The Battle of the Awning

It rains on the rich and the poor alike. Similarly for the blowing wind and the driving snow. Ditto for earthquakes and floods and simooms, and all the meteorologic and democratic phenoms of the world. The only difference is in the realm of human consciousness, where man had worked to spend more money and time on the design and construction of buildings housing important people, while neglecting the foundations of the elementary schools, which turn to rubbery ooze in an earthquake. Or the aristocratic heat-coil pavement which melts the democratic snow... or a house built strong and sturdy set upon a hill to be seen, and far away from the cardboard boxes makeshifted under roadway culverts: Jerusalem seen in contrast to Goshen; the pain of Nature is swift and overwhelming and passes on like a killer tornado, while mankind's inflictions create an ongoing symphony filling every audible nook in extended octaves, killing by simile and metaphor, but also by antithesis and oxymoron.

Case in point: my brother's favorite bar, Rocky's Watering Hole - a name too expensive by far for all that neon, and the son of the eponymous Rocky, Joey but still called "Rocky", re-did the sign so that only "Rocky" lit up. It turns out a cost analysis of the electricity required to jitter neon gas through a longer tube compared to a  shorter is not so very much after all, and Rocky II was a victim of a false logic brought about by spending an afternoon waiting in his doctor's office and reading a TIME article on the Wharton School of Business.
The State had passed a law banning smoking from all public places. This put the hurt on Rocky's, and on my brother as well, for he was a habitue of Rocky's, and really what's the point of going to the bar to drink and smoke if you have to get up, leave your beer in the bar, and go outside and smoke a few butts? You can't take the alcohol outside. Even though there is a great public bacchanalia of drunkenness every year smack dab in the middle of downtown - a celebration for the sailing race from Port Desespoir to Malatesta - and open consumption of alcohol is not only tolerated, but positively encouraged, the rest of the drinking year remains under the law of the hijab of obscurity, and open alcohol must not be seen on the public streets. In fact, during the public drunkenness, smoking is forbidden even along the open streets where the Rocky bar people smoke now, because the festival is considered a public place, and all the streets which comprise ground zero of the festival are unified into one big network of "public place", and smoking is forbidden. At these times, people duck into the bars and cafes to have a smoke, and remember the good old days when they could sit there and drink beer and smoke and let their hair turn the color of a white dog's backside. The logic of it all escapes everyone, but logic is a stranger in a strange land.

My brother and his mates were watching some sporting event or other, seated in Rocky's. After a while, they decided to pop outside for a few cigarettes, only to be met by the driving rain of a sudden storm driven eastwards against the prevailing winds by circulation off the large body of water beyond the harbor. They whirled about the brick exteriors of the old buildings like packing peanuts and old leaves blown by the wind, and scouring every nook and cranny within the furrowed brick faces along the alley, looking for a dry spot. When they found one, their smokes were wet. They stood in a quiet desperation. My brother did two brilliant things: first, he decided to build, and did a preliminary design in his head for, an awning to provide cover from the rain; second, he realized that his way of life was being consciously undermined by an intelligent agency, an intelligence which obviously not only could sway lawmakers into inconveniencing him - which was not all that much, since every lobbyist could do so - but could also command the weather and elements to drive him into a state of furious defiance, where he stood alone like Ahab thrusting his fist against the sky.
On re-entry into the bar, he grabbed a fistful of napkins and secured a ballpoint from Rocky and began designing. Rocky's butted up against the Don't Worry, Be Happy Bistro - the entire name in neon - and formed an "L" shaped alley between themselves and Smiley's Diner which filled out the block up to the sidewalk. The two legs of the "L" were not very wide. The only appreciable area of ground was at their juncture where the two drinking spots came together. So from the aluminum overhang from the 1970s sheltering the front of Rocky's, you could duck into the narrow part of the alley - where you would be rained on only if the rain were coming straight down or ricocheting off the brick sides - and trot down to the smokers' oasis where a free standing awning, stretched between sturdy poles set in old buckets filled with "comcrete" awaited - the awning would not be attached to any buildings due to the necessity of a building permit.
So all hands sprung to work, and this week of construction was fondly referred to ever after as "The Week We Built The Damn Awning" with a smile of pride, and a haughty flick of ash. My brother forgot his newly found paranoia for a while, and drew plans and gave orders. Rocky had saved poles from front awnings earlier than the 1970s behind the dumpster, and they were ferreted out and roughly cleaned. Containers and buckets were procured, most of them coming from the bar itself or the diner; goodly sized 5-gallon buckets smelling of pickle chips or with a dab of strawberry filling along the sides. Broken bag - hence "free" - concrete was caged from Artis Hardware, and Mikey the part-time tattoo guy did this, and he did it in the afternoon of the day the morning of which saw him drinking beer and messing with his utility knife whittling a long pointed stick... and Artis wondered why he had so many broke up bags of "see-ment" in the chicken wire enclosure when Mikey stopped by to buy some "duck" tape and ask if there was any broken bag stuff.

And they kept at it. Drinkers usually plunge into projects like this with a gosh-all fury, but by 3:00 it peters out when the cinema paradiso of the imagination starts running travelogues and documentaries about green, cool oases in the hot desert, where the wadis run amber and - golly! - wouldn't a foam moustache on your upper lip be a hoot?
Not this time. The canvas for the awning was old sail thrown out by the sailors in the Port Desespoir to Malatesta classic. Real racers replace sail every three years or so. And it just goes to landfills, where it has a half-life of a thousand years, so Rocky found some guy refurbishing sails and got free space-age sail material for the awning.
The only thing they had to pay for was the rent on the heater to weld the space-age sail material into a hem around the transverse poles; no one sews sails anymore.

After 12 days, it was done. There were no big problems, and no one got hurt, except for Mikey who was the cement guy and he threw the bags around and mixed the cement and poured it into the containers to hold the poles, and it was a hot day, so he took off his shirt and the cement dust mixed with his sweat and began to hydrate... and that's an exothermic guy, you know, it gives off heat when it mixes with moisture, so he got some minor cement burns on his chest and shoulders.
So Rocky bought them them all a round of drinks, and they went outside and stood underneath the awning. They lit up, and life was good. All they could see was the sides and backs of buildings, and the dumpsters were close, and you could smell them, since food was served in all three of the surrounding places, but right then life was good.
They looked forward to rain.

Into each life, some rain must fall, as the saying goes. To the guys at Rocky's, it was not coming fast enough. They wanted to see how the new awning worked. Up until now, it had only functioned as a parasol, keeping the sun off them, or would have, had the sun ever descended into the narrow spaces and the covered area, but it didn't hardly, being at the wrong spot of the earth, so to say, and the "angle of the dangle" - as my brother put it - was wrong.
They began to look to the sky and pray for rain like farmers.

Soon after, it began to rain. If they hadn't been drinking yet, it was time to go. Bosses at part-time jobs listened to sudden reports of emergencies requiring the awning crew members to get home as soon as possible, everything being OK, well, not exact OK - there is an emergency - but it ain't like the end of the world as we know it, but emergency enough, but I'll be back here on the job in the AM, sure!
So everyone converged at Rocky's.
Two rounds were demolished, and they dashed out the door into the rain, squealing with delight like school kids, holding onto their smokes, protecting them from the rain, almost giggling with anticipation. They ran down the narrow alley leading to the awning like madcap Bowery Boys. My brother was in the lead. When he got there, he pulled up short, just inside the lip of the awning, just out of the rain, and the others sort of piled into him from behind - again, like Huntz Hall into Leo Gorcey.
They stared with disbelief. There in front of them stood a crowd of smokers they had never, ever seen before. The two groups squared off and eyed each other warily. The crowd that had been there first conformed slightly to allow Rocky's boys to just edge inside the protected area, but the Bowery Boys stood there looking around, and muttering just loud enough to be heard "Whathufuh?" and shaking their heads: looking, shaking, whathufuh and swallow a great gob of smoke.

The crowd thinned, the alien smokers withdrawing back to where they'd come from: the women wearing Anne Taylor and the men wearing Brooks Brothers back into the Don't Worry-Be Happy, and the Minnie Pearls and guys wearing overhauls into Smiley's.
My brother and his crew just stood around, pointedly flicking ash.
"This ain't right! This is our awning!" someone said. They looked around at their handiwork, and felt cheated that they had not even been the first to use it, to break it in... to christen it Rocky's Awning and Smoking Club!
They took their complaint inside, where the disbarred lawyer, Jerry Koppel, sat drunk and in a cramp about his own coffee house/bistro three blocks down, and how much his vendors were screwing him. He just laughed at them and said the awning overhung the three "propity" lines, and everyone had a right to be there.
"Even if there's no room for us? The guys that put it up?"
Jerry laughed again. He tried to think of some witty thing to say about justice... Dame Justice One-Eye, maybe... and irony and what goes around, but he could only come up with something from Star Trek, or maybe Star Wars, and it didn't have the weighty ring to it he wanted; he may have been disbarred, but he was still the only philosopher in the bucket of blood academy! So he laughed again.
"We could force 'em out!" They all agreed.
Jerry shook his head. "You'll end up in the slammer. The Be Happy crowd is the right crowd the city fathers want downtown, so you don't have a chance there." He paused. "And the Smiley's crowd is a bunch of farm boys that'll whoop you with one hand tied behind their backs." He used his laugh once more to punctuate his observations.
"It ain't fair, though!" the Bowery Boys wailed.
Jerry thought about fair. Fair. Something to say about fairness, like here's a quarter, call me when you find some! But it didn't come. He took out a cigarette... and lit it, wondering if anyone'd bust him.

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pix:   Third picture: http://cajeffrey.blogspot.com/2010/05/yonge-street-patterns-2-toronto-ontario.html
Yonge Street Patterns 2