Narc

Copping weed in a sleepy suburb that's always been more country than city was almost impossible for me growing up, the city even harder for me because of my clean-cut good looks. I joked with my buddies at the corner store that no one even wanted to stand near me during our town St. Pat's Parade because (according to one of them), "You look like a cop!" If being a detective means I'm aware of open container laws, cognizant of my surroundings, and respectful of my neighbors even during a daytime "beer buzz" by still recycling appropriately, then I'm the Sheriff of this here town.

After being rebuffed by do-ragged bangers hanging curbside in the tough gang towns of Rockland run by drug dealers during the 80s, me and my friends turned to the city for our teenage rebellion, but I was quickly becoming a curse to them in their nefarious deeds, in an anti-anti-establishment cancel out. We'd cut class to take the city bus to buy weed near Central Park, only to be ID'ed by a beat cop who laughed at my underage library card (the only ID I had), throwing our small dime bag into the trash with the order to take the first bus back home, which we did, after debating about trying to find the little baggie in the garbage pail.

It didn't end there, either. Me and my friend who'd emigrated from Ghana as a girl tried hanging out in her family neighborhoods of Harlem and Downtown Brooklyn, but without my Hispanic home-girl outfit from back in the day (slicked-back ponytail that made my hair look darker, bright red lipstick, big hoop earrings, and tight jeans), the people in those 'hoods treated me like an outcast on my own native soil, to be shunned and feared as a girl-child not of their kind. 

The pinnacle of my brief career as a country criminal officially ended in the back of a Harlem liquor store with my girl, Donnel. She'd said she bought weed from the guy behind the plexi-glass window with a pull-out money drawer before, so it should be no problem. We laughed on the street before going in that he'd be afraid of me as a "white girl", which was the only way to explain my presence in certain parts of New York City that hoped they'd killed or frightened off the natives a long time ago. I mean, I look this way at 47; you can see from my photos how youthful I've always been.

And it's true; there's a purity and wholesomeness to me that doesn't go away with alcohol, or pot, or cigarettes, or junk food, because I don't let it. I want to live, even in the chaos of this world. And so, with one quick walk to the back of a ghetto liquor store, the nervous demeanor of your average black man livin' on my mean streets told me everything I needed to know about what my choices would be. In his wide-eyed stare, I immediately knew what side of the line that he'd drawn between us I stood on, and it was with the good guys.

"Uh uh. I ain't sellin' to huh." My friend improvised like the slick con she can be, rolling her eyes at him. "Oh, come on, man! I've bought from you before, no problem!" He wasn't buyin' it. "She a cop! You a narc?" He asked me flat out, but my friend pushed me aside. "Look at her! When was the last time you sold weed to a 15 year-old narc?!" And it was pretty incredulous, his irrational fear about a baby-faced teenage girl. But, just like that, I knew it in my heart, that this native New York girl wan't no criminal, and I never would be. As we left the store empty-handed, I could feel my less-principled friend cutting ties with me mentally, diverging in the opposite direction, because (s)he was right about me. I'm no fucking criminal. I AM THE LAW.

By Any Other Name

You probably know by now that the American immigrant experience isn't some "la-di-da" fantasy concocted solely by rich Hollywood filmmakers and gay Broadway producers. The streets weren't paved with gold when my ancestors arrived here (nor are they now) because they built this city, and dozens of others like it, too. If it was paved at all back then, it was put down in the sizzling heat that is New York's hot summer sun, made with durable Rockland County gravel (hence the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockland_County,_New_York), padded with the well-trodden horse-shit from so many carriages, that fragrantly emanated from between the big paving stones in the heat.

My grandfather told me stories about "The El" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Third_Avenue_Line & (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line), a newly-elevated carriage service that rode high above the stink of the messy cobblestone streets that was turn-of-the-century New York City, in a pleasant riding experience that had velvet ropes for them to hang onto, while standing between the fancy crushed-velvet seats. Quite an experience for a native-born Brooklyn boy like my grandfather to have as a child, used as he was to the small family farms that still lined Brooklyn's streets back then, with double-wide avenues functioning as one big farm route that was conducive to trade between rural crop-producing Long Island and the borough of Manhattan: http://www.bklynlibrary.org/brooklyncollection/historic-brooklyn-photographs.

