Ghetto Movie Theater

Back in the day, when America's air often buzzed with a thousand flying bullets in broad daylight—like that was the sane thing to do with twin concepts like "new" and "people"—we had an attitude of social looseness that constantly imposed upon the needs of others with an impunity that was artificially called "freedom", when, really, it was often a smokescreen for insanity committed in public spaces without fear of censure. Take, for instance, the ghetto movie theater (see also, Times Square in the 70s: http://gothamist.com/2013/03/27/photos_of_times_square_in_the_1970s.php#photo-2). 

Kids dared one another to run into a peepshow theater and back as if we were risking our young lives like western gunslingers of yore, and we were. Yeah, we had the buses of the Port Authority to take us back home, but if you missed the last sane commuter bus leaving the station, it was just you and your friends with hours of time in an almost empty bus depot, trapped with bums who got much scarier, louder, and active with each passing sip from their cheap bottle of wine. 

We were terrified of getting caught in the city's rain, because we knew a trickle of water could rouse a bum if it reached him before the rains stopped, like the time me and my boyfriend watched water fall down in torrents, stuck underneath a Central Park overpass. We only had so much time left before the water woke him up, and then it finally did. He was pissed off until he suddenly noticed us, which sent him flying towards us in a greatly renewed psychotic rage.

Which meant that we were constantly searching for safe places and happy diversions to combat the hellish scenes popping off around us. It was, uh, a little stressful, to put it mildly. People chain-smoked and drank like "The Final Days of Judgment" were being visited upon them any second, and if you believed the signs of the ranting religious zealots who frequented the midtown tourist areas, the end was always near. Ditto with the bald white "Hari Krishnas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Krishna_(mantra), who were usually ex-hippie burn-outs from the 60s looking to wind down (or amp up) from their tense neurosis "the natural way", which meant spinning around like a "Whirling Dervish" for hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevlevi_Order), banging tambourines and asking for money from onlookers.

There were also door-knocking, tie-wearing, short-haired Jehovah's Witnesses, robotic over-groomed Mormons who looked like extras from a 1950s-era movie, or "Moonies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonie_%28nickname%29) who would turn aggressive on you in a New York minute, which made the average New Yorker play this weird game of pretending not to notice that bleeding guy sitting next to you on the train, because he might stab you if you tried to help him out. Eye contact was also a serious no-no that kept us from helping out one another, because my dad repeated the same line about it over and over again with "no good deed goes unpunished", as an illustration of that very principle we used to live by. 

And so, our public lives were rife with strangely surreal scenes from horror movies or prescient sci-fi movies like "Escape from New York", that warned of The Second Coming as an apocalypse for the damned. Behavior was at an all-time low, and public life reflected the lesser of two evils that presented itself to us at any time. Sure, smoking a big stinky cigar in a movie was rude, oppressive, and unhealthy for everyone around you, but heck, it was better than rape, right? Right?! People sneaked booze and pot into theaters all the time under their jackets, and gay men used the movie's bathrooms as frequent hook-up spots that became so notorious for city people, we avoided public restrooms like The Plague. Anything could happen to you in there.

Like the worst of the human experience that becomes repetitive over time, we got used to extremely fucked-up people. Not comfortable or complacent, but accustomed to seriously violent offenders who'd snap at the slightest excuse to do so. People shouted back at the movie screen, or hissed their questions loudly to each other, in bad stage whispers that were clearly audible to everyone around them. My mom is so bad with watching movies, that I got used to prepping my friends about her odd behavior, because she loses the thread of the narrative quicker than anyone I've ever met. 

At home it was better, because we could stop the movie for food and drinks, or bathroom runs, or funky relatives with serious impairments, which my parents are not nice about. They're New Yorkers from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, ya feel me? They aren't "nice" about anything, including their own ignorance that they self-defend like embarrassed kids at the rough local playground for tough kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and greased-back hair, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while snapping their chewing gum loudly. In other words, "assholes" presenting themselves in quick visual shorthand. 

"Who is that?!" my mother would yell out loud, and if you ignored her, she'd just abuse you until you had to give her the answer, which she argued about through her constant sense of befuddlement and misunderstanding, especially if she objected to the highbrow intellectualism that surpassed her grasp of the subject matter, like an offended two year-old after their lollipop is ripped out of their hands. It was histrionic bullshit, but look where they came from. Horror shows.

