And then, a miracle happened. I graduated and within one week landed a job, the next, I moved in with my college boyfriend. Finally, I was an adult and could live the life I wanted. Unfortunately, after a couple of months, my boyfriend decided to live the life he wanted too, and threw me out. And instead of going back home to 2:00 am curfew, I proved I was truly an adult by getting an apartment by myself. Oh, excuse me, did I call it an apartment? Ever hear of the film This Property Is Condemned? Well, I lived there. The ceilings dripped, every outlet sparked like a Tesla coil and there was a hole under the kitchen sink large enough for a German shepherd to crawl through. All this for just $550 a month. But it did have a backyard that could have made a pretty nice garden, if it was cleaned up. I was sure it would only take a week. Two months later, I had dug up a half-century of fossilized pets, (I kept some of the more interesting bones) a three-foot pile of rusted nails and five dollars in Indian-head nickels. And every time I cut myself on yet another piece of beer bottle forged before my parents were born, I saw it as one more manifestation of my rotten miserable life. And then, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I lost my job. My new job. The job where I hadn’t yet worked long enough to qualify for unemployment.

I had $2000 dollars in my savings account, enough for about three months rent and exactly $66.66 a month for everything else, including my two new kittens. I looked out the window at the clean, tilled garden. When I looked at it before I had pictured a soothing floral oasis for my tortured soul. Now I looked at it and saw dinner. The next morning I went straight to the library and took out every book I could find on organic gardening (the internet, sadly was still a couple of years away). In the afternoon, I went to the Caton Avenue stables and pushed home a creaking shopping cart of Key Food bags overflowing with horse manure. Before the week was out, I had planted my miniature farm with plum and beefsteak tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, eggplant and 36 stalks of Silver Queen white corn. All under the watchful eyes of my next door neighbors, a family of indeterminate Eastern European origin consisting of a fat mother with an eyepatch, an even fatter drunken husband and their skinny teenage son who liked to sunbathe in his rotting yellowed underwear. They all had something to say while I planted garlic, scallions, marigolds and nasturtium in between each row. “Vy you is plantink flower mit food?” my neighbor said to me in her indeterminate Eastern European accent. “You are knowing nothing of garden. All plant vill be diet. You vill see, ugly girl.” I thought I knew what I was doing. According to the organic gardening books, planting the spices and flowers would guard my vegetables against mold, infestation and rot. But, not unfortunately, against theft.

By the middle of August my garden was like an Henri Rousseau painting bursting with life and color. My neighbor’s, a soggy heap of mold and rot. “Vat you do my plants, ugly girl?” my neighbor said as she shook her fat fist at me. What could I tell her? That all the bugs and germs that were repelled from my garden were feasting on hers? Besides, I had other things to worry about, I was now living off the bottom of a 10-lb. bag of rice, but the first veggie to be ripe, a fat purple eggplant was just a day away.

Have you ever been hungry? Really hungry? The kind that wakes you up at night and keeps you on edge all day. I know I was always just a phone call away from my parents, but I was stubborn. I intentionally had moved as far away from them as I could (while still being in the same city) and I was determined to deal with this on my own.

That morning, I went into my garden and my perfect eggplant was gone. The next day, the next eggplant was gone. Then a zucchini. Then half my tomatoes. I couldn’t understand. And then one morning, a message in the dirt: A fat bare footprint next to the chain link fence and on the other side, a stepladder. How could I have been so stupid? I looked into my neighbor’s yard and she smirked at me. “Vy your plant livit and mines is die. Not correct, ugly girl,” and she put out her unfiltered cigarette with her fat bare foot.

I had never been so furious in my life. I wanted to climb that fence, break off her fat fingers and her fat foot and stick them into the fat hole where her right eye used to be. But I knew if I even as much as touched her, I would be the one to go to jail. I went into my apartment and cried and screamed until I collapsed onto the floor. I was a total and complete failure as an adult and would now have to call home and beg to come back. As I resigned myself to a lifetime of 2:00 am curfew, Boris, my fat little Russian Blue kitten, who I caught eating a waterbug the night before, went into the litter box and took the worst-smelling cat crap I ever smelled in my life. And through the miasma, the hunger and the tears, came an idea.

