I was standing outside being bored, and I wished I smoked, so I would have had something to do. Give myself an attitude. I was annoyed with myself that I had only put on a thin top that morning, although it clearly wasn’t spring yet. I had stopped giving a thought to the fact that I was walking barefoot.
We pass a wooden security door with a thick metal frame built to withstand forced entry, out of the rainy day light into the stained stairwell, my Father’s shoes scrape the step where I smell the stale cannabis smoke from the younger youths on their way to college. Their forceful young male voiles boomerang off the walls when they are in the Estate and their behaviours exhibit strong territorial instincts, moving in large groups, wearing similar clothing and colour combinations. Once in a while somebody is killed in their tribalistic fights.
Only when my foot hits the bottom stair do I become conscious that I have been running. I stop in my tracks, only to realise next that such a sudden stop probably looks more suspicious than if I had continued running. I take that one last step onto the sidewalk and lean against a railing, feigning nonchalance. Sweat flows from my forehead and under my arms like blood from a deep gash. I try to right my blurry vision by fixing my gaze on one object at a time and trying to identify it. If I can do this I might be able to figure out what to do next. I see a car, a red car. I notice that both of my hands are clutching the railing in front of my building – oh God, the building where I live. It’s cold. It must still be early. I look left – east, towards the park – and right – west, towards Broadway, Astor Place, crowds of people. I know where I am now. I can hear something; the boom of an airplane’s engine is only a growl by the time it reaches my ears. I look up and watch the monster pad its way across the sky. The white trail it leaves behind makes me uneasy again.
This is where fireflies found their voice in violent arcadia trying to fit in with the freaks and ghouls. In a toilet paper frenzy, like a picture from the 80s, ornamenting the cave walls and gardens of destructed family temples. The fireflies came together in their shiny cheap vinyl dresses and their glittered faces. They danced the night away in amphetamine hype, mixing in sweat with the drooling freaks and ghouls that licked at the fresh skin of an early 18s crowed, unblemished, untouched by facelifts and silicone. It was there, amidst the throbbing disturbing thunder of the so called Satan music performed by skinny drug abused bodies and heavy caked on make-up male faces, they lost whatever naïve child spark was left on them.
‘And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it’ - Vukovar poster, propaganda campaign against the siege of Sarajevo… In the coffee shop at the edge of the old Ottoman bazaar there is a vast array of glittering cakes with creamy fillings and dusted with icing sugar, the coffee is strong and staff clear away ashtrays regularly. The people who frequent the coffee shop are not tourists, some are old men dressed in brown and grey suits who wear caps that have been atop their heads ever since Tito first ruled over Yugoslavia. There are young Muslim women wearing colourful headscarves with two adorable children in pushchairs, feeding the children chunks of cake as they chat around the table. I am reminded that even babies weren’t safe during the siege of Sarajevo, targeted by the sadistic snipers secreted in the hills, and shot in their pushchairs. A serious faced young man, dark hair, dark eyes, a dark countenance of brooding violent energy, emerges and patrols past the coffee shop wearing the uniform of the Bosnian armed forces, laden with a heavy looking assault rifle.
We will never know if kids today are more bored now than they ever have been. What a wealth of tv they posess, what a bounty of internet, what variety in confectionary and playthings. Every xmas, trucks full of new electronic equipment is designed and shipped into their bright new anorak pockets.
Not content to spend their Sundays locked in their houses, like the other inhabitants of the suburban Sabbath ghost towns, those who invested in motorbikes roamed wild and free. Their hard work in cubicle farms and in butlery to children deserved the attempt to replay certain days of their lives. The family computers in the corners of the living rooms scoured leathers, routes and get-togethers. This was all much to the offspring’s embarrassment but a leisurely cruise on an unused road never hurt anyone.
