A tale of two gritties

July in the city is like no other month. At noontime, cars on streets bake where it’s all opened up and raw like a sunburn.

Uptown, sweaty people stand in doorways smoking cigarettes while downtown negroes with frayed pants push shopping carts filled with crushed cans.

In the city, the rich eat prescription drugs and snort good cocaine while the poor breathe spray paint from paper bags and shoot dirty heroin.

And the people in the office buildings talk into telephones about money, and at night out in the suburbs they fight with their husbands and wives.

In Fremont Park, nervous joggers listen to hip hop while scarecrow men crawl under benches for lost change.

On the dark hill under a gentle oak tree, the queers give blowjobs under the countenance of a pewter Civil War general and his horse.

And then the sun comes up again, the last public swimming day of the year.