Years later, after we escaped our own individually tragic fates that working class people like us were often fated to, we could sit back and relax over something as simple as watching a t.v. show or a movie without being molested with uncommon violence for our presence or preferences. And, lo and behold, along came a show that addressed our humble city roots with a fun twist: we were safe now, and we also had homemade hand puppets to help spread the fun around to our friends. We'd say to each other in asides: "Yeah, check out that guy's hat and hairdo! Historically accurate, n'est ce-pas?" Or: "Yo, did you see that karate move?", quickly followed by "Hey, I wonder what he'll do next?" "Oh, I don't know! Let's pretend to be surprised by hammy bad acting and a cliched script!" Ahhh! Look out!! He's right behind you! Nooo!!! Don't go into that scary dark basement! 

Credit

In addition to his lack of driving skills, Cotto has no idea what money stands for (hint: it's for goods and services).To him, every day is either the best day ever (like a whacked-out teenager at Disneyland), or his imminent death—like a kid eaten by a gator at Disneyland (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/us/alligator-attacks-child-disney-florida/). And that's exactly what his serious mental disorders are about: really really REALLY!!! great things that make you stay up for days and days and you just don't understand and why aren't you more excited, Marie? Sleep?! Food?! WHY???!!! GET PUMPED UP!!! Yeah, kid. Call me when the show is over, or starts, whichever happens last. I'm going to sleep, and I'm eating breakfast. Bitch.

The same is true about his understanding of family. His dad was his drinking buddy/sexual escapades partner (aye yi yi), and his mom's new "old man" looks at him kinda funny, too. He's been staying up late to watch t.v. recently, so he could screw the people living around him from using "his" pull-out sofa as a bed, and when you question that, he blames you for his escalating drunken abuse. It's a landscape without any safe places, which makes jail seem much better in comparison, because at least you get decent food and a bed to sleep in, you know? And maybe skip the nighttime rape scene, for once.

I felt bad for him because he had it that hard coming up in "da game" of life, but he's such a selfish fucking dick, you can't help but wish for him to be as far away from you as possible. Just because someone's really sick doesn't mean they can't also be a completely selfish asshole. I'm sure the staff at his residency center wants him dead or gone on his worst days, particularly the days when he deliberately craps his bed so the big buff orderly in the tight white scrubs can change his diapers for him while he sexually harasses him with molester-type comments. You know? A punch in the face is sometimes much quicker and easier than strapping him down to the bed and cleaning out his mess. Poor fucker. I've been there with head-cases before. Many, many, many times over.

So, when I asked him about his "credit card debt" that he intentionally mischaracterized as a fun "Sex and the City" shopping spree, it was just as depressing as I thought. "Well, Marie...", he began. Oh, OK. I'm the dumb fuck sleeping on your floor in your Army/Navy sleeping bag that you can talk down to. I forgot where I was for a minute! Actually, I didn't. Yeah, Cotto. What happened? I wanted him to just take his sleeping meds and go the fuck to sleep, but he was going off of his prescriptions one-by-one, because he couldn't handle the stress of homelessness, welfare, and his broke-ass two-year school on Staten Island for people without their G.E.D.'s coping with several mental disorders, and I was supposed to pretend that wasn't true with him, so he could psychotically pretend that I was his trapped quarry, when in truth, I could crack open his shin bones to the marrow whenever I wanted. 

Not that I wanted that. He was a dumb bloated mess of a human being, and I questioned that status on most days, too. But, let's hear it. It'll come out anyway, and it's not like I have anything better to do on a Tuesday night, besides getting a good night's sleep on this here dirty tenement floor so I can out-design the crazy "creative director" at work tomorrow, who would short-change me out of a health plan and rip-off all of my cover designs out of professional envy and hateful sabotage. So, yeah. Go ahead. Well, my grandmother died, and she asked me to "look after" her mail while she was in the hospital, so I did. Uh huh. I question every part of that sentence, but yeah. And?

"I took her Sears credit card." For how much, Cotto? And he waffled on that, too. Sigh...every step of the way, eh asshole? "About 3 or 4 grand." It was probably much higher than that, between the $5-$7000 range, because he then told me his "lawyer" advised him to pay it back quickly. Riggght...while you blow off your dish-washing job (not good enough), buy dirt weed instead of meds, and jam in a stressful college-like experience at the same time, so you can justify your subsequent freak-out and imprisonment? I think I know this tune! "It came addressed to her in the mail and I was staying there." So? So what? "I needed money." He clammed up like a hardened convict who's just "lawyered up" because he already knows the drill.

