Welcome Home

  A block away from the museum, on Jefferson, an Amazon pick-up storefront opens, on the first floor of a huge high rise built to replace one of the old brick apartment buildings. The storefront was once the entrance to The Mural Room, a jazz/strip club, which did indeed feature murals of jazz legends. Rectangular planters squat on the sidewalk in front of the building, though the plants are always being yanked out of them.

The store is a glorified pick-up locker, with a human working the counter. I try to keep my Amazon patronage to a minimum, but there are always people coming and going, often double-parking on the busy bus route or bike lane. Like so many other places, it closed during the pandemic, then reopened with reduced hours. One day, with no warning, they tape a printed notice on the door saying they have permanently closed. They remove the lockers along the wall to reveal the back room, on the wall of which are the words CUSTOMER OBSESSION. A few days later they board it all up, though the Amazon sign remains lit, a beacon luring confused customers to tug on the door handle that sticks out through a gap in the boards.

Garbage begins to accumulate on the sidewalk between the planters. I often see people sleeping between them, curled up in sleeping bags or else just in their clothes.

As I walk past on the way home from work one day, a stylishly dressed bald man says, to no one in particular, "Everything's boarded up. About time. This is China's century." The sheets of plywood covering the empty storefront where the Mural room once stood have themselves been covered by a new mural. Very neat, legible graffiti reads "Do I use blues? LOL No" and "Help, kidnapped by weird chicken woman, call 911 HURRY," plus a number of other cryptic passages. The centerpiece is a huge cartoon of an earthworm sitting on a green sofa, watching one of the planters as if it was a  TV. "Welcome home!" the worm cries cheerily. The piece is signed A Wormboy Scrapcan production. The name wormboy has recently sprung up in block letters all over downtown.

Graffiti artists come and go. Most of them just scrawl their tag, but every once in a while you get someone a little more creative. For a year or two, our neighborhood was covered in the name LOKI. For some reason, it irritated me more than other handles. I don't know why. The tags are still around, on walls and telephone poles, though I haven't seen a new one in years. One day as I got in the elevator in our building, I saw the word LOKI scratched in the black paint on the elevator gate. I felt violated; did LOKI live in my building, or did they have a friend here, or had they just slipped in? Someone eventually scratched it out but you can still see it. In the meantime, I say welcome home to Wormboy. Long may he squirm.