Hard to imagine Harlem as my home without a measure of self-deception. Really, Harlem as home to anyone strikes me as a dubious proposition. Spending time here, one can't help but suspect that the place has been imagined — designed — as a way to kill people.
The triumph, in any case, would be for me to become — to be — my own home.
~
4:00 AM. The music is so loud it sounds like it's coming from my kitchen.
I roll out of bed and make my way through the dark to the living room window. It's from a car parked below. Three girls have climbed onto the car and are twerking. Their dresses ride up their dark thighs, onto their asses. All three of them wear white panties. Boys film with phones. And dance shouting encouragement, I’m guessing — although I can't make out what they're saying over the music.
From my window, above the fluorescent streetlight, with the boys below I watch the girls twerk. Maybe for them Harlem is home.
What would have summoned the Belmont police in a matter of minutes apparently here only after a very long time, if ever. I know I'm not calling. I've retired from — am in flight from — calling or being police.
~
It was after midnight; I was alone and feeling peaceful and — unusual, for me — wanted to smoke.
I came outside to the sound of a young woman shouting. Screaming.
I walked the other direction, to the closest bodega, and bought American Spirits and a bottle of Stella.
On my way back, the woman and I passed each other. Now she was muttering. She might have been crying.
Sitting on the stairs of the brownstone I smoked and wondered what it would take for me to scream in the street after midnight.
She came along — I saw her bleached white, closely cut hair and tight pink top, jeans and high heels. She passed me, or almost passed me, and stopped. “Do you happen to have an extra cigarette?” I handed one to her and lit it and she sat down next to me. “I'm not having a good night right now.”
I stayed silent, letting the cigarettes do their work.
“I just can't let her do it. She’s fifteen. She's my sister. Out here blowing guys for what? A pair of Jordans? I can't watch it happen. The fucking guys. A bunch of weirdos. Just using her, I know, I know men. I'm a model. I know how they think, it's not like I don't know. I just can't watch it.”
She didn’t need me to say anything; I said, “That's heartbreaking.” And wondered — or later wondered — at the fact that listening to her I was more curious than sad and that her story seemed like life and mine an impoverished dictatorship of fear and feigned — or, worse yet, real — indignation.
But she was heartbroken, panic-stricken.
I was able to contemplate her not-yet desolated beauty and listen to her and say as little as possible, because anything — everything — I might have said, given my imagination, would have been patronizing — supremacist, maybe, and dishonest, as there is little about me more dishonest than my supremacy, which is really insecurity, because how else does cowardice feel when confronted with real pain, horror? Maybe guilty — I suspect guilty, inevitably.
Before my cigarette burned out I offered her the pack. She declined: “I don't smoke packs. Just one when I need it."
"Me, too," I said.
Soon, she asked, “You live here?” She nodded at the brownstone.
“I do.”
“It's nice. But I don't want her to come here.”
"No."
Two nights later, I heard her screaming again. “You all fucking weirdos!” For a while, from my couch, I listened, but it was a cold night and eventually I closed the window.
~
To the man filling the bodega’s beer coolers the cop said, “I deal with mental health issues all day. I put my life on the line every day. So I don't need to hear this right now.”
The man, agitated, said, “You kill people. You kill people.”
The cop said, “I don't kill people. But if you're having some kind of crisis, you need to go in the back and calm down. You need to calm down.”
The man — very pale, paler than me, his brown hair a mess — pushed boxes of beer into a storage cooler and disappeared into it himself.
The cop said to the young man behind the counter, “You need to control this. This is your store. If you know one of your guys has a problem, you need to keep them in the back. This is on you.”
The bodega is across the street from the 28th Precinct; I see cops in there all the time, ordering sandwiches and buying bags of chips. I've learned to speak to them without deference, which seems somehow more respectful of their humanity and will I hope eventually reflect how I feel about them, around them.
~
I'm on my way to a BBQ in Anna's backyard garden in West Harlem. Spring is here: the trees are in bloom; the breeze drifts with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms.
Descending the stairs at the 125th Street subway station I come upon a man terribly disfigured by what must have been third degree burns. His face, his arms — the fingers of the hand he holds out for coins have been burnt away; his hand is nothing but a scarred palm. I have no coins, no cash — just a debit card and my phone.
The BBQ is wine, steaks, fresh fruit, cupcakes. Aperol spritzes and cold beer. Sunlight and the company of a breathtaking tree — an eastern redbud, I think — covered in clusters of pink flowers. Laughter, friendship, cigarettes.
~
There will be a reckoning. This overabundant life — a world that feels sometimes like Mad Max and sometimes like Moonlight — will either be survived or not survived, a journey to madness or freedom. Those are, from what I can tell, the only possibilities. Harlem won't let me kid myself — play myself. At least not as I did, for so long.