As great and hard as our real life experiences could be in this land of our birth, it was not always so for many other poor immigrant families, burdened as they were by a lack of education and native know-how. My ex's family was like that. Even though he had the privilege of his mother's ancient Indian lines—for precious government money, land rights, and serious tuition breaks—his father's Polish family fared less well in upstate New York, when it came to free handouts earned from the backs of our joint ancestral labors. It made them twitchy and greedy when it came to earning off of us as a people, competing in the wild marketplace that freedom brings. It makes people nervous about surviving here, you know? Winter's always coming.

Besides immigrant dreams that turned out not to be true, they also wrongly believed that the death-defying boat ride to New York during wintertime was bad, starving as they were then, with a few hastily-shoved potatoes in their dirty pockets, in between sudden squalls at sea and pulls off a bottle of homemade vodka. Uh uh, homies. It gets so much worse. Like, much much worse. My friend Linda's family were Muslims from Russia and Poland who had their name changed immediately upon arrival to Ellis Island, for the comfort of the paper-processing government workers who were basically illiterate. She knew that because her grandmother told her her own emigre story, and she told it to me, not that Linda was always truthful with me. Some families are just tricky like that, you know?

Her white Muslim grandmother married a Mongolian man before they emigrated further east, becoming "Janowski" for ease of travel through Poland and Russia, which was then changed once again to "Janow" here in America—to ease their arrival experience—and that's what my friend Dave's dad did, too, though he told it to me in the tone of a perpetually aggrieved, long-suffering people. "We had to change it, just to get work in 'the unions'. All the unions were run by the Irish back then!", he would explain to us over a dinner of kielbasa and German baked potatoes au gratin with bacon and cheddar melted on top (bless you, Ginger: you know upstate winters, mama!). And that's exactly what his grandfather, his father, and then, he did: they went from being proud, big, strong, Polish-American  "Budzanowski" Catholic boys (http://www.thetreemaker.com/family-coat-b/budzanowski/poland.html), to pseudo Irish-Americans, in a state that has one of the biggest Irish immigrant populations outside of "Eire": http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/#59703e0a495e.

Anyway, it was a common enough story among Americans in this vast wilderness that can be the American experience. Anything can happen, at any time. Birth certificates could be falsely-made, and then just as easily lost. Names were quickly taken up and easily discarded, for a variety of reasons: for work, to escape notice as a convict on the run, or to hide the "blackness" behind the real origins of your "low" birth, like a poor native girl who just took on the faith of her loving husband, as Catholics assume during the Rite of Confirmation. 

I willingly chose to take on my grandmother's American name "Ann" in the French spelling (she was baptized "Angelina") to also honor St. Anne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Anne), my patron saint of Confirmation, so as to commemorate that time period forever through divine ordination onto my name, which officially makes my name "Marie Louise Anne Doucette". I pronounced it in French for an older friend of mine here at the local library, which was totally impenetrable to him, and then I said it again in perfectly unaccented English, because it can be that dissimilar with a change in pronunciation. 

I know how tricky names can be, as well as the risks involved with naming. It can (or could) mean life or death for some of us, still. It couldn't have been easy for my former in-laws to "pass" as Irish-born back then, but I did understand the economic and cultural pressures his family felt, to conform and survive as "strangers in a strange land". Luckily, he found his squaw in high school, and it isn't like Polish/Russian-born people are exactly "new" to the deep cold of a Northern climate, just our like indigenous people. We need(ed) the change of seasons to remain healthy, because our climate does a lot of good things to our bodies, for the continued health of our tribe. 

Anyway, we found each other through the ensuing centuries of assimilation and madness, because New Yorkers know their own. 
I found—in a very small isolated town buried deep in the rough, dense, wild mountains of New York—an Indo-European American Indian kinda like me. You can't mess with a destiny like ours, love, because we have a "forever" kind of thing goin' on. Trust on that, peeps. We are forever wild. For you. Come find us! We want you in it with us, for real. Be in it, with us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_(New_York)

Minority Report

"Minorities" tend to change with the times, depending on who you ask, and the amount of money involved. Sometimes it's also dependent on the size of your notoriously murderous, squaw-stealing tribe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohegan_people), so you can cash in on the white man's excesses involving his drinking and gambling by manipulating those weaknesses (just like they did to you, right?), using the prized tribal lands that your ancestors fought for, to feed your own greed. Its sort of like a dog biting its own tail, don't you think? Neither party goes very far in sickly co-dependence, preferring to stay trapped in their own pattern rather than risking a cure to good health.

