Had a couple of conversations today that I really enjoyed because sometimes, in the ever-growing blandness that is Brooklyn becoming, it's easy to forget what Brooklyn was and what it still, in some places, is.
First conversation, with a guy I work with, outside our building during a smoke break. Ralph's a street guy, you can tell. Lives in the Bronx, but grew up in Bushwick, in the '70's.
Go ahead, Google "Bushwick August 1977." Bushwick was the ugly face of the riots and looting that took place during the Blackout of '77. Remember "The Bronx is Burning?" That was 1977, when the city was broke and desolate and on the brink of ruin. That's what Ralph grew up in and escaped from.
Now, the whippersnappers who moved here from Jersey six months ago and run around telling people, "I'm from Brooklyn," really oughta pipe the fuck down and listen to the Ralphs and Carloses and Hectors in their neighborhoods. While they're busy getting their rent paid by daddy and pretending they're going to be rock stars, and looking down their noses at the Ralphs and Carloses and Hectors hanging out on the corners, they are Brooklyn. The real deal.
Ralph is a street kid who managed to escape. Lost two brothers to drugs, prison, and finally, AIDS. Can you imagine losing not one, but two members of your immediate family to AIDS, within a span of eight years?
And Ralph was very frank about his oldest brother -- he spent so much time in prison, Ralph hardly knew him, and when he came out, he would do something stupid just to go back in. Institutionalized, is the word they use. Ralph shook his head between puffs of his cigarette.
"Man, I don't know how I got outta there alive."
Then, as I walked up Bushwick Ave from the subway, I saw Carlos, my neighbor from downstairs, walking along with a kid about 13, with a basketball in his hands. Carlos grew up in the neighborhood, over on the South Side. South Side's now full of more of the same, hipster guys in skinny jeans and their overfed 25-year-old suburban girlfriends. (I ask again, what's with all the fat 25-year-old girls?)
When I lived on South 2nd, it was still pretty grim, very much a gang and drug area, but in six short years the neighborhood has become "desirable." Meaning whiter, as landlords jacked up rents on rent-stabilized apartments that these kids are too stupid to go to the Housing Department to look up to see if they're being overcharged. Most of them probably are, and it serves them right. Hey, Dad's paying the rent, who cares what it actually costs, right?
So Carlos gave me a hug and commiserated briefly about his buddy Mambo, may he rest in kitty peace, and introduced me to this kid, who if you saw him walking toward you, most of you would cross the street, or at least clutch your purse a little tighter. But before I could say a word, Carlos starts braggin' on this kid. He's a good student, he listens to his mother, he doesn't get into trouble...he has braces. Carlos pointed out this last with as much pride as the good grades and obeying his mother.
This kid is not related to Carlos, but because he's neighborhood, he kind of is related. It's Brooklyn, man. Carlos told a story of how the kid brought home some not-so-great grades once, and his uncle, one of the guys around the neighborhood, made him go to the teacher and apologize and promise to do better. The kid did it, too.
Can you imagine growing up in a place where getting good grades and wearing braces on your teeth marks you as so special that your entire neighborhood is pulling for you to do better -- to escape? Where you are the hope for people who couldn't or didn't get out?
Can anyone of us, who grew up in even moderately affluent circumstances (my family wasn't rich, and Daddy didn't buy me a car when I was 16, and sometimes we ate bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches toward the end of the week because that's what the grocery budget could handle, and I certainly heard "no, we can't afford it," often enough when I was growing up -- no dance lessons, or scouts, or camp for this girl -- but I certainly never felt like we were poor, either. I guess having lots of brothers and sisters helped, somehow.
We were a tribe, and we were laughing so much around the table that I always thought bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches were a TREAT, for god's sake. Food, no matter what it was, means laughter and family to me. I had a happy childhood. So sue me. Subject for another post.) -- can any of us really imagine what it must be like to have to climb the hills these kids have to climb -- just to get the the playing field that a lot of us started from?
Try to imagine growing up in a neighborhood, in an environment where poverty and violence and crime are the norm, instead of a place where getting good grades and playing sports and going to college are expected. Do you think you would be able to bootstrap your way out of the projects or the ghetto? We'd all like to think we could. The kids who do get out, the ones who get the good grades, and don't get into trouble, and manage to maybe get a scholarship to a state school? I guarantee you they have had to work five times as hard to get that college acceptance letter as we did.
