Crazy, Drunk and Homeless

St. Louis's Best Kept Secret

Anyone who's ever seen the Arch at sunrise knows how beautiful the Midwest can be.

The metal structure, when caught at the right angle by the sunlight, becomes a halo over a city of white, a place of tradition. Chuck Berry lives here. The Cardinals play in the city, both the birds and the piss-poor baseball team.

But a few blocks away from the Arch, at the Central West End, a man in a pink tutu used to dance down the street every day or so. He'd wave a baton. He was big and black and muscular and sometimes he wore wedding dresses and got into fistfights with cops and parade workers.

He was a much more normal person at one point. Something in his brain twisted itself around and then the sanity was gone, and suddenly snake was suddenly eating its own tail. In this age, there are plenty of excuses to use for acting like an animal, so if you ask him, he'll say that he's just very, very happy. All he wants to do is make people happy. He's trying to cheer everyone up. And why not?

He came here as a tourist, and now he stays to entertain the tourists. Of course, the tourists that come to St. Louis aren't brought here by the dancing man, but rather the damp summer air of the Midwest, the promise of a simple and slow existence in the breast of Americana. They think (correctly) that we live more casually here, that the hard and fast New York-style tumble of the East coast and the back stabbing California sun aren't present in the faces of plump Missouri housewives that wait out on screen door porches with lemonade. Cahm in hea, honey, it's far to warm outsahd.