I went into my backyard at 2:00 am. It was cool and peaceful under a fingernail moon. I waited until all the lights on the block went dark, then I crept into the garden. I compared the last two eggplants, only the plumpest, ripest one would do. Lying on my back, I took out my sharpest Xacto knife and slowly, carefully, sawed a circular plug out of the bottom of the eggplant and hollowed it out, all the time comparing it to the circumference of the cat turd in the baggie at my side. The sky began to grow light. I was sweating. I saw a light go on in my neighbor’s kitchen, slipped the turd up into the eggplant and replaced the plug just in time to hear their screen door open. I crawled back into my apartment just in time. Later that day, I saw my neighbors on their front stoop. They wouldn’t look at me. “How is garden?” I asked. They banged into their house and locked the door. I thought I was going to break in half laughing, because what I was dying to know was, how/when did they find out about the booby, or should I say “poopy” trap? Did it slide out into her hand as she picked it? Or did it liquefy inside as she steamed it for her family whole? I would never know.

What I did know was that nothing ever disappeared from my garden that summer or any other summer for the five years I lived there. Funny thing is, now, for some reason, there’s one vegetable I just can’t eat anymore. So nothing good ever happens after 2:00 am? Sorry mom, this time, you were wrong.

Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.

I didn’t get a ticket that morning. Not because they had sold out, but because I didn’t have enough money. Even the blue nosebleed seats were now $5.50—a whole dollar more than the year before—and I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed. Some of the kids were so disappointed they started tearing up the selling floor, tagging and throwing mannequins around and cursing. I was having none of that. I had spent a half-hour in Central Booking for graffiti writing and vandalism once and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. So at 10:30am, I left Macy’s with my five crumpled one-dollar bills and walked back to school, figuring the day wasn’t a total loss, as I had only missed three periods. I got to school a little past 11:00 and right away saw something was up. For one thing there was a phalanx of cop cars around Westchester Square train station. For another, I heard the yelling all the way down the hill. And then I remembered. Today was Kill Whitey Day.

I know that in some alternate universe one’s high school days are a halcyon, carefree time, with fond, gauzy memories of homecoming days, pep rallies and proms. But at my high school, Herbert H. Lehman High, (fondly referred to as Lehman State Prison) the pivotal events we had to look forward to each spring were “Kill Whitey Day” and “Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day.”

It’s said that gangs are cyclical in NYC. There were gangs in the 1950s. There are gangs now. And in the mid/late 1970s, teenage New York was a city divided and ruled from Parkchester out to Morris Park and up to Throgs Neck by the white gangs The Bronx Aliens and Bronx Ministers. Their black and Latino counterparts The Savage Skulls, Savage Nomads, Mongol Brothers and the biker gang The Ching-A-Lings claimed everywhere south of Soundview Avenue and west, past Yankee Stadium and Fordham Road all the way to the Harlem River. Every spring, every high school would have their week or so when they would be at war. And as in any war, any unfortunate civilians who found themselves behind the front lines would just have to get by as best they could.

The messed-up thing about it was, you knew exactly when it was going to go down. The information crossed gang, race, and ethnic lines and flashed through your entire school faster than group text messaging locks down a campus today. You knew when your Kill Day was going to be. And not going to school that day was not an option. Because everyone would know you had punked out and your own neighborhood would make you a pariah for being a faggot, a pussy, for not having enough heart to risk getting a major beat down with everyone else.

Lehman High School, being in a mostly Italian neighborhood, was Bronx Ministers territory. But by some fate of late-60s decentralization, half the student population were various ethnicities of white, the other, black and/or latino. So Lehman was a school doubly “blessed” as it observed both Kill Days. Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day had been the week before and luckily I had escaped unscathed. Not so the year before, when two Italian boys stabbed me in the shoulder with a stiletto. Not because they specifically hated me, but because a couple of Savage Skulls had whipped them with a car antenna. And since they weren’t motivated (brave/stupid) enough to go down to the Bronx River projects to extract revenge, the next best thing was to attack me. They both actually apologized to me later and hoped I understood it wasn’t personal. I still have the scar.

