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Notes From The Inner-Ring · by R.H.S.
Today is springy for no good reason. I cruise the forgotten backstreets to kill an hour before work. The declining housing stock, draped up in crafty holiday decorations, slumbers groggily alongside high-tension wires coursing with precious energy. Women old enough to deny their age and young enough to exude grandiose taste in gear take mid-morning consitutionals. The neighborhood children attend a temporary elementary/ junior high school. At recess they are corralled into a vacant space enclosed by chain-link fences with no toys or athletic equipment to speak of.
Everyone under the age of sixty-five is Black or Hispanic or some indeterminate combination. Perception is experience is perception. A black Cuban family shares a house with a young Haitian-Dominican couple and a half-Jewish/half-Puerto Rican hospital worker. Lots are irregular and of mixed use. Tiny parcels of red-clay land run right into each other. Clotheslines are as resplendant as national flags and as confrontational as pocket handkerchiefs. People move in and move out so frequently that ownership is a laughable concept, even in the abstract. The exceedingly ugly, long-defunct Integrated Packaging, Co. headquarters is everyone’s backyard, every child’s pirate ship or battlefield.
The local businesses are also crammed. Nearly every shop is attached to a check-cashing spot, or moonlights as one. A drive down the main thoroughfare provides plenty of material for a tastelessly funny racist comedy routine: Nail Salon/ Check Cashing, Chinese Buffet/ Check Cashing, Diamond Jewelry/ Check Cashing, Spanish-American Grocery/ Check Cashing. Tacky awnings, malfunctioning neon signs, and unintentionally hilarious advertising is our culture. Even the vacant lots and condemned buildings exclaim a connection to the ‘hood’s Jewish-Gypsy past and offer a glimmer of hope that the renovation downtown will hit the outskirts any day: COMING SOON GOURMET FARMER’S MARKET.
The White Castle was never converted to a competing burger stand nor torched by an enraged soda jerk, contrary to the script of Harold and Kumar Go To…. It is very much in existence, in its space-age polymer glory, and functions more or less as the center of all social life. Famished teenage girls brag about their pregnancies and convictions while waiting on a heaping order of the new Roma Tomato Burgers. The actual workers are about as rebellious and eccentric as Benson.
The main drag, such as it is, closely (but not precisely) follows the official boundary between the “city” and the “township.” Most adults are unimpressed with such distinctions, but the kids are big on it, and they have reclassified their budding ethno-racial-lineal gangs along municipal terms. They stick mostly to baseball bats and knives and spend most of their spare time talking shit while wandering through obsolete gas stations and aborted mini-malls.
Drudgery.Comments for "Notes From The Inner-Ring"
Being in the middle of the house-buying process I can say that realty is such a fucked up field. Realtors casually warning us away from “diverse� schools (isn’t that a good quality?) or neighborhoods “in transition�.
— rafi Nov 30, 05:07 PM
— 360 Nov 30, 11:50 PM
— sankofa Dec 1, 07:49 AM