I stood on 125th street, listening the rumble above me as the train rolled into the ground. McDonalds smelled behind me. Cabs, like giant ants formed an army up Broadway. Crossing the street, the sun staring between train tracks, I hear a voice laced with the Grant Projects and affection.

“Yo, Ms. D!”

I knew her as my own immediately.

Gisele Henriquez-woman. She had the same sexy Harlem gait that I remember being alarmed about when she was my student (a girl her age with a body like that shouldn’t walk like that). Her face was unchanged: she was still beautiful; black opal eyes against the backdrop of alabaster skin, the slight curly patch that joined her eyebrows in the middle of her forehead, her long thick black hair alluding Taino heritage was in a ponytail, exposing her small ears which hung “banji girl” gold doorknocker earrings.

She ambled toward me, glowing and very pregnant and kissed me hard on the cheek.

She had house keys and Chico Stix in her hand, and as her face re-emerged from the nape of my neck I watched her seductive lips exclaim some statement of happiness adorned with expletives. This is how Harlem girls address each other, in affection, in nostalgia. In profanity. The train gargled uptown on top of us and I grabbed the Chico Stix from out her hand. I couldn’t stop smiling. When the 1 ran past she repeated herself.

“Mira, Oh my God, how you doin? Oh fuck!!! Ms. D”!!!!

I grabbed her hand and crossed Old Broadway, the small inlet that gave itself over to Grant projects and grand tenements, that housed so many of my students. We walked towards the sunshine, away from our train, next to the bodega that sells loosie cigarettes to all the hard faced man-children that plant themselves on the corners under the train when they should be in social studies class. I stopped and opened up the Chico Stix, bit down, and took my beloved student in, fully.

She started talking slowly, holding my arm, she complained about her feet being swollen, I told her how beautiful her hair looked-it really did. We walked towards the diner before the firehouse, where cars park at an angle when the cops are busy stuffing themselves with Dunkin Donuts.

-The diner, where all the waiters speak Spanish, the corner where the Citerella just didn’t quite take.

I walked with her and listened to her tell me about her life, and him.

I know this beauty. I know this woman from her 15th year as an angry and sarcastic and beautiful hold over- an overage school kid- a hot mouthed, neck swinging thing with a chip on her shoulder and signature Dr. Jay jeans that were way too tight. I liked her immediately.

And she liked me too, Thank God. I never got cursed at or fought like so many other of my District 5 colleagues, and plus, she loved my music class. She had a beautiful voice- clean, chimy, but nasal, like a true Latina. She joined chorus, and my Saturday morning community service outreach, and got into a pretty good high school, thanks to two recommendations from the principal and guidance counselor that I almost had to sell my soul to get.

She was on her way, I thought. She was fixed. She was going to break the cycle of degradation and miseducation that has plagued far too many young women of color in Harlem or any ghetto in the USA for so long. She was the story I told to skeptics and naysayers who wanted to scrap NYC’s public education system completely.

Gisele went to A Philip Randolph High School, next to City College. She also won a scholarship to Harlem School of the Arts (HSA). She was a vocal major, excelling in her studies. She enjoyed high school, remarked how much easier it was that middle school, both socially and academically.

“There were girls there my age. None of these little bitches who gave me shit looks cuz they was jealous.”

She loved voice class very much, and was even crazy about music theory and appreciation class. She was asked to tutor students in the learning annex because of her prior community service experience. The end of freshman year found her on the Dean’s List. There was talk about putting her in accelerated college prep classes.

We sat down in the diner, she remarked about “Precious” being filmed there- I laughed when I remembered the bucket of chicken scene.

“Word,” I smiled bigger, and ordered some coffee to compliment her san cocho.
I asked her if her mother is still at 26 Old Broadway, where she was living in junior high school. She nods, and smiles.

“Yo, you remember when you showed us “Fame” the last week of school in 8th grade? I loved that movie, yo. “

“I remember, Ms. Thing.” I sipped my coffee slowly, watching her square-cut French manicured nails wrap themselves around the soup spoon.

“We was in vocal class last year tryna harmonize Body Electric n’ I thought of you. I sounded mad good too,” she smiled, and finished her compliment with a lip smack that would make all of West Harlem proud.

Then, She told me about Peter. She describes the first time he kissed her like she’s reading script from a novella, her street-Spanglish cascading out over tumescent lips.

“I fell in love with him the night he gave me this,” she points to necklace she wears, with a medallion, of Saint Peter, patron Saint of what, she isn’t sure. It was enough that he entrusted this necklace to her. From that moment, she entrusted her heart to him.

I asked her when she realized she was pregnant.

“I know from that day he would be the father of my children. We NEVER used anything, Ms. D, we just knew it was right.”

Peter subsequently dropped out of school, and has a job now at the new Costco that opened up in East Harlem. Gisele still lives with her mom and younger siblings in that house on Old Broadway and plans to attend Missions School, for pregnant teens. She says she still sings, and wants to name her baby, India, after her favorite Salsa singer.

“Its gonna be ok, Ms. D, you’ll see.”

I smiled again and looked away, not wanting her to notice the worry in my face. I stared out the window and I watched the baby banji girls on the corner headed towards the Old Navy and the braid spot, licking innocently on the deliciouso the Mexican woman pushes on the corner (“$1 mix coco/cherry”!). I eye them closely, like I did Gisele, and wonder if they really know what they’re doing, licking the ice like that, pretty sugar stained lips adorned beautiful ethnic faces full of attitude.

She reached across the table and touched my hand.

“He loves me.” She said it, I realized that after all these streets had thrown at her, after all the clawing over broken glass and racing under booming train tracks and fighting for a meager public school education has done to this girl, that was all she really wanted.

I told her I was happy for her.

Her phone rang, her face lit up, and she told me she had to go. She waddled up, saying her goodbyes way too loud for the small corner diner. She kissed me goodbye and left me with my coffee.

I sat for a minute, stared out the window, and watched this beautiful woman-child venture down a coolly-lit Harlem side street that seemed to me as precarious as her future.

Breeanne Elizabeth Daniels is a native New Yorker. She is taught middle school in New York City for 11 years and community college for 3. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.

Another man said, “Well, the world ends every day.”

“And it begins every day!” I said. I’m usually the optimistic one in a crowd. I also believe in everything: ghosts, King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Loch Ness Monster, conspiracy theories and true love, amongst other things. So May 21st was a challenge as it’s hard to be an optimist on a day you believe the world could end. There’s no denying the world can end on any given day, but I would much rather it be a surprise. I must admit that when I found out about the world ending in May of 2011 I felt a little gypped, as I had expected to enjoy a whole year of my life before having to worry about the world ending in 2012.

Of course, the End of the World is a common theme in humanity’s collective memory. We are obsessed with our own demise and our collective ego does not allow us to separate our fate with that of the Earth’s. So, naturally, during catastrophes like the Black Death we assumed the world was ending. In reaction to the forecasted doom, many practiced extreme penitence and flogged themselves. These flagellants rolled into towns carrying the plague with them. Since misery loves company, the flagellants claimed they could cure plague victims and perform miracles in an effort to persuade others to join them. Some people, seeing that the plague did not discriminate between sinner or saint, resorted to hedonism and debauchery so they could at least go out with a bang. Though the Earth has continued to continue, the world has ended in many ways already. The world as the Native Americans knew it, for example, ended the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola.

The first time I heard about the end of the world was in 2007. There was a special about Nostradamus on the History Channel and he predicted that the world would end in 2012. I found out the day before a test for grad school. I was a New York City Teaching Fellow getting my Masters in Teaching while working full time as a classroom teacher. To prepare for the test I was diligently Googling all the names and theories and laws that I had failed to pay attention to in class. After learning that the world might end in five years I saw the test not as a step towards my future, but as an obstacle preventing me from relishing every last moment of my life on Earth. I found my way to the nearest bodega and got some beer.

At the bodega a funny thing happened. The sliding glass door guarding the beer looked innocuous and the handle felt normal when I gripped it hard with all the weight of my new knowledge, but as I pulled it, instead of sliding obligingly to the right the door started keeling over right on top of me and I thought I would be one of the lucky ones to die before shit hit the fan. Though it would have been painful to be impaled by hundreds of glass shards, at least there would still be people around to mourn my passing.

The door fell on top of me knocking me against a shelf. But it bounced off my body as if I was made of plush before tossing itself to the floor and smashing into a thousand pieces; none of which touched me. Was it a miracle or was I just lucky? At any rate I was comforted by the fortunate outcome of this near death experience and took it as a sign that I shouldn't so readily believe in the worst.

Three years later, when I was still a teacher in the Bronx, I was in my classroom proctoring a state-mandated practice test. My students had already taken at least ten such practice tests in different subjects. This test came on the heels of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Some of my students, who didn’t have younger siblings or cousins, had been bringing used clothes to class to send to Haiti. My students were quite the humanitarians, but there isn’t a state-mandated test that measures that.

Five minutes after I had distributed the test booklets, one of my students, Eladio, turned to me and said, "Ms. Kilmer, maybe 2012 will happen."

It was not unlikely that my students equated all of these tests with the death of a certain part of their soul, and that perhaps Eladio was using a clever metaphor to express his feelings regarding all of this testing. But I wasn't sure.

"Why do you say that?" Though Eladio was taking a test and as the proctor I should have scolded him for talking, this was a matter of tantamount importance. After all, I know how hard it is to take a test while the end of the world is on your mind.

"Well, first there was an earthquake in Haiti, then there was an earthquake in Chile, and this morning there was an earthquake in some place called...Turkey?"

Eladio was one of the first students to know about the earthquake in Haiti and one of the first to vocalize his desire to help. He loved watching the news and telling me about it, and now he was informing me about this earthquake that I was not even aware of.

I told Eladio that many scientists say that 2012 is not going to happen. It was the least I could do. In retrospect, I should have told him that yes, 2012 will happen, right after 2011, and right before 2013. Not sure if his fear had been dispelled, I wondered if he was thinking of five thousand and one better things he could be doing with his limited time than taking that practice test.

In the hours that led up to the projected end of the world this May, I found myself wondering how I should spend my time before the apocalypse commenced. Believers quit their jobs and spent what they thought would be their last days at Columbus Circle passing out flyers. I, on the other hand, wanted to make sure I was at least enjoying myself. Conveniently, it was a Saturday, a day on which I tend to enjoy myself anyway.

My friend and I ended up spending the whole day walking along the Hudson River and working up an appetite. We decided to get pizza at an Italian restaurant. I’ve been trying to mind my budget, so I was going to pass on ordering wine. I explained this to the waiter since he looked offended when I declined to look at the wine menu.

“Ha!” He mocked my logic. “The world is going to end, so if I were you I would just buy wine and forget about the food!” My friend and I laughed and decided that, what the heck, we might as well get both.

As the day progressed I started using the Apocalypse as an excuse for mild misconduct. My friend and I left a bar without paying for our drinks, bought more beer at a bodega and drank it on a stoop. We saw people fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the street. But then again, if there hadn’t been fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the streets of New York City I might have been more likely to believe the end was near. And because this is New York City, where anything can happen, it was strange, but not too strange that I ended up sitting next to a white man in a Native American headdress after the deadline for the end of the world.

The man in the headdress confessed that he was an alcoholic. I wondered if alcoholism is another form of flagellation. Standing outside Columbus Circle all day passing out flyers certainly is, and debauchery is rampant in New York City on any given day. In some ways not much has changed since the Black Death. I thought about Eladio and what he might have done on May 21st. It was a comfort to know that since it was a Saturday he couldn’t have possibly been taking a test.

My secret hope was that I would live in one of those secret apartments one day. I wasn’t the kind of writer who hoped for a garret. I wanted a warren, a private place inside a big structure that would be utterly silent at night. The moment I found the apartment in the basement of The Museum of the America Indian, it became my apotheosis of a writer’s warren.

I had unfettered access to the basement because I’d gotten a part-time job at the gift shop in the Museum. This is back when the Museum was up on 155th Street, sharing one of the grand Beaux Arts buildings of Audubon Terrace with the American Geographical Society, the American Numismatic Society, the Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The compound was an elegant testament to the retro-classic architecture of the early 20th Century. The people who ran the Museum of American Indian chafed to get out...the dated sensibility of Victorian anthropology clashed with the enlightened post-Modern interpretation of the native American cultures.

I was happy because the job was on the Number 1 Line and midway between my apartment way uptown on Wadsworth Avenue and the Columbia campus, where I was finishing up my junior year.

My primary qualification for working at the gift shop was that I had wrapped packages for a letter press shop was I was thirteen. The hours were flexible and the setting fed my need for eccentric and out-of-the-way New York experiences.

As dated and stodgy as the Museum was, the gift shop was vital and energetic. The manager was one of the most sophisticated buyers of Indian jewelry, Navajo rugs, modern native American painting, pottery and Hopi Kachina dolls in the New York area. The shop also had an extensive collection of literature and research about native Americans.

I was intrigued by the expertise of the people who came in to the shop and began to read all of the books about Native American art that I could sneak out with me at the end of the day. Soon I was allowed to work the counter, and in time I became one of the most confident people on staff talking about the pottery and rugs that we carried.

Nancy, the shop manager, encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the things in the shop. My enthusiasm began to attract her attention. Dane, another guy who worked in the shop with me, didn’t seem happy when Nancy invited me down to the stockroom to see the new shipments that had come in from her last buying trip to the Southwest. Jane, the girl who worked the admissions counter and handled the phones, told me that Dane and Nancy had a thing going, and that I’d better watch out for myself. I wasn’t sure whether I was all that interested in Nancy: she was in her thirties, had stringy blonde hair that she kept in a business-like cut, and her hips did an odd, mis-aligned seesaw switch when she walked.

I was sure that I was interested in Jane. She was a couple of years out of Michigan and lived in a ground-floor apartment on 79th Street, just off on West End, by the entrance to the West Side Highway. She always had an apologetic smile on her face, but her eyes twinkled mischievously, and she wore her bangs over her brows, so that when she didn’t want to look at someone all she had to do was tilt her face down. She favored nice wool skirts and silky blouses to work the admissions desk, and she always had a book to read when things were quiet.

The best thing about Jane was that she wasn’t Janet. I’d been trying to wind things down with Janet in that rocky, unclear way that incomplete relationships fall into.  We’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, and then we weren’t, and then we kind of were again. By the time I started working at the Museum, we were in a suspended state of weren't.

One day I told Jane about my fascination with the custodian’s apartment in the basement. I wondered if she had any idea who I could talk to about using it.

“Why would you want to live here when everyone was gone?” she asked.

“I could play my saxophone as late as I wanted,” I said.

“I could come and play my cello then too,” she laughed.

The die was cast. I didn’t know she played the cello. I was fascinated. I wanted to know more.

One day I asked Jane if she wanted to go over to Trinity Cemetery and picnic at lunch. I figured that this could be a kind of trial date. I could use the time to figure out whether she liked me that way or not, and what her deal was with her boyfriend.

Trinity Cemetery ran up alongside the Museum, and was across the street from The Church of the Intercession. The cemetery was heavily wooded and ran down the hill to the river, surrounded by a high stone wall. We went in through a side gate and ate our sandwiches sitting on fallen grave stones so we wouldn’t get our pants wet. I finished my sandwich quickly and sipped on a seltzer. Jane put her sandwich down. We kissed. I had my answer.

Back then, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the West End’s jazz club and listen to Benny Waters play the alto saxophone. A few times I’d brought my horn and he’d invited me to sit in. He’d been brought back to the states by Phil Schaap, who hosted (and still does) a seminal show on Charlie Parker every morning on WKCR, the Columbia radio station.

I invited Jane to listen to Benny Waters that Friday evening. We hung out on the Walk at Columbia, sitting by one of the fountains, watching people walk by, enjoying each other and stealing kisses that became progressively more urgent, that dulled our eyes, lowered our lids, left our faces flush.

We walked over to the West End hand in hand and got a table at the back of the club. The 9:00 set was crowded with jazz buffs. Waters was swinging hard, blowing out the side of his mouth and egging on the rhythm section with quick glissandos and sharp honks. I was elevating: the girl, the music, the night, what might happen.

Jane squeezed my arm and leaned in.

“Do you know that girl over there?” she asked, turning her head.

I looked over to the door.

Janet was standing in the door. She had square shoulders, and her hair was pulled back from her head, so her forehead shined in the stage lights. She was staring hard at me. I hadn’t noticed. She started to make her way over.

“Who is she?” Jane asked.

“My girlfriend.  Ex-girlfriend,” I said.

Now she stared at me hard.

“What’s she doing here?”

“I don’t know. She’s not really my girlfriend anymore. We broke up. But I don’t know why she’s here.”

“Did you tell her we’d be here?”

I tried to remember. I didn’t know. I’d talked to Janet earlier that day. But I knew what the smart answer was.

“No. I don’t know why she’s here.”

Jane narrowed her eyes.

“I’m going,” she said.

“No, no,” I said, while I stood up. “Don’t go. It’s going to be all right.”

Janet stood next to us.

I introduced the two women. They stood there. I searched for that elevated feeling, looking for the escape that would come with floating away in the air, or a blinding moment of invisibility.

The women were silent. Then Benny picked his horn up from the stand. The piano player hit a chord -- E7 -- and then another -- A -- then vamped a little, picking up the shirring of the drum brushes, and Waters lifted his horn to his mouth, licked his lips, and kicked off a little run that took him in the center of the E chord, and the melody broke. A Jerome Kern standard, The Nearness of You. It would have been ironic if I’d known the words. I just knew the melody and the changes.

I sat back down. Jane slipped next to me, held my arm, leaned in. Janet sat on the other side. Waters played, the set ran on. I sat between the two women -- the woman I wanted to sleep with, whose breast I’d tentatively caressed just an hour earlier, who had wrapped her tongue around mine, and the woman I had slept with, who I wanted to be away from, who I didn’t trust -- and looked straight ahead, unmoving. I could have used that custodian’s apartment just then.

After the set we walked out onto the sidewalk. No one was willing to make the first move. Janet looked at me with wounded eyes. Jane looked a little away, like she was bored or had forgotten something.

“Stay here for a sec,” I said to Janet.

Jane and I walked a couple of steps away.

“I’ve got to talk with her. I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” she said. She whispered. “Come down to my apartment after.”

I walked Janet back to her apartment on 106th Street. It was a big building on the corner, a luxury rental once upon a time and well out of my price range still. She lived there with a roommate. Her dad paid the rent. She had wanted to go to art school, but was going to business school instead. I told her that it was really over. She cried a little. Then we got to the building and stood outside the door. She wanted to hug. I held her. The night was warm and sparkling. A cab pulled up to the corner.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. I skipped over to the cab. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I didn’t know why I said that. I told the cabby to go down to 79th Street. I hoped that Jane was still waiting.

J.W. Rogers grew up in Massachusetts and came to New York in 1977. He's been in and around NYC, collecting stories and writing them down, ever since. You can read some of his work at www.drmstream.com.

Smith has sent us a revised version of the piece, which we are happy to publish below. We're going to keep the original up, though, in order to see if we can learn something about the role of revision in the writing process. --Ed.]

They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of the building on the corner of 158th and Edgecombe Avenue, an immense pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar. I remember him forever dressed in a soiled white tee shirt and painter’s pants; his pale complexion, shaded always by a bibbed cap, resembled a whitewashed wall, and through his rimless spectacles poured eyes the color of cool blue water. He was tiny, built as if he might blow away, but his Cagney-esque air assured you he was no pushover. His most entertaining feature emerged when he spoke: his voice, a croaking drawl that reeked of age, whiskey and cigarettes, belonged to a character right out of John Millington Synge. The sound was cartoonish, and whenever I heard it the imp in me longed to belt out a lusty “argh, Matey.”

He was familiar; he’d engage with anyone who met his long-stared gaze. He annoyed me on mornings when I was late for the train. Whether I was running or merely walking fast, he’d scrunch up his small toy face, and in that bark on its way to a cough I’d hear, “Ennis, slow down, you’ll kill yourself one day.” In winter, if my coat was open or I was without a hat, you could be sure he’d let me have it: “Young man, you’d better put something on your head.” Always, he’d fling the words like someone who’d been deprived of his morning coffee; always I’d toss him a shrug and a stupid grin as I hurried away, piqued at the man’s paternal presumption, as if knowing my name gave him the right. Of course I didn’t know his.

Most mornings my craggy super sat across the street in Highbridge Park. He was always with some massive guy whose head belonged on the face of a nickel; together, the dark Indian and the pale, tiny building super made an odd pair. By evening he’d be back by the gate at his building’s rear—I assumed the small alley beyond, lined with piles of lumber, rows of garbage cans, led to his apartment—ready to croak some variation on “I see you slowed down,” refusing to let me forget my interminable lateness. But there were other evenings when he’d drop his admonishments, cornering me instead with neighborhood gossip: who got evicted, who got arrested, who had a fire or who had a fight.

That was our relationship. I never really got to know him; he was a fixture on my street, like the woman who minded the stoop of the building across from his, or the man who went in and out of her apartment, the one who smoked and pitched bootleg DVD’s to every passerby. I didn’t know their names either, but I’d say hello. Occasionally the woman on the stoop would tell me how nice I looked as I headed for the train; once, the smoking man confided he’d been in prison and asked for money, prompting me to beg poverty and walk a little faster.

The arrival of the craggy super dovetailed with an unexpected shift in our Harlem Heights landscape. Just a few years earlier, his building went co-op, something I discovered when the then-super—a decrepit black man whose tentacled mustache dribbled with bits of crust—accosted me like a real estate agent looking to unload some property before the feds arrived. After I demurred, he never spoke to me again which kind of hurt my feelings. In those days, I was in no position to purchase a doorknocker, let alone real estate. I was an actor on a low budget, with no assets. My office gig just covered my rent, food, Con Ed, phone, cable, plus the essential tools of my trade: headshots, acting classes, voice lessons and the maintenance of my one good suit. I’d become an expert in the art of living below my means; besides, I was a transplanted Midwesterner mired in the belief that one bought a house, not an apartment.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the notion that any building on our stretch of Edgecombe might convert to saleable apartments seemed absurd. The mere sight of our streets would have given the most desperate buyer pause. The strip of Highbridge Park overlooking the Harlem River and Yankee Stadium was a functioning dump for anyone looking to abandon cars stripped of their valuable parts; smatterings of fenders and transmissions competed with the refuse left by motorists who treated our street as if it were a drive-in restaurant. The noise was a challenge, fueled by roving SUVs whose sound systems blared, and the Saturday night drunks who rattled my sleep by hurling empty liquor bottles against the sycamore trees. You could chart the seasons by these glass showers: the onset of warm weather increased the likelihood those jarring crashes would shatter my middle-of-the-night peace.

Other spooks haunted the night. Crack addicts lurched along the avenue like demented puppets. They’d buy their dope on the cross streets between Broadway and Amsterdam; from there, they’d make a beeline over the hill to Edgecombe. None of the neighborhood’s residents could forget the sight of men and women anyone might peg as homeless, if not for their jerky physicality and the impossible speed with which they walked. They were the stuff of nightmares—back then the papers shrieked the rise of random, drug-induced stabbings; whenever I’d pass some wild-eyed frantic on the street I imagined he or she could turn killer in an instant, and there I’d be, the victim of some crack-addled derangement.

About a year before my craggy super boldly croaked “good morning” for the first time, more changes occurred. One day I woke to the grinding whirr of trucks and cranes; from my window I watched men on a mission of auto exhumation, city workers pulling battered car doors, pieces of fenders, lids of trunks, sometimes even whole automobiles, up over the cliffs through the thick brush of Highbridge Park. This went on all week, until the avenue took on the look of a sprawling, addled metal sculpture done in shades of battered reds, scratchy blues and rusty yellows. And then it all got whisked away. Sternum-high black iron fences went up on the park side; so did aluminum barrier strips along the curb, highway accessories that felt out of place on a tree-lined city block. Those green trucks emblazoned with a white oak leaf and the words “NYC Parks Department” became fixtures on our streets, followed by foot brigades of trash gatherers, mostly black and Hispanic women in smocks, the “welfare-to-work” crowd created by the Giuliani Administration. No matter the weather they’d be on the avenue when I’d head out for work, stabbing bits of trash by rote with long wooden spears.

Political theater was playing uptown: I remember how all the media outlets covered the field trips made by city officials to those drug-infested blocks near Broadway in the 160s; Giuliani and his minions got their faces on the evening news by showing how easy it was to score whatever inebriants your heart desired. It was a shameless publicity stunt, but maybe it worked, for soon after, the legions of crack addicts who’d dodged Edgecombe’s swerving traffic to reach the park began to thin out. Maybe the addicts were literally dying off—or maybe they relocated, fearing a Disneyland invasion similar to the one that, thanks to the city, robbed 42nd Street of whatever character it once possessed. Even so, they left their mark. From my apartment window I’d watched those poor fools scurry in and out of the park’s tangle of trees and grass, pacing the streets as if searching for remnants of life before the word “crack” invaded their consciousness. Over time their wanderings etched a narrow path in the thatch of green directly across the street. Someone—the parks department perhaps—carved that haphazard footpath into a formal walkway that set off the jutting Manhattan schist in ways that were positively…Olmstedian.

The appearance of the craggy super dovetailed with the arrival of myriad dogs and their owners on a strip that now gave semblances of other, better groomed Manhattan burbs. More white faces gave the game away; they began to pop out of the usual sea of dark complexions along the avenue, at the supermarket and on the subway platform at 155th Street. Many were young strivers armed with strapped-on iPods and a mod confidence that screamed Williamsburg USA. I’d ponder these obvious signposts of gentrification, as I calculated their rents and the odds of whether such changes meant that tastemakers would now perceive my neighborhood as cool and hip.

The summer morning I breezed past the shrine of flowers and prayer candles at the super’s back gate I was late again. That evening as I emerged from the subway a light shower coated me with drizzle, its pleasing coolness slowing my pace as I headed home. ; the day’s heat had withered the bouquets, the candle’s fragile flames extinguished by the rain. I stopped to read a typewritten placard sheathed in plastic. The shrine was for the super—the placard referred to him as Shag, and announced an upcoming service somewhere in Jersey. It also gave his real name: William.

A man’s voice tapped my shoulder. “Man, was that Shaggy?” The corner streetlight revealed pockmarked caramel skin and deep circles under filmy brown eyes. He was in his 30′s, wiry and perhaps a hair taller than the deceased. I paused, annoyed by the stranger’s easy use of a nickname I’d only just learned.

“Yeah, the super.” I couldn’t call him Shag so casually, didn’t feel I had the right to call him anything. I wondered how the stranger knew him—casually? A tenant, or was he like me, another neighborhood resident unwillingly shanghaied by a familiar manner, by cool blue eyes? We stood there, two black men mourning the startling, vague absence of a dead white guy under a crying sky. Behind us the M2 bus rumbled as the evening traffic rolled a wail of sizzling tires on the shiny wet asphalt. My new friend shook his head. “Man, that’s a shame. He was a damn nice guy…damn shame. That cat got around, he used to be everywhere.”

And now Shag was nowhere; there was nothing left of him here except the memory of his toy face and that disgruntled fatherly rasp. I found out later from a friend who lived in the building that Shag had died of a heart attack. One of the tenants looked out of her window to see him spread flat on the walk behind the gate, as if he’d jumped.

The Blonde In The Brown Jacket, as I shall refer to her, looks like a movie star, a Saturday matinee gal, and is often mistaken for an Australian actress by both strangers and close acquaintances. Most would argue a redneck like myself would be fortunate to gain the attention of a girl like The Blonde In The Brown Jacket, and I tend to agree, although my conformity with that opinion usually has to do with the hour of the day, the lunar cycle, and the quantity of jubilations my liver is negotiating.

Negotiation has become a crucial term for our relationship. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket is sparkplug, a firecracker, and a cowgirl, all before breakfast. Most importantly, and why the word negotiation is poignant, The Blonde In The Brown Jacket was raised a Blue-Texan, a soft shadow of a young Anne Richards. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket shoots first and inquires whenever. She takes no prisoners. She jumps to conclusions. She also demonstrates a delicate side, dragging me to Lincoln Center to watch Ethan Stiefel, out to Brooklyn to catch Pina Bausch, and on peaceful cab rides up the Westside Highway at night to see the Jersey lights across the Hudson.

The Blonde In The Brown Jacket and I have been together for seven years. But we dispute when and where we met, when and where we started dating, when and where it all came together, if it ever did. I claim I saw her in a line of fresh students at Columbia University, waiting to have her picture snapped for an I.D. She will tell you our first meeting was at a weekend exercise where I insulted the Columbia Theater faculty with a satirical stab at “The Tempest,” lampooning our teachers as characters from the Shakespearian comedy. Both are true.

The debate on when we started dating is just as foggy. I will claim we started dating in late April of 2000, at a loud Mexican restaurant called Rio-something on Amsterdam between 81st and 82nd. We had guacamole and margaritas and had to yell at each other just to be heard. She will tell you it was a date located sometime between February and May, when I gave a her a toy raccoon packed in a soup can which I haggled from eight to six dollars off a street vender on the corner of Broadway and 107th. Rocky the Raccoon would ultimately be liberated from his shell with a Swiss Army Knife by a man called The Good Reverend. The Good Reverend would slice his thumb in this act.

But, I insist when and where things came together for us was Thanksgiving, 2000. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket was alone trying to cook herself a meal with no butter, while I was swamped with my roommate’s drunken amigos, most of them mathematicians and French cooks drinking bountiful amounts of Dewar’s, playing poker and wolfing down lamb and yams. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket and I hadn’t spoken in several months. We had disagreements during The Good Reverend’s birthday bash that summer, and I retaliated by dating a nursing student, whom I met at a bookstore, until that Halloween.

I can’t place the reason I called The Blonde In The Brown Jacket that Thanksgiving night. It must have been murmurings of scotch-soaked calculus that drove me to the phone. I asked her to a movie, a faked documentary on dog shows. She told me to meet her on 116th and nowhere. We went to the movie. We negotiated our issues. We made up.

Thanksgiving has become exclusive for us. In 2001, we did it right. The mathematically inclined roommate hopped a red eye to the left coast and The Blonde In The Brown Jacket and I had the joint to ourselves. We roasted a turkey, made two kinds of potatoes, two kinds of stuffing, cornbread, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole. We rented a John Cusack flick, strolled down Riverside Park, and watched the Dallas Cowboys with the volume turned low. The meal didn’t matter; it was the company, the down time, the quiet, the being together for one brief day that made it all magic.

The next Thanksgiving was rough. We moved into a cute little place together, dreamlike really. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket was temping at a law firm, but I couldn’t find work. I spent my days interning for Richard Foreman in the East Village, making no money, watching Foreman work the same scenes repeatedly, then walking back to Harlem every night, because I couldn’t afford the train. We started saving for Thanksgiving in September, picking up nickels and dimes off the sidewalk. I ate two meals a day to save money, a bowl of All Bran in the morning and a Lipton noodles for dinner. It snowed brutally that Thanksgiving. We couldn’t afford a turkey, so we bought turkey parts we marinated in sugar, an old lemon, and a cheap Kentucky bourbon I can’t bring myself to name. We made mashed potatoes, one kind of stuffing, and no dessert. And we got into a fight. Something ugly, something inappropriate, something football, something about food. I blame her. I am sure she blames me.

The next year, things changed. I got a job at a SoHo theatre and The Blonde In The Brown Jacket left the law firm for a gig at an upscale ballet company. Her job was difficult and lonely, negotiating failed artists. I loved my job. I was only averaging six dollars an hour, but my coworkers were a blast. We danced at 1:40 every afternoon, sneaked swigs of the donated fundraiser vodka, and I met one of my closest friends, a lighting designer and comic artist hired to fix the toilets. He was always the Rosencrantz to my Guildenstern. I wish I had a fancy name for him. For this story, we shall call him Chris.

Things were still hard, we still had to budget Thanksgiving carefully, but The Blonde In The Brown Jacket and I could keep ourselves from drowning. We had a good Thanksgiving. We watched the Packers and Lions. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket was learning referee signage. Holding. Safety. Unnecessary rougness. It was quiet. It was romantic. And I cannot remember what we ate.

The next year became quieter. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket would fight with me about nothing, and then let it all abruptly go to the wayside. We would have isolated moments of thrill, mostly during football games and movies, but she wanted me to read her mind. The lease on the cute little place was up, and she threatened to move to Houston to be with her family, and to get away from me. This was not to be negotiated.

I moved out of the cute little place on Duke Ellington Avenue, and relocated 110 feet down the street to a nasty, smelly, humid joint that was the size of a French elevator. Now I was living with The Good Reverend. Little did I know, The Blonde In The Brown Jacket bluffed, and had moved to a brownstone six blocks to the north. My new apartment was not quiet, it had barking dogs beneath the floorboards, and there was a curious neighbor, el Jefe, who dressed in O.R. scrubs and cut holes in the top of his Air Jordan’s to “let his toes breathe.” This apartment was not cute. It was covered in stains and cockroaches.

The Good Reverend obtained his namesake by purchasing a theological degree from an ad in a pornographic magazine. He looks like George Clooney and relaxes like Ernest Hemingway. Living with The Good Reverend was odd. We never fought, we never cooked, and we drank too much. When we watched football, we didn’t pay attention to the referees. Living with The Good Reverend was never quiet, and my mind was never calm. It was always on The Blonde In The Brown Jacket six blocks away. I called her. We talked. We negotiated. We made up.

The summer came and went without much sound. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket and I went to Coney Island, The Natural History Museum, and talked about nothing. September came sweeping in, we watched football, and we watched the leaves change. October came. I wrote two plays, one about squid, another about the A train, and while sprinting between rehearsals I decided it was time to pop the question and give The Blonde In The Brown Jacket a ring, for no reason other than wanting.

I’m not too proud to say I found a rock online. It was small, silver, and in my price range. I had it FedExed to work, where Chris would sign for it just one day before Thanksgiving. Everything was set. The Good Reverend was in Atlanta. My Colts where to play Detroit on Thursday. And I was to put the ring in her mashed potatoes. Knowing that it would be the last night of singlehood, Chris and I cracked open a bottle of Irish vodka, chewed on pizza-flavored Combos (a hopelessly addictive snack) and watched cartoons on the office iMac. We laughed, we joked, and talked openly about what married life was to be as the night slipped away into a cab ride up the Westside Highway.

I crawled up the stairs to my third floor apartment, placed the key in the door, and heard the deadbolt snap. With The Good Reverend away, and my landlord in Vegas, I was locked out of my apartment, stranded early on Thanksgiving morning, the day I was to ask The Blonde In The Brown Jacket to marry me. I yelled. I slapped the air and slammed my head against the door. It wasn’t fair. I had waited for years and asked for so little until now. The food was in the fridge, my team was to play, and I had the ring in my pocket. With no money for a locksmith, and no other choice, I laid on the stained-soaked carpet in the hallway, glaring at the ceiling. It was all quiet. Until el Jefe awakened me with a kick. “I got a crowbar. It’s blue. It’s good,” he said. I was pleasant to him and we popped open my door with a bang and a clatter, metal on metal, to greet Thanksgiving, my day with The Blonde In The Brown Jacket.

And in a day that seemed to move like water, Peyton Manning threw to Brandon Stokley. The Blonde In The Brown Jacket signaled touchdown. We ate bourbon-glazed turkey, and Jeanne pulled a ring out of her potatoes. She wore a brown jacket that day. Two years have passed now. We’ve canceled the wedding twice, moved to different towns, in different states, and have different jobs now. Sometimes we fight. Sometime we negotiate. Sometimes it’s quiet. We may never get married. But we always have our “one-day.” We always have Thanksgiving.

They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the super of the building on the corner of 158th and Edgecombe Avenue, an immense pre-war slab of gray-yellow brick and mortar. For some reason I remember him forever dressed in a soiled white tee shirt and painter’s pants; through his rimless spectacles poured eyes the color of cool blue water shaded always by a bibbed cap. Built like a prepubescent boy, his pale dry complexion made me think of a whitewashed wall. But his most entertaining feature emerged when he spoke: his voice, a croaking drawl that reeked of age, whiskey and cigarettes, belonged to a character right out of Synge or O’Neill. Such a funny sound—the imp in me longed to belt out a lusty “argh, Matey” whenever he appeared.

He was familiar; he’d engage with anyone who met his long-stared gaze. He annoyed me on mornings when I was late for the train. Whether I was running or merely walking fast, he’d scrunch up his small toy face, and in that bark on its way to a cough I’d hear, “Ennis, slow down, you’ll kill yourself one day.” In winter, if my coat was open or I was without a hat, you could be sure he’d let me have it: “Young man, you’d better put something on your head.” He’d fling the words like someone who’d been deprived of his morning coffee. As part of this routine, I’d toss him a shrug and a stupid grin.

Most mornings my craggy super sat across the street in Highbridge Park. He was always with some massive guy whose head belonged on the face of a nickel; together, the dark Indian and the pale, tiny building super made an odd pair. By evening he’d be standing by the gate in the building’s rear—I assumed the small alley beyond, lined with piles of lumber, rows of garbage cans, led to his apartment. As I approached, he’d always croak some variation on “I see you slowed down.” I’d smile and wish him good night, all the while a touch annoyed that he refused to let me forget my interminable lateness. But on other evenings he’d corner me with neighborhood gossip: who got evicted, who got arrested or who had a fight.

I never really got to know him. He was a fixture on my street, like the woman who minded the stoop of the building across from his, or the man who went in and out of her apartment, the one who smoked and pitched bootleg DVD’s to every passerby. I didn’t know their names either, but I’d say hello. Occasionally the woman on the stoop would tell me how nice I looked as I headed for the train, and, once, the smoking man confided he’d been in prison and asked for money. I begged poverty and walked a little faster.

The presence of the craggy super was as unexpected as all the other shifts in our Harlem Heights landscape. Just a few years before he landed on my radar, his building went co-op. I found out when the then-super—a black man of average height, his tentacled mustache always caked with bits of crust—accosted me like a real estate agent looking to unload some property before the feds arrived. After I demurred, he never spoke to me again which kind of hurt my feelings. In those days, I was in no position to purchase a doorknocker, let alone real estate. I was an actor on a low budget, and no assets. My office gig just covered my rent, food, Con Ed, phone, cable, plus the essential tools of my trade: headshots, acting classes, voice lessons and the maintenance of my one good suit. I’d become an expert in the art of living below my means; besides I was a transplanted Midwesterner mired in the belief that one bought a house, not an apartment.

What a surreal notion—at the beginning of the 21st century, the idea that any building on our stretch of Edgecombe might convert to saleable apartments was absurd. For one thing, it was predominantly black. For another, the mere sight of our streets would give even the most desperate buyer pause. The strip of Highbridge Park overlooking the Harlem River and Yankee Stadium was a functioning dump for anyone looking to abandon cars that’d been stripped of their valuable parts. The smatterings of fenders and transmissions competed with the refuse left by motorists who treated our street as if it were a drive-in restaurant, and the Saturday night drunks who rattled my sleep by hurling empty liquor bottles against the sycamore trees. You could chart the seasons by these glass showers: the warmer it got, the likelihood that such unexpected crashes would shatter my middle-of-the-night peace increased.

Never mind the drive-by boom boxes that inspired me to christen our block “Café Edgecombe”: other spooks haunted the night. The crack addicts lurched up and down Edgecombe like demented puppets in those days. They’d buy their dope further west on the cross streets between Broadway and Amsterdam, and from there they made a beeline over the hill to Edgecombe. Who could forget the sight of men and women anyone might peg as homeless, except for their jerky physicality and the impossible speed with which they walked? In those days the papers were full of violent incidents, stabbings that occurred without warning or motive—whenever I’d pass an impossibly frantic soul on the street I imagined he or she could turn killer in an instant, and I’d find myself the victim of some drug-fueled derangement.

Years before my craggy super boldly croaked “good morning” for the first time, more changes occurred. One day I woke to the grinding whirr of trucks and cranes on a mission of auto exhumation, as workers pulled battered car doors, pieces of fenders and trunks, sometimes even whole automobiles, up over the cliffs and out of the thick brush of Highbridge Park. This went on for some time, until the avenue took on the look of a sprawling, addled metal sculpture done in shades of battered reds, scratchy blues and rusty yellows.

And then it all got whisked away. Sternum-high black iron fences went up on the park side; so did aluminum barrier strips along the curb, highway accessories that felt out of place on a tree-lined city block. Green trucks emblazoned with a white oak leaf and the words “NYC Parks Department” became common, followed by foot brigades of trash gatherers, mostly black and Hispanic women in smocks. Most mornings I’d dart by as they worked the avenue, stabbing bits of trash by rote with their long wooden spears.

I remember how all the media outlets covered the field trips made by city officials to the drug-infested blocks near Broadway in the 160s; Giuliani and his minions played politics (and got face time in the press) by showing how easy it was to score whatever inebriants your heart desired. At the time I thought what an ineffectual stunt but maybe it worked; soon after, the legions of crack addicts who’d dodged Edgecombe Avenue’s swerving traffic to access the park began to thin out. Maybe the addicts were literally dying off—or perhaps they feared a Disneyland invasion similar to the one that robbed 42nd Street of whatever character it once possessed.

For years I’d watched those poor fools scurry in and out of the park’s tangle of trees and grass, or aimlessly walk back and forth as if searching for remnants of life before the word “crack” had invaded their consciousness. Their wanderings had etched a narrow path in the thatch of green directly across the street. Someone—the parks department perhaps—carved that haphazard footpath into a formal walkway that set off the jutting gray Manhattan schist in ways that were positively…Olmstedian.

The appearance of the craggy super dovetailed with the arrival of myriad dogs and their owners, idling along that strip as though it were a regular civilized park. More white faces began to pop out of the usual sea of dark complexions along the avenue, at the supermarket and on the subway platform at 155th Street. Many were young strivers armed with strapped-on iPods and a raffish confidence that screamed Williamsburg USA. Gentrification loomed.

The morning I noticed the shrine at the building’s back gate, I was late again. Those totems of lit prayer candles, flowers and notes, so prevalent on evening news reports of innocents slain by a drive-by shooter, are easy to dismiss. That evening I was greeted by a fine rain as I emerged from the subway, and by the time I reached the super’s building I was slick with warm drizzle. The candles had gone out, and the day’s withering heat made the flowers droop pathetically. Someone had anticipated the weather; the death notice was covered in clear plastic. The shrine was for the super—a typewritten placard referred to him as Shag, told of a service being held somewhere in Jersey. It also gave his real name: William.

I wasn’t the only one who paused. A man’s voice tapped my shoulder. “Man, was that Shaggy?”

I hesitated before replying. “Yeah, he was the super here.” We stood in stunned wonderment, two black strangers mourning the startling, albeit vague presence of a dead white guy under a crying sky. The corner streetlight revealed my new friend’s pockmarked caramel skin and deep circles under filmy brown eyes. He was in his 30′s and wiry, only a hair taller than the deceased.

He shook his head. “Man, that’s a shame. He was a damn nice guy…damn shame. That cat got around, he used to be everywhere.” And now Shag was nowhere; nothing left of him here except the memory of his toy face and a disgruntled fatherly rasp. I found out later from a friend who lived in the building that Shag had died of a heart attack. One of the tenants looked out of her window to see him spread flat on the walk behind the gate, as if he’d jumped.

This was only our fifth Sunday in the city. My fiancé and I had come to Highbridge Park that morning to volunteer. We wore old jeans tucked into hiking boots, and t-shirts that were already dirty. We carried plastic bags full of water, peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and apples. We were ready to work, and maybe make some friends.

The site leader gathered us around, ten in all, and explained that we would be picking up trash in the woods on the other side of the park’s playing fields. She handed out trash bags and trash pickers, whose three-pronged gripping tools we could open and close mechanically. None of us wore gloves.

Highbridge Park sits on a large plateau on the east side. Down a steep, craggy slope, and across the Harlem River, is another New York, filled with suburban wooden enclaves. Mostly Dominicans live around the park; they come there at night and on weekends for baseball and cookouts, bringing fritos verdes, yaniqueques, and different brands of cola.

We admired the views of the old water tower and of High Bridge, New York’s oldest bridge, built to carry water from Westchester County to the nineteenth-century city. George Washington headquartered nearby in the fall of 1776; the revolutionary Battle of Washington lent the neighborhood its name: Washington Heights. After that, people cultivated large farms and lived in grand houses. Today, as it gentrifies, some residents and real estate agents call the area WaHi or Hudson Heights.

Scrambling along the roots and rocks, we filled our bags with beer cans, wrappers, condoms, comforters, and syringes. There was a small vegetable garden, in which someone or some people grew cabbage and what looked like cauliflower; we carefully stepped between the rows to pick up empty potato chip bags.

The heat made us sluggish. A volunteer called out, and we ambled over to where she stood, poking at a large dark mass next to a bush. We began to hold our breath. Fanning out around the site leader, we watched as she lifted away some dirty towels to reveal a goat’s head.

Its eyes were open, staring. A half-burned candle had been pressed between the horns. The black fur looked greasy with blood, maybe. Someone flipped it over, and we saw how cleanly the head had been severed. We gagged watching the maggots writhe in what remained of its brain.

The site leader did not hesitate to put the head in a bag, nor did we urge her not to do so. Shortly after, the shift ended. We carried all the bags through the woods, back across the grass, and onto Amsterdam Avenue. We took the subway south, and showered.

What haunts me about Highbridge is neither horror nor repulsion, although I felt both that Sunday. When I think back, I don’t see the goat’s head. Instead, I imagine the scene as it might have been a night or two before: darkness punctuated by weak candlelight and the bleating of a goat before slaughter. I see several souls gathered together over a voodoo tableau, desperately trying to make this island home.

Once while living in Harlem, finishing a run on the bike path in Riverside Park, I chanced upon a high-powered drug-addled couple fucking in one of the stairways that leads from the park up to Riverside Drive. For a split second they didn’t notice me, and I saw an act of sex that was almost ridiculous in its urgency because you could tell that neither the man nor the woman were there. Both seemed to feel nothing. It scared me, two people in this act, unfeeling, uncaring, stuck in their respective other worlds. When they noticed me I was already walking by them (I had to get up the stairs, I had to get home) as if I hadn’t seen a thing, and the woman started to pull her pants up, embarrassed, but the man convinced her to turn around and keep taking it. I think about this and wonder why. He seemed to get nothing out of it, but he kept pumping away at four in the afternoon, rush hour traffic twenty feet above on Riverside Drive whizzing by, the smell of urine on those stairs almost alive, and he was looking off, dead, at a completely different reality than the one in which he was living, the woman nothing but putty. Why even continue?

My wife and I lived on Riverside Drive at the corner of 151st Street in a huge (by Manhattan standards) dimly-lit two-bedroom apartment. The apartment building itself was one of these urban hideaways. Sometimes coming home late at night from work at the restaurant I would enter at street level and walk up the cramped hidden stairway from the lobby to the first floor, and the smell of urine would attack me, and there in front of the door leading out to the hallway would be a small puddle, drying in the heat. The next day the stairs would be hosed down and bleached, but again that night I would smell urine.

Our nextdoor neighbor often stayed up all night, smoking crack in our hallway, because when he was like this his parents locked him out of the apartment. He was probably in his forties, his parents in their early to mid sixties. Again, I wondered why the hell he picked this spot. He obviously felt safe from the authorities, but it seemed too public, neighbors entering and leaving their apartments, even in the wee morning hours. My wife often had to step over him, passed out, on her way to work breakfast and brunch Sunday mornings at Café Luxembourg. This man, who would greet neighbors when sober, ignored everyone when he was high, creating his own privacy. I hated it when he did this. I felt trapped in my own apartment, and if I went out there he was often blabbering to himself, playing with a glove, a pile of dust, any stupid little thing, and well on his way to bliss or hell or wherever he was headed.

Another of the neighbors did the opposite. He would get disgusting drunk and high on I don’t know what-all and, sitting on the hallway windowsill, he would greet us on our way in from work or from our own night on the town. These meetings were always scary because, though talkative and friendly, this man betrayed an anger that showed even more readily in his state of disrepair. You often couldn’t understand him, and you just wanted to get by and into your apartment. Unlike the other man, however, this guy was always gone in the morning, having been taken in by his momma, an unbelievably patient and nice woman.

As you can imagine, I never felt at home in this apartment, coming from Kentucky, raised in a house, plenty of space to get into trouble in our own backyard. But, of course, the backyard can’t compete with the creek running just beyond it or the train tracks across the cornfields or the trails running through the woods just beyond the creek. These places held mystery and, surely, adventure. I needed the equivalent of these places when I first moved to the city, and the bars were it. But, though I often felt jocular and alive, pumped by music as the nights wore on, I never felt truly comfortable. Eventually, in need of less adventure and more quiet, I graduated to the libraries and the bookstores, the parks when it was nice out, anyplace I could find peace enough to read myself into another world.

Which is why, on a morning before work, in my new town in North Carolina, killing a couple hours before I have to walk to work a couple blocks away, I am ecstatic to have found my own urban hideaway under an overpass by a stream. The area is green with mimosa, young oak, bamboo and elm, and the banks are swimming in kudzu. Water striders dance on the calm waters just before the rocks turn the water into miniature burbling rapids. Joggers pass periodically behind me, and the early-morning light makes the place look like heaven. Though decidedly less urban and urine-soaked than the stairway descending from Riverside Drive or the tunnel running under Henry Hudson Parkway to Riverside Park there are still the obligatory pair of jeans, a pair of shoes, beer cans and empty potato chip bags. But there are no smokers of crack, at least not right now.

One morning soon after my wife and I had returned to Harlem from a long road trip to Alaska, during which we had eaten way too much ice cream and had drunk too much wine and microbrew, we were running stairs, not on the same stairway as the drugged sex, but across a walkway that spans over the Amtrak tracks that run parallel to Riverside Drive. As we neared the top of the stairs a lady wheeled her cart to the landing and stood, watching, and each time we reached the top she would say things like, “Ya’ll sure are getting’ it this morning” or “Damn, ya’ll are sweatin’”. And we were sweating terribly, because, though cool, it was a damp September morning. After a few more minutes a man met her at the top of the stairs, and they talked quietly for a second before the lady rummaged through her cart and pulled out her fixings. They stood up there, leaning on the railings, watching us, smoking crack. You expect people to smoke the occasional spliff in the park or, sometimes, walking down the streets of Manhattan, though it’s gotten rarer, it seems to me, since the days of Giuliani. But the wake and rev of a crack morning, acting as if nothing in particular is going on, is a little weird.

They didn’t try to hide it, not really. They just continued to watch while our lungs burned and our thighs turned to acid, and they even continued to offer encouragement, or at least incredulity. “Damn, how many are ya’ll gonna do?” I answered, “Just a couple more,” smiling as if exchanging pleasantries with neighbors. Finally, we finished and, impatient to get home, said our good-byes and jogged up to the “normal world” of our apartment.

I’ve come to realize that these hideaways are necessary to escape the madness of the city or even the large town, and if you’re enjoying the privacy and the solitude of one of these places you feel violated when someone barges into what for you has become a sort of sacristy. But you learn the places aren’t just yours. Others have found solace here, as well, and will continue to do so, and though I still don’t like to I’ve learned, through a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship in New York, to share the space with whoever needs it. So I sit down here near this stream bed, far far from Harlem and far from my new job at the garden center and far from any responsibility I may have “up there,” and I write and let the joggers (I don’t do it too much myself anymore) do what they will, and I hope that no one wants to come down here and discard their jeans or smoke crack, but if they must I will mind my own business and let them escape however they deem necessary.

Jan’s is located on 122nd and 3rd Avenue across the street from V.I.M., the clothing store. Jan’s is my favorite clothing store to shop at, once you see it you can’t miss it–you have to look at the store, it is all glass with manikins in the window with the latest style clothes.

As I walked into the store I got attacked by the guy who works there, his name is Courtey-O. That is my man; he knows that every time I come in there I will purchase something. So as he was talking my ear off trying to sell me some sweat suits I had my eye on this eye popping, butter soft, all black leather coat brand name Pelle Pelle. I told him to let me try it on, and the coat did not fit. I put my arms up and it was looking like I borrowed the coat from Michael Jackson. I asked him did he have another size and he said that was the last coat. I was a little upset because I really wanted that coat, I began to exit the store, but something told me to look up, and I saw this checkerboard box leather with all solid colors like black, grey and white. With no Ifs, Ands, or Buts, I decided that I was going to buy that jacket.

I asked my man Courtey-O , “What is the price of the jacket?” and he said $750. I looked at him like he was stupid, and told him that I only have $400 when I really had $500.

So I did what I always do. I went to the manager, his name is Jans, he is real cool. Jans usually gives me discounts on everything as long as I have the money on the spot. So as usual did not take long for Jans to give in. He gave me the coat for $400. As I walked out the store knowing that I got a good deal for a coat that was damn near half off. I just said to myself, “Damn! I’m good!”

**

This was written as part of a
Mapsites.net workshop.

I can think back to about three months ago. Whenever I would come home his door would be cracked open. I could see the inside of it, it was dark like a hole in the ground. I think he would leave his door open to see who was going to and from their apartments. For some reason whenever he would see me or anyone who lived with me he would close the door. I can remember on some occasions when I would go to throw the garbage out I would see B-man. He would throw tomato sauce on peope’s doors. Even if I was in the hallway that wouldn’t stop him from doing it. Just about every door in our long yellow hallway was filled with tomato sauce except for mine.

B-man stopped for a while because people stopped noticing him. And they also stopped talking to him. I think that the only reason that he would do these thing to people is because they spoke to him. Even If it was just s simple hello from a nieghbor a how are you doing? From a passing individual. B-man would always reply with a smirk, “I’m fine. I am doing alright.” Right after that he would attack. So I just never said anything to him. I guess that is why he left us alone. As time went past a new family moved onto our floor. They were a Hispanic father and son. They were B-man’s new victim’s. The father was about the same height as B-man and a little thicker with curly hair.
One afternoon when they were both in the hall way, they got into a big argument about who was making the moist noise in the apartments.

A couple days later, B-man stabbed the Hispanic man in the head. No one knew what was going on in the hallway we just heard a few, “Oh my gods,” and, “What are you doings.”

Then, a few moments later I heard a big bang. I ran to the door to listen but couldn’t hear much. I got frustrated and just opened up the door to see what was going on. All I saw was the Hispanic guy run in his house with blood dripping from his head and then I heard B-man in his apartment laughing at the top of his lungs.
Oh my gosh, I really need to get the hell out of this building.

**

This essay was written as a part of a HREF=”http://www.Mapsites.net” TARGET=”_new”>Mapsites.net workshop.