Diaper Alley

There is no urban domain on the planet Earth without a skid row. Whether it is as big as a city itself or localized to a small cluster of houses, every city and town the world over has one. The skid row of Innisfail was known around the town as "Diaper Alley". It was lovingly nick-named as such because of the amount of parents that resided there. Young families, single mothers, potato-nosed alcoholic fathers with their merry bands of F.A.S. children, were scattered throughout the block. This meant that the large garbage bins placed intermittently down the alley were always chock full of little bundles of shit.

Diaper Alley consisted of one street that branched off from the main road through town. It was made up entirely of four-plexes aside from a Dairy-Queen fast food restaurant and Suds Liquor Store & Car-Wash both of which were at the north end of the street bordering the main road.
Just one more bad omen for the neighborhood, being gated by businesses both hocking unhealthy lifestyles. I`m sure it must have exacerbated things for many a resident.

Almost everyone who drank at the Ooze, at least semi-regularly, either lived there or had at one time. Those who didn't actually live there at any point in their lives had, however, most certainly been to one party or another on the ragged strip. A four-plex on Diaper Alley was almost a rite of passage for the young adults of Innisfail.
Everybody took their turn. Some took several.

Buck's history with Diaper Alley began even before he was born. When his parents had first moved to Innisfail to settle down and raise a family in the early 1980's, that was where they went, for the same reason that people still shack up there today. It was the cheapest place in town and there was almost always a vacancy. This was where they met Chops' parents, who happened to live next door. Both couples got pregnant at the same time with Edith the Fedith and Chops respectively, but would be living elsewhere by the time their children were born. Yet another strand in the complex web of Innisfailian relationships.
The fact that his own parents had resided in one of these tiny domiciles years before his birth always made Buck think of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of other people who must have inhabited those spaces in that time. So many people just coming and going. So many secrets and memories fused into the walls like nicotine stains.

The first four-plex Buck physically went to himself was inhabited at that time by Davey Wasted. Buck was a pup, no more than twelve, and it was the first safe haven he had found to drink or smoke or do what he pleased without the supervision of adults. There were no parents to worry about coming home because Davey was eighteen years old and lived with his girlfriend, Andrea and an assortment of room-mates.

One morning there is a knock at Davey's door. Andrea walks to the porch in her pajamas and finds two police officers on the front step. They are looking for the fugitive who stole the tractor. Andrea has no idea what they are talking about and invites them in to explain themselves. This is when she sees the Animal on her couch. As it turned out he had attempted to walk home from a bar in the neighboring town of Bowden, but on the way decided it was too cold, found and stole a tractor in a farmers field, parked it at a gas station and walked the remaining block to Davey's front door. The police simply followed his foot-steps in the snow.

Eventually, as Davey and Andrea became a more serious couple, they relocated to an apartment on their own and that was that for the old four-plex. Eight years and several life-times later Andrea would find herself in a different unit up the block living with her younger sister and the daughter that Davey had sired with her. Davey himself was in Calgary.
C'est la vie.

It wasn't for some years after the Wasted unit folded that another party-house of sorts emerged for the group in that old familiar neighborhood. This one was occupied primarily, by JFK and his girlfriend Shanna. They rented out the extra bedroom in the basement to Nan. Although there was only three people living there officially, there was certainly alot more people in the house at any one given time.
JFK and Shanna's previous apartment had been the same, constantly overrun with friends and visitors. They had nowhere else to go.

(JFK had coined a term there, which was coffee-mate kids, sort of a product specific kind of latch key kid. It was meant to describe children whose parents would give them coffee-mate and water as a substitute for milk. That was diaper alley)

That four-plex seems to stand out in the group’s history as a kind of love-den. Suddenly everyone turned into a couple and what used to be a bunch of friends sitting around listening to music and indulging in various substances now became a triple, quadruple or even quintuple date. All of them in the same room but focused on their individual pairings. It was very cute.
For almost the entire duration of Jon and Shanna's occupancy, Bizz had annexed himself the storage space underneath the stairs for himself and his girlfriend. It was a small closet with a single mattress on the floor and it was Bizz's little patch of heaven.

Shorlty after JFK and Shanna's place was established, the group found another sanctuary up the road. This unit was inhabited by Crusty Bill Dangers, Keeba Llama and Beaton. By this time everyone had reached legal drinking age, those who remained in school now had their diplomas, and supposedly everyone was starting to grow up. Despite all this alleged maturing, there was a great deal of juvenile hijinks.

One particular occasion saw a group of them indulging in one of the worst mushroom experiences someone could force upon themselves. Shortly after gobbling afew handfuls apiece and washing them down with forties of malt liquor, they decided to put themselves through six hours of graphic violence and disgusting debauchery by watching "Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies" as well as "Necrophagia: Through the Eyes of the Dead". Seeing GG Allin eat his own feces is unpleasant enough without the aid of hallucinogenic drugs.

Eventually, of course, real life had begun to impose itself on the love den and party shack respectively, tensions ran high among various room-mates for a grocery list of typical room-matey grievances and everyone had decided to move on for one reason or another.
JFK and Shanna moved to a small community south-east of Innisfail called Three Hills to start a family and, sad as everyone was to see them go, there was no longer any anxiety about where they would all meet to swill beer and act like idiots. With everyone finally of legal tender, they found a cozy new home at the Ooze. Not that it was the last they would see of Diaper Alley, not by a long shot.

Crusty Bill Dangers made her triumphant return to Diaper Alley moving in with Nan to a place that ended up being known as "The House of Health". This was of course a very intentional use of irony on their parts as there was absolutely nothing healthy about it. Crusty Bill had moved in after both her and Nan’s relationships had simultaneously shit the bed. Nan’s boyfriend moved out, Crusty Bill moved in. Both girls were still experiencing the residual funk of love lost and were feeding off of one another's blues.
So unlike many of it’s predecessors, the House of Health was not so much a party house as it was a drink-until-you-can’t-feel-feelings house. It was a kind of catharsis that became the norm for afew of the crew. Happy being depressed.
Their refrigerator became a physical manifestation of all the negative emotions wafting through the walls. Day by day it was covered with odd bits of graffiti, gloomy song lyrics, vulgar inside jokes, de-faced celebrities and self-loathing proverbs. Some of it was funny, other parts were just downright sad.

Some years and several different living arrangements later, the girls found themselves in Diaper Alley again, but on opposite sides of the gravel strip. Nan was living with Bizz, who was back in Innisfail for the summer in between semesters at the University of Edmonton. As one would expect, it was a leisurely party house. Bizz didn't work for one hour of that summer and Nan was as carefree as usual. Crusty Bill, on the other hand, was pregnant, preparing to start her family with the Animal and his nine year old daughter. She gave birth to a boy while living there.
When Buck first held him, thinking back to his own origin, he had to wonder, will this boy be gallivanting around this street with one of the neighbors in twenty years?

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me

I'll bring them to Diaper Alley, unit C

And let them sleep on my floor"

She actually said this one day, but the only people present to hear it were a group of tourists from Milan who didn't understa