Since not going into school was not an option, I went around the back way, where I knew (and security amazingly didn’t) a door was always propped open. Fourth period was about to begin and something told me not to try to sneak a cigarette before entering the relative safety of Health class. But I was nervous, so I took a chance. I peeked into the Girls bathroom and seeing no one, ducked into the last stall and immediately assumed the smoker’s position. Crouched on the toilet seat so someone bending down to check the stalls wouldn’t see any feet; constantly waving my right arm back and forth so the curling smoke wouldn’t give me away either. A few minutes later, the Newport Light just wasn’t doing it for me, but I decided to have one more drag. Famous last words.

I was about to flush the cigarette when the door opened and four black girls came in. I knew they were black because of their names. Keishas and Tawandas were in-utero or just being born. Girls my age were the last of a generation who were still named after jewels and desirable attributes: Crystal, Ruby, Precious and Unity. Delicate flowers who stashed razor blades in their afros and carried rolls of pennies balled up in their bandannas. I knew who they were because of their reputation. They were finely tuned, Black Pride lionesses who hunted their prey with particular savagery: What they caught, they would not release. And I knew that if they caught me, I was a goner. Because none of them would stop to ask a light-skinned freckle-faced redhead where her family was born before they beat the hell out of her.

“Dag, Ruby, you see that blond bitch face when we knocked her toof out?”

“Yeah, but my hand cut up, shoo. Precious, watch the door. Oh shit, you smell something? Who in here?”

I had neglected to do the one thing that could have saved me, which was to douse the cigarette and keep still. There wasn’t a thing I could do except wait as the four of them opened the stalls one by one until they found me. It was pointless to fight back. One, definitely. Two, maybe. But there were four of them. And it would have been suicide to try to tell them they were making a mistake. The year before, an olive-skinned Irish girl named Ellen something-or-other had tried to say she was half Puerto Rican and she ended up being held down and raped with an umbrella. That was not going to happen to me.

They pulled me off the toilet and threw me on the floor. I rolled up in a ball and tried to protect my face as they punched, kicked and penny-rolled me. How long? Too long. And then, the door opened.

“Yo, Nan-cee, we got another white girl, you want some?”

I looked up through one swollen, tear-and-Afrosheen clouded eye and saw Nancy Ortiz walk in. Nancy, who really was half Puerto Rican/half Irish, was one of those anomalies in our little world, a blessed creature who moved seamlessly between the races, befriending everyone, beat up by none. She came over to look at me.

“Dag, man, that girl ain’t white, she’s Puerto Rican.”

“What?”

“She’s Puerto Rican. That’s Shell, I know her from Homeroom. She’s from St. Peter’s, but she’s Puerto Rican. She just looks white.”

The punches stopped. A razor blade whizzed by my left cheek and clattered onto the tiles.

The one called Unity said, “She’s Puerto Rican?” and prodded me with her Pro Ked.

“I axed you, you Puerto Rican?” I spit out a trail of blood and snot and croaked out the only thing I could think of. “Si.”

“See, I told you. Stoopid!” And Nancy, having secured her place in heaven, left the bathroom.

Four pairs of eyes saw me as a person for the first time. “Oh man! We sorry.” “Oh man, we sorry.” “Shoo! Why didn’t she say something?” “Why didn’t you say nothing?” “Come on, help that girl up.” That was Unity, their leader talking. And Crystal, Ruby and Precious picked me up off the floor, patted my hair and tried to rearrange my clothes. “Get some water, clean her up,” Unity commanded. The girls ran to the sink, wet their bandannas and daubed at my face. I took Ruby’s pink bandanna and walked to the mirror to clean myself. She didn’t protest.

