These Little Town Blues

The grimy little town I grew up has made the news. Amazingly, not in relation to being smacked by a hurricane, which is the only reason anyone has ever paid any attention to it before.

Baytown, Texas is a wart on the intestinal tract that is the Houston Ship Channel. It's location between that and a large oil field encouraged Humble Oil to build a gigantonormous oil refinery there. Humble Oil eventually morphed into a lil ole company you might have heard of: Exxon. The refinery is considerably larger than the scruffy burg that hugs it skirts. Scent is supposed to be the one sense that you're not able to call up in you memory, but I swear I can close my eyes and smell that goddam stinkpot.

When I was growing up, although Baytown boasted several very swanky establishments where you could buy guns and ammo, there were no book stores. My whole life, I equated "making it" with "getting the hell out."

So why is this particular Mouth O' Hell in the headlines? A serial male rapist there, and by that, I don't mean a rapist who is male, rather this is a rapist of males. The Houston newspaper emphasizes the rarity of this: "Male-on-male serial rapists are so rare that this case marks the first time the FBI has ever profiled a man alleged to have assaulted other men."

That's my hometown - cancer-causing pollutants and sex freaks. I thank the goddess every day that I escaped.