He almost wished the taxi had run him over. Prick.
Dan got up off the curbside and dusted his jeans down before remembering they were covered in shit, and three months due for a wash anyways. He watched as the lights of the cab span around the corner disappearing behind the in-yo-face, neon, never-bloody-switches-off billboard for the latest smell like angel-shit perfume. He took one last glance back at the door of his apartment block, half hanging off it’s rusted hinges, and strode off down the street. Lets go find a sweet bottle of sin.
Sin city was a place like no other. That wasn’t it’s real name of course, but only out-of-towners called it anything else. Every street corner, underpass, tower block and highway was another opportunity to disappear – if only for a moment. The city would happily suck you in and spit you out like a month old prawn taco. No one really knew how it all worked. Not even the mayor and the rest of his cronies that ran the place. They were just as much a prisoner of it’s madness as the rest of them. It was a living, breathing organism, and we were all just parasites hitching a ride.
Dan lived in “The Block”. A 5km square grid of copy & paste apartment blocks. If Brutalism could be considered to have a perfect form, this would be it. The repeating designs made it a nightmare to navigate if you hadn’t grown up in the area. Luckily, Dan had. Block 22-C, apartment 4A. That was the dump he was born in. He’d gone up in the world since then of course. Block 3-A, apartment 6-G was his current residence. I mean, sure, the tower designs were the same. And sure, the apartments followed the exact same layout and came pre-installed with all the same features. But 3-A was a border tower! He could look out of his room and see the rest of the city, in all it’s random chaotic design. He was on the edge. Almost free from the maze of The Block. Almost.
And the best thing about 3-A? It bordered Half-Way Street. From dingy biker bars, to high-end nightclubs. Half-Way Street was a sort of threshold that held the middle ground between the city proper and the endless sea of housing that surrounded it. Folks flowed into Half-Way street from both sides of the city. Rich business types looking to fade away for a night, and kids from The Block looking to fade away for a lifetime. Dan stumbled onto the street and it was if a shadow was instantly lifted from him. Outside the block, everything seemed a little brighter – or maybe that was just because the sun was rising: it was 5am. Time to get wasted.
Thank you for reading this canto of Sin City.
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Chris Black Writes 