Pubic Enemy

I am constantly reminded that I don’t live in the best neighborhood.  It’s not safe.  It’s not quiet.  It’s not pretty.  Fuck, it’s not even convenient.  Because the cons far outweigh the pros around here, my ongoing decision to renew my lease year after year has forced me to perpetually assure my friends and family that I am not, in fact, Tommy the Pinball Wizard.  Contrariwise, I am well aware that this neighborhood is a total shit hole. 

What needs to be realized by those that bother to return my calls is that this is the very best neighborhood I can afford on my salary of Broadway dreams.  Maybe (just maybe) when musical theatre is discovered to be the official cure for ovarian cancer, I can move somewhere that I don’t fear getting mugged while on my way to the bodega to buy rat poison to kill whatever the fuck is living under my sink. 

Inevitably, I am the first person to make a distasteful joke when something goes terribly wrong- but not often when my pride is at stake.  I like alone.  I pay my own bills (sometimes even on time).  However, something happened the other day that made me slightly too nervous to laugh.  I saw a newsflash when I was sipping my morning coffee that a young woman had been dragged off into the woods and raped near the ball fields in Inwood Hill Park. 

That’s where I jog. 

Granted, I know that I’m probably not too much at risk of getting raped (at least not in this neighborhood- or galaxy), but hearing news like this still makes you crane your neck to look over your shoulder on every third or fourth step when you walk to buy a slurpee at 10PM.  You can’t help but ponder what exactly is standing in your way of becoming a statistic.  Hopefully the recipe for safety is some combination of common sense and not making any eye contact with anyone ever. 

Yesterday I was practicing this recipe as I was getting off the subway and starting my self-contained walk down the hill to my apartment.  At the station exit, I was met by an unavoidable commotion.  A dozen women were there with stacks of flyers with a crude police sketch demanding that everyone beware of the Inwood Hill rapist.  They were shoving the flyers in people’s palms as they looked them straight in the eye. 

It turns out that the image of the rapist was so generic that it could have easily been 60% of the people in my zip code, but bearing witness to this act of upward mobility made me so momentarily proud to live exactly where I do.  Even if the police could care less about our problems, we could take the matter into our own hands and demand our justice be served rape-free (and with a side of chorizo). 

Tonight I was at Columbus Circle waiting for the A train to take me back uptown to the boulevard of broken dreams.  After a few minutes of distracting myself with Plants v. Zombies on my phone, a train pulled into the station at a glacial pace.  The conductor’s window was open and I heard a cop tell him, “Don’t you open those doors.”  The conductor nodded as the cops began to pace the platform and peered in every window.  The people stuck inside the train were smirking and shrugging their shoulders.  After 15 minutes, some old woman standing next to me on the platform gave me a, “What’s going on?” look with her eyebrows. 

I said, “They’re looking for somebody.  Or something.  I hear there’s some serious stuff going on in Inwood and Washington Heights,” never actively admitting that this is exactly where I live.  One of the cops put a key in the side of the subway car and opened the door I was standing in front of.  Several people struggled to push their way out, including this homeless guy that I see a couple of times a month.

When you see the same homeless people over and over again on a continuous loop, you can usually monitor their vital signs and make some guess at how they’ve been holding up.  Having first seen this guy in the dead of winter, I’ve always seen it as some sort of miracle that he’s even still alive.  I have never seen shoes on his feet and he can barely lift his legs when he walks.  His hair is matted in dreads and his beard extends halfway down his bent torso. 

As he pushed his way out of the single door that was open, the cops grabbed him by the elbow and put him in cuffs. 

I said to the old lady, “I see this guy all the time.  Whoever they are looking for, it sure as hell isn’t him…” 

She grimaced and said, “I know. I’d bet half of this platform could vouch for him.  Still, maybe he’s better off with a roof over his head for the night, even if there are bars holding it up.”

It made me so sad to see him taken off.  It felt like he was merely a scapegoat- that the cops had wasted everyone’s time and they needed to cart someone off to prevent getting any egg on their uniforms.  None of us said a thing as we watched them go. 

When I finally got off the train uptown, I called my mother and made mention of all the crazy goings-on.  Police cars slowly passed on the streets by my apartment.  I told her that even though I didn’t like the reason that they were there, it still made me feel better to see them than it would not to. 

I got home and started to round up the trash that needed to be taken down to the dumpster.  Reaching over to the small mesh wastebasket in my living room, I saw a jolt of moving fur- another grey mouse, my third.  I screamed and threw the basket into my larger kitchen trashcan and turned Mommie Dearest white as I grabbed the hammer.  I started swinging while it repeatedly tried to climb up the sides to escape.  My mother said she could hear the thumping like I was Lizzie Borden with her axe. 

Now, before you all freak the fuck out and call PETA on me, I don’t even know if I killed the thing.  To be honest, I was sort of squeamish and sort of crying and I don’t think I ever made contact once, which leads me to believe that he is now on the shores of Montego Bay sipping Pina Coladas before the limbo competition. 

I trembled as I ran the trash downstairs.  Thankfully, I bumped into the super. 

“You’ve got to do something.  I just killed a fucking mouse with a hammer.” 

He laughed.

“No, seriously,” I said.  “I’m not made up for this shit.” 

He said he would be up in 20.

He came to my door with a flashlight and started opening cabinets and throwing their contents on the floor with his overbearing, muscled arms.  He pointed to two holes under my kitchen sink and told me, “They come from there.”  I nodded as he comforted me and said that he would stop by tomorrow evening, how he was going to patch them up and how it was going take care of everything.  I showed him to the door and sighed as I looked down at the mess that lay in his wake.  While picking up after him, I reached down to move my tabletop Christmas tree and found a bundle of paperwork sticking out of its branches.

Ironically enough, it was my lease renewal form.  I had forgotten that I stashed it under the sink several weeks ago.  It was due a while back and I had devoted 30 frantic minutes of every day this week to trying to find it. 

Looking down at the document, I saw the shape of whatever it is that’s been lurking in the shadows.  The latest newsflash would make it hard for a hyena to laugh.  However, I know I’m going to sign the damn thing, lick a stamp and mail it back in.   And when I do, it is going to be pretty hard for me to keep a straight face.