Part III

written on Friday, September 2, 2011 at 2:44am

Day Two

I never took to drugs.  Sure, I smoked weed in college, but that is what music majors do. However, my control freak personality never allowed drugs to take hold as I found that I could never relinquish control to a substance.  I had watched my mother lose 20 years of her life to alcohol and a certain suicidal stepfather who kept guns in the house cured me of the desire to ever try anything harder than marijuana. I spent my childhood in and out of foster care and slept countless nights on the couch in the welcoming living room of my best friend’s family. I worked endless hours as a waitress through high school while attaining mediocre to poor grades and at the end of it all, I lucked my way into college with an ability to sing on pitch. I knew nothing else ..only that I could get away. 

Fifteen years later, I have stepped back into chaos all over again.  MY life is well and settled; I have a successful studio of hilarious young musicians, I am newly married to a good man (although he does spend a few too many hours playing video games..)  and I am addicted to taking classes even though I am well past my college days. However, I look out my window and I feel paralyzing helplessness.  I am torn between my bleeding heart liberal tendencies, which want someone to give these kids everything that kids should have, and my desire to shake each kid until they realize all of the potential that they are pissing away.  in some cases, I feel rage. I want to use a belt to beat the mother who walks around after 2 am with her sleepy children in tow and I want to punch the older men who use easily manipulated teenagers to do dirty work for them. As a child, I was lucky. I was in a small town, surrounded by normalcy, with the exception of my own home. I was shown examples of what love should look like. These kids are surrounded by chaos in such a way that chaos is the norm. I empathize even though I cannot excuse.

Day two of sitting started on a slightly darker note than day one.  I chose to forgo sitting on the balcony and moved immediately to the doorstep. Soon after settling in, I watched as a short mid 30s black man walked out of the building across from me, reached into his pants, pulled out a bottle of vodka and took a long swig. Upon noticing my (what must have been an amused) smile, He made a sad attempt to hide the bottle behind his back before walking a few more steps and taking another healthy gulp. I said hi and he shuffled away.  I watched as a boy around 13 (I would guess) road his bike by multiple times and I said hi to the middle aged white man who walks his corgis on average of 29 times a day. I talked to an older man with a strong accent who lives in the same building as ‘vodka man.’  I learned that the older man works every day from 6am till 2pm and that he shares his home with his four kids..the oldest 13 years,  the youngest 3 years. He asked how old I am, if I am married and why I don’t have kids. (If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was Indian..) He then told me that my husband and I should have kids soon, but we should have only one or two...definitely not four! Shortly after he headed home, A group of women, including the girls I had talked to the day before walked with a little one in a stroller, down the opposite side of the street and stopped to sit across from me, on the other side of a large SUV. They were shortly joined by another lady (and I use the term loosely..) 

I hold no affection for this woman in particular as I have seen and heard her many times before and her voice tends to precede conflict. She is a white, poorly kept, loud creature somewhere around 30 years, though I suspect that due to some heavy substance use, she is probably much younger than she looks. I first noticed her around midnight two summers ago when my husband and I had just begun dating.  I was at his house (my current home) sitting on the couch along with two other friends when this woman could be heard shouting obscenities...based on her volume, one can only assume that she was shouting at someone in Canada.  We all rushed to the window only to watch in shock as the man she was with punched another man, knocking him out cold in the middle of the street. We continued to watch while dialing 911 as she turned tail and ran as if Satan himself was about to give chase. ( I feel it prudent to mention that the 911 operator seemed disinclined to send anyone as she was sure the man was just drunk.. as if that was relevant to the fact that a man was lying bleeding in the middle of the street about to get run over..)  

I quietly observed as the women chatted away on the other side of the street, until another woman with the roots under her black hair dyed red, ran down the street chased by a man.  She shouted at him to get away, screamed that he was drunk and crazy, and shouted for someone to call 911.  I called, she ran the way she had come and the drunk man stumbled on in the opposite direction.  The police never came..

A few minutes later, a group of about 10 men/boys (including the kid I had seen earlier on his bike) approached the girls heading east. The girls stopped chatting.. in fact, not a single word was said as the boys passed, at which point, the girls immediately headed west. I have my suspicions of what might have happened that the SUV blocked from my view, but as they are only suspicions with no base in fact, I can only wonder at what may have been sharing the baby stroller with the baby..

After this incident, the street remained quiet for a few minutes until a woman was trying to get into her car while a man shouted at her to give him money for a drink.  I went inside.. I had seen enough.