Free Fuckness by Andersen Prunty Page B

Although, I didn’t know how valid the title of Historic District was. The houses were built just after World War I. They weren’t even the oldest buildings in Milltown. It was like the founders botched their first attempt, trashing it up, and just decided to start over.
    As the town sloped southwest toward the river, it got even dirtier and smelled like all hell. The area closest to the river was called the Tar District. Those were the earliest buildings. My Uncle Skad lived in the Tar District. Uncle Skad was the mother’s brother and I only knew about him through stories. There were a few foggy memories the name conjured up from childhood but I didn’t think I’d be able to pick him out of a crowd. The parents apparently wanted nothing to do with Uncle Skad. Racecar told me while other boys were off fighting for their country and freedom and all that fuckness, Uncle Skad sat in a cozy institution, faking a disability. The mother didn’t talk to Uncle Skad because Racecar’s reasons were good enough for her. The parents always said Uncle Skad lived in the “flat out most disgusting house in the Tar District.” The Tar District was typically seen as the home of the lowest common denominator. The only people lower than the people who lived in the houses in the Tar District were those who couldn’t even find a house, the homeless. They lived around the Tar District, waiting for a house to open up. In other words, they were waiting for someone to die. The Tar District was kind of a mythical area. It was blamed for most of the town’s problems. Some said it claimed souls and when people talked about it, it was like none of the individual places had names, or the people either, for that matter. The places were referred to as “that place in the Tar District” or, sometimes, simply the Tar District, as though it were all one sprawling complex of sin and crime. The people were simply called the dregs or the bums or the hobos.
    I really didn’t know where the fuckall I was going. I think there was a part of me that knew I would eventually try to find Uncle Skad’s house in the Tar District, but that seemed too depressing at the moment. So, keeping the wheelchair and, mainly, my giant horned head off the more heavily traveled roads, I stayed around the outside of the Historic District, in between that and the new large homes. The people who ran the mills and factories in Milltown built most of the new large homes. I always thought of them as “The Clean People.” They were the people who could make money without getting shit on their hands. They were the people Racecar called the whiteshirts. The Clean People really knew how to play the game. If the game had a power structure, like the food chain, these were the people at the top. The only thing separating them from blobs was their overzealous obsession with cleanliness and order. In a way though, they were blobs. They were like superblobs, an entirely different class. They were what most lower blobs aspired to be.
    By going by that area, brimming with those blobs in suits and their blobbish families, I figured I would be able to really get in touch with my anger. And I was starting to feel like I should be really angry, like back there at the house, but I didn’t really feel that way at all. A sort of serenity enshrouded itself around me. I just rolled along and looked up at the sky that was actually blue and at all those huge houses with happy people living in them.
    Why couldn’t I have been born to one of them?
    It was a tired, resigned thought, not full of any sort of anger. Only I knew it wouldn’t really have done me any good to be born there. I wouldn’t belong there any more than anywhere else and I knew they probably weren’t happier than anybody else. They were rich people with problems of their own, even if their problems were just blobbish inventions.
    Suddenly, overwhelmingly, a feeling swept over me. It was the feeling that I should, at that point,