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! 

Tar Beach

Me and my friends instantly hated "Baywatch" the very first time we saw it, even though David Hasselhoff was the "King of Cheese" back in the day for this crazy show about his talking police car (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series), and his status as a "rock star" in Germany (http://chicagolampoon.blogspot.com/2011/10/germanys-perplexing-love-affair-with.html), but it gained cult status in our 80s-era dorm rooms filled with horny teenagers who played drinking games every time there was a run on the beach filmed in slow motion with a girl in a tight red bathing suit. It sucked, but so did most of pop culture. Who fucking cares?

We humped a grind over every summer like any other east coast kid trying to make a buck for school and living expenses, and to get out of our mother's collective hairs. The kids from Long Island did clam-digging over the summers for work, plus surfing, boarding, and skate-boarding that became rollerblading with the next "fitness" craze. My family had long aborted our annual trips to LBI as too expensive, though occasionally a relative might rent a house, but with our clash in cultures, it wasn't worth going to yet another house full of crazy people.

My Brooklyn friends did what any other kid from the 'hood does: they took the train out to the beach. After I graduated, started my career, and transitioned to my own work full-time, I found myself in a similar situation: broke, alone, and wanting to hit the beach. I lived in the fourth floor of a 120 year-old walk-up in the Slope, and after I ordered a boogie-board for cheap online, I hooked up with some of my training partners in BJJ at the Far Rockaways boarder's beach, no swimmers allowed. It was a good fit for us, because we could use our mandatory rash guard shirts that we used for no-gi classes to surf with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_wrestling), which gave us more exercise that was different from our main sport. Well, not mine.

They were blown away by some "white" middle-aged female rolling with the boys as a part of my MMA training, then hitting the beach like a native, and it was easy to see why. The beaches of Brooklyn and Queens had been home to hardcore ghettos for a hundred years, despite the kitschy faded glory of Coney Island that attracted dykes, misfits, and trendy hipsters looking for retro "art fag" design spaces on the cheap, but they learned. White kids from out-of-town always do. After dark, our beaches became some of the worst neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs, definitely not some fake SoCal paradise from t.v., not that I believed any of the hype I saw on t.v. anymore.

You see, in response to a "tidy whitey" Manhattan that catered to rich foreign diplomats and the local ethnic population serving them, we were supposed to retain a foothold in our culture on our teacher/social worker/publishing salaries that mandated we live as far away from our now over-priced native homes as possible. Makes sense, no? No, it didn't. But, rich white men hate looking at "depressing" project people who are passed out on a subway grating. It's, also, like, really hard on your shoes, too! So, the "powers that be" ruined our fair city in a few short years through some of the worst, most corrupt urban-planning to ever happen on planet earth, changing the landscape of our city from a great trading center with gorgeous waterways to a depressing hellhole that you couldn't walk through without an escort.

Coney became infamous for murders under the boardwalk and floating bodies washed up on the beach, as Jersey spiraled down into dysfunction with an annual epidemic of dirty hypodermic needles dumped carelessly into our waters, some of them infected with HIV and AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_Tide), through the evil immorality of "healthcare" businesses looking to make a quick buck off the backs of a downtrodden and exhausted sick people. It was doubly worse for an elderly population that still remembered with great fondness Steeplechase rides at the beach during sunset, cotton candy with their loved ones, and the novelty of an electric Ferris Wheel that lit up at night to illuminate the sand with its many colors, as fireworks exploded in the background of another day in a public urban paradise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steeplechase_Park).

Sure, it was hard working the daily grind in a city of strangers, but so what? We had everything we needed in a quick bus ride or train stop away, but then it changed drastically. A disenfranchised people who never had any real comfort with swimming in our rougher waters were pushed out to the beaches, as a cruel reminder of a place they knew they didn't belong. My Filipino training partner was horrified by the early murkiness of our summer Atlantic Ocean, because he grew up in the tropics. Uh, this ain't that, homeboy. Ditto for my sparring partner from Korea. Are there animals under the surface? Uh, yeah, girlfriend. She preferred to stay on the beach while I body-surfed the waves like an otter fishing in its home waters, because I am.

Slowly, we came back after many years away, and so did our town. We brought to it all of our experienced know-how about social justice and real public change, just like we said we would to each other all those years ago, as we sat in spare, dirty, broken-down rooms; drunk, high, scared, and often alone. Never again. That's what we thought then, and that's what happened, as I fought my own battles in middle-age through the corrupt court systems of the city and country. 