“This ain’t right,” Unity said. “We sorry Shell. We didn’t know. Why didn’t you say nothing? You’re not gonna tell, right? We gonna make it up to you. C’mon. Give her your weed.” And Crystal, Precious and Ruby all looked down at their sneakers. “I said, give her your weed,” yelled Unity. “Give it up!”

And one by one, the girls reached into their afros and their tube socks and pulled out crooked joints rolled in banana, chocolate and strawberry EZ Wider. Mutely, with averted eyes, they handed them to me. “We sorry,” Crystal mumbled. “Yeah, man, we sorry,” Ruby said. But not Precious. She had been standing on the other side of the bathroom and was now trying to sidle her way towards the door. But she couldn’t get away from Unity’s watchful eye. Unity’s fist shot out: Biff! And punched the side of Precious’s head so hard her afro pick flew into the sink, clattering in front of me. “I said, give her your weed, bitch!” Precious’s hand trembled as she dug around her bra and finally handed me a crumpled, sweat-stained, half-full nickel bag.

“Look, we sorry, It was a mistake, right?” Unity said. “You’re not gonna tell right? I mean, like we did you a solid and all. Come on, let’s go kick some real white ass.” And just like that, they left. I stood there for a moment and totally accepted what had happened as just the way things were. I still couldn’t quite believe my luck in escaping with just a cut lip and black eye. And then I looked at what was balled up in my clenched fist—and I did believe it. I walked right out of school and over to Zappa’s Corner where I sold all the pot, then ran back to Macy’s, getting there just before Ticketmaster closed at 4:00pm.

The day wasn’t a total waste after all. I was going to see “Kashmir.”

Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.

A little while after that, my dad became the neighborhood pet rescuer. He had always loved animals and had tended pigeons on many rooftops in Spanish Harlem as a child and teenager. I have vague memories of animal wards on our fire escape. Shoeboxes with anything from a broken-winged pigeon (that disappeared) to a baby squirrel (that died) to a couple of poor, mangy, flea-ridden kittens, one of which my mother actually let me keep (it died too). But one day on his way home from work he saw a puppy get hit by a car and thought if he saved it and found the puppy’s owner he’d get a reward. So my dad brought it home, shaved and cleaned up its gashes with hydrogen peroxide and sewed up the biggest one with my mom’s crochet thread. He made a splint for its broken paw—with sticks from the popsicles he made all of us eat after dinner—in January. He gave the puppy a bath, fed and brushed it, and pet it until it fell asleep. It was the best treatment that poor dog probably ever had and as I recall, my dad did not get bit once. But when my dad tracked down the owner—who happened to live in our building—the owner said he had thrown the dog out on purpose, he had wanted him to die. And my dad said, “What?!? How about I take you outside and throw you in front of a car, see how you like it!” “Oh yeah, how about I punch you in the nose!” “Oh yeah, how about I… “This went on until someone finally called the cops. Nothing happened to my dad except having to hear every Bible verse about minding one’s business for the next couple of days. I don’t remember what happened to the dog. But that was the end of his veterinary hobby.

Then when I was a little older, my dad got the idea he could rewire lamps people had thrown out and sell them back to the junk shop (this was before “junk” became “vintage”). My mom said, “What do you think you’re doing? You know nothing about electricity.” But since, or maybe in spite of her not being able to find any verses about lamp wiring in either the Old or New Testaments, our living room was soon filled with a collection of lamps that had probably been “the cat’s pajamas” when they were new. But one day I came home from school and plugged one of them in. The next thing I knew, my brother was crying, my mom was saying “I told you not to bring junk into the house!” and my dad yelled back, “Well, who told her to plug the damn lamp in!” Meanwhile, I was clear on the other side of the living room with overcooked spaghetti for limbs and brain, and little black marks on my right thumb and left toe. The trip to the emergency room ended up costing my dad more than he would have made on ten lamps. That was the end of his electrical career.

