here nobody pays for electricity every so often people go in for an X-ray not because they’re worried about their health but because the X-ray costs practically nothing and then you cut it up into lots of tiny strips of plastic and you stick one into the meter which keeps it from turning and nobody pays for water where I come from because they haven’t even installed water meters nobody’s ever paid for garbage collection either and it’s the same with everything here because down here we’ve never had an example to look up to there’s never been any cause for hope for instance if only in my town there had even ever been a tiny minority that did things honestly or if there had been any public services you could rely on even for a few people but something that the others could hope to get for themselves that they could dream of but there has never been anything of the sort there’s never been a fucking thing zero never nothing at all because where I come from in the evening after working hard all day if one evening you happened to feel like going out there’s not a single place to go I’m not saying a club or a bar there’s not even a public square or a piazza where you could hang out with your friends so you just loiter on the sidewalk and the only street is this Corso Umberto that’s it all the rest is just little alleys houses and alleys and lanes so all you can do is stand outside an apartment building lobby door on Corso Umberto like an idiot on the sidewalk and make sure you don’t get hit by a car

and girls let’s not even think about girls you never get a chance to meet girls or spend time with them or if you do meet some at school they won’t give you the time of day because since as I’ve pointed out this is just an absolutely shitty town if there’s a girl from here who goes to school in Aversa and if she meets boys from her town in Aversa she’s not going to want to have anything to do with them she’ll never get close to them because she knows that if she does the boy will go back to town and spread rumors about her so if she’s going to get close to a boy it’ll be one from Aversa or even from another neighboring town but if a boy from this town ventures outside to other towns he’s not likely to make time with girls from somewhere else because girls from other towns look down on boys from this town they consider them to be so many uncivilized criminal asshole murderers and after all here in my town the boys have never really had much contact with girls at least not to go out with them on a date or even really to run into them on the street just to say hello instead they cluster together in groups of boys and after years of that they degenerate into a bunch of backward brutes