But, like, why? I mean you have two fucking cell phones, an expensive video game console that's also your hard drive, an iPad, a laptop, and ghetto headphones. The whole nine, kid. What the fuck did you spend it on? I never got a real answer that made any sense to me. What the fuck did he buy with it? For those of you reading me outside of the U.S., "Sears, Roebuck and Company" is a really old catalog business that began when the west was still a bison-filled frontier for European sharecroppers in covered wagons hoping to escape/frame "Indians" for all of their horrible massacres, in a lustful quest for blood and oil money that has come to be known as "The Wild West." You've seen the movies, right? Like that. Or, more specifically, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears.

I mean, he wasn't exactly home-owner material as a self-entitled welfare queen. People like me work hard. Not him! He's "special". Well, Cotto, sigh...don't make me phrase it like I'm taking away your lollipop, you fucking prick. I'm tired. What did you buy with it? I waited...and then waited some more. And some more. This, from an arrogant dick who liked to pretend he was exceedingly verbal and highly loquacious with his carefully chosen bon mots. Give it up! He looked down, and thought about it, but finally, he was too embarrassed to tell me. I'm sure it wasn't for garden hoes, or trimming shears for his fucking front lawn with carefully groomed hedges. And to this day, I still don't know what he bought with a housewares store credit card used by Americans for generations as their rural general store.

I know what we did. My mom asked me to circle clothes out of a huge Christmas catalog every year for toys and clothes, and if they didn't fit or we didn't like it, we went back to the store in Nanuet (still there) to return it. That's what country folk did back then, while your dad browsed the barbecue grills and dreamed of a motorized lawn mower with a comfy riding seat, like the big Italian douchebag next door to us had, riding around smiling on his ghetto "pizza money" from his 'hood storefront in the Bronx that would become a model for the summertime NYC movie classic "Do the Right Thing" that explored ethnic and racial tensions between the Italian-American immigrants who earned their plush living off the backs of impoverished, trapped African-Americans living in a hot city without air conditioning, just like we did.

We had heavy, awkward window units that sat tipsily in the small window sills of our split-level home, and if we wanted even that cool comfort in our rooms, we had to pull down a ladder in the ceiling to go into the attic, carefully stepping between the beams so we wouldn't fall through the floor, and then pushing the heavy units down the stairs at a steep angle to whoever was at the bottom. We had air conditioning in our small bedrooms only; not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the converted basement downstairs. If it was too hot to stay in our rooms for too long, we went outside, or we walked a mile and a half to the public pool up-and-down the impressive hills of this area, or we ran through a sprinkler on the lawn, spraying each other with a green garden hose. I know that he didn't do any of that, because he said would die in his early 50s, just like his father and his father's father. 

It was sad, but it was real. As he told me his life of woe, I knew his life was designed for him to fail. And so, I listened to his halting confessions that he had to work up the nerve to tell me over shared dirt weed blunts and cheap beer, because it probably included evil staples of the projects like child rape, child abandonment, and/or child endangerment. How did I know? He told me his dad was his first "party" partner. You fill in the blanks. And that's what I did. I "read" him expertly, better than anyone else did, and that's why I got out of the ghetto alive, just like my hardcore New York City family. That, and I kicked out an old abandoned bookcase piece-by-piece after work one night, so I could leave the floor of his dirty room for the room next door with a chain through the opening where the doorknob used to be, in front of him and our neighbor "Rex", his "hood rat" partner-in-crime for those days, even though it was mostly particleboard. Almost.

My mutha's naybahood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Avenue
My fahthizz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn
And mine, bitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodside,_Queens

Camouflage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage

We've all seen the reports about "Problem America" and our supposedly rabid bloodlust for gun violence, but that only tells part of the story. For every raging "gun nut" with a pseudo-militaristic bent who's overdosed on too many boyhood war flicks, there exists an actual veteran with a licensed weapon who belongs to a legitimate gun club, carrying an updated permit tied to a rigid background check with a psych screening (perhaps a blood test with a urine sample or two thrown in, for good measure) that's current. Why would owning and driving a car require more testing than carrying a deadly weapon? It shouldn't be like that, and that's not our intention here*.