I see you, muthafuckas. I take pictures, and I document, document, document. You can, too, because it works. That's how we bring back the world, people: one beach at a time, block-by-block—or lot-by-lot, like my good folks of the "Stop Anellotech" movement in Rockland County fighting Big Pharma and Big Corporate Petrochemical—because this city and this land is ours by our collective birth rights, and not yours, so give it back. Now is the time.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tar%20beach

Jailbreak

 

After I went bust during the last big economic recession, I was forced to undergo severe deprivation, like Americans do in times of war. I didn't have any luxuries to begin with, which meant that I almost immediately lost a lot of weight, and fast, too. I spent a few weeks light-headed and slightly dizzy, especially when my family chose to reenact their rather ritualized behavior called "kicking people who are down" by pretending that my living expenses were the result of laziness (ha!), ineptitude (how?), incompetence (oh, no) or an inability to work, which is, unfortunately for them, not backed up anywhere by any type of actual legal documentation, like, say, my complete work history through Social Security and the IRS. Hard to beat, but true.

As I freefalled expertly into poverty like I always do (because I've compensated for familial inadequacies all of my life), I met the typical lifelong poor who live in the 'hood, and who've never accurately reflected me or my reality. "Everybody's 'crazy' in the hood!", my friend Cotto explained to me, as my so-called expert on ghetto fabulosity, not expecting a "white" girl (uh, oh) like me to come from the projects in Queens (also documented), or having parents from Bed-Stuy and the Bronx. Real but true, as our native stories from around the way. He got angry and aggressive at my "street creds" (like I planned it), tensely inquiring about street names and directions to my parent's so-called neighborhoods that were immediately under suspicion, because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth.

And that's true about critically impoverished project people who are on their 7th or 8th generation of the American Experience; they don't actually solve problems. Other people do that for them! Cotto had an arrogant sense of entitlement about his welfare the same way a wealthy white man expects "his" table to always be ready for him at his favorite restaurant, as part of his price for eating at the establishment. "It's not a law, but that's the way it works in the world, Marie", typically accompanied by a pitying gesture like the sideways head tilt and a condescending tone. Right...I'm the poor muthafucka who doesn't know what time it is. I keep forgetting that!

In truth, after my family forced me into "Public Assistance" by turning their backs on me (I got some MetroCards for hours and hours of waiting and form-filling), I needed a sit-down with Cotto so I could take notes on his lifestyle. It was fascinating. There were unwritten rules about everything that you'd never find in print, which would legitimize an already-shady situation. He had to tell me what time to get there so the lines wouldn't be painful to wait on, and after I did that successfully, he told me I forgot to go to this particular window on this floor to ask for MetroCards because "they're supposed to do that for you!" Huh. Uh, homeboy, nobody told me that. It was so fucking crazy and half-ass that I immediately knew it was designed for him and his mentality.

Nothing made sense about their process. Not one single fucking thing, and I can write books on any subject matter there is. There were secret rules about special windows, lines, locations....it went on and on and on. After his bad Alfredo dinner, I finally told him the truth. "it sounds like this is a full-time job!" He agreed. "Yep. Being on welfare is like having a full-time job, because to get benefits, that's how much time you need. You have to think of it as your job." What the...? A job? But, like, I've been working since I was a minor. Where do healthy brilliant female publishers go? Of course, the answer for me was as simple as the local library (duh), but for unskilled generational poverty on a continual course, I was stumped. I still have no idea how anyone could live within a system as fucked up as that and survive, but as I found out through Cotto, it's made to foil criminals, not law-abiding citizens rocked by changes in the economy as old as the hills, like highly-skilled managers dumped for their pricey salaries.

As I fought the final battles with my disordered family on an empty stomach, I found a temporary cover design gig, then more "Unemployment Benefits" that I paid for in full (like all of my single-girl health plans), then another design gig that was deliberately cut-off to intentionally suck cover designs out of me for catalog season before my six-month kicked in that would give me full health benefits, as they cheated me out of them for the first few months that I worked longer and harder than around me, and then a final round of Unemployment Benefits that I lived off of for months, at my mom's place. Being healthy didn't pay off for me, yet again. But, how to fake being sick? If I had to bend myself into that contorted a shape, I might as well go into the movies and acting! Who can do that? It hurt me to even try to be in a sick world for too long, like one big held-breath underwater.

