Where it didn’t really happen as it’s fiction but what didn’t happen has its base in this place kind of as well as something that may have occurred here or a place like here but is very different in the book.
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Thanks to Adron for serving as a physical guide.
This is not where Johnnie's girlfriend, Hellene, lived, and my friend is pointing this out.
This is not where Johnnie's girlfiend, Hellene, lived, and my friend, again, is pointing this out.
However, geographically, I have Hellene living in these two buildings which face each other on Highland Ave., but not really as she lives more like a couple blocks down and in a fictitious taller, bigger building with no landscaping that’s well integrated into a small shopping area. Geographically, she is in this area as I have her fleeing the opening car wreck on foot for her home, and as these buildings are around the corner and a couple blocks down from where the car wreck that never happened takes place, bits and pieces of the terrain went into the imagining of her fictitious apartment building.
From the book, pages 36-37:
Only three weeks previous, Johnnie Jackson had been spread out on Hellene's faux black-and-white tiled bathroom floor, exhausted from retching, her whining dog scratching at the apartment's front door wanting out, and, as usual, Hellene not hearing or caring to hear the dog's whimpering need, because, at the moment, she was lying in bed, curled around a pot, too post drunk dazed to care about anything, even Johnnie, who was just plain sick with a super bug that wanted to take over his body and kill him despite the fact that a dead Johnnie would be no use to anyone but the mortuary business. Made no sense to Johnnie why bugs, however they functioned (couldn't be so different from Hellene though, who he at least liked, maybe, despite all) didn't want to play nice and keep their host happy and healthy, behaving as though their sole self-sacrificial purpose was to eliminate the human race. At least that was what Hellene was yelling at him from the bedroom. Each time he mumbled a week, battered, "Why me?" she heard and informed, "Because you'e a scourge on the earth and bugs are its way of trying to kill you off."
Johnnie retched into the hundred year old porcelain toilet bowl. Up close and personal with the irreducible privileges of a thousand previous tenants, eased then and there the romance of the building having been for decades the dumping ground of junkies and prostitutes, which transitioned into counter-culture chic with the residence of a few publicity sharp guitarists, then not-so-subversive collegiate chic, and now purchased higher rents with the application of fresh cheap paint and vinyl flooring, but not new plumbing fixtures. The perpetual, narcissistic reek of urine that clouded the cracked bowl for several feet, mingling with the sharp chemical aroma of the flooring, both belittled and amplified misery.
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Return to "Sightseeing" Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine.