Okay, so here’s the update on the corner. The crack ho who once looked like a middle class college kid backpacking across Europe, is now indistinguishable from the other women who sit twitchily on the stoop and stand at the corner. Her backpack and her caramel colored highlights are gone and her hair is brassy and lank. She’s gaunt and scabby and dresses in getto boy clothing, baggy pants, huge hoodies, baseball caps, and somebody else’s old timberlands. The criminal mastermind01 who took over after the murder of the last pathetic dealer is having some problems of his own. Or was. I’m not sure what the status is now. Things have yet to go back to the way they were. There is a vibrating base level of tension that did not exist here a year ago and then events spike up from there. A few months after the drug dealer was shot dead in front of our house, a women was caught in crossfire a few blocks north and shot through the back as she pushed her little boy to safety. She was leaving the laundromat and had no connection to the gunfight. She died. After that there was a lot of bustling back and forth during the day (past the playground across the street) and then things settled back down into an uncomfortable, but fairly consistent tension for a few weeks. That was disrupted when a strange bustle started at the building across the street. People who didn’t live there began sitting in front, day and night, along with a vicious pit bull who, though tethered, would spring and fall back gagging and barking when anyone walked by. It got loud at night and the corner dealer’s lookouts stalked back and forth, while the crack hos wandered a bit out of their normal itinerary. I called 311 and accidentally complained that there was a bad energy on my corner again. I may not have used those exact words, but I’m pretty sure it was something equally stupid. A malevolent force or maybe a prescient vibration? 311, as always, listened with deadly seriousness and demanded descriptions of everyone involved. (Medium height, medium build, medium complexion, with daily altering lined out facial hair. Oh yeah, black hoodies and Yankees caps. That should narrow things down for you, NYPD.) As always, I did not know the password to buy drugs, or the exact location of the stash house, but I do know what a tiny ziplock baggie and an antenna crack stem look like. (I no longer presume the existence of tiny sandwiches and tiny TVs.) I have the hard won streetwise sharpness of a suburban white lady who has watched The Wire and reads extensively in the noire genre. That is to say, I mostly don’t know what 311 is talking about when she asks me a lot of brisk questions about rocks and woolies and ploplocks. (I made that up, as far as I know.)
Once in the summer the baby and I were playing on the jungle gym in the park with my neighbor and her tiny daughter, when a dude came wheeling around the corner with three undercover cops, guns drawn, in pursuit. They tackled him and cuffed him directly below us as my neighbor and I pointed wildly in the opposite direction and asked in high cheerful voices if there are any doggies over by the fence, let’s go over there, okay, let’s go find the doggies, now dammit. The babies were not deceived and watched with timid interest as the police searched the guy on the ground and two more plain clothes cops brought another guy out and laid him at the foot of the slide alongside the first unfortunate fellow. The police stuck around for a ten minutes or so, poking in the bushes and scuffing at the mulch around the trees. As soon as they left, a flock of tweakers showed up to comb the playground and meticulously go through the garbage bins. We and they don’t mind each other though. They often sit on the benches in the park with the (other?) homeless people and in the morning at least, are happy to see the babies, though they don’t usually recognize us by afternoon or evening. They have to conduct all the business of their lives publicly. They argue and wash their faces and pluck their eyebrows and hook up and break up and have sex in the bathroom, where we don’t go both for fear of interrupting and also because of the evil stench.
A few weekends ago we were all awakened at 5am by a loud crack that sounded like someone had violently crunched a ping pong ball next to the bed. It didn’t really sound like a shot to me, but it’s always hard to tell about sounds that wake you from a deep sleep. V got up an hour later and saw a lot of cops and flashing lights. When we left the house at 9, there was blood on the sidewalk, trailing in a zigzag around the corner. The white painted brick and grating over the door of the building across the street were smeared with blood. I checked the police blotter again and again, but nothing appeared. I was very, very anxious for a few days. And then not so anxious any longer, because who can live like that? The people who were sitting in front of the building across the street aren’t there any more. I don’t see any signs of anyone other than the analphabetic chump who has been in charge of the corner since late June. The gossip on the block is that nothing actually happened– that is, some jackass got drunk and accidentally cut himself up, then wandered around for a while. Maybe. But the guys with the dog are gone now.
The neighbors who have been here a long time seem resigned. I don’t think they really ever stopped thinking of the neighborhood as the place it was in the early nineties. They shake their heads and say that things are bad now in the same detached voice they used to say that the Bronx “is coming up now” a few years ago. I suppose they’ve seen these cycles before. It all feels new to me. It’s as though there are simultaneous dimensions occupying the same space and until recently you could see into them but the seething tension in the space occupied by the drug dealers and crack heads read from here like a movie of a storm with the sound switched off. I watched it, and worried about the people inside, but never felt unsafe myself because I never felt compelled to go behind the school and buy crack in the nighttime (That spatial-temporal position is one of several The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe style portals between dimensions). Now the volume is suddenly blaring and the roar from the other dimension is making our dimension vibrate and compress a bit and just feel generally unsteady. I have been a bit discouraged. We get a lot out of living in this lovely landmarked building on this beautiful street, but I suddenly worry that it might actually be dangerous. A bit of inconvenience is fine, and absolutely worth it, but danger is something else. It’s a much finer bit of cost benefit mathematics and I am suddenly uncertain of my ability to properly assess the variables I’m working with. I am often glad that several of my neighbors with children also own their own places and won’t easily drop everything and go elsewhere. All this hand wringing is only one side of the story of course. If it were all bad, the decision would be easy. We’d just leave. But it’s not. It’s mostly good. I was reading Sweet Juniper the other day and feeling awful for minding all this when things could be much worse, and realized that Detroit and the Bronx are not comparable. The problems there arise because there is no one. The problems here, because there are a lot of us. The very structure that makes me feel a part of my neighborhood is vulnerable to the things that affect individuals apart from the built environment and infrastructure. Of course, it’s not all the same people, but it’s people and their people problems, not a lack of people. When I talk about that craziness on the corner, everyone responds the same way: it must be the economy. And at first that makes sense, and then it seems less obvious. What actually is the connection between the two economies? Is it quantifiable or is it really a matter of the quick, squishy answer everyone offers up about people feeling hopeless and turning to drugs. Does it really work like that, and if so, why? What’s the actual mechanism? And does that mean that conversely, when times are good people celebrate by eating leafy green vegetables? The next time I have a spare moment to chat with the internet, I will ask some difficult questions. (No. I will just look at some more photographs and drawings and fall asleep.)