Okay, I've gotten up on a little bit of a soapbox here to direct my own episode of Limousine Pinko Theater, but I guess living in the neighborhood, and having the locals tell each other, "She cool. She neighborhood," and not having the fluffy air mattress of some trust fund to catch me if I fall, having to stretch a paycheck to make ends meet and not always being able to do it, gives me not much patience to sit around on my fat, privileged-by-ghetto-standards ass and whine about how some boy was mean to me. I snapped myself out of that one fairly quickly, mainly because I realized that doing so was wallowing in a luxury I can't afford.
Can any of us, really?
Besides, I'd rather be neighborhood.
6 comments:
Dammit, realized I lost half a thought in a bad edit and can't load blogger on my Kberry. Fuck. So now this half-finished thought will have to hang there until tomorrow morning when I can finish the thought. Sorry, folks!
My editing skillz improved immensely after my guys went all IT on me and I couldn't blog before going to work and then log onto Blogger again at work and fix my post a hundred times. :)
(I know I still have issues, such as teh who/whom thing, THANK YOU DON!)
Anyway, yep, I was way privileged, NOT RICH, but lucky enough. My girls were for a long time, and even now compared to the average (though not the average HERE), but not what they expected or what I thought they would have. That's life though and they may end up better people for it. Maybe I should have had some harder times in my late teens/early20s instead of being able to la la around. Who knows.
Hey, I'm "Neighborhood" in my neighborhood. Mainly cause I'm a perennial board member in the neighborhood association. It's different here among the wealthy. I've got more in common with the old school guys who were all Boeing engineers and Maritime folks that bought waterfront before it was anything special and were the kind of guys that could improvise an engineered solution to just about anything, as opposed to the new school guys who pretty much just throw money at stuff.
But we ain't poor in this parts, and the greater area (my city) is breeding the new super race. Not that they are any one race-they're not, but all these super smart, multi hued children of super smart parents are all gonna grow up together and intermarry and become our new overlords.
It's not a question of privelige, they are priveliged, but they're putting every bit of effort that they've got into it. Frankly, it scares me, cause my son is slacker-track and he's still a whole year ahead of where I was when I was his age/grade.
Of course, I went to an interesting mix of schools growing up. At one of the four junior highs I attended, we were always escorted by a teacher to the lunchroom. Apparently there was a problem with a race riot the previous year. I was never "neighborhood" growing up, cause I was always new in town. But I had every other advantage.
I've been anticipating light-brown nation for years, and I can't wait.
Where I grew up "neighborhood" was guys who went off to J&L Steel in the morning, or some other blue-collar gig. Here in NYC it's the firemen and cops and construction guys and electricians and stagehands (did you know stagehands make beaucoup bucks?)
I love that my nephew and niece (19 and 17) are part of a generation that is virtually color-blind.
If folks want to read here and mentally red-pencil my posts, I say have a good time. I won't refudiate any of them.
My nabe was half and half. Simply stated, the Town part of Town-and-Gown was split between working class flatlands and more educated, better paid hillside. (The Gown part was split between internationally known college professors of various types and hippies, activists, etc., IOW a whole nother story.) I grew up where the hills met the flats: A few blocks either direction and you were firmly in one or the other.
I forget what that has to do with anything, except I never felt priveleged (I had a single mother, hello) nor guilty about not being poor. We just sort of existed, and I still envy people whose family households had laughter and/or *gulp* dancing. (People really do that?)
I got mugged a few times and then grew height and a street face and never got mugged again. People used to cross the street when I was coming. Can't explain that because I didn't roll with anyone, just sort of hulked along by myself. It's a weird thing to remember. I still wear the street face way too often and people (at work, say) tend to think I'm pissed off. They leave me alone. Not what you want at work, but I don't give a shit anyway. Besides, sometimes I do look approachable.
Still don't know where I'm going with this except to add my impression that poor people who want their children to succeed tend to be immigrants. This is false, of course. Maybe my impression is more that a higher proportion of the really poor who have not lost hope tend to be immigrants. That makes a tiny bit more sense.
I have that face, Don! For the first 2-3 years in my neighborhood, Carlos tells me, everyone thought I was a cop.
Once, some weasely little guy followed me off the subway after I worked late, and after it was clear he was following me (walking 3 feet behind me and ducking across the street mid-block when I did was a clue, duh), I rounded on him and put my finger in his face and advanced on him, "Don't you EVEN fucking try it." I was in one of my dont-mess-with-me moods.
"a higher proportion of the really poor who have not lost hope tend to be immigrants" -- this is so true. Maybe because the circumstances some of the immigrants left were so much worse, and they still view America as the Land of Opportunity.
I purposely haven't addressed the "crabs in a bucket" mentality that also exists in poor communities, which is something that you also see a lot of, because I'm thinking to maybe write a separate post about that.
Post a Comment