Gateway Town

Gateway town, Mississippi and Missouri river flooding confluence, with its celebration of manifest destiny, its looming, iconic archway. Stainless westward marker, its culture flowed southward for influence within the lawn-jockey, pink flamingo neighborhoods of moral decay. T.S, Eliot, Darren Wilson, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, Phyllis Schlafly, just like all my childhood companions who remained on the plantation. With all its gated, dead-end streets, I never dwelled there easily. But mine was nothing like Angelou’s’ tale of hell and damnation. I was always just passing through this checkered town, another suburban white boy lost in the irascible ploys. Elsewhere partly bred, I nervously fended off my breakdowns. I constantly checked my watch in the sullen sudden noise. I learned to occupy the ink shadows and the glassy moonglow. During the August heat waves, I inhabited all the boarded shelters. The son of Amanda Wingfield, I knuckled under my labored tow. Slow-moving trains passed; boxcar wishes I counted in the swelter. This was my tour of duty; I was stationed there, poised for adulthood. Like most rough-hewn youth, I claimed my own heroes and certainties, and just like the fluctuating gender waves, I never really understood. An alien in this Catholic city, I felt the rigidity against all my proclivities. This provincial patchwork of many faces, soothsayers, betrayers, street hookers, faith healers, city planners, corporate pretenders, the East-West Gateway Council, and all the miniature big city fakers, the camouflaged bank mortgage red-liners and crumbling ghetto defenders. The artificial white flower of suburban privilege granted me safe distance. In endless antiseptic bedroom cul-de-sacs, I heard the clicking metronome. But I knew only second-hand the perennial Veiled Prophet ritual pretense where elites assumed mythic idolatry and racial diversity found no home. But then, there was the Gashouse Gang and a legacy of scruffy heroes growing smiles on both the overly credentialed and the city’s forgotten. Baseball alchemy bewitched every viewer, nearly stealing all their woes. Brock, Gibson, and Musial, enduring names sewn in this silk cotton. Laclede’s Landing wraiths still ride horseback on cobblestone blocks. All the shadowy apparition riverboats are docked along the bank, where slaves secretly study, and visions of freedom fill their talk. Landing cheesiness mires history, an imaginative dearth we can thank. On our side of the color line, the white security state made us feel safe. Across the river in Privation, menacing, scary blacks deserved lockup. Few knew of its bloody 1917 white riots, history under which it chafed. We learn to reset the clock of justice, ending the wallpaper of mockups. On Clayton Rd., a cannonball could fly blocks at night and never hit a soul. The rustbelt city gave up its elusive soul during the Pruitt-Igoe disaster. The woman with diamond rings died slowly, financed with federal bankroll. Urban renewal left a land of weeds for miles, rendering no life thereafter. I am just another Old Man and the Sea after my technicolor misfortune. My withering town jacket is still animated and impossible to leave behind. Once a captive of my emotional squalor, I see my pact there was Faustian. As I age, my childhood broken city streak of failures isn’t so unkind. Gateway Town, I might have won an Emmy as a true believer. My teenage lovers lived in the attics and jewel boxes of my impetuous heart. Coveted girls and boys jumbled my hormones; I endured in a silent fever. But today, I merely record my recall of wounded city, sip coffee and depart.