Part 13 Forever boner

I am old. As is my bicycle. We fight over maturity in friendly stomps and menacing creaks in return.  But since I am the younger, I tend to win by default. Oh wait.

Mornings along resplendent streets of Philadelphia, pocked, or blocked, are rhymeless and sweaty. Boasting tramlines of a once foregone era of seamless public transportation for a dime a ride, as I had learned previously from an elderly gentleman on a train once, toothless, friendless, and merry. Now they just killed careful bicyclists that chanced their tires up onto their midst. The careless ones were taken by the careful car drivers anyway.

But a journey along a tramline caught tire brought me to its end one fine morning. Shaky and miserable. The edge of the old Philly. Where all the tramlines take you. To get away from the roars of the twenties in Center City. In the affluence of hanging quartz chandeliers, gassy. Where you went with family on a getaway. Or without. Sharing walls. Prayers and whores. Greasy bellmen, unbeknownst freshly shipped home-cooks spitting in their marinara and calling it a family recipe, smoke, and a warless penchant for expense of new money, minted or made. Lights announced The Divine Lorraine Hotel. In a curvy font, singing.

But who knew that there would be a bomb and a cloud? That the men and women and children would go? And the chandelier quartz would end up on Ebay? That the trams would no longer bring you to happiness?

On one face, today, a big green hand, with painted nails - “You go gurl!”

On another, a wishful and deviant “Forever Boner”.

Ten stories of stories flipped over like broken chairs, unsettling.