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This Used To Be My Playground| | This one's for you, Kimberly.
This Used to Be My Playground, a nonfiction essay
Largo. Lar-ghetto. Land of orange groves, the Restaurant Supply warehouse, crack whores, alligator-infested lakes, burnt houses, ghosts, railroad tracks but no station, and Dead Ends. A lot of Dead Ends. Growing up in Largo, we thought the entire town could be summed in those two words: Dead End.
The curse: If you were born in Largo, you will die there.
This used to be my playground. Take my hand, we'll go for a walk. In Largo, you could walk to almost anything dangerous, dark, and fascinating. If not walking, most certainly by bike.
The Dead End got its name from the sign bolted to the reflective, road block fence that barred cars from entering our neighborhood from the back. It was an odd, afterthought kind of cul-de-sac that ended abruptly in that sign. Only one house faced the Dead End, and the kids who lived there were weird. The girl grew up beautiful. I don't know what happened to the boy, but when we were all young I bullied him mercilessly. No mercy for the weak in the Acacia hierarchy.
The Dead End separated our neighborhood from Dansville, also known as Rainbow Village. It was the projects, ugly concrete block buildings painted hideous pastel colors that must have looked old and cheap when they were still in the can. Mostly black people lived in Dansville. Our neighborhood shares a fence with the people of Dansville, but they were never our neighbors. You borrow sugar from neighbors; you don't erect roadblocks.
Between Acacia and Dansville, after the roadblock and ominous sign, was the real Dead End, a mesh of dried, tangled vines and pine trees surrounding a green, fetid bog. A kid could wander in the Dead End, circling that bog, and not find their way out for an hour or more. Like Rabbit in the Mist.
The stories of The Dead End were myriad. A girl was raped there. No, she was murdered. No, she was kidnapped, tied to a tree, then raped and murdered. They found her body tied to the tree. No, it was fed to the gator in the bog. She haunts The Dead End.
We told each other these stories, psyching one another up. Who was brave enough to walk to the bog and back? Alone?
The Dead End is gone now. The fence is still there, but the sign is gone and the bog has been plowed over. Land in Pinellas County has become too valuable.
The strip malls in Florida are legion, and all of them have one, blighted stand-alone store. For the Kash'n'Karry by my house, this blight was affectionately called, at least by the skaters who went there, The Bank. It had been a bank, once, but now it served as skate park/meeting ground. The boys would skate, their pants eight sizes too big, their hair shaggy and colorful, some with piercings, some with tattoos. The girls would watch, trying to look both seductive, and bored. Or maybe that was just me. We bet whether TJ, a 5th grader, could buy smokes at the Newsstand across the street. He did, and smoked them with us. The skaters were smart, defiant, sexy and nihilistic. I knew them when they were in grade school, but somewhere between 8th and 9th grade they had become gods. They smoked cigarettes, cursed liberally, bragged about their drug use and their dick size. They swapped girlfriends regularly, and with a casual sense of sexual liberalism I can't believe was faked. I was on the outside. The Girl They Knew from Anona. A friend. A little weird, but basically a Nice Girl.
I hated being considered a nice girl.
The cops eventually banned us from The Bank. It's now a health food store. Or it was last time I checked.
The Southwest Recreation Center still exists, and is, physically at least, largely unchanged. But, I can't go there without hearing soft, teenage voices hiding in the tube slide, or wafting from the Merry Go Round like an echoed chorus. We smoked our first cigarettes here, saw our first porno magazine (I vomited shortly thereafter, with no explanation), and had our first, tentative sexual rendevous there. For me, the voice I will always here is Grant's.
"If you could walk through a portal, Autumn, and disappear into another world, be another person, but you could never come back, and you couldn't say goodbye to anyone, would you go?"
"Do you believe in UFOs, Autumn? Do you believe in spirits? Heaven?"
"What do you want to be, Autumn? Where do you want to go when you get out of here?"
