Malt liquor is the ghetto�s shackle. It faithfully represses all uprising and ambition, keeping the weak: weak, the poor: poorer. It�s a bleeding-heart liberal thing to think, but that doesn�t make it any less true.
I watch the drunks stagger in front of my house, clutching cans of malt liquor cloaked in paper bags. They converse with phantom homies and curse unseen enemies as they pass. Some of them ambulate at odd angles, as if they were fighting to get upstream.
I want to stop them and ask how they defy gravity so well.
A happy drunkard stopped me on the streets of Paris two years ago. He picked me out of a crowd of people for no apparent reason and began to sputter alcohol-soaked French at me. I tried to explain that I could only speak english. He replied half in English, half in his native tounge, that he could speak for both of us.
I would have stayed to chat, but schedules�timetables�sleep�
I think that he could have taught me many things. Smelly, foreign-old-man things. Drunken french things.
Maybe someday I�ll become that old man: blotto and ragged with all the stars in my eyes. A disheveled statesman dispensing aged wisdom from the bottom of a bottle of wine.