Renie Spoelstra (Indirectly via Drawings and Notes). Still and beautiful– though when will I learn not to read artist statements? They are intended for no one outside the artz biz and leave a taste like licking playground equipment. Can anyone talk sense? There’s someone I was thinking of… Maybe Uta Barth?
Photographs of the Battle of the Somme.
Maureen Drennan’s Meet me in the Green Glen.
Mrs. Beaton online. A quick reference for keeping your ox healthy and resolving domestic disputes. Also lots of pudding and soup.
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I will say this: then, after all that, there was some more illness but now there mostly isn’t. At least for a while. That part was unpleasant, but I sure enjoyed spending every waking moment (and, come to think of it, most sleeping moments) with my child for a couple of months. I would likely have felt differently had there been no end in sight, but this was lovely and finally over with even as it was unfolding in front of me. In the meantime, my living environment has frayed a bit and it’s hard to concentrate when I know that there is a mysterious gooey crust on the top shelf of the fridge and the pile of architecture and science magazines by the Christmas tree is reaching a lethal and precarious height. I can’t even characterize all the other piles. They are a lot like the titles of my posts here.
In the current issue of Tin House, the one with the breastfeeding baby on the cover, (My own talkative toddler will soon be done breastfeeding and I suddenly find it no inconvenience at all now that I know it’s almost over. I heartily recommend it. It was difficult at first, but then both delightful and delightful. I’ll be sad when it’s done. I will also go on a juice fast or something and maybe a yoga retreat or some girly overnight spa thing all by myself. Oh boy!) there is an article called I Cannot Live on Bread At All about having to eat gluten free. After two years, I still haven’t quite worked this out either. I mean, I have worked out the mechanics of eating without and around gluten, but I haven’t quite settled the rest of it. My identity has always been tied up in being the sort of person who will devour anything placed in front of her. (Also puns. Identity bound up in bad puns.) (For a while I mostly didn’t eat meat because I didn’t like anything about the way it was produced, but these days in NYC it’s easy to get high falutin’ meat to meet my meaty meat requirements. Meat!) When I was twelve, my parents took me to the fancy revolving restaurant on top of the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I wore a grey, white, and pink dress polyester dress, and pantyhose for the first time. (They were itchy and sagged at the ankles.) I ordered a caesar salad. I don’t remember anything about it besides the fat anchovy reclining juicily across the croutons. It was an important moment. Since then, I have eaten many other stinky and delicious things. On a daily basis, I handle the gluten thing well enough, but every now and then I think about dim sum and I feel like weeping. Travel is frustrating and I tend to take risks which sometimes don’t pay off. I did that before all this by eating street food and periodically paid the pukey price (Though not as often as I should have, thanks to the mysterious properties of s. boulardii. Very effective for those who can’t swear off fruit, vegetables, juice, meat and whatever else it is you aren’t supposed to touch when you travel; and according to the linked paper prolly something to take when venturing within a three block radius of the hospital.) but now I have the puking on top of the loathsome array of long and short term gluten reactions to consider. I nearly ground my teeth to dust as we walked past barrel after barrel of special strawberry chicha during the festival of the Descent of the Kings in Oyantaytambo last year. Brilliantly arrayed ladies were dipping enormous plastic glasses into barrels of chicha, pouring them back and swirling it all around, elbow deep in pink froth. But alas, it was all fermented with barley. Even the quinoa stuff often is, at least in the hoods I visited around Cuzco. I know. I discussed it at length with half a dozen authors of half a dozen chichas.
On Sunday I went to the Chinese grocery store under Manhattan Bridge to obtain ingredients for sticky rice in lotus leaf. (It will be Christmas dinner.) I found dried oysters to make a veritable oyster sauce, though I could not find a Chinese sausage without wheat or wheat products. Not sure yet what I’ll substitute. Maybe just flavor the roast pork similarly? Though the sausage has a special chewy texture… I had to go several herbalists to find whole lotus leaves, but I’m glad I did. They smell perfumey and utterly different from the banana leaves I was going to substitute. While I was at the grocery store I also purchased something identified as pickled delicious, because I like both of those things (it is a long green plant and I can attest that it is both pickled and delicious); and some fermented sweet rice, the ingredients of which are sweet rice, water, and yeast. The latter fizzed when I opened it and tastes pleasantly of booze.