Into this scary mix of crazy systemic incompetence came the necessary delve into tenement housing and shady subletting situations, like the weird OCD guy with a rental listing service who made me stand behind painted lines and follow his posted instructions written out in his tensely scrawled handwriting from behind a long counter, because he'd been beaten up too many times for taking poor people's money and then giving them bad information. Huh...so, not like my Park Slope real estate agent taking pictures of available brownstones for me to peruse while I corresponded via email in Denver? Uh, no. Not at all like that, or like me. The place on 9th Street that Cotto rocked like it was his personal prison cell gave me the creeps, but I survived. The guy who sometimes lived next to us on the top floor had invented a pseudonym named "Rex", which his friend told him to do if he dared to rent a shady sublet, as another critical piece of "hood rat" info that I didn't know. Ah.

Advice like that also originated from the same bodega that had attracted a drunk and high Cotto like a magnet, where he bought his "loosies" (didn't know that, either), and received such sage wisdom as "Don't let me hear that you actually paid Jose for that place!", which is so illegal, I can't even touch it from this angle. Do your thang, hood rat. What could I say? He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Our neighbor Rex was deeply saddened and shocked by my "phoneless" state, which he telegraphed to me as this, "Oh, you should let me 'jack' your phone! I worked for a Verizon store." Uh, excuse me? "Yeah! You 'jailbreak' your phone from your carrier so you can get another plan!" Okay...I actually tried looking it up on the Park Slope library's public access computer, but it was so fucking convoluted and fraught with technical difficulties that once again I thought to myself, well, shit; if he can do that, why is he here in a tenement with us, you know?

I'd adjusted to having no phone the good old fashioned way: I used payphones on the corner, and the library's WiFi to access the Internet through my old iPhone. Still do. In time, I bought a cheap drugstore cell-phone, and my mom's broke-ass cousin had to tell us how to do that, too. I simply didn't know you could buy a phone for, like, $10 and then load it with phone minutes. I always paid for all of my expenses. Sure enough, the next time I walked down Fifth Avenue towards the Hispanic neighborhood of Sunset Park, there it was, advertised on a placard in Cotto's special bodega: WE JAILBREAK iPHONES HERE. Great. Yet another piece of criminal knowledge that I didn't want or need. I just wanted to live life for another day.

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

A West Side Story

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

My family left the city in the late 70s because it fell apart, as captured through many fictionalized movies like "The Warriors" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_%28film%29), "Fort Apache, The Bronx" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Apache,_The_Bronx), and "Escape from New York" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York). While they may seem like gross exaggerations to you, for the millions of displaced New Yorkers forced to leave old established neighborhoods that'd been in the family for several generations, it's hard to describe that feeling of watching your home burn to the ground. It was utterly heartbreaking in its devastation.

I met up with a few other Irish-American "white-flighters" (white people were widely criticized for fleeing bombed-out buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) from the old neighborhoods at the local lavandería here in this Nua Brigadoon we've made our own 'hood, after another tragic ousting in yet another town we helped to build, patrol, and heal. Their impressions were exactly the same as mine and my family. One guy had a brother who was an engineer at Co-Op City, as part of our last stand towards crime and crack in those rapidly de-zoned blocks that created instant ghettos almost overnight, in some of the most corruptly bad urban planning we'd ever seen in a city famous for its intellectual capital. What the fuck happened?

And so we talked about committee meetings held in basements that fought obviously poor building codes with my "new" old friend from around the way, who had to type up a report as former FDNY about an escaped gorilla from the zoo that was killed and burnt to death in a city street, while an entire neighborhood slammed their windows and doors shut in response to such a weird tragedy. We were losing badly, block by city block. It was hard for us to pull up stakes in such a high stakes place that we actually helped to construct, but there were no other choices available for families living paycheck-to-paycheck. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before, a horror we could sense coming with such a power, that it actually left a bad taste in your mouth.

As me, my bud "Brennan", and Paul talked it over, the short Mestizos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo) clustered in small groups around us kept a comfortable distance with wide eyes that silently folded laundry, as we talked about roving packs of wild dogs that haunted certain city streets, burning garbage cans roaring out of control on almost every corner, and entire cars lit on fire that stayed that way until they burned out all the way, that we saw with our own wide eyes through the muddy, streaked windows of cars that didn't seem to go fast enough after the light finally turned green. "What, did they change the time on all the lights so we could be 'sitting ducks' here?!", we'd say to each other in fear of the regular carjackings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carjacking) that happened all the time, in yet another part of a rigged game leading to our once-beautiful city's downfall, and no one seemed to give a fuck about it but us.

Certainly not the zoned-out crack zombies, part of the huge packs of drug-addicted hookers who walked up-and-down the West Side Highway every night of the week. We watched our infamous meat-packing district become a den of such evil, that the local S&M club seemed like a funny joke compared to the strange group sex that happened in oddly-named Greek club, yet another stab directly at the heart of the ancient Mediterraneans who had crossed many seas to make a happy life here. It was cruel, a hard slap in the face that we will never forget.

