

The apartment was small and bleak. It couldn't be any worse than Hell itself. It was shabby, sparse, and painted with the most disgusting shade of red you'd ever laid your eyes on. Man, it was a horrible place for a kid to grow up. I remember there must have been three--no, four--stories, and each was littered with people who'd never wanted to be there, and would have taken any chance whatsoever to leave if they could. This was the kind of neighborhood where the goddamn windows were covered with bars and messy duct tape.
I don't remember much, but I can still remember walking down the street in the middle of the winter. Homeless people everywhere in the streets. Branches bare, like the arms of an old man whispering his last breath. Even in summer there weren't no trees. The small houses that crowded around the apartment building weren't anything to be proud of. They had been there for decades, and none of them showed any sign of renovation or fixing.
There were a few stores on the road on the way to school. There was a small video store a whiles off that would rent out the classics--Casablanca, the Godfather, Citizen Kane, that kind of thing--on dingy VHS tapes that had been passed around hundreds of hands. On the other side of the street, across from the video shop, was a small grocery store run by a little old lady who lived alone after her husband died. They sold all the usuals--bananas, apples, meat, cereal, carrots, but they also sold these little taffy candies that the old lady made using a special family recipe. Now, they sold for ten cents apiece, but if you talked up the lady, you could probably get away with just five cents apiece.
There weren't any parks in the neighborhood, and if there were, I think the grass would've died out after just a few weeks. Now, there was the little tiny po-dunk alley behind the bowling rink. In this here alley, all the neighborhood kids would've gone each and every Friday, just to kick around a tiny little soccer ball or toss the pigskin around. Passing by, you'd have thought the kids were homeless or something. Their faces were always as dirty as a coal miner's, and their clothes were always torn and hanging from their frail frames. It kinda made me sorry that I got to leave, yet they didn't.
The last thing I remember about the neighborhood was this massive factory in the back of the quarter. They made tires and other rubber products. Every single day, you could look north, and you'd see a massive cloud of black smoke smoking up the air and spewing smog all over the place. That was the horrible factory, the centerpiece of our neighborhood. On bad days, the rubbery byproduct would sift down into the streets, and you'd cough if you tried to go out.

