Vacant lots in Brooklyn are grim, unappealing stretches of rubble grown over with nameless malevolent, malodorous plants; littered with roach-spotted household junk; and inhabited by scabrous, scrofulous, scurrying things you wouldn’t want to look at unless it were out of the corner of an eye, in passing. Vacant lots here in Alabama, even in downtown Huntsville where I live and work (if study can be called work, and if what I do can be called study), are like miniature Euell Gibbon memorials of rustic runaway edibles and roadside ornamentals—dock and pigweed, thistle and cane, poke and honeysuckle, ragweed and wisteria—in which the odd overturned grocery cart or transmission bellhousing, the occasional sprung mattress or dead dog, the tire half-filled with black water, is an added attraction: a seasoning, you might say, that adds to rather than detracts from the charm of the flora. You would never cut through a vacant lot in Brooklyn unless you were being chased by a scarier than usual thug; in Alabama I cut across the same corner lot every day on my way from Whipper Will’s law office, where I slept and studied for the bar, to Hoppy’s Good Gulf where I had my own key to the men’s room.