We moved up here in packs of our own, as average but well-educated working class families of every kind that inhabited Gotham back in the day: African-Americans working union jobs they got after their mass migration from the newly desegregated South, Puerto Ricans escaping a poverty so extreme that it sometimes still hurts to look at old pictures of their former tropical beach paradise (like the Haitian boat people and Cubanos who would float to Florida on the backs of flimsy, quickly-built rafts to run from oppression and mass murder like we had), and the Irish who met with famine greatly assisted by many a wealthy Brit with no interest in helping them out at all, in order to preserve the bottom rung of the European ladder just for them. Ditto with my poor Greco-Roman farm folk, without mentioning the mixed horrors neatly hidden behind the distinctive looks of an "Original" Acadian Métis. Who.....? How do you spell....? Huh? What?!

You know, those wily muthafuckas who bought this here island called "Manhattan" ([PDF]The Origin and Meaning of the Name “Manhattan”) from a bunch of Indians for some wampum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), so that we could all cash out on those rapidly-boating Brits and Dutch looking to farm near a convenient seaport town near you....but, no! Wait!! What does that word you just said mean? Which one?! And, how to catch you up on all of our history with your kind of brain, dude? You just don't fucking get it, feel me, turista? That's what it feels like: a stranger in our own strange land to you, and you definitely do not belong here.

So, when my friend Donnel's second-cousin from Harlem, Lawrence, told me his own particular horror story about the west side gone way wrong during the last century, I could totally relate to it. We'd all been through a version of it as immigrants or indigenous people, or both, as the case may be. He told his story to me one night after a few drinks and a couple of tokes, in this native tale of woe. He'd been walking down West Street looking in the cheap juke joints (he's a musician), feeling broke and alone, pushed out of another family home gone "KABOOM!" as tightly-packed tenement apartments with four generations of kids tend to do, when you cram in enough teenage mothers and their illegitimate children living on the minimum wage of one powerful grandmother working as a nursing assistant at the local, run-down, welfare hospital because if she falls down hard, the whole family goes down with her.

Yeah, man. I get it. But, he was also working through a lot of shit that comes with being an angry young black man in the city, and as much as he didn't know about me and my history, I felt that static, too, but I also knew it was his road to walk down and not mine. I wanted him to know that I wouldn't take anything more away from him, as a New York kid who was getting just about everything ripped away from him at the same time. He saw "black and white" in everyone and everything, because that's the steady ghetto diet he was being fed at the time. I got it. Well....what happened, man?

Lawrence was used to presenting a tall strong front on the streets, and this was something he had to work up to. Take it slow, kid. He was nervous. Deep breath....okay. Pass me that joint. Inhale....now, go. He was walking down the street when a friend passed by in a car (a car! WOW! Rare treat for "hood rats" to have moving vehicles that worked right in their possession), and he hopped in. They cruised down West Street with the windows open on a hot summer night, looking to catch a breeze, score some weed, or make some kind of deal....something. You know that feeling on certain warm nights when you're young, right? That was it...waiting, and also moving along with it, which they did.

Suddenly, he saw a young woman walking by struttin' her stuff like working girls do. She was obviously a hooker, but there was something else about her, he craned his neck to look....yo! Turn around, bro! He got out of the car and walked down the block, turning the corner she just passed by. He followed her for a minute or two before she turned around to meet her attacker/pursuer or potential "John", with an expectant look that quickly changed to astonishment. "Larry....! Is that you?!" Unfortunately for him and her both, she was right. He was her former classmate from high school, and they both knew it in that one instantly-recognizing moment. That hooker you passed by in Times Square (now dressed-up in a furry cartoon costume handing out stripper bar fliers on the sly), yeah, that one, man.

She went to school with one of us, yo. Hope you score cheap tickets from the midtown kiosk for the musical, though. And don't answer knocks on your pricey hotel door in the middle of the night, either, bro. Because that hooker there? Yeah, she's a "lady of the night", too. She's also someone's daughter, former classmate, sister, or cousin from the 'hood. I know you only give a fuck about your stupid fucking tourist trip, though, so enjoy the show. I hope it was worth the trip, while you pretend to see and understand nothing about our pain. Asshole. One more time! <jazz hands> Entertaining, isn't it?

Walk On The Wild Side

Lou Reed

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody's darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She sayes, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go,

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo

Little Joe… Full lyrics on Google Play