Alley Cat

I thought I might bring you up to speed on my situation, I mean, where I live. I know that many of you have been wondering about that. Sometimes lying in bed, kept awake by such questions as, I wonder where he lives and what it’s like? I know and I’m sorry.

The entrance to my apartment can be accessed through a small alleyway. This alleyway, though often swept and relatively clean, is crawling with cockroaches and the occasional rat. It is just wide enough for a single motorcycle to pass through and there are various barred sliding entrances to small apartments along each side. One of these apartments has recently been demolished and is now a quagmire of construction mud and filth. It has been curtained off from the alley with sandbags and plastic sheeting but I have peeked inside to see that the construction workers sleep nightly in this mud nightmare. The daytime temperature, right now, is hitting around 40 degrees Celsius and I’m not sure it’s much cooler at night. And, you should know this about me, I couldn’t sleep there. There is never anything provided for these construction workers to sleep in; they just string up a hammock in the adjacent alley in or in the site itself.

Today, as I left my apartment, I saw, in the alleyway, a very young kitten about to disappear into a broken drainpipe. Damn, I hear you cry. It’s a kitten story. Well, you should know, that within each one of us, there lies a kitten story, each one unique and enlightening, and you can just thank your lucky stars that mine is short. Okay?

We both stopped what we were doing – neither of us was really doing very much – and looked at each other awhile. He wasn’t scared of me. He wasn’t scared of death. He wasn’t scared of anything. His eyes said to me – in the weakest possible way – okay Mr. giant cat, or whatever you are, you can either feed me, or kill me, cause, right now, I don’t really give a damn either way. As I walked away, he turned and went into the drain hole, disappearing into the ground. If it lives in there, I could leave some food for it, I guess, fatten it up a bit so my neighbours can eat it (and you think I’m joking!).

Most of the interior of this alleyway lies in shadow and is relatively quiet compared to the street. Secret sounds issue from within the walls as the apartments’ occupants sweep and cook…and sweep…and cook…and watch tv…and sweep some more. The Vietnamese are outstanding sweepers. Outstanding! And they love it. I’m surprised they were able to put their brooms down for long enough to win the war. They wake at about 4:00AM for a good sweeping session. I guess it’s because they are big floor dwellers: they play cards on the floor, they eat on the floor, they sometimes sleep on the floor. And, I’m not talking about sleeping on some inch-thick shagpile here, I mean straight on the hard tiles. In the rainy season, this alleyway becomes an obstacle course of large puddles, which, not receiving any direct sunlight, tend to stay around for a while. Right now though, it’s just a welcoming cool.

If you were suddenly dropped into this alleyway – let’s say you were that guy in the book The Time Traveler’s Wife and you suddenly found yourself, Zap! in the alleyway – and you walked to its end, out into the street, you should know this: the tranquil atmosphere of the alley would, in no way, prepare you for what lies beyond. If you walked out onto the street – and I say this to you as to a friend, and not as to some guy in the bar who I am trying to impress; I say this to you, without the need to make any grandiose exaggerated sweeping claims like some guy who doesn’t know that the bar is closing and it’s time to go home; I say this to you because it is the truth and because, if you were ever to come to visit me (which, you never do, you bastards) – if you walked out onto the street, you would think that you were, literally, in a war zone. In. A. War. Zone. From the moment you step out of the cool alley, your senses are assaulted in ways that you previously thought impossible. It is not a particularly large street, but it is a busy street. And, not just busy, but Vietnamese busy, which can be summed up in two words: frenetic chaos. Much of the road is being dug up to lay underground pipes and, at each end of the street, there are large holes in the road surrounded by hastily erected iron sheeting, above which, large bulldozers peer out like dangerous animals in their pens. On one side, there is just enough space for a one-way motorcycle path. The Vietnamese commuters(being Vietnamese), refuse to take the small detour, and force this one-way path to become two-way. Watching motorcyclists as they force their way through this tiny space leaves one feeling completely bewildered and the mentality behind this craziness would make for an interesting study.

Within the first few steps from the safety of the alley, at least one or two motorcycle taxi drivers will begin shouting at you for a fare, and you will, almost certainly, have been hit by a passing motorcycle by now. To rise above the noise of the traffic and above the music being blasted from a certain clothing store up the street, these motorcycle taxi drivers need to shout at you fairly loudly and they need to clap their hands at you fairly loudly. So, they do. There are very few trees, there is no shade and nowhere to stand, and it is hot, very hot. Within a few minutes, your eyes will begin to get sore from the pollution and from the dust being thrown up by the traffic, You will be overwhelmed by humanity and in one glimpse, see a hundred lives lived on the street as they make the most of the smallest of spaces and you will see, in the raw expressions of these lives, happiness, hardship and the desperate need to get ahead at all costs; you will sense the poverty. You will see it is the absolute front line of a world that has gone completely insane, a world that is being completely overrun with humans like locusts over a wheat field.

To negotiate this street where I live, you need to use every one of your senses at all times and, make no mistake, that you also, are being watched by every pair of eyes at all times. In this street, you cannot afford to be blasé or careless. Except, that everyone of your senses will be, initially, at first step, so overwhelmed, that you will be incapable of registering any details as this hurricane cacophony threatens to engulf you, and that little kitten that you just saw in the alleyway, that’s you, and you are looking for the first drainpipe you can find to crawl into to escape all this.

So, this isn’t exactly Sesame Street here; this isn’t exactly Shirl’s Neighbourhood. But – and this is the strange bit – sometimes, on some days, when the wind is right and when I’m in the mood, I love it.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode when I will take you into the apartment, into the back bedroom to see what really goes on in there.