THE HIGH COST OF LIVING IN FEAR

I

In the 1970s and 80s, larger American cities were bombed out, violent and imposing. In the 1990s and 2000s, many of these cities became safer and even chic. Flush with yuppies and then millennials, they had art movie houses, fusion restaurants, microbreweries, pop-up craft markets and multiple Starbucks.

Trenton, New Jersey, where I used to work, missed out on this wave of gentrification. One of my uncles moved to Trenton after serving in the Korean War. He described with great fondness a lively 1950s city with abundant, decent-paying factory jobs and vibrant night life. This is not latter-day Trenton.

State Street is Trenton’s main street. East State Street used to have many stores. Over the last two decades, many of these storefronts have been boarded up. One of those storefronts is a closed bank one block from City Hall. The bank is three stories high and used to have a copper roof. Over the course of several weeks, thieves scaled this building in the center of the city and ripped the copper off to sell for scrap.

http://6abc.com/news/rash-of-copper-scrap-metal-thefts-in-trenton/126872/

East Hanover Street parallels East State Street. Several lunch hours/week for 25 years, I played basketball in the second floor gym of the Y on East Hanover, one block north of the copper-stripped bank. The Y has a pleasingly cozy court ringed by a tiny balcony. There was a fire escape in the adjacent alley that ascended to the side door of the gym. Neighborhood youths would often climb up the fire escape, sneak in the door and join the games.

Time constrains me from telling you much about the hundreds of characters that played there during those years. Some had New Age urban names starting with Da, Ray or Tai and ending with Shawn, Ron or Quan. More than a few had played college basketball or football. Many others could also play well; some who could didn’t look like athletes until the games began. Other smooth players told me they weren’t even on the team at Trenton High.

Some had done bids. One day, a guy named Rashad lifted his shirt and showed us his bullet wounds. Another distinctive Y drop-in named Shabazz was a willowy, ethereal, dreadlocked, long-bearded rapper who had toured with The Wu Tang Clan. Unlike The Wu Tang, Shabazz was an exceptionally warm, gentle man with, as he would often say about his art, “a positive message of peace and respect.” While I was walking in what remains of downtown Trenton with a co-worker one day, Shabazz walked up to me in my white shirt and tie and gave me an urban handshake and hugged me while his crew looked on, seemingly disapproving his brotherly overture. My surprised co-worker asked me how I knew him. Shabazz did this on other occasions, too; he didn’t care what others thought about him embracing a Caucasian in business attire. I received similarly warm greetings at other times on other downtown blocks from other guys I knew from the Y. Usually without the hugs.

One player was a break dancer named Reggie with a small bare patch on the crown of his head that he maintained he got from doing too many headstand spins. Another, Chris, was a powerful drummer with presence who I saw play several times in music festivals. He was also a good baller but ceased playing because he made his living drumming and literally couldn’t afford to injure his hands. Over the years, there were some disagreements and scuffles at the Y. But mostly, there was competition, teamwork, cross-cultural laughs and too much fun to measure. Males being males.

The Y building resembles Havana: it’s old and marbly elegant but worn and broken down. They ran kids’ and women’s programs there for years, and did other direct, informal, and obviously helpful community work. As one of many examples, one afternoon I saw one of the Y workers in a quiet room on the third floor holding and comforting an at-first crying baby that was not hers. The Y also had a five-story temporary residence, sheltering people going through rough patches. The neighborhood needed the Y. But the Y became insolvent and closed a few years ago.

From the sidewalk on East Hanover Street in front of the Y, in addition to seeing the stripped-down bank, you could see empty storefronts or boarded up apartment buildings with bold street paintings. Some were gaudy geometrics that brightened the space. One was a vivid painting of the glowering, shaved-headed, late, former boxer Marvin Hagler, covered with multi-colored sweat. Part of this block is shown in the photo at the beginning of this post. All of the events described in this post happened on, or within 30 yards of, that block.

Almost no one lives on East Hanover. It is nearly devoid of pedestrians or even men sitting on steps or milk crates. Most of the few who go there are buying and selling heroin. Some of these are drive-up transactions involving expensive cars or SUVs. Trenton’s nearby Market Street, which I am told was very lively for many decades, has almost no stores left now and should probably be renamed. In the same way, East Hanover Street would more accurately be called East Heroin Street.

Multiple shootings have occurred on East Hanover within 100 feet of the Y in the past few years. Several of these were fatal. Some were at night, others during the day. For example:

http://trenton.homicidewatch.org/2015/03/11/two-shot-one-killed-in-tuesday-night-shooting/

A neighborhood man named James Wells, a/k/a Wellsy, owned and cooked for a one-of-a-kind, eponymous restaurant in the living room of his narrow, red brick row house on Montgomery Street, a half block from the intersection of East Hanover. Wellsy’s kitchen was open to view from the narrow entryway, Wellsy would smile and greet you as you came in. He cooked only two tasty entrees each day, usually Fried Whiting and Honey Rock Chicken, with sides like collard greens, mac and cheese, and sweet potato pie and peach cobbler for dessert. On cold days, he would light a fire in the fireplace, which you could sit alongside. The room had eight small, mismatched tables with uneven legs. They were almost always fully occupied. It had a beat-up upright piano on which a lanky black guy in a kufi would play ruminative, yet thumpy jazz during Friday lunches.

As Wellsy lived upstairs, his bathroom was the restaurant’s bathroom. It was unlit, except for a speckled glass skylight over the bathtub. One day, as I entered the restaurant, Wellsy told me to check out the bathroom. Its tub had three sunfish swimming in diffuse, banded sunlight. When I came out and expressed my admiration, Wellsy told me he had just caught the fish from Trenton’s old downtown canal a few blocks away.

