The Stroll
An excerpt from A Thrash In the Trash, my book about the first punk club in St. Louis, the Sloppy Club.
OK! Alright! The Stroll! William Burroughs, where are you now, down on the Stroll? Stanley Elkins, have you ever been down on the Stroll? Where you gonna put a punk rock club except down on the Stroll?
Tell me, Dr. Gass, have you ever rapped with the drunken old men who linger in their dusty Black skins outside the chain-link bedecked liquor stores on the Stroll? Oh, the agony of having to explain this Midwest funk to either coast; the New York sophisticates who sneer and the West Coast mystics who mumble a few less-than-enthusiastic ritual wows. Let me tell you about the Stroll.
In the 70s and early 80s, the Stroll was located a few blocks west of the fire-scarred ruins of Gaslight Square, a hippie entertainment district that briefly tried to imitate similar places in better cities like San Francisco or New Orleans. St. Louis was a racially divided city, with legal barriers to Black ownership south of the area, so it came to be an early hotspot of integration just as Civil Rights were passing into law. It started with Trad Jazz and bar stools, and ended with The Allman Brothers and Barbra Streisand, before it crashed and burned in racist outrage. By the punk era it was a scary, violent slum.
“Listen, it scared the shit out of me down there.” Stanley Ray Simpson told me. “We needed a place to call our own, see? My dad had just kicked offed way out in California—” Chronically lying through his teeth here, because everyone knows that his dad eventually kicked him out of the club… “Drunk in some gutter, no doubt, and as it turned out he owned this big nasty old warehouse—” Dinky little abandoned storefront… “—on Olive between Boyle and Sarah in the proximity of the ultra-cool hip West End geographically but about a million miles away in terms of of safety, respectability and crime. On the Stroll. It was like a totally deserted ghetto area like you only have in a completely blighted and depopulated Northern industrial city like St. Louis you know—the old brick buildings with the plywood peeling off the shattered windows underneath, the vacant lots full of venomous weeds that I was really allergic to—that reminds me, I forgot all about this. I had to take a machete to all the weeds in the little backyard area of the club right after my old man bought the place. I did a lot of work around that place I never got any credit for. It took me an entire afternoon to hack those weeds down, just so my old man wouldn’t have to pay a thirty dollar ticket or something.”
We have to leave Stanley Ray Simpson and turn towards the older and wiser heads of Saint Louis Beatnikdom for a real down home description of the Stroll.
I bumped into Jose Sanchez one night in the bar at Balaban’s feeding drinks to some gorgeous and obviously underaged girl with long legs and big tits. Being rather drunk, I let Stanley Ray Simpson ask all the questions.
“You mean like the geographical confines of the Stroll or what? Whaddaya want?” Jose looked all confused through his little hipster glasses, his glossy black hair not yet gone gray, glamorous and movie star and exotically Hispanic as only Hispanic can be in a town like St. Louis where no Hispanics ever hardly came to stay. He flashed a little nervous grin at his underaged girlfriend, who reassured him with a crack of her chewing gum and a cold, aloof flip of her glossy black hair, bored shitless as usual if there was no sex to occupy her sleek animal frame. Stanley Ray Simpson, who really loved the idea of a book about his club, raised his eyes heavenward and moaned a long drunken “No-o-o-o-o!”
“Isn’t it about the same as the old Gaslight Square area?” Stanley Ray Simpson asked, knowing absolutely nothing about Gaslight Square, which was once a very big deal in Saint Louis, before it was burnt to the ground in a series of insurance scams that still makes any decent Saint Louisan nervous to talk about.
“No, man, Gaslight Square was like, further down Olive than that.”
“You mean down past Triple-A Do-Nut Shop and that?” Stanley Ray Simpson asks. We all groan.
“Hell yeah. Where all those vacant lots are now. The city tore all of that down years ago. That’s all been bulldozed to rubble.” Because the point of it was that Stanley Ray Simpson’s vainglorious dream was to start a new Gaslight Square. He thought that the club was the start of a new golden era of St. Louis hipness that stretched all the way back to Bix Biederbeck knocking up local gals and driving them in fender-flapping model-T cars over to East St. Louis for quickie abortions. Stanley Ray Simpson thought that the brief blip of the club was a huge landmark or something in the annals of St. Louis Hipness or something. After all, he was almost on TV once and everything.
Thoroughly disgusted with Stanley Ray Simpson and his precious club, I stumbled back towards the forever occupied bathrooms and somehow ended up back in the kitchens dodging waiters and blinking up into the huge sweaty face of Big Jim, the mountainous goateed Head Chef.
“Hey Big Jim!” I yelled at him, as the chaos of the kitchen swirled all around me, “Whatchoo know about the Stroll?”
“You shoulda been around there about two three decades ago baby!” Big Jim hollers back, shaking towers of flames from sauté pans as gay waiters screeched their final orders for the night. “I had me a fine trio of hoes down on the Stroll. They was in and out of the Acorn Hotel five and six times a night! Man, I was turnin’ some coin!”
“He lying like a muthafucka,” skinny salad girl Kim told me as she helped me to my feet and pushed me out towards the bar before Herbie, the owner, caught me back there. “He ain’t never had no hoes down on the Stroll. He lying like a muthafucka.”
“Yeah, and you was one of them, baby!” Big Jim screeched as the swinging doors between the kitchen and the back bar hit me on the butt on the way back into the comforting darkness of the bar.
More, please! :)