A couple of years after that, my dad lost his real job. The construction company he worked for closed down overnight and moved to North Carolina. He didn’t work for almost two years–and it turned him from a life-long Democrat into a “Republi-Rican”–but that’s another story. For almost two years we endured welfare peanut butter that tasted as if it was made from shells off a barroom floor, welfare cheese that tasted like mutant Velveeta combined with spackle and various powdered food products that none of us dared talk about. My mom’s Bible readings now centered on prosperity and blessings, as opposed to punishment and damnation. And for once, my dad had no money-making ideas.

Then Louie “The Light Bulb Man” Eisenberg hit the legal number, (a.k.a. “Lotto”) took his million-plus dollars and retired, and somehow my dad ended up with his job, at the courthouse on 100 Centre Street. In-between screwing in light bulbs, he followed the cops and detectives around all day, picking up the trash they left behind. My dad would bag it up and put it out back, on Baxter Street, to get picked up. One afternoon he was leaving the courthouse from the back way and saw the neighborhood homeless guys picking through the trash bags. “Hey Rudy!” they called out to him. They all knew who my dad was because my dad would buy them coffee every morning. There was Flaco, who was fat, Lucky, because he obviously wasn’t, and Ching who was well…Ching: The Drunken Kung Fu Master of Columbus Park. “Hey Rudy, can you do us a solid? If you separate the deposit bottles and cans from the rest of the garbage, we’ll cut you in, 10%.” “What do you do with them?” my dad asked. “We take ‘em to the Pathmark on Cherry Street, can make $20 a bag. C’mon man, do us a solid!” I can only imagine the ring of light bulbs appearing around my dad’s head as he did the math: At least 10 bags a day @$2 a bag, every day… “Deal.”

And so, in the wake of the first wave of Reaganomics, a new economy was born. In-between the cans, letting JFK Jr. leave from the basement so Pablo Guzman, now a Channel 2 investigative news reporter, couldn’t ask him why he failed the bar again–plus getting free hot dogs from Pablo in return for information about JFK Jr.’s whereabouts–my dad was making about an extra $100 a week. But then one day Flaco disappeared and Lucky and Ching, being small, skinny and quite likely in the final ravages of alcoholism, couldn’t handle the load. “Hey, you guys gotta get this junk out!” “Yeah man, we do it, we do it. Give us time, man.” Later that afternoon, my dad’s boss opened up the storeroom, saw all the bags and told my dad he had to get them out of there or else. That evening, dad went to Columbus Park, found Lucky and told him he’d pay him to get the bags out of there. “Yeah, man, no problem, I meet you 10:00 tomorrow morning.”

Well that Saturday morning happened to be my 18th birthday and my dad was going to take all of us to Carmine’s at the Street Seaport for lunch. But as we were having breakfast he said, “You and your brother have to come to work with me first, I need help with something.” We got to the courthouse, went to my dad’s storeroom and found it filled top to bottom with huge black industrial garbage bags bursting with cans. “Just help me load this up outside, someone is going to come and get it.” So we carried the bags outside and we waited and we waited, and Lucky never showed up. After a while, Ching passed by and asked my dad for a quarter. My dad said, “Where’s Lucky? You guys gotta take these bags, I can’t keep them inside anymore.” Ching goes, “Hey, man, not my problem.” So my dad said, “OK, the hell with this, we’ll just leave the bags, let’s go”. But then a cop, who obviously had been watching us the entire time, came over and told my dad he couldn’t leave the bags there. And when my dad said, “Well, I can’t bring them back inside”, the cop went, “Hey, man, that’s not my problem.” My dad turned around to offer Ching $20 to take the bags but Ching was long gone. So we had no choice but to take the bags ourselves. We loaded them into a wheeled canvas dumpster that looked like the biggest shopping cart you ever saw and my dad said, “Look, we’ll just bring the cans there and someone will take them. It’ll be fine.”