Wellsy’s closed abruptly. I heard a rumor that Wellsy’s teenage nephew had been killed less than a block away on Wood Street and that Wellsy was so dispirited that he shut his restaurant’s doors. Permanently.

About ten years later, Wellsy was beaten to death just a few steps from his house and the front of the Y. Terrible.

http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2015/09/trenton_man_dies_from_beating_death_ruled_a_homici.html

I drive a 19 year old Ford Escort station wagon with dings inside and out. I can park this car on East Hanover with little concern about theft or additional damage; not that it might not be damaged or stolen, but I don’t have so much at stake if it is. One chilly day, after I got out of the Escort, a large, bundled up, perhaps homeless, bearded, fifty-something black man sitting on the steps of a vacant building smiled and asked me, “Can I buy your car? I had one just like it and it was a good car. I want to buy yours.”

I smiled back. Recalling the poem that Maya Angelou recited at Obama’s first inauguration, I try to make eye contact, smile at and say “Hey” to anyone I see in the neighborhood. (I would do this whether I heard the poem or not. But I did like the poem’s ending). Most of the few people walking on desolate East Hanover look past me. But life teaches one not to always expect reciprocity.

I responded, “Sorry, I can’t sell this car. It runs too good. What happened to yours?”

He frowned, paused, shook his head and said, dolefully, “It’s a long story, man.”

He lowered his head and shook it slowly again. “It’s a long story.”

Occasionally, I see a burly, now graying man named Leo who played with us at the Y twenty years ago. Leo lives in a small rooming house a block away from the Y. Back in the day, Leo used to bring his teenage son, Keon, to play at lunch. Every time I saw Leo after that I would ask him about Keon. Leo would smile and update me.

After not seeing Leo for a bunch of years, I saw him on East Hanover. He looked and sounded as if he had had a stroke. He was walking and talking with some difficulty.

Leo was still happy, though. Funny, too.

One winter afternoon, after not seeing Leo for another year, he saw me and another player named Bryan on the sidewalk leaving the Y after the lunch hour. Leo smiled broadly and said, wistfully, “You guys still playin’? Then, holding his hand down to his own thigh, Leo looked at Bryan, who is 6’5” and 240 pounds, and added, “I knew you guys when you were this high.”

Keon has become a Christian minister who started his own church in Trenton.

In addition to the obvious drug dealing, I’ve seen various types of misbehavior and crime on or near, East Hanover. I’ll leave those out of this story.

One day, around 1:30 on a cold winter afternoon, I was leaving the Y after having played, talking with a few old player/friends, showering and pulling my hooded sweatshirt over my head. After I play, a deep, biochemically-induced peace and mild euphoria often descend upon me. At my age, and if I have played well, I have sometimes told myself during this golden hour that I have had more than my share of life’s blessings, and that I could die happy.

Exiting the Y in this state of being, I started walking the long block on East Hanover toward my old car. As I did, I saw three black males in their mid-twenties, slightly over six feet tall and also wearing hooded sweatshirts, on the opposite side of the street. We four were the only people on the block. If, as has been said, integrity is what you show when no one is watching, I hoped these three had integrity.

They briefly talked amongst themselves and began to cross to my side of the street. They were heading for exactly the same spot on my side of the street where there had been a recent killing, this one in the daylight. My car was twenty feet past that.

I quickly evaluated my options: three guys, all as big as me and thirty years younger; me, tired and chill from playing, with a large gym bag over my shoulder and no weapon is my possession. I said to myself, “You got nothing. You can’t outrun them, you can’t outfight them, and you don’t have anything scary to pull out of the pocket of your hooded sweatshirt. And they might.”

I suddenly wished I had watched more Jackie Chan movies.

Not knowing what else to do, I stopped and stood still.

They reached the sidewalk on my side of the street and stood fifteen feet in front of me. They huddled again.

There was silence.

They turned and looked at me. Not knowing what else to do, I grinned sheepishly and raised my eyebrows.

More silence.

Then one of them said, “Aw, man, THIS ain’t THAT.”

I replied, “THIS ain’t THAT?”

“Nah, this ain’t that.”

A more alert form of euphoria descended upon me. I replied, “OK. Have a good day.” I thought about saying, as they say in the neighborhood, “Have a goot one.” But I decided it wasn’t the right time for cultural appropriation.

I walked past the three and reached my car.

Even on East Heroin Street, a smile is understood and appreciated and goodwill can be shown.

Most of the time.

—

Throughout the Scamdemic, various government officials repeatedly told people that they were taking various extreme measures to “Keep everyone safe!”

This was ludicrous. To begin with, nearly everyone was safe, even if they were infected. Moreover, none of the “mitigation” measures could possibly have stopped the spread of yet another respiratory virus. We’ve always lived in a sea of microbes.

Playing basketball entails yucky stuff like many people touching the same ball, sweaty bodies making repeated contact and guys getting into each other’s grills, spewing droplets the whole time. Oh, the humanity!

The Trenton Y was in a neighborhood that scared most people. But those unwilling to go there and to mix their microbes with others’ microbes missed out on much fun with lively people who didn’t have to cheat to compete.

During the Scamdemic, how many billions of mental and physical health-building experiences and relationships did governments deprive people of via propagandistic terrorism and closures of public places? How much more time, vitality and memories did people steal from themselves by buying the scam and living in fear?

That time is gone forever.