George Mills by Stanley Elkin

Author:Stanley Elkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Blue collar workers, ebook, Fiction, Literary, Sagas, Humorous fiction, General, Domestic fiction, Espionage, Working class families
ISBN: 9781564782922
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2003-04-14T10:00:00+00:00

6

I told her, I don’t know the matter with me. I suppose I love the neighborhood. I’m no native son, I didn’t even grow up there, but I—most folks—recognize home when I see it. Something old shoe in the blood and bones, at ease with the brands of lunch meat in the freezers and white bread on the shelves. At one with the barber shops, the TV and appliance repair. The movie houses in my precincts still do double features. Those that don’t do evangelists, I mean, those that don’t sell discount shoes or ain’t political headquarters or furniture stores by now, the little marquees fanned out over the front of the buildings like a bill on a cap. We still have bakeries, and there are mechanics in the gas stations who can break down your engine in the dark. I root for our neighborhood banks, the local savings and loans, you know?

Stable, we’re a stable neighborhood. How many areas are there left in the city—the city? Missouri? the country? the world?—that still have a ballroom and live dance bands that play there three nights a week? And even the discos bleed an old romantic box step, the generations still doing the stable dances under the revolving crystal. We have a saying in South St. Louis——“We’re born out of Incarnate Word and buried out of Kriegshauser.” The stable comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of people.

They cross the river from Illinois and come from far away as west county to eat the immutable old ice creams and natural syrups at Crown’s, less flavor, finally, than the cold and viscid residuals of produce and sweetness themselves. A kind of Europe we are.

I knew all this back in ’47 when I first saw this section of town, recognizing at first glance that what the cop was walking was a beat, the grooved stations of vocation carved like erosion into the pavement, the big dusty shop windows with their brides and grooms and graduating seniors in their dark marzipan robes balanced on the topmost layer of the cake as if they were going to stand there forever. Something already nostalgic in the framed portraits in the photographic studio window, in the crush of the sun on the low two- and three-story commercial buildings up and down Gravois and Chippewa Avenues, something daguerreotype, a thousand years old, mint and lovely as a scene on money. I was nineteen but the Millses were a millennium. Here was somewhere I could hang my hat, here was a place I could bring our history.

I found three rooms in one of the blood brick apartment buildings on Utah, and there I began my life as a free man.

Where do we go wrong? How does joy decline? What rockets us from mood to mood like a commuter? So that, years later, in Mexico, that stable neighborhood of restlessness and revolution, I perfectly understood Mrs. Glazer’s valedictory. She could have been speaking for all of us.

She was in the hospital by then.

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