CONFESSIONS FROM THE FEVER

In black hoodies they congregate on their street corners, calling out across the avenues amidst the cold dreary daze of the fading afternoons. People swearing and smoking in the pre-dusk light, the sun sinking now beyond the towers and the projects out by Harvest Avenue, the muffled bass beats of old 90’s hip hop hits echoing off of every block, a curbside serenade, a hymn for the coming night.
Bike messengers and young boys navigate the old potholes that litter these inner-city roads like little pools, tiny minefields mixed within the old snow and sleet and the muddy gravel that collects like ash.
They weave through the gridlocked traffic like spirits through an old haunted citadel, standing atop their bike pedals, looking out at the maps and routes before them.
 Dealers bustle through the throngs and crowds, calling out the names of their potions like salesmen on wallstreet offering up stocks.
"Got that Kneel-Down. Got that Kneel-Down ish right here. Right here."
"Got the Fever, Fever. Got the Fever."
"Temp-tawn, Temp-Tawn."
"I got the Fever here, I gotchya Fever right here."
The blue #40 bus comes hissing through, its motor clanging in big gulping breathes. A siren wails for the smallest of seconds, the familiar red-and-blue washing the faces of all the passer-byes. Sunlight streams through the cracks in the brick and mortar, the sun almost gone, silhouetting the drug dealers and the single mothers and the cold-and-lonely crack-room dwellers as they all dart to their destinations, all a single purpose, a single mind, one single vision.
"I gotchya Fever right here."
And there like a jagged piece of glass hidden amidst the sand; like a fragile egg untouched amidst the fallen branches; like Christ’s own head buried beneath the crown of thorns; this is where it lies:
The Parlor.
I sigh and lock my car door and look around at the heights of Hartford around me.
How many times have I made that drive? How many miles along the same freeways and inner-city streets littered with the broken concrete and the gunslingers and the poor ones?
The dealers stalking single girls, calling out to the gangbangers.
"Gotchya Fever right here, now."
 I’m covered with tattoos now and my friends say I have a different kind of Fever. That’s okay. But the drive into Park Street gets me every time.
They say this is the rim of human-kind, down here on Park Street, far below the poverty lines that the Republicans and the politicians and those unfamiliar to suffering like to mention at their convenience. If I’m honest with myself … I thought those things too, once.
The first time I came to Park Street a young Puerto Rican man assumed that because I was white I was there to buy drugs, so as I parallel parked outside the tattoo Parlor he opened the passenger door and hopped inside, sighing in the late-July heat, waving a hand through his hair tied back into a pony tail. Stenciled tattoos of Spanish names all over his sleeveless arms, his veins robust and popping out as if they were trying to escape his body.
He smiled and shut the door as shock gripped me and I assumed that this was what all those novels were about, those moments that collect like cold coins in your stomach swimming around.
“What the fuck,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Get out,” I screamed. “Get out, Get Out.”
“I thought—“
“Get the Fuck Out of the Car,” I said, opening my own door, ready to meet this man in a more primitive way.
Thoughts crossed my mind in single words – Gun. Knife. Soul. Death – but as the young Puerto Rican drug dealer and I exited the car I realized that he was smiling and laughing in embarrassment.
“Yo,” he said, his hand a fist covering his amused mouth.
“What the fuck.”
“Yo I apologize, yo. I thought you was all tryin-a sneak on suttin suttin. Thought you wanted the Fever. You know?”
“No.”
“Shit, nigga,” he said. He covered his mouth with both hands. “Yo man really I apologize I thought you wanted to hit on suttin.”
“Nah,” I said, still silently terrified, just wanting a tattoo, nothing more. “I don’t do drugs.”
“Shit, nigga,” said the Puerto Rican man. He slapped my hand, clutching it, genuine and smiling and shaking his head and chuckling. “Everybody do drugs. Ain't chyou hearing that shit?”
In the distance the dealers call out,
 Got the Fever here, I gotchya Fever."
