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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones |
Like all the other decisions I watched Cotto make on his own, each and every single one of them was the wrong one, just like the other scared kids from Brownsville before him. He was angry and arrogant about his lies, too, preferring instead to say to me that he found "creativity" similar to "lying", because that's what most 'hood heroes do: they puff themselves up beyond average human reason and typical imagination, creating the sense that everyone and everything around them is bullshit, so used to the scammers and liars most project folk also believe themselves excellently to be.
His brush-up with "the real" through me was absolutely horrifying for him. I saw him turn white in shock while I sat on his floor describing my hard-working studio days, and he was a rather dark-skinned male when I knew him. "What you're saying to me is absolutely terrifying to me", as he shook his head slowly back and forth, hamming it up to me over the drinks that I bought for us down the block at a hipster joint, now that I had money again from my design work. Any real welfare queen has great acting chops as part of his/her arsenal that are the ideals of the insane. Cotto tried in vain to convince me that waiting all day in the depressing rooms of Public Assistance was his "job" when he did it full-time, and if I wanted to work it, that's how I had to think about it, too. Uh, excuse me, what...?!
It was so utterly poor in quality and convoluted in its execution, that the few days I did interact with the staff there, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "social workers" working there were just as crazy as the people who worked them over for a living. It felt like the blurry line that sometimes divides inmates from officers in a prison setting, as time spent together that sometimes created an artificial camaraderie not actually existing between a convict and their supervising warrior. When was the last time you met a timid Samurai?
As soon as I got a job, the "case worker" in her early twenties assigned to me immediately shut the door to all the city programs and services that were supposedly available to someone like me, even though I told her I would still need help as a single working woman living alone in the city. Ever heard of back rent that's due and unpaid bills? She blew aside my concerns, so rare an experience it must have been for her working in a dead zone of Brooklyn that's atypical for our lives there, living in one of the most beautiful boroughs of the world. Case closed! She seemed relieved to have less work to do, though I doubt she'd ever met someone like me before. For all my time spent waiting and shuffling between odd appointments, all I got out of their bloated bureaucratic structures were a few Metrocards for the mass transit trips necessary to reach the wacky appointments made for me by various city agencies, scattered around town in a way that made no sense, especially to an efficient and practical Acadian like me.
Cotto worked the rooms he visited at welfare like he was born to the life, and he was. It was, for him, the perfect fit. He described the one part-time beginner's web job he had (self-described to me as his brief work as a "designer", even though he couldn't draw his way out of a paper bag), and much like his beginner's job in the professional world of cuisine, he felt that this paltry desk job was wayyy beneath him, lacking as it was to his superior sense of self. You see, he told me his employer was "crazy", making him work out of his home as a self-starter in his own business, constantly watching over his shoulder while he did all these banal chores like scan in art every single day, over and over again. It's called being a "Production Assistant", or "Production Designer" in desktop publishing, Cotto!
Much like the other jobs he tried working, he hated every single one of them. What could compete with sitting in a small room playing superhero video games stoned off your ass, day after day? Like a perpetual teenager who never really got a full kickstart in life, he just felt that wasn't made for real life. His juvenile dad (his "best friend" and favorite drinking buddy) had died at the early age of 53 from heart disease, and Cotto told me that he knew he would, too. He already had a disturbing hacking cough. What was left for him to do? He felt that his lazy rolling about the streets had given him all the "life experience" he needed. What could there possibly be for him? It was shocking in its' ineptitude for someone like him: someone who'd never really traveled anywhere or seen anything really good in life.
He'd partied with a bunch of people who were dead, in various key spots around the city. Wasn't that what I meant? He'd then adopt a quizzical look for show. Sigh....always another tiring con job to front. He could memorize the best subway route he needed to buy weed at Washington Square Park, shocked by the commuter routine I'd adapted to early morning weekday life as it was for me then. But, but...that's too slow! What if he wanted weed quicker? He could get me there in 15 minutes! Of course, his route meant shite to me on the weekends that I had time to explore or run errands around town, because the tracks changed routes for servicing then anyway, but like any of the other real points I shared with him, he'd feign disinterest, suddenly closing his eyes and dozing at the diner table I brought him to in the middle of the day, so we could get breakfast (paid by me, of course) before hitting the laundromat, so I'd have fresh clothes for work during the upcoming week.
As soon as I finished cleaning up the room next to his that was "for rent" by the squatting former super operating in a tenuous situation I hadn't been made fully aware of (seeing as I went to another corner store than the local Nuyroricans living closer to Sunset Park than Park Slope), Cotto soon became paranoid by our change in circumstances. I figured from the cocktail of meds he showed me that he purposefully weaned himself off of them to hurt me with his burgeoning psychosis anew, but by then, I'd handily locked myself into the room I cleaned out with a thick chain through the punched-out doorknob that he'd have to borrow a heavy cutter to undo, and that was labor, man. Not worth it to him, I guess. Besides, I actually paid full market value for the rooms' legal worth, and as such, I wasn't a person of interest to the other 'hood rats in the building, or the people in the neighborhood watching us. I'd be gone soon, anyway, funded by my earnings.
As soon as Cotto got his money from the city for his cheap community college (and I doubted that story, too, but that's life in any ghetto), he cashed it and went on a spending spree, like I knew he would. He told me "they" gave him $30,000 for tuition, books, supplies, food, and rent, but have you ever heard of a two-year CUNY school on Staten Island for that kind of cash? Exactly! One of his stories surrounded this myth that he was a "media major" at school, because he got baked and watched a lot of t.v. shows and movies. Oh....times have sure changed! Must be expensive to study it at school, wink wink. The one paper he showed me was clearly written by the prof with his college study group. It was like a bad essay from a kid attending junior high school. In his make-believe role as a hardworking college kid from the 'hood looking to "make it" on his own finally (like the welfare myth about "a hand-up, and not a 'hand-out'!"), Cotto greatly justified his purchase of a fancy new digital tablet he didn't actually need for his school coursework, because he showed me the curriculum he had.
After that, he felt free to dream aloud on his small twin bed at me as I barely listened, nestled comfortably in his Army/Navy sleeping bag on the floor, ready to drop off to sleep like the hardworking girl without medication that I am, in stark contrast to his rapidly firing mania. That's why he was a coke addict, too! Did I know that? It was always something with him. As he fantasized aloud to me about a future he'd never really wanted to have, he pretended to me that he needed a fancy pair of designer headphones that every single 'hood rat from around the way sported on the trains, colored as they were to match the "kicks" (sneaks) and caps that were trendy then, like every sad pricey item that came before it, perpetrated by the same con artists who charged extra to their home crowd for the distinction of selling their shattered dreams of fame and stardom back to them, in an endlessly parasitic cycle that marks the life of hardened criminals.
After all, the rapper who sold them was from the "mean streets", too, yo! He makes some fresh gear that I just gots to have! It was always this craving for stuff that was barely hidden hidden behind false ideas about an American Dream that most of the cons never genuinely wanted, anyway. They'd be us, if they really wanted our lives to share. I'd known that as well, but like his other reveries, he didn't bear up under the close scrutiny of another native New York kid like him. He just wanted to sell you some "beats" that you missed out on, man! Hey, where were you for that? Huh. He wasn't there for it with you, you know. He just disappeared at the exact right time by lurking creepily in the background, to the murky depths lingering on the edges of any true society where he feels he belongs, happy to catch our petty little crumbs and call them "bad", because that's the way he liked it. Badly.