It's insanely cowardly, but that's how human nature can be sometimes. It's up to us, as "publicans" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publican), to keep the records regarding our histories straight, for the sake of our children's children.  So, today, it is with great pleasure (and perhaps a touch of sadness for your lately-ruptured innocence) that I present you with this true life story about murder by numbers. If I were you, I'd think carefully before your next racist diatribe, friend. You're probably on the majority list, along with the other so-called European elite. All I ask is that you let your computer do the math for you, by adding them up. Everything else has already been done.

Read 'em and weep, and then, I want you to disband your favorite federal "colored folks" organization, made for getting money through some trumped up case of "white guilt" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt). Every type of human on this planet has suffered through some kind of holocaust or massacre involving direct family. It's over.

Africans around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
Hispanics, and other Latins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans
Holocaust victims, in total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust 
Armenian Genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide 
Russian deaths during Stain's rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin 
Chinese starvation and state-sanctioned murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution 
Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
Great Potato Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29
And, finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll 

Now, here are my relevant numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. I expect no further questions need to be asked regarding repatriation, resettlement, and reclamation, on behalf of my people? Yes...?! Good! I hear nothing but crickets! I like that sound. Reminds me of the country.

Linden's

Me and my lunch: a meatball sub and Linden's cookies (with "hat head").

Growing up in New York is really, really weird. I knew the food was great, my grandparents were really fun and cool, and my parents very well-educated. I also knew that our culture is pervasive among t.v., movies, and the radio, but... isn't yours, too? No?! Oh, sorry 'bout that.

My journey has taken me many places, and the more I travel, the more I notice people's reactions to me and my hometown, my unique last name and distinctive looks, my marked speech patterns and my wealth (and breadth) of knowledge. It's a gap that continues to widen out there in the world which is why, like so many of my childhood classmates, we find ourselves drawn back to what is possibly the most famous place on the planet.

Same deal with our food here, and my kind of cooking: the only thing I knew about Linden's cookies as a kid was that we got them for lunch, or as after-school snacks with whole milk, not that it was a small, local, world-power that began at the same time as their friends, the fine makers of "Hellman's Mayonnaise"*, which is the best mayonnaise on Earth. It's so good, I used to eat mayo sandwiches for lunch or right before dinner, if I was starving and the food smelled delicious. 

We can't wait to finally meet you. Bonjour, les amis!

http://www.lindencookies.com/pages/about-lindens

The key to coolness is in the ingredients: no bullshit necessary!

*http://www.hellmanns.com/home/about

Rockland County Redneck

Tits, guns, cows, and lots of red meat. Fuck you, city folk!

Believe it or not, we have serious hicks in New York. It's hard for outsiders to acknowledge that, because they see these crime dramas on t.v. about city people, but truth is, we have an enormous amount of wilderness here; a state so vast up north, driving in that direction will take you to Canada.

I need fake books, hot wings, and beer to be American!

And so, we have certain pockets that stand out in stark contrast to the neurotic, uptight, therapy-case Manhattanite who's originally from "Lawnguyland", or "Long Island", as it's referred to in English. Upstaters chafe at "The City", citing Albany as the state capital and all them types that frequent urban areas as being different and threatening to them and their culture, and they aren't exactly wrong about that.

Spelling and punctuation sucks! If you do it right, you're a pinko liberal.

Truth be told, an upstate accent sounds much more like a Wisconsin "donchaknow" type of folksy backwoods talk than a "Nuyorican" (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican ancestry) who's lived on one city block for his entire life. Provincialism exists everywhere on the globe, and we are no exception in that regard, either.

Mah huntin' dog gets me through deer season. Fuck you! Go hump a tree.

But ideally, genuine native New York culture is actually one that incorporates town and country, like the magazine of the same name. Urbane, sophisticated people typically have a home at the beach or in the woods, and an apartment in the city, switching up locales on the weekends and holidays. It's a harder lifestyle because it necessitates a certain level of income, but also a flexible and adaptable mentality to go along with the life, too.

I needs guns to express myself, asshole. Get a job!

It's something me and my group of friends have always had that marks us as not quite fitting into rigid categories of "city", "country", or "beachcomber", which some people trade on and off like a set of clothes. We do it all because we love it all: the beach, the mountains, the woods, the waterfalls, the wild untamed forests, the parks, the culture, the food, the weather, the changing landscapes with their exceptionally beautiful vistas, and most importantly, our fair Gotham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker

To know us well is to know and appreciate those things, too, with all their individual facets, and if you can't do that, then we don't have much to talk to you about, so bounce, muthafucka, because that's how we roll. Keep up, will ya?