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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.
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
Years ago, I found myself confronting a situation I'd always feared, like anyone else would: becoming homeless. Unlike Amanda Byne, I am not the "crazy wealthy" member of my family. I merely fight in opposition to it as a lifestyle choice, often alone, and when I don't get any kind of support from my beleaguered family, sometimes I find myself in the company of someone who happens to be in the same boat as me, though through different ways and means.
Such was the case with a friend of mine I met a few years ago at the Brooklyn Public Library. He sat next to me at a row of public access computers, fidgeted for awhile, then asked to borrow my ear-buds that I'd just taken out and put on the desk after my work was done. He said he worked in a kitchen, supposedly for the NYJets football team at their stadium. He also told me that his boss wanted him to take a cleanliness certification course online. A chef! Cool! Turns out, he was more boastful than anything else: a classic New York City "hood rat".
C'est la vie. I liked him well enough, and as I bottomed out financially, I found that my friends were few and far between (as so often is the case), while my family hid from my "misfortune" like it was a disease they could catch through exposure to it. Going broke had never happened to me before, and without me to lead them through it (because I was the one who needed help, not the other way around), I was alone in it.
So, I free-fell into homelessness without any help from anyone, clutching at hastily applied artist's residencies (and accepted into, without actually participating in), grant applications, and housing programs in rapid succession, along with my new friend's suggestion that I could stay with him, if I needed to. At that point in time, it was the only offer I had. When the inevitable expulsion from my Park Slope apartment due to a lack of funds finally went down (with dramatic court appearances and rushing back from the courthouse to confront a U.S. Marshall by myself, none of which I'd done before), my insane friend let me sleep on the floor of his rented room in a nearby tenement.
Cotto was used to squatting, coming from a background that prepped him for it, like public housing and generations of welfare. He told me how to "petition the city for 'Public Assistance'", as I sat on the floor of my soon-to-be-gone apartment taking notes, while my guest sat on my couch after dinner. I didn't really know how confusing the system was until later on, after I realized it was designed for drug-addicted mental patients, but more on that another time. Suffice to say, I was terrible at welfare, and soon after Cotto and I became friends, I found myself back at work in publishing, which immediately kicked me out the system and any city or state-funded programs I'd been enrolled in.
In the meantime, I'd cleaned up the room next door to his by paying off the "super" and a friend of mine from my old building to do some repairs and minor chores, like garbage disposal, patching holes, and nailing down loose boards. During the day, I worked as a senior book cover designer in Manhattan, and at night, I went back to a ramshackle tenement in Park Slope to do more work. After clearing out several layers of trash, I whitewashed the badly spray-painted walls in thin coats (because money was/is so tight), then applied several washes of white vinegar to disinfect the old wood floors and chase away the roaches while I stayed in my friend's room next door, sleeping in his military-style sleeping bag on the small space he had on the floor at the foot of his bed. It was the most comfortable sleeping bag I'd ever slept in, so props to the USMC for that.
We still spoke after I moved into my own room, because he knocked on my chainlink-locked door every night (the doorknob had been completely removed, leaving a gaping hole) when he heard me come back from work. He was lonely and bored, so we talked, smoked, ate, and drank the hours away while I worked on the spare room, periodically feeding cash to a man named José, the building's illegal super. One night as we smoked (stress drove me back to it), we chatted about my favorite sport, fighting. He was really interested in MMA, especially after I kicked apart a bookcase that'd been abandoned in the hallway right in front of him (so we could pile it up on the staircase to the basement with the other junk that'd been left behind), and I also talked to him about my family's history with the sport.
Because he's utterly mad (diagnosed manic/bipolar, a narcotics addict, paranoid delusional, and hyper-sexual), he always wanted the spotlight back on him and his dubious accomplishments, expounding at length about religion (he doesn't get it), prison, women, and crime. I started talking about Mike Tyson and his similarly rough New York past in a way that linked the conversation back to fighting and my friend, when I was abruptly interrupted by a bout of crocodile tears, standing in his doorway with the door open to get some air from the horrible stank of his cheap dirt-weed blunt, while he talked at me from a small twin-sized mattress that came with the room. Well...what is it, man?! Kooks love to interrupt people abruptly, but I was too exhausted to care.
Turns out, he and "Iron Mike" shared a ghetto past in Brooklyn's Brownsville projects, a place that's been rough for a really long time. My crazy friend seemed weirded out when I told him my dad grew up in BedStuy, that I was born in Queens, and that we'd once lived in the projects there. He couldn't connect with it, questioning me more closely on minor details, like, what street had my father lived on? I directed him here, to this site, so he could read the story and see the photo for himself. I was too tired to go over it again.
With a big dramatic pause, my fat snuffly friend finally blurted out the cause of his distress, as well as his subsequent build-up: "You're really getting to me, man, because Mike Tyson once gave me a free turkey for Thanksgiving!" It was so incongruous to our actual conversation that I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I mean, without even trying, his timing was, for once, actually perfect. I had to know: "Oh, yeah? Why's that?" Bruce Lee and the history of martial arts could wait. This was comic gold.
Well, for every year of Cotto's childhood, "Iron Mike" had dutifully returned to the humble home of his roots to give out free turkeys to all the people living in his old neighborhood; a sign of loyalty that is indeed touching. My friend wasn't there every year to get a free bird because he shuffled between different apartments, which is part of the lifestyle, but 'hood heroes are a big thing in New York. The Gottis (when they lived in Bensonhurst) were infamous throughout Brooklyn and the tri-state area for their overblown light displays and free toy giveaways at Christmastime. It's the kind of thing New Yorkers remember.
Even though my cripple of an acquittance (made out of necessity) would never fully get off the ground with his disabilities, overblown delusions, crippling arrogance, huge ego, multiple addictions, and serious mental disorders, I was genuinely touched by Iron Mike's home-grown Thanksgiving feast for his people. At the end of the day, he's just like you and me: a New York kid trying to give back to the people and places he comes from. And, like every other native New Yorker, we never forget it. Amen to you on this Thanksgiving, in the year of our Lord, 2014.
