I steered my Honda down my childhood street and turned left onto the circular drive which wrapped around the tidy, seventies apartment development. “Look,” I said to Megan, and pointed to the white faux-column building where Kristy Crofoot lived in fourth grade. It was now a jumbo CVS.
I started bitching about gentrification and locating a chain pharmacy in a two-bedroom apartment, but parked in an open spot anyway. “I need something,” I said. Inside, I was seduced by room after room of Oriental rugs and Chinese vases and large, ornate lamps and expansive chandeliers, and asked Megan if she thought I should buy a carpet because they were marked down from $800 to $200.
But we emerged emptyhanded and returned to the car. Through the windshield, I noticed that across the street, where I used to deliver newspapers to senior citizens, had become a Super Walmart. I reeled from the injustice. And right next door was a Taco Bell and Burger King. Where the baseball bullies Mike and Dave Ballstein lived, there was a mall and cinema multiplex.
Megan thought the amenities were nice and convenient and didn’t understand why I hated economic development. “Don’t you get it?” I yelled, “they’ve taken over my life!” I drove faster. “I just want to see the rest of Bon Aire Circle to make sure it’s still okay.” I was thinking about my dentist’s office, in the basement apartment, shrouded by evergreens, where I’d first tried laughing gas while submitting to root canals. Megan agreed.
The curving street was familiar, but the double yellow lines disappeared as the pavement turned to dirt. I shifted into high gear and an expansive lake appeared. The road vanished and the car bumped onto grass, and the grass turned into a field of neat rows of crops, and my wheels began to sink in the soft planting soil. We came to a stop facing Smith Road, cows and sheep on either side of the car, and a long, white farmhouse just to our left.
As we climbed out I noticed a tall chain-link fence along Smith Road and scanned it for the hole I used last time, but someone had repaired it. A man in a suit, the owner of the farm and the land, appeared to ask why we were there. We explained that we took the wrong curve, and he said he understood, it happened all the time, especially to New Yorkers. He opened a gate in the fence, and we pushed our motorcycle through. “Good thing we said we were from New York,” Megan whispered, holding our helmets in her hand. “If we’d said we were from Illinois, he probably would have killed us.”
“We’re not from Illinois,” I replied, even though we were. “Why would we say that?”
We wheeled the motorcycle to a driveway, entered a house, and went upstairs into a bedroom, where Kim was waiting with six other women on a large but nondescript bed. “I only have this one pair,” she was explaining, “but they’re too big on me and they’re really wet.” Another woman said “I don’t care,” and Kim removed a pair of underwear from her pocket. She unwrapped them, and they were enormous, far too big for any of the women, and yellow, and I could smell their strong scent from several feet away.
Kim addressed me for the first time. “Are you ready for all seven of us?” she asked. She handed me the wet underwear. I panicked, overwhelmed by shame and desire and fear, and turned to see three men coming into the room. One of the women, who had dreadlocks and owned the house, began yelling at the two men with dreadlocks, calling them lazy (N-word)s. The other women turned on her immediately, disappointed by her lack of awareness and sensitivity, and began dressing to leave. Megan had disappeared. I didn’t know what to do. The outcast homeowner looked at me. “You don’t understand,” she pleaded. “This is all more complicated than it seems.”
The third man was Jesse, and he was dressed and grinning and ready for the party. I asked to talk to him in the laundry room, but he became upset and turned to the homeowner, who followed us. “Why?” he begged. “I just want to know why.”
Outside, there was a railyard, and as we walked through it, an old man showed us an abandoned warehouse. The door was dusty and motionless, and a broken lock hung from the clasp on the doorframe. “Don’t go in,” he told us. “It’s nothing but junk and you can get hurt. Nobody ever goes in there.”
We nodded and opened the door. It was dark inside, and the old man turned on a flashlight. We could see windows thick with layers of dust, and objects piled high in front of them. Strange shapes loomed at us from every angle, but we walked through one aisle and then another, where it became a little lighter, and the junk was thinning out. We got to a concrete wall and the old man told us to watch the beam of light.
I followed it carefully as it traced the patched-up outline of a door against the wall. There were tables and chairs and bicycles and boxes and crates and bags stacked up against it. We got to work and moved everything out of the way, panting and sweating, the flashlight beam jumping around. Finally we got to the door. It very easily swung open and great pools of light spilled into the warehouse. I stepped forward to see, in this secret and hidden part of the building, a single railroad car, shiny and new and well-kept, sitting on a long piece of gleaming track, and inside I saw movement and heard music. The old man’s face lit with pride as we climbed up into the car.
It was a dining car. There were about ten tables on either side of the car, and young people sitting at many of them. There was an aura of revolution and rebellion in the air and I understood immediately that these people didn’t exist, that nobody knew they were here. As soon as we entered, everybody began to work. People were streaming in and out from the secret concrete door and it became obvious that the time had come to empty the warehouse so that the railroad of revolution could emerge from this dark and dusty place. People worked like ants, carrying loads of junk, sweeping, piling, sorting.
I followed some people outside into the railyard. We stood and shared a cigarette. I recognized one woman from somewhere. She had long, dark hair and wore a short flower print dress which stopped above her knees. She walked away from me without saying anything and as she went back into the building, she flipped the back of her dress up and I could see her ass. She wasn’t wearing underwear.
I followed her back into the warehouse and it was completely transformed. Light streamed in from polished windows, piles of junk had been reduced into neat half-aisles of sorted materials, the floor was freshly swept, and the concrete door had doubled in width and the train was in plain sight from the entrance of the warehouse.
I became very worried that someone would see inside and know how we had changed everything, made improvements and created something new and dangerous, but with all the people around me, I thought, nobody else is worried, so I shouldn’t be either.
everywhere tints childrening 
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