Just off the corner of University and Porn, just up the block from the Faust Theatre, there was this shack. This was in Saint Paul. The shack was little more than a leanto, and a black man ran it.
He was in his sixties, the black man, maybe seventies, it's hard to tell sometimes about age. He sold found items. He sold cigarettes, and sometimes wine or whiskey. I bought a great door knob one afternoon. Very oranate. He didn't have any licences.
Whenever I stopped in for cigarettes, he called me "poet," because that is what the teenage hookers from a local group home named me. It was my street name and I took it as a huge compliment that he called me that. He sold kerosence and other things...mostly cigarettes, Marlboro in the box. He didn't deal in "lite" anything. I admired him for that.
There was a strip club just down the street from him; kitty-corner from the Faust Theatre. And in that club there was a dancer called Tito. Man, black hair...half-way down her naked back. She was ab...so...lute...ly beautiful.
I pumped gas for a living and I had as much chance of atrracting Tito as that black man up the street, selling junk from a leanto, had of becoming an actual American Citizen, even thought he was born in Ohio.
The night Mr. Obama became President I thought of that man in his leanto for the first time in years. I wondered if he was still alive and what he thought. Did he cry tears of joy?
Coldest place I ever walked was the Corner of University and Porn in December and January. Up the block the old man's shack was not insulated. I don't think Obama has done that man, or people like him, any favors.
A lot of times when I stopped there, the old man was sitting outside watching his breath float on the cold Minnesota air. I hope there will be more substance to our next African American President than that old man's breath wavering on the air, outside his shack, near the corner of University and Porn.
