the day the whorehouse burned

It took place long ago when Mrs. Phillips and I were just starting out. She was as pregnant as a person could possibly get. Nine months had come and gone and Stubby Junior had shown no intentions of making his entrance any time soon.

We were poor as church mice back in those days. I was still in school. In the morning I did my post-graduate work in banjo technology at the University of the Middle of Nowhere. In the afternoons, I dug ditches at the local ditchworks.

We lived in a nice neighborhood at the edge of town. Our little house (we had the second floor) was nestled between a huge power substation and the local whorehouse.

Bedroom community indeed.

This particular whorehouse had a certain amount of noteriety in the area. This was a town without much of anything in it. The nearest shopping mall was a hundred miles to the south. There was no local bank, no Sears Roebuck or Wal-Mart. There were no elevators. There was no cable TV.

But there, a hundred miles from civilization, as far away as you can drive without falling off the edge of the earth, was a two-story cathouse complete with red lights in the window and a rotating staff of strumpets imported from Detroit and Flint and Grand Rapids.

It was a twin of our own house. They had been built at the turn of the century exactly alike. Over the years, the twins had grown up differently. Ours was a squalid refuge for the working poor. Theirs had been painted pink and turned into a business of ill repute.

When my father, the Reverend Doctor J.L. Phillips came to visit, he often reported being slightly disturbed by the beckoning of the working girls leaning out of the windows next door. He always arrived blushing from his clerical collar to the top of his distinguished, bald head.

The houses stood no more than ten feet apart. Many was the time I'd glance out the window and see a naked stranger glancing back at me from the corresponding window next door.

At least once a day, if the furnace kicked on or somebody foolishly attempted to start the dryer, the fuses in the house would all blow at once and we'd be left smelling ozone in the dark. Every day we lived there, I feared that we would be swallowed up in a fire.

Luckily, some previous resident had nailed a derilict wooden ladder to the side of the house as a sort of half-assed fire escape. That would surely have allowed easy and safe exit to me and my very very pregnant wife in the unlikely event of an emergency.

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