I blow hot and cold on Ta-Nehisi Coates but this post about getting old and no longer wanting to stay in the hood is really worth reading. Warning: It does features some language I would never put in print.
We lived in a downtown neighbourhood when we were first married. I'm pretty certain it wasn't as tough as the one Coates describes but ...
Our apartment fronted on a public park. It was quite beautiful to look at. But the city planners, in their wisdom, decided that it was a great idea to okay a beer store to open on the other side of the park. Then they decided to open a needle "exchange" too. Pretty soon the park filled up with people who wanted beer but had no where to drink it or wanted needles and had no place to use them.
Sometimes I would wake up because of some noise I'd heard and discover that it was a hooker using our backyard to service her customers. (The hookers magically showed up the same week the province dispensed welfare payments every month.)
One night I woke to find the police busting a guy. I didn't think much of it at the time but the next day I saw a police officer in the yard searching it. I went out and asked him if I could help. He was very evasive at first but eventually admitted that he had good reason to believe that guy they had arrested the night before had been carrying a weapon which he believed he had thrown away just before they got him. After he left, I took up the search myself on the theory that I probably had more motivation to make sure there wasn't a loaded handgun lying around my property than he did.
I did not find any gun but I found five used needles in a space of about 60 square feet.
I used to tell stories about all this at parties—the kind of stories that pass off as complaining but are really bragging—and watch the envious looks in the eyes of friends who lived in less edgy neighbourhoods.
One day my friend Rob came by walking his then-girlfriend's Golden Retriever. We walked down to a street corner and sat and talked for about an hour.
We noticed the guy across the street because he had a Pit Bull on a crude rope leash. We wanted to be sure to move if he came our way so as to avoid the Golden getting ripped if the two dogs ran into one another so we kept a half an eye on him. That was why we noticed that he was dealing. Every once in a while someone would approach the guy and talk awhile then they'd go down the side street and come back. I knew the people coming up to him because they were regular panhandlers in our neighbourhood.
It was one of those eye-opening moments. I was never so naive as to think that the money was really for food. A friend of mine was once yelled at and nearly assaulted when he went and bought a sandwich and brought it to panhandler who had claimed that was what he wanted the money for. Still, it was quite a jolt to see the steady path of them even including a woman who would stand on the street with her baby in her arms and say she needed money to take care of it.
I started seeing things in a different light after that. I didn't want to move. It felt disloyal to the wonderful neighbours who were trying so hard to make the neighbourhood work. The sort of people who would, as Coates puts it, call 311 when a street light burns out. But sometimes also the sort of people who would defend the needle exchange and defend the legal rights of panhandlers.
The people who ran the needle exchange, and the people who defended it, always insisted on the "exchange". They claimed that needles were only given to people who brought used needles in return. It wasn't so much the lie but the blatant falseness of it that bothered me. Eventually a particularly determined critic dug up the facts. Thousands of needles went missing every year.
And then someone buried a bunch in the sandbox in the play area at the park. The play area was fenced in and locked at night. This wasn't someone casually throwing away a needle, this was a deliberate act of hatred.
And then a drug user decided to retire. He didn't owe anyone any money, he just wanted to quit. He was sitting with his girlfriend and her son when there was a knock on the door. He opened the door and his former dealer stuck a gun in his face, backed him up against the wall, pushed the barrel up a nostril and pulled the trigger. The guy survived, minus a significant portion of his face.
The last straw was when three rubbies had an argument behind the local grocery store. It was two against one and the two pushed the one down and lit him on fire.
We moved further out.
Postscript: The other night, some kids had a party in the local park. Someone called the police and the kids were told to leave. As soon as the police were out of sight, they started going through the neighbourhood committing various acts of petty vandalism to punish the neighbourhood for ruining their party. I went out and confronted them. On one level it was pathetic. I caught two guys trying to let the air of someone's tires. They were trying to figure out how to do it!
On another level it's troubling. If people who put flowerpots out in front of their house keep waking up to find the pots smashed in the middle of the road, they stop putting out flowerpots. And when that happens, something gets lost.
Already we also have people who try and protect the "right" to panhandle-some even handing out business cards and offering to defend panhandlers pro bono and who worry more about the conduct of the police than the criminals. And you can see how it happens ...
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