts to do this just once. Oh, no. We zig zagged our way back and forth like this for almost 45 minutes before we finally happened upon her house.
Every time I watch National Lampoon’s Vacation and Chevy is driving through the hood, I think of this day in New Orleans.
Lesson learned? Hardly! If I had learned my lesson I would have never ventured to the wrong side of the tracks in the Big Easy.
As I said, I’ve been there before. In Los Angeles, no less.
This was back when I still had Faith. No, not the religious kind, the New Orleans kind.
She and I were still having our little fling. On one such tryst, Faith offered to fly me down to LA so we could go to Disneyland. I’ve covered that little adventure before here.
What I failed to mention was the day we managed to get lost. If I recall, we were looking for the Le Brea Tar Pits. This was long before the days of GPS, so we had to go by map. Faith wasn’t exactly the best navigator; inevitably we were totally lost in the streets of Los Angeles.
Me, I’m sensing this is not the best part of town that we happen to be in. Faith, she’s oblivious. And hungry. She whines that she wants food, so against my better judgement we pulled into Taco Bell so I could shut her up.
We entered. She is torturing over the menu. I am noticing that we are the only white people in the restaurant. The clerk is so amazed to see white people that she forgot to charge us for half of the food we ordered. As we sit down, I said, “Did you notice that the only white people we’ve seen in the last hour is us?”
Faith hands me the map. I finally locate the cross streets. Yes, we’re in Watts. Two whiteys in Watts. I don’t think anyone ever ate so fast in their life. It’s not that I have a problem living or driving through areas on the wrong side of the tracks – hell, I lived in White Center – but when everyone is staring at you and you know they’re talking about you, you know it’s a good time to get out of Dodge. Or in this case Watts.
We never found the Le Brea Tar Pits. Somehow, I think they would have seemed a little tame after our tour of the Taco Bell, down by the wrong side of the tracks.
In the Emerald City, back on the right side, I think, in Shoreline,
– Robb