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