When the bottom fell out of my life financially and economically through spiteful intent and malicious design, after my supposed friends and family abandoned me, I found that abandonment embodied in a ramshackle tenement, in what was also supposed to be one of the "best" neighborhoods in New York City: Park Slope, Brooklyn. By no coincidence, it is comprised mostly of white out-of-towners who ask to be resettled there through their also-wealthy realtors and big money companies, so that they can feel some sense of security living in a town with a really bad reputation, much hyped as it is on t.v. and in movies. It is not my native New York.
It should then also come as no surprise to us, as New Yorkers, that we awoke Sunday morning to a loudly trumpeted double murder and suicide luridly served up and gleefully splashed across every local "news" program, a horror that was supposedly committed in response to "racism" (a divisive concept I do not believe in, because it is a human construct that does not actually exist in our blood that flows freely), but which is actually madness in the guise of evil. I was not fooled by the gunman's racist exhortations online, a mockery to all of us during this season of glad tidings and one very special birthday, but isn't that the point, the very hell that we women relive each and every day? We give birth, only to watch men and boys kill each other (our children) in each others' name. One life is given, and two are taken away, or two are taken and one is murdered, but the result for a woman is always the same: grief, pain, and mourning, as we watch our children taken away from us, after laboring so hard to keep them alive and safe under our charge, brief a time as it is.
And so it was with me, when I was forced into poverty and homelessness by the very people who pledged to give me life and succor it gladly in G-d's name, in His House, and standing on His alter; a move I made done in quick fear to a rotten, filthy hole of a building with horrors inside that also existed in full view of one of the wealthiest neighborhood's in the world, like a sacrilege to any who dared enter it, in the form of a roach-filled, rat-infested tenement that was the only thing I could afford to pay at the time before another corporate job started (at half the salary and below my level, you know, to fully take advantage of my vulnerable status). My labor only encouraged the tenants who lived there, beneath me in every regard, to feed off my body and blood as I worked unholy hours every day and night for them. I gave them everything: first as my money earned through my labor which is made from my honest and good hard work, my few scant hours of free time filled up with their petty tricks lies, deceits, and nonsense, all my best advice and attentions, my good wishes, all my richest and most worthy gifts freely given to them, and still it did no good. They still choose each day to waste G-d's precious riches.
The man who introduced me into his world and environment was recommended this dirty place through the local bodega, the very same place that sold him "loose" cigarettes, an unknown element to me before I came first to sleep on his floor in his sleeping bag and then, after I paid he and the super to help me empty out another filthy room adjacent to his little cell, was the same place I made clean so I that could sleep in that chamber of horrors that was padlocked with a chain instead of a doorknob before I went to work in the city, earning more for them to take from me cruelly, as they devised.
This focal point of crime disguised as just another local bodega served as the community hot spot for criminal endeavors, because I asked my fallen friend to tell me about it. The same bodega owner who sold him cigarettes one by one in a small paper bag also took advantage of his derangement and continued poverty by directing him to an illegal tenement where he squatted, until the rich old white lady owner from Long Island found out that super was also in on the take, and kicked us out through some rich white lawyers working the city housing court system, because we hadn't given her enough to stay in her illegal building. After all my battles there were won, I actually paid what is considered "fair market value" for the privilege of staying in her squalor.
They told my mentally ill friend at the bodega (because he was new to this place that he always aspired to be, susceptible as he was: a broken ghetto kid from Brownsville) where to buy pot, and they advertised in their store window how they could illegal hack into your iPhone for a $50 fee (which was locked because you couldn't pay your phone bill) through something also unknown to me at the time that's called a "jailbreak". My friend and a neighbor had to teach me how to do it, where to go, and which man to ask for at the bodega for these services. They were that unknown to me at the time; these strange, foreign, shadowy, secretive underworld concepts that baffled me and still do, like the criminal who spends ten years plotting a crime that's over in ten minutes, never recouping his actual loss spent planning such hopeless endeavors. That's how wasteful and stupid it was to me, emotions not dulled or diminished today through the time and distance that has passed.
So the next time some carnival barker (with his obvious freckles and slick pompadour) appears on t.v., the same one who refuses to pay taxes in our home state and city where he also resides, tries to convince you that we exist in a society that's as flat and dull as any generic black and white cookie bought in a corner bodega that can easily be broken in half, remember my words here as you read my true life tale, before you rush to judgement about who is the criminal and who is the thief. Chances are that when you look in the mirror, it's you, and that this current tired rerun being played out on t.v. for sport and amusement is a phoney crusade made from fool's gold.
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Merry Christmas to you during His Holy Days
of Peace, Prosperity, and Love.