As a nation of expats, exiles, and immigrants from war-torn countries around the world that have in power a wealthy ruling elite funded by corruption, Americans tend to be a little sensitive about oil barons in fancy trucks who have all the guns, and we don't. Our Constitution actually preserves our rights as citizens to form an opposing militia, in the event that it all goes wrong somehow with our government sometime in the future, like, maybe during a zombie apocalypse coupled with the latest impending nuclear attack. It's extreme, really. Or perhaps, like my gentlemen friend from the post office who sported flannel along with his ole fishing hat with NRA and scouting badges: you grew up in rural upstate New York where the wild things live, because hunting and fishing is a big part of your life.

I'm not talking about those faux hicks who sell it in modern "cuntree" songs about some pretend lifestyle that preserves inbred rednecks getting drunk and shooting off guns in the middle of woods, because we certainly have those type of kooks 'round the way, too. My former handyman from the 'hood is just such a type of Nuyorcian. One afternoon while he and his skeleton crew worked (including a one-eyed Mexicano who didn't have his own paintbrush, even though they were there to paint my apartment, and he's probably an illegal alien, too), my friend came up to me while I was writing a novelization of yet another office situation gone mad in the city, he though it was more than acceptable to interrupt my work at the keyboard so as to settle some crazy-ass nonsense he and his brother had about Bruce Lee. 

You read that right, amigos. My handyman though it was totally fine to ask me in the middle of my work day to "squash a beef" for him about Bruce Lee, by asking me to look up a YouTube video for him, so as to ascertain whether or not the video was real or faked, like, some far out Sasquatch or Loch Ness type of shit that would link up to Lee's faked death, a la President Kennedy and the grassy knoll type of situation, ya feel me, peeps? We all have that kind of paranoid, conspiracy-theory friend. I told him that it was definitely possible for a real martial artist like Bruce Lee to bust that kind of move on film with nunchucks**, hard as it was, because in addition to his professional acting chops, he really was master martial artist.

After his grunting concession to that blatantly obvious and very well-known fact from martial arts movie history (I know, "hood rats", I know. I'm rollin' my eyes, too), I couldn't help but notice that my friend had decided that today was the day to sport (from his colorful bevy of them) a charming camouflage print do-rag*** decorated jauntily with silhouettes of very large guns because, of course, he and his wacky friends have indeed gone upstate to a remote location (or so they thought) to get drunk, get loud, and mow down trees... or not, as the case may be.

You see, another one of my handyman's wacky theories was finding out if you can indeed get 1) crazy drunk, 2) whacked out of your mind on blow, and then 3) shoot down a tree, if you only have enough ammo and the right AK-47. It's just one of those things that freakin' Ricans do. You see, back in the day, some o' my peeps were so desperate for cool green spaces in the 'hood that they decided city parks sucked (too much crime), and that parking by the side of a busy highway upon first seeing any type of grass at all was perfectly fine, car exhaust be damned. It was so widespread a thing that as we drove back from the city, my family called them "Puerto Rican picnics" because you are not supposed to park by the side of a busy highway just to eat with your little children. It is, in fact, highly illegal, as is almost every recreation that my friend attempts in his leisure time.

He proceeded to tell me about how they pissed off the farmer next door (because, you know, that early rising scumbag with all the kids and animals to take care of is racist, man), and then the cops were called, with tickets, fines, and summons issued, all because my dumb-ass friend and his stoopid crew of wackadoos from the 'hood thought it was funny to shoot at shit in the dark of night, with the lights of a distant farmhouse next door suddenly signalling to them that is, indeed, not okay to do that to your neighbor, you dumb fuck.

And no, he didn't chop down a tree in his friend's backyard at three a.m. with his big gun (nor did any of his friends), because there ain't enough ammo in the world to do that job well, and also because (this is key, kids) that IS NOT what our Constitution guarantees (nor do any of the Amendments), but he decided with more than a few beers in him to take what we fight for everyday and wipe his butt with it, because despite charming t.v. sitcoms about "making it", a locale change for him and his motley crew can't make up for what education and life skills can really do for them. He needs that. Not more ammo. Certainly not more guns.


*     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms 
**    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunchaku  
***  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-rag