Remembering Mr. Butch & Allston

7/16/2002

Now that I know I’ll be moving before the end of the summer, I’ve been taking more notice of my neighborhood, and the people in it. I’m trying to store up all of these little mental notes about things so that years from now I can remember Allston the way it really was when I was fortunate enough to have an apartment here.

For instance, there’s this homeless guy who hangs out on Harvard Avenue that always makes me smile. He’s this huge older black guy who wears worn and dirty suits – as if the fact that the clothes he wears all the time are suits will make up for the fact that he slept in ‘em – and his name is Mr. Butch. I know Mr. Butch’s name because it’s painted on the side of his suitcase, which he carries everywhere. The luggage is beat up and the painting is hand done, announcing “The Mr. Butch Show”. In the more than a year that I’ve lived here, I’ve never caught the Mr. Butch Show, but Aral has. She says he has a tiny amp and a microphone in there, and he sets up in front of the liquor store and sings.

Mr. Butch is such a part of my neighborhood that a muralist painted him on the side of a building near the interstate behind the neighborhood. There’s this huge beautiful red brick building back there that must have been a hotel or something overlooking the Charles River before the flow of black asphalt cut it off from everything. The old hotel is large and ornate and totally run down and vacant. Windows were bricked up at one point – maybe somebody used it for a factory or warehouse in between the time the interstate killed it and it became abandoned. Some local artist, trying to make a point or just to get people to notice how the nice building got run down, painted happy scenes in the bricked up window spaces. The painter filled the building with all different sorts of people who would live there if the space were converted to low cost housing. There are families sitting down to dinner behind the fake windows, people dancing, watering flowers on the window ledges. And in one window space, a likeness of Mr. Butch leans out, smiling, relaxed. His painted up suitcase is dusty in a corner.

I should find out who painted the window spaces; they make me really happy.

Unemployment is starting to wear on me. It’s only been six weeks since my last contract ended, and I’m trapped in this space where time seems to stretch out unending and strange. To make matters worse, I got the call today about two other short-term projects I had interviewed for at Harvard. One of the projects has been delayed until after Christmas; the other project simply hired someone else. I wonder if the interviewers could tell somehow that I planned on moving, that I’ve given up on Boston in my heart, that I know I’m going to Atlanta. I would’ve left them before the project ended. I haven’t worked a day in over a month now though, and I needed to do something for money. My unemployment check keeps me fed and the utilities on, and that’s it.

One day a couple of weeks ago, a woman stood out on Brighton Avenue screaming and crying. Quickly 911 arrived and for a few hours police and a fire truck and an ambulance were in another building while the Korean woman stood outside on the sidewalk screaming and crying loudly. I wanted to go over and help her, but she was talking to the police, and of course I don’t know Korean. I sat out on my balcony for a while, watching her, wondering what the hell must be going on in her apartment. They must have taken whomever died away when I went inside to get something; the ambulance drove off without sirens.

Her family – or maybe just some friends – finally came to talk to her. I felt like I should have done more, but was at a loss to be of any help. There was a woman screaming and crying in Korean across the street from me the other day, and I still have no idea as to what that was about. The proper Southern response to grief is to make a casserole, but I didn’t know what the woman would think, in the middle of her grief, if this huge white woman she didn’t know suddenly presented her with Tuna Noodle Surprise covered in potato chips. She’d probably think I was trying to kill her with salt and grease, and I have no idea how I’d get my pan back. Still, I feel guilty, like I should have taken her some sort of food. It was better that I stayed out of the way though – she had people with her. Still I feel kinda cruddy about it.

There’s a guy in the building next to the Korean tragedy who is really creepy. The is creepy guy likes to lean out of his 2nd story window and ask women passing by for blow jobs. I can’t imagine this has been a terribly successful sexual strategy for him. He’s pretty pathetic.

Some grown men – well, college students, I guess – were actually throwing water balloons off of the roof of our building on the fourth. That cracked me up.

I love the streets of my neighborhood, once you get off Brighton Avenue and back where there are houses. I like the old huge brick apartment buildings with courtyards and English names like “The Chestershire”. There are also a few old Victorian treasures along our streets, some of them well taken care of, some of them run down, most all of them used as multiple unit rental properties. My apartment building actually has gas lighting fixtures in the back stairwells, non-functioning, of course, but still there. There are lots of three story row houses too, and I envy people in these buildings with their nice big front decks.

I’m going to miss living here a lot, but I can tell it’s time to go. I always knew this was temporary, that Boston was a nice thing that I could have for a while and that I’d always go back to Atlanta where I know I belong. So I’ll soak up all I can of Boston until I can pull the way Gardner Street looks on a summer day right out of my memory like a perfect holographic projection, a frozen photograph of a breezy tree-lined street I can walk down in my memory whenever I’d like.

Yay Allston.