It is only due to the fact I now live in South America that I am able to write about my time in New York from March 2011 until I left again in July 2011. Only now, and comparatively, could I find in that hell, a few things I could perhaps appreciate, that I could even miss, and thus, a year later, I feel I am ready to give the period the justice it deserves, good and bad, and write with some of the clarity needed. I condone nothing.
It is, as always, as fictional as a metaphorical bell jar.
“Le Sup a Plato Curtido”
“Tastes like dirty dishes” – used when one does not like the final out come of the situation (Puerto Rican saying)
Brooklyn Apartment, after a three-hour interrogation at JKF, and a taxicab through darkest Queens, March 2011.
The young man standing before me, who was smiling, and who was to be our new landlord, would be, in the following months, with his jaw wired up and eating his food blended and through a straw.
His furniture would be glued together with a mix of Staples best budget glue and gaffer tape, and his walls would be filled with a thick mix of Poly filler and a cream topcoat (that wouldn’t remotely match the colour beneath) and that would leave strange looking damp patches all across the apartment. The remaining undamaged part of the walls, which was not so much, would be, for the most part stained in red wine - the type of staining that has withstood vigourous scrubbing, to leave, yes, lighter stains, but consequently, twice the size and now the colour of shit.
He would be facing a civil law suit from his neighbours, (initially the ones on the left, however it would also transpire they will not substantiate their claim, mainly due to their cultivation of extraordinary quantities of marijuana, grown under large sun lamps, and over small toddlers, and in the comfort of their own home, and next door, and thus explaining the desperation at any unwanted additional police attention on their floor), as well as complaints from the condominium as a whole.
The complaints will address the breaking of the general rules of conduct set in place to ensure the wellbeing of the block, and will cover illegal subletting, as well as referring to a terrible and recurring, raucous outburst, which would explode outward from the walls, then out from the apartment itself, along the corridors, into the elevators, up onto the roof, down the fire escapes, and back down onto the streets four floors below.
The bed sheets would be worn on the roads rather than on the bed, there would always be broken glass in the trash shoot, and should one try to seek a peaceful moment in which to grab refuge on any of the chairs in the apartment, then rapid splintering of the wood would cause one to plummet to the floor gabbling about the best budget glue not being best at all.
“Woodworm, it must be Woodworm!” the cries could be heard.
On the upside however, his plants, will have been watered, and daily, and with such tender, love and care, they will have grown a good 3 inches towards the light.
I do not mean to write without remorse, these are however the facts.
He will also have his own personal court case against the doctors at Bellevue hospital that sewed up his jaw against his will.
But as I said, right now, the man, our new friend, is smiling, and in fact, he looks quite sane, even placated, with thick curls of hair and a happy disposition, for which, be assured, we will never see again.
However, we are a long, long way from that just now, for the journey into true hell is often intricate and laced with many holes and conflicting stories.
Firstly, the apartment I am told is in Bushwick, near all the trendy, up and coming bars and cafes, (explaining our still high rent), and I think they must be so up and coming they’ve actually all up and left.
It will, of course, soon transpire I actually live in a rather different area than the one offered, one more on the very fucking edge of life.
Perhaps this won’t surprise you. But, here and now, I don’t know this yet.
“Is there anywhere we shouldn’t go?” I ask, as I receive the keys to our new apartment. I am excited, despite the jet lag. The sky is endless and dark and navy and blocks out the view.
It is a very large space for New York standards (perhaps justifying the rent) - most space in this city, is at great costs, and still in which one would fail to fling a cat. (And cats should be flung, and often, for they cause allergies and ruin lives).
“Oh no, you’ll be just fine,” our new friend says, as he hands me the keys, pauses, and then as he is about to leave, turns, and casually adds while scratching the back of his neck, “huh, although, you know, you probably shouldn’t go more than two blocks down to the left, k?
“Really, and why is that?” I ask.
“Well no it’s fine, you can, I mean, don’t, but yeah really, it’s cool, well anyway, yeah, there’s a Chinese take away on the left, near Kosuizko subway, maybe don’t go past the Chinese, k?”
“k” I say back, American like.
“k” Wolf says, and I know then we’re probably in for a spot of bother, as a wolf would never say, “k” which means he isn’t listening.
And with that the door (that will be later slightly off the hinges and the screws loose) snaps shut, and we are closed into our new home and both alone in the large empty space.
