College Ghetto

March 2, 2004 | 11:03pm

My close personal friend is moving. He’s actually buying a feak’n house! It’s times like these when my other friends and I really take note of our own living situations, how fucked up they are, and all the insane people that populate it.

Matt lives a few blocks from me, between us lies the glorious hole that is ASU. Instinct Magazine rated it number one on the hot guy scale. I agree. In fact when I’m feeling a little down and life’s just not chugging on all that glamorously, I’ll take a stroll down to hottie central. Okay fine, I just don’t walk down there, I cruise — hard. The gym at ASU is designed so that all the walls are windows in what I like to call "The big boy gym." You’ll find gorgeous men lifting, sweating, scratching, and panting. You can also tell who is not a student anymore. For some strange reason you can still work out here for a year after you graduated. They’re the guys who lift, but never look at the weight. They just stand there with wandering eyes, always following the eye candy of academia — kinda like me, only not as cute.

But Matt and I do not live on campus. We live on the outskirts of campus — we live in a ghetto unprotected from the cruel, cruel outside world. Sure, it’s not your average gun shooting, gang banging, whore infested neighborhood; although we do have those every now and then.

Welcome to zipcode 85281!

Tonight, I’m giving Matt a ride home; his car — Hortence — is in the shop. Matt lives fifty-three feet from a train track, the very track we’re waiting in front of while cart after cart flies across the horizon in front of us. As it finishes, a police van cuts in front of traffic. It weaves in and out of the blocking flashing arms rising up from the train tracks.

Me: Is that "the" police van again?
Matt: Perhaps. But you know your neighborhood is bad like last time when the officer yelled over the megaphone, "STAY IN YOUR HOMES. THE K9 UNIT HAS BEEN RELEASED. I REPEAT, STAY IN YOUR HOMES. THE K9 UNIT HAS BEEN RELEASED."

Matt doesn’t even notice the unholy noise and demonic shaking appliances as the trains pass in the oddest hours of the night. He could be talking on the phone and then ask the person to hold. For. Like. Twenty. Minutes. A shipment of coal and homeless heroin junky stowaways are being shipped to Santa Monica peer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Can you imagine? Piles of heroin are being shot sixty miles an hour past his front door.

Luckily, the dogs don’t get released on my side of the neighborhood. Oh no, I have a different animus prowling in the shadows: the butt skid cats. They disappear every now and then, but when new ones appear it’s always the same drill. I get my car washed — the old scent of old cat forgotten. That night a new cat will slide down my windshield — its butt leaving behind a trail of pleasure and ownership. WHY MUST THEY DO THAT?

Driving to work on those days is always a challenge. I never notice it when I’m parked, but after I back-up out of my driveway and unfurl my car into the Tempe traffic I see it — I see butt skid.

And sure, the hooker with blond hair worn short will be back. She’ll forget — again — that the bus stop is not the best place to take a shit. Just as I’ll forget — again — to look away when I think to myself, "That woman is taking a shit on my street. No, that couldn’t happen. Wait, is that woman really squatting? Is that really crap dropping from behind her? Oh my fuck’n god, she’s taking a shit on my street!"

Then there’s the dirty book store a block away. One can smell the ammonia peeling paint and body fluids off the walls. You can smell it within a half-mile radius.

But there are good things in our ghetto, too. There’s the $5 yoga gym, the $15 rock climbing gym, the $.25 coin-less wash (Tuesdays and Thursdays), and the two dollar "cheapy" theatre. Plus, the average age of Tempe is 26, which leads to a lot of hot man-gut just moments away (and always online). But the number one reason why I choose to live here is because my landlord still thinks its 1972 and charges rent accordingly. God bless all the insane people who live in my neighborhood.