Bowling Diarrhea

“Your inlaws are not a retirement plan.”- Billboard, I-190 North

I’m in a wasteland, driving to a destination already destroyed. 

Niagara Falls’ present is America’s future: a place half-full of mutant junkies squatting in burnt-out mansions. The Munsters without a laugh track. Warlocks, vampires, and oddly preserved blondes driving boosted 2002 Chevy Trailblazers with garbage bags for windows, billowing down the thruway like post-apocalyptic vandals from Madd Maxx. 

Aboard their vehicles, screaming and malnourished hooligans raise their weapons, hellbent in a mad rush toward Sunoco. They want scratch-offs and vape cartridges: any quick buzz that will help them forget about this place for a few minutes. As they pass, I see their tribal insignias: Bumper stickers with assault rifles and coiled snakes, symbols of the growing hoards of angry, dim, and disenfranchised whites. Republican Bolsheviks. In a few years, they’ll lynch me because I’m a “Libtard” and I have more than 7 dollars in my bank account. I don’t know why they would care about my paper money, the currency here is Donald Trump’s commemorative coins and I’m fresh out. 

I can’t blame these angry whites for their hatred, they’ve watched all their jobs move to third-world countries and now their city looks like one. This is a population perfectly primed for the Fox News twist and grift. All they have left is a giant waterfall and a souvenir shop that sells snow globes and T-shirts that say “I Survived Love Canal”. The shirts only come in size triple-XL and they have extra sleeves for extra limbs. 

A billboard tells me Jesus Saves, and I hope he does. Soon, he’ll be scraping my corpse off this profoundly littered highway. In a fit of terror, I sincerely pray: 

“Oh Jesus Lord our God, If I die on this road, please take my corpse before the giant seagulls do. They live on top of the garbage dump and they harass me in the Outlet Mall parking lot. They take really big poops, but I know you know that, Jesus. One time there, I saw a gull take a poop on the hood of a Lexus, and the frothy violent squirt totaled it! While perched on the wreck, he flipped me the bird and called me a slur. Ever since then, well… I can’t eat the tzatziki sauce at Pita Pit anymore. Any food that is white and chunky, I just can’t stand the sight of it. Don’t let the giant gulls peck at me!  Don’t let my eyeballs and liver become chunky white seagull poop, IN JESUS NAME I -”

I’m interrupted by a horrific sight. A salt-covered ‘98 Cadillac Deville is barreling toward me at 90 miles an hour. The driver is a geriatric Italian man in a fedora crossing multiple lanes in a tangent of senile heedlessness. His car suffers from a mortal wound: the front bumper scrapes the asphalt, and a headlight dangles by a wire. He is clearly fresh from a hit-and-run and he’s coming straight at me. I press my peddle and gun for the pass to avoid the flailing bumper. I turn my head and share a scowl, but he can’t see me. His head is barely above the steering wheel. 

My grandfather used to say that “the Italians destroyed the falls”. I didn’t know he meant their driving. I always figured it was the decades of nepotism and pollution that turned this place into a dump. But, hey, you live, you learn. Bada bing bada boom. 

My mirror shows the disfigured Cadillac exit at the boulevard. He’s likely on his way to some kind of Italian oasis. One of the God-tier pizzerias that hide in the local strip malls. Soon he will be sitting at a table surrounded by a mural of  Sicily. Fake italian marble, painted with a sponge, a lost villa simulated on drywall. With a little luck, his server will be a bombshell in yoga pants but her painted-on eyebrows will give him unease. The dining room doesn’t look like Italy, and the girl seems to be infected with millennial sentiments that he can’t quite explain to himself. The only charming thing left in the place is a portrait of the Rat Pack laughing on the wall. Their cigarettes frozen in time. 

He thinks about the Yankees. Maraylin Monroe’s legs. His late wife’s pasta fagioli. It’s cloudy outside. How did the ancestors of da Vinci and Michaelangelo build a city like this? What happened here? This place is a crime scene, one with no class. A literal wonder of the world. Free tourism for eternity, but it has the charm of a bootleg DVD booth in a flea market parking lot.

This place has been sucked dry. The last puddle in a drought. Lions and crocodiles are drinking from its shrinking edge. Eyeing each other as they lap. Ready to mangle and murder over the last drop of it. 

Who is picking this scab? Throw them in jail and let this place heal.