Death creeps up on the walls, leaving silvery, strange shadows in unfamiliar corners. The Manhattan skyline is somewhere to the right, tall and glittering, but we can’t and won’t see it yet, for it is far, and over the shivering wintery waters of the East River.
A quiver runs downwards along my spine and curls my toes. Jet lag I think.
I never do this, but lets presume for just one fleeting moment, things are going to work out well, that this is the perfect NYC spot for me and Wolf - to make art, film black and white footage, sell second hand books, string guitars, paint on canvas, make love, write crap poetry, stroll hand in hand, take photographs, even try to make a living from our existence as such.
Then lets consider the reality.
My address is ** Lawton Street. I live, on Broadway Avenue, near the train tracks, and on the very edge of Bushwick, and it’s not long before, we realize we are actually bordering into the area known as Bedford Stuyvesant.
Basically what I’m telling you is that I live, along with East Harlem, in one of the worst areas in New York City today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Bushwick is the area that backs off Williamsburg to the south east and onto Bedford Stuyvesant in the East. It is "attracting" a larger number of white people now moving there, but, along the J line, it is very much still the ghetto, and lets please be sure of that (early 2011)
As the New York City rents keep soaring year after year, artists will continue to influx these new (to them!) areas in search for cheaper rent, thus driving up rent in those areas too, and so pushing the most hardened artists, that have either never made it work, or never sold out, (or the poor local people) much further out into absolute hell.
This is about where we are now.
I stare out of the long windows of the apartment, silver and white and blue. The night descends and moths flutter from the cupboards and will soon make holes in all my wool clothes, and destroy everything of mine too.
Bushwick, I think. The area on the lips of most - not just the crack whores on it’s corners – but also New York’s “hip crowd” who lets face it probably give more blow jobs on an average Tuesday night.
Mainly: “will it gentrify or not?”
Well, they’ve put a Beauty bar, you know how they did in Las Vegas and LA, right on Broadway, next to an illegal gambling and betting room, that you’re not meant to know about, and there’s a vegan only coffee shop opposite the black Methodist church where on the steps the screw balls hang out.
But no one lives quite where I live.
So allow me to tell you - when your standard of living is specifically on Broadway Avenue, which happens to loom under the monstrous overhead metal construction of the booming, shaking, tracks of the J and Z line – a line that withstands trains made up of four to five cars, each car weighing 38,600 kg, so that’s 38,600kg x 4 of old honking hot heaving metal, and with over a 1000 trains passing a day, non stop, in both directions, hurtling up and down, at great speed, clanking away on the oldest, and loudest, and busiest rapid transit rail system in all the word, after only Tokyo, Moscow, and Seoul…
…when, it is possible to touch the tracks from your front window on the third floor, from a room gathered thick with grime and dust from the black fumes, and where the roaring, and screeching, and hissing, shudders straight through your life, and straight through your fucking head, every couple of minutes, and your only respite is between the hours of 4am and 6am, when you thank lord god! You thank the Lord God you no longer believe in! For then, it’s only every 20 minutes - such are the benefits of the all night NYC subway system…
…when for every time one of these train passes, the glass in all the cupboards shakes violently, and the lamps from the ceilings swing, and when you are in the midst of talking, you must scream, and scream, and scream, until you are turning blue, flattened under the crescendo of trains, and yet with no hope in hell, (and you are in hell), over that mammoth turmoil, that you will ever be heard…
…when, you cease to live, everything terminated - films, TV, music, conversation, writing, sleep – all on hold, so only your blood keeps cooking with reverb, while you wait 1 minute every 4 minutes to resume the freedom to your life.
And, this is every day, every night, every weekend, every holiday.
And eventually, you’ll manage to learn how to sleep at night, and you must do so only by incorporating that relentless, thundering, heaving into the demented warped nightmares of sleep, half real, half lucid, and to sleep now, as if swallowed into the darkest pits of the living dead – half sleeping, very much dying.
Then! Let me tell you - whether you’re dragging up your children or plastering up your latest mosaic for your Trader Joe Organic wine garage exhibitions, not all the artists, or all the brats living on inheritance (that’s me if you don’t count the insurance claims and $50 model royalties), or all the fucking hipsters in the world can gentrify this area.
Not unless you tear down the iron rudders and the hulking, ugly, edifice of those humongous tracks, which run overhead and all along Broadway, that block out the light, block out the sky, block out the day, block out the sense. Where people fight to beat the maddening noise.
A place almost only populated by Hispanic and African American families, and by the disadvantaged, and by many plagued with illness, and incapacity, and crime. An area where torment never ceases, like