I wish I could remember what I'd told him. It seems important now. Portentous. At thirteen, I wanted to be a famous writer. But I never dreamed I'd ever live anywhere but Largo. Indian Rocks Beach, maybe.
I wish I could remember if I asked him the same questions. I probably muttered something about H.P. Lovecraft, hoping he would think I was cool, hoping he might kiss me again. We hid in the tube slide, head to head, my feet pointing to the bottom, his pointing to the sky. Or we lie in the Merry Go Round, spinning the stars around us.
The Rec is still there, but Grant has been dead for years. Overdose of OxyContin. I hadn't seen him in years. I'm not sure I even have the right to miss him, but still I hear his voice at that old playground.
At sixteen, we took over Serenity Gardens cemetery. Still there, but the badlands surrounding it have been largely trampled down. Tamed. Subdued by exposing its underbelly to a unrelenting sun god. We walked among the baby graves, mourning for the children who didn't live, often half-frightened our own wombs would quicken from a boy's lustful surge. I'd had sex by now, and the line between life and death had never seemed so thin. I was a child, a grown up. I was alive, I was already dying. Weren't we all?
Do you remember the mausoleum? Before they remodeled? The crypt that read "Do not stand over my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die." We were terrified. We were mesmerized. Remember the day the sky turned red? We were at the fountain, and I was tempting Fate trying to bless myself with the dark, scummy water in the basin. The firepit, and the rabbit bones?
Satanists, we were sure. The coffin we found smashed to bits? Vampires. We knew it.
The Renaissance Festival came only once a year, but the Village remained standing all year long.
RenFest. The Village.
Shanties built of clapboard and plywood, circle after circle of store fronts that we could duck into, hide, lurk, wait, spring out from behind. Better, the roofs were connected. You could creep along the roofs, then leap down on your friends like a ninja, like shadow incarnate. The games of Hide and Go Seek we played there.
Did the others know about the homeless men living in some of the buildings? I like to think they didn't.
The cast of characters that night was the same as usual. I was there, hair flung into a ponytail high on my head, sassafras cane ready, pouches open and purse strings loose. I was a thief. In our game, where reality and D&D had been hopelessly blurred, I was a very good thief. Fearless. We met at the center, and I remember there'd been a fire. The pit was black, but the smoke had long since dissipated.
I was near the corner of the fairgrounds, across the bridge, where the witch told fortunes when the fair was running. I was alone, unsure of how I got that way, and when I stopped to take a breath I realized my character mask had fallen away. I was just me, and I was hopelessly terrified. I slipped into one of the crackerjack buildings to hide. From whatever it was I felt was watching me.
I didn't see a man. I saw a bed. A thin mattress, an old sleeping bag. It was blue. I remember being able to see it in the moonlight, filtered as it was through the surrounding vines. And I remember being aware, really aware, that the man who lived here hadn't gone far. He'd return. He was here, somewhere, in the fairgrounds.
He was probably harmless. Just a homeless man.
They tied her to a tree.
I shrieked, slammed my fists against the door, and shot through the fairgrounds, my scream racing behind me like a comet's tail. I found Mark, who had never really liked me, (or maybe had only liked me too much and couldn't show it?), and I begged him to take me out of the fairgrounds. He did, walking me to Chris's big, ugly beast of a car. A Chevy Nova.
The RenFest Village was torn down a few years ago. A state of the art library was built there. It's the coup-de-grace for downtown Largo, which also demolished the old Restaurant Supply warehouse and a couple other old buildings to build a park and an absolutely hideous clock tower.
Where do the kids go now? What part of Largo has been left un-improved, un-revitalized, un-exorcised? If there are no shadowy places, no dark corners full of urban legends and dangers both real and imagined, what on earth do the children of Largo do nowadays?
Somehow, that scares me more than anything I've written here.
| | | Posted 12/21/2008 10:02 PM - 20 Views - 0 eProps - 1 Comment
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