It took all three of us to wheel that cart, that huge canvas dumpster chock-full of garbage bags the 15 or so blocks from Centre Street to Cherry Street and the FDR. All along the way people were looking at us funny, my brother was almost crying from humiliation and my dad was quite visibly pissed. But I was okay with it, I thought it was kind of punk actually. When we finally made it to Pathmark, my dad saw Lucky, grabbed him and said he had to take the cans, but Lucky told my dad to fuck off. Of course he did. He was homeless, he was happily drunk at 11:30 am and he had already done his cans and gotten his 50 dollars, so why should he do any more work. My dad was so angry he himself used the F-word, something he almost never did. “Fuck it! We’re leaving them here.” So we started unloading the cart and the same cop, who must’ve followed us all the way from the courthouse, came over and said “You can’t leave them here,” and my dad said, “Well, what am I supposed to do with them?” The cop pointed across the parking lot to the row of redemption machines and the lines of homeless people in front of them. My brother couldn’t take it any more and really started crying. But with the cop watching us we had no choice, so we took our bags and took our place among the homeless.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, if it hadn’t of been July and the cans hadn’t of been so sticky and there weren’t so many yellow jackets buzzing around. After doing two or three bags my brother refused to do any more and walked over to the side of the parking lot to sulk. I went to him and said, “Why are you being such a pussy? I’m the one spending my birthday with homeless people.” He threw a can at me. I went back to the redemption machines. My dad was kind of slow at it, but for some reason I got the hang right away. You just tossed a can into the slot and pressed a button. For every five cans, you got a quarter. It got to where I was doing two machines at a time, right and left-handed, and I was so quick, some of the men on the line offered me a cut if I’d do their bags. I looked over at my dad, who I knew was keeping an eye on me the entire time. It never crossed my mind that I was probably the only female ever to grace the Pathmark Redemption Center. But even at the age of 18, I still looked about 12 and with my black jeans, Doc Martens and Devo t-shirt, not to mention my “Flock of Seagulls” haircut, they all probably thought I was a boy anyway. So I said, “OK,” and on top of the bags we brought I must have done an extra ten bags and as promised the homeless men came back and gave me my cut. Some of them looked at my dad and nodded. I guessed they thought my dad had brought me up right. Yeah. Right.

By the time we finished all the cans it was three o’clock and we had made $200 dollars. In quarters. By the time we had stood on yet another line to redeem the change, it was after four and my dad said “OK, let’s eat”. We took the dumpster back to Centre Street–which went a lot quicker being it was empty–and finally got to the Seaport. Only we were all filthy. Our hands were black and sticky, my brother’s new, white, New Balance sneakers were new and white no longer and all our shirts were disgusting. We looked homeless. My dad said he’d buy us some new clothes, so we went to the brand-new Pier 17 shopping mall where he took us to the Gap. My brother smiled for the first time all day. But now I wanted to cry. The Gap? The antithesis of punk? The shame! But I had no choice. My dad bought us all new t-shirts and jeans and we had to go to the public bathrooms to clean up and change. In the ladies’ room, a couple of people looked at me with averted eyes. I resisted the temptation to ask them for a quarter.

At Carmine’s we had the Lobster Fra Diablo, the Veal Marsala, the Eggplant Parmigiana and the Zabaglione with Ricotta Cheesecake. After all, it was my birthday. But my mom never made it. Between Lucky and Ching and the cop and Pathmark, my dad had forgotten to go to a pay phone to call her. When he finally did–from outside the restaurant–she was so angry, she said she wouldn’t come. My dad joked that between the dinner and the new clothes we really didn’t have a lot of money left over for her to eat anyway. My brother and I laughed. What mom did remains a mystery to this day. And as we walked up Fulton Street back to the subway, who did we run into but the same cop who had been the catalyst to all the events that day. He unwrapped a piece of gum and tossed the wrapper into the street. My dad walked right up to him and said, “Hey, you can’t leave that there.” The cop looked at my dad for a long moment, bent down and picked up the wrapper, stuck it in his pocket and said, “Even.” As we walked away my brother asked, “Daddy, you know that cop?” “Who, Officer Colletti? He works at the courthouse. I used to pick up his cans all the time. Not anymore.” And he whistled all the way home.

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Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.