used to divide neatly into two parts, the river splitting the town in half.
On the east side, the further away from the river you got, you had the middle classes and the upper middle classes and then the very wealthy. The west side was largely working class, though even that was subdivided by several factors — race, steady employment (a good factory job was worth more than menial labor) and aspirations. Men who wore neckties to work (even if they sold shoes) did not want to live in the same kind of house a truck driver did.
This all started to change in the eighties when the yuppies decided to democratize Cedar Rapids i.e. start building on the west side where land prices were cheaper. Today the east side still has the greatest number of upper-class and wealthy people, but the west side also has its share of climbers, boomers and yuppies, everybody from cut-rate dentists to advertising executives. And, because the gods of urban planning seem to like such ironies, the west side can no longer claim the roughest parts of the city. No, they're now to be found on the east side, all the Chicago drug-gang members who moved out here to tap a new market (not unlike Amway with guns) — drugs and numbing poverty and terrifying violence all now within less than a few miles of where some of the better folks live. I recently saw a little black girl run into the middle of the street. She was as ragged and filthy and frightened-looking as a waif you might see on a TV show about famine. You never used to see this in Cedar Rapids. And you didn't have one or two shootings a night, either. Drugs have turned all small cities into bad imitations of the bigger ones.
My pal Perry took me over to the west side.
I used to live out there back when there was still some pastureland and fast silver creeks and ragged piney hills. I had a horse named Buck and a dog named Timmy and a sister named Jane and we all played together and had a great grand time, especially in the fall when the leaves were turning and the air was intoxicating with a smoky scent.
You couldn't imagine any of that now. Maybe as many as 1,000 housing units packed both sides of the street. This was the new working class, better fed, clothed, housed and educated than the old one, and yet paying at least a small price for it by being packed together this way.
We drove twenty blocks and then turned right, toward the bluffs and apartment houses and condo units that the yuppies had brought along with them.
He crossed the long bridge that spans the Cedar River and then turned left, up into the highest of the piney hills. He came to a gate marked PRIVATE and stopped. He took a garage-door opener from his glove compartment and opened the gate. He drove through.
I watched all this through my trusty Swarovski field glasses, the ones the Bureau let me take along when I resigned. I sat across the road, staring.
Through the pines at the top of the hill, I could see the shape of a Chalet-style house. Perry pulled in there, got out of his car and went up to the front door. He walked very fast. He was smoking a cigarette with hard fast anxious drags.
The rest I couldn't see.
The next ten minutes, I did some more reading about sexual mutilation — not a subject you want to embrace right before dinner-time — and kept an idle eye on the house where Perry Heston had gone. I had the sense that he was on some urgent kind of mission. I often have this sense of things. And most of the time I'm wrong.
This time, however, I was right.
They came out of the house, the two of them, moving fast.
There was a very pretty young woman with him. She wore a red blouse, tight black slacks. Her outsize dark glasses, vivid red lips and perfect cheekbones gave her the look of a starlet.
Perry Heston carried a large buff blue suitcase.
He put the young woman in the shotgun seat, stuffed the suitcase in the back seat, and then got in the car and started up the engine.
He backed down the driveway very
On the east side, the further away from the river you got, you had the middle classes and the upper middle classes and then the very wealthy. The west side was largely working class, though even that was subdivided by several factors — race, steady employment (a good factory job was worth more than menial labor) and aspirations. Men who wore neckties to work (even if they sold shoes) did not want to live in the same kind of house a truck driver did.
This all started to change in the eighties when the yuppies decided to democratize Cedar Rapids i.e. start building on the west side where land prices were cheaper. Today the east side still has the greatest number of upper-class and wealthy people, but the west side also has its share of climbers, boomers and yuppies, everybody from cut-rate dentists to advertising executives. And, because the gods of urban planning seem to like such ironies, the west side can no longer claim the roughest parts of the city. No, they're now to be found on the east side, all the Chicago drug-gang members who moved out here to tap a new market (not unlike Amway with guns) — drugs and numbing poverty and terrifying violence all now within less than a few miles of where some of the better folks live. I recently saw a little black girl run into the middle of the street. She was as ragged and filthy and frightened-looking as a waif you might see on a TV show about famine. You never used to see this in Cedar Rapids. And you didn't have one or two shootings a night, either. Drugs have turned all small cities into bad imitations of the bigger ones.
My pal Perry took me over to the west side.
I used to live out there back when there was still some pastureland and fast silver creeks and ragged piney hills. I had a horse named Buck and a dog named Timmy and a sister named Jane and we all played together and had a great grand time, especially in the fall when the leaves were turning and the air was intoxicating with a smoky scent.
You couldn't imagine any of that now. Maybe as many as 1,000 housing units packed both sides of the street. This was the new working class, better fed, clothed, housed and educated than the old one, and yet paying at least a small price for it by being packed together this way.
We drove twenty blocks and then turned right, toward the bluffs and apartment houses and condo units that the yuppies had brought along with them.
He crossed the long bridge that spans the Cedar River and then turned left, up into the highest of the piney hills. He came to a gate marked PRIVATE and stopped. He took a garage-door opener from his glove compartment and opened the gate. He drove through.
I watched all this through my trusty Swarovski field glasses, the ones the Bureau let me take along when I resigned. I sat across the road, staring.
Through the pines at the top of the hill, I could see the shape of a Chalet-style house. Perry pulled in there, got out of his car and went up to the front door. He walked very fast. He was smoking a cigarette with hard fast anxious drags.
The rest I couldn't see.
The next ten minutes, I did some more reading about sexual mutilation — not a subject you want to embrace right before dinner-time — and kept an idle eye on the house where Perry Heston had gone. I had the sense that he was on some urgent kind of mission. I often have this sense of things. And most of the time I'm wrong.
This time, however, I was right.
They came out of the house, the two of them, moving fast.
There was a very pretty young woman with him. She wore a red blouse, tight black slacks. Her outsize dark glasses, vivid red lips and perfect cheekbones gave her the look of a starlet.
Perry Heston carried a large buff blue suitcase.
He put the young woman in the shotgun seat, stuffed the suitcase in the back seat, and then got in the car and started up the engine.
He backed down the driveway very
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