“It’s alright,” I said. “You just scared the shit out of me. I thought you were gonna rob me.”
“Hell naw dawg,” he laughed. “White dudes is my best customers. White dudes all got the Fever. I apologize, dawg. Don’t see too many white dudes round here less they tryin-a cop on suttin.”
“It’s alright,” I said.
“Shit, man.”
Johan –my tattoo artist—says I’ll get a real run for my money, getting my tattoos on Park Street.
He’s been at the Parlor for about four years, dealing with a clientele base whose foundations are made up of young hoodlum drunks and spur-of-the-moment wall-art lusters.
“It’s rare we get dudes coming in with real art, real artistic integrity, like, you know what I mean?”
Johan likes what I bring in so I get it for a discount.
We listen to old reggae tapes that are half-muted from the weight of time. Ornette Coleman live at the Golden Circle. Wu-Tang 36 Chambers. We talk about old stripclubs, we wonder aloud about the dichotomy of man. We argue about what shots get you the drunkest, we trade stories about Switzerland and France.
Johan carves me up, the mask and the glasses inches from my arms, changing his gloves every few minutes, the boombox in the corner flipping these old tapes over. This little room is a world of change, a sterile field of white walls and gleaming floors. From the time I walk into the Parlor until the time I walk out, I’m lost in this little world. The realities of environment around me cease to exist. When I am in the chair – despite the pain – I am happy.
I am lucky.
I am fortunate.
I am doing what I want.
I am doing something that means something.
But every now and then I am reminded of the true nature of things.
We take a cigarette break and go outside to find ten thousand police cruisers, an ocean of racing red lights, a crowd of two hundred people frothing at the mouth shouting and chanting and hystericalin tongues.
“What happened,” Johan asks a kid on a bike as he lights the stub of a half-smoked cigarette.
“Them dudes robbed Ray-Mays,” the kid says, nodding at the tiny liquor store across the street. The police whirl around a young woman covered with tattoos, the handcuffs tight around her as they shove her into the back of the car.
“Her too?”
“Yeah. And them two dudes in that other car, over there.” 
“When,” I say. “Just now, they robbed it?”
“Like ten minutes ago.”
“Jesus.”
"Dudes is all jacked up on the Fever," said the kid. "Fever gets you crazy, like. All got the Fever round here."
"Jesus."
“It’s nothin,” the kid says, spitting and starting to bike away.
A black man blazing out of his mind came into the shop once while I waited on the sofa in the lobby. He was so high there was drool coming out of his mouth, he was leaning like flower stem in a slow wind, eyes half closed, glazed over, remnants of food or trash in his shoulder-length beard.
“Shush wanna get a tat … do …” he muttered. He struggled to swallow and almost fell backwards, reaching out for the wall. “Howabouts some … body buy me a …”
“Think it’s time for you to go, hoss,” said English Pete, the Parlor’s clerk. He sweeps the floors and makes the appointments. He’s two hundred pounds and has broad shoulders. He’s got a shaved head and bad teeth and he looks like a shit-kicker.
“Shush wanna tat…do…get some Fever, man...”
“Get the fuck out or I’m gonna beat your junkie ass.”
English Pete looked at me and shrugged.
"Goddamn Junkies," he said. "Fever this, Fever that."
There’s the man nicknamed ‘Dread-Ex’ who rides around South End on a bike selling calf-skin wallets that his wife hand makes in their crummy one-room apartment on Whaler Ave.
There’s the crews of school kids skipping 8th period, skateboarding through the main streets, stopping traffic and throwing snowballs at the crossing guards.
There’s the stumbling junkies that wander the wide sidewalks, tripping on the weeds that grow through the cracks, holes in the knees of their old jeans, heads red with Fever.
Fever Fever Fever.
And there’s me, in the Parlor, as happy as a man can be.
"Gotchya Fever here," they call out to me, as I go to my car. "Fever, Fever."