For six years, I would walk through the quarter every day, just about every day. Past all the garages with the grease-stained mirrors, the young dudes with their permed hair jumping around in overalls, wrestling with merchandise. More often than not, the pavement was crowded with shoppers, cyclists and motorbikes put out for sale. Racks of jackets, helmets nearly as funky as their kin in Vietnam! Old guys who burned their rubbish on the street, or chucked seed for pigeons to eat. I never used to work out why they needed to burn their garbage (couldn't they just throw it in the trash?), and sometimes I saw pigeons trapped in cages. I used to wonder: Were they planning on eating them? Late at night, when most folks were home asleep, I observed the homeless old men pushing their carts stacked high with cardboard and aluminium cans, making their living off the refuse of the land, like pigeons. I was there the night jihadists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York, drinking with a Swiss anarchist in the Flight Club, on Showa Dori. The club was done up like the cabin of a passenger jet, complete with fake airline windows on the walls. We were talking about Fight Club the movie, and how they detonated the American Express building, during their rebellion against the state.
