Harlem

It's not a ghetto. A friend of mine asked me that once, not long after I moved here. "Is it the ghetto?" Harlem isn't the ghetto. At least, most of it is not the ghetto.

In fact, the NYT recently described my buiding complex as 'luxury apartments". They're nice, and mine is certainly newly renovated, and that's nice. A notable Member fo Congress lives here, along with another prominent black politician, and the NY state governor has a residence here. I'm near a hospital and a public school, near an express train and a convenient bus stop. It's a nice place to live.

Still, there are certain things I don't tell my parents about. This blog is safe bc while my mother is net-savvy, I don't think she reads blogs, let alone my blog.

Gentrification has taken its toll. A white male friend of mine was punched for no reason other than, from what he could tell, he was white and moving in to the neighborhood - this after living here for something live six years. Another time, I was walking down the street minding my own business when a man at the other end of the sidewalk looked straight at me and said, "get the fuck out of Harlem". I ignored him, and wondered if he'd ever talked to the big and loud guy who greeted me outside the grocery store with a solicitation to suck his dick. I declined.

Most of the people here are good people. Every day I see those who anywhere else in America would be called minorities studying hard to get in to college, or for a technical training program, or to be nurses, or computer technicians. I see well-dressed, responsible young men and women slogging their way to and from work just like me.

But I also see, through the democratizing means of transportation known as the subway, some really rude behavior. Eating on the train is one thing; eating fried chicken is another. People get nasty with each other and rag on each other's ethnicity. I'm not talking hillbilly race riots, I'm talking about Latinos ragging on black, or the other way around. I have seen mothers screaming at their own children for dripping ice cream on their hands, as if they were dogs that shit on the rug. Or, another time, I was alone on the train with two boys, and the older one pulled out his dick and started waving it around. What is it with men and their dicks?

There's violence. I've been spared, and I've certainly pushed my luck, coming home in the wee hours of the night from a couple of rounds in the LES. A couple of years ago, a man high on PCP started shooting around the projects that are on the next block. When the police arrived, he ran up fourteen flights of stairs, forced his way into an apartment, then jumped out the window to escape (he died, but they say he probably didn't feel anything). A month or two ago, there was some kind of rampage, or possibly unrelated killings, that meandered from Marcus Garvey park ten blocks south of me to 130th street or so and Lenox, which is about five blocks south. I was out of town that day.


Sometimes you just can't tell. The other night - second week of July, after a hot and muggy week - I fell asleep early and work up just before one AM. I heard a lound bang, like a truck bouncing on one of the bridges, or a metal plate in the street. There were two more, then screaming among the crowd at the basketball courts nearby. The yelling surged, like a crowd rushing past. There were a couple more pops, lighter, I'm guessing smaller caliber. The police showed up, but by the time they did, the crowd was still dispersing but more slowly. When I asked my doorman about it the next night, he said it was probably just people shooting in the air to celebrate.

Now, is that true, or was he just saying that to make me feel safe, the pretty little white girl in Harlem?

Harlem is, all at once, the most interesting neighborhood I've lived in and the most depressing. There are some amazing people here, surrounded by old habits that perpetuate misery. I have seen some really wonderful moments between people, and some depraved, abusive behavior. It is inspiring and degrading, a microcosm of humanity.