South Side Dreams None of those reviews are for my book, I have no idea what book they are for either. Mine is not hardly about sex or too much about love for that matter.

I hate the cover til I die.

And since there is not preview, I can give you a few pages here (at absolutely no cost to you) and when I get home, I can post a link to see some more, if you so choose.


chapter one
If the world had stopped, Dorothy Evans would have gotten off. The world did not stop, the Jackson Park El train did. It was the Garfield stop; Dorothy's would be next. 63rd and King Drive, King Drive, the street named for the slain civil rights leader, the street once known as South Park, and before that, Grand Boulevard. Before that it was prairie land, at least that’s what the neighbors told her when she was a little girl.

When she was little the neighbors were always telling her stories about their childhood. They talked about Greenville and Jackson, Mississippi; North Carolina, Arkansas, and the two or three other places they all had seemed to come from. She remembered her father, drunk and laughing, about the old days on Thirty-ninth or Thirty-first, between the stockyards and Cottage Grove, where all the black people on the South Side of Chicago lived.

They spoke about the old days like it was some time of magic; about how they all pulled together because only one of them had a job, and the parties they used to have. She'd heard how they knew Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong before they got rich and famous. They never talked about how shitty the times were; it must have been shitty then because it was shitty now. This shit had to have come from somewhere.

The El train pulled into the King Drive station. 63rd street, the street made infamous for the whores and pimps of the sixties. It wasn't near as bad as the legend, but it was still bad, and a hell of a place to hang out and party. But it wasn't just 63rd, there were 55th, and 47th Streets as well all with clubs that had drinking and dancing. The music was better then too, not like that rap shit her children listen to today.

Dorothy looked over the platform and saw a totally different 63rd Street, not the one she used to jam to, the one where she could hear Martha Reeves and the Vandellas or Smokey and the Miracles. This was not the street she saw the Temptations and the Impressions on. She actually met one of the Impressions once; he lived on 87th Street, just a few miles from where she was living now. Life got that close to her.

63rd Street today was a hellhole. It was full of shit people living shit lives, and Dorothy knew she was just another one of them. Presently there was the matter of negotiating the steps, the crowds and the bums to get to Walgreen’s. She had to get her prescription for the evening, sometimes it would last two evenings, but lately she was lucky to make it one. After maneuvering through the crowds, she went into the store and headed straight for the liquor section.

Dorothy looked at the row of bottles, wondering which one she would be with tonight. She compared the prices from the ultimate cheapest to the sale priced good ones. Tonight it would be one of the better ones. She wasn't feeling that bad, and this was definitely going to help make her feel better. She paid for her vodka and headed out to 63rd Street. She walked down King drive to 61st and then turned east toward Eberhart.

She could have walked down 63rd to Eberhart, but that would have meant walking down the 61st and 62nd blocks of Eberhart. Those were the kinds of blocks that had those drive by shootings, those were the blocks where women got raped, and children disappeared off of. Drug dealers and all that kind of shit was over there. Dorothy would walk down her own block of Eberhart and that was it, those blocks across 61st Street may as well have been on the other side of the world.

61st Street smelled of the ever-present scent of smoke from the barbecue shack there. It was powerful enough to draw Dorothy through the doors, with the intent of getting a few wing dinners for herself and her grandchildren. Her grown ass children could fend for themselves.

Inside, Dorothy took her place in the line. In front of her was another one of those bum ass niggas that seemed to be everywhere now-a-days. They didn't wash, and they didn't seem to be bothered by the stench they created. Even worse they didn't care who they bothered with their odor. Dorothy tried to breathe around him, and she tried not to look at him. He stepped up to the window and ordered a large order of necks and backs.

Dorothy looked up at the menu, for the first time in a long time, and saw two different order sizes of necks and backs. The world was coming to that, po' ass niggas ordering backs and necks. She imagined that one day she would be standing in that line getting a bucket of necks and backs, and thinking it was a good thing. Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a wing dinner, so maybe a bucket of necks and backs wasn't far fetched, not far fetched in the least.

Ten minutes later, the wing dinners were ready. Dorothy gathered her bags and headed back up 61st Street. Across the street was that boy that everybody knew was a drug dealer. He, his friends and his fancy ass car sitting in a vacant lot, it was a damn shame to spend all that money on a car just to sit in a vacant lot with it. Well, he got his mama a big ass car too, and she drove all over everywhere in it. Dorothy looked away as a bus passed by her.

Hmmmmmmm for a man's whose motto is "i don't no nothing" this summary appears to be juuuddd!

~ ..... ...Hey, Wiz, you should check out the blogradio program The Write Spot and plug your book with Kisha Green. She shouts out errbody [author] that asks. The other day she had Brooklen Borne co-hosting with her and he talked about his book. She had a couple of different guests. Anyways, it's a 2 hour listen. You should check it out and get your "shout" on.~


http://thewritevibe.com/

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/WritersLifeChats/2008/04/0...-WRITE-SPOT-ON-RADIO