I moved to this block 26 years ago. February 1, 1997. I saw the place on a frigid January evening. No one had lived in the apartment for many years. The building owners were German and had kept the ground floor flat for themselves. But they had died several years earlier, and their children held on.
Funny how even the safest street seems scary at night when it’s not your own. When you don’t know the neighbors or the guy who runs the coffee shop on the corner. I was clutching my arms around my chest as I walked to the building. The apartment was empty and kind of ugly. It had an old, cracked linoleum floor in the kitchen, sheets of fake yellow tile on the walls and long fluorescent lights as sconces on the walls of the main room.
But I had been living on West 140th Street, where there were frequent gun battles outside my window. Clockers and drug dealers lining the sidewalks. Sometimes, as I walked home from the 137th Street subway station I would wonder what weapons they carried, hidden by their puffer jackets. I wanted to see.
“What are you doing here?” That was the question on the days when I splurged for a taxi home. Of course the answer seemed simple enough. I was a starving artist and anything was better than getting a day job.
Finally, though, I gave up and got a job as a writer at KPMG. I worked late and they sent me home in black cars. “You know, they probably think you’re an undercover cop,” one driver said to me. “Why else would a white girl live up here.” Seriously. That’s what he said.
One of the drug dealers was especially nice to me. We chatted on weekends when I sat on the stoop to lace up my rollerblades. He told me about growing up in the Dominican Republic and explained what had happened whenever a new, make-shift shrine appeared on the corner of 140th and Broadway. I listened politely, ignoring his flirtatiousness. One morning he wanted to give me a ring. I tried to refuse. He insisted, and I worried that I would offend him. Which was going to be worse – taking the ring and being beholden to him, or not taking the ring and insulting him. That the ring seemed like something out of a gum machine made me give in and accept it.
A week or so later, as the KPMG black car dropped me off in front of my building, a bunch of guys, including my ring buddy, were hanging around the stoop. A big guy I’d never seen before walked up to me. “You’re the girl in 5D,” he said. How did he know that, I wondered. He was a big white guy. Far more menacing than any of the others. I slipped into the building and ran up the stairs to my apartment.
It dawned on me. He thinks I’m an undercover cop. The ring. It was probably a microphone. That’s the kind of crazy shit that went through my mind. I pulled it out of a drawer where I’d stashed it and put it on my left ring finger. I held the back of my left hand to my mouth and, talking right into the ring, I said, “Attention drug dealers. I am not a cop.” I said it several times, pacing around my apartment. Just in case.
A few weeks later I had had enough. It was the gun shots and the explosion that blew out the window of an apartment across the back alley from me one Saturday afternoon. I tried pulling down the shades and getting on with my reading. But I was done. That’s when I moved to 85th Street.
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