Back to the Gutter

The beautiful streets of East Fordham Road didn’t last for long. Within two years my father’s

Social Security expired and we lost that income, which caused a huge reversal of fortune that forced our family back into the gutter. We said goodbye to East Fordham Road and in 1982 moved to the projects on Crotona Avenue, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the South Bronx. After Fordham Road, moving to Crotona Avenue was like moving into hell, but it was hell on earth.

Even the neighborhood looked like it was in pain because of the corruption and rundown buildings, where graffiti covered every concrete wall within reach. This was a place where you could touch the poverty. And always, hanging in the air over everything, was the ever-present reality of crime. Right next to the bodega (grocery store) on the corner, the Chinese takeout looked like a miniature Fort Knox. Every time you went for Chinese you didn’t know whether you were going to get food or heading to the bank because of all the bars surrounding the place. Now we played baseball and football on a schoolyard concrete lot—no longer the lush green park of the East Bronx.

We lived a block away from the Bronx Zoo, and sometimes I wondered whether we needed to be caged up and the animals set free. The pent-up anger, frustration, and rebellion of those who lived in this neighborhood were contagious, and we caught the infection. Sometimes killings occurred at two o’clock in the afternoon, right out in the open. Without warning you’d walk by a crime scene on your way to the store and see where the police had taped down the corner. Or, worse, you would glimpse the body of a young man covered in a white sheet, nothing but his sneakers sticking out.

During our first few weeks there, all my brothers and I did was get into fights with guys from the neighborhood. In a tough neighborhood like the one we now lived in, someone always wanted to test you and see what you were made of, and my brothers and I were really tested. Whenever we came home from school, we never told Mom about all the fights because we knew she would worry. We tried our best to hide the cuts and bruises, making some lame excuse for why our bodies bore the marks of street violence. Eventually the neighborhood bullies got tired of fighting us, and we became friends. But being friends was worse than being enemies because every bad thing these guys did, we followed along just to fit in. Hey, who said there were any good boys in the hood? There were a few nice kids; they just weren’t hip like us. And in time their parents moved away from the neighborhood so they wouldn’t lose their children to the streets or watch them end up in jail.

My brothers and I knew there was no way out for us, so we adjusted to the environment of drug dealing, shootouts, muggings, stabbings, and death—which went on every day—by hanging out with school friends who lived in better neighborhoods. The violence in the neighborhood was out of control. One time involved a friend of mine who was very well-known with the drug dealers in the neighborhood. As he sat in his car at a stoplight, two guys drove up on a motorcycle. Before it was said and done, bullets rained into his car, cutting his life short. I was stunned by the news. Who would have thought his life would be over while waiting for a traffic light? That was life in the hood—alive today and dead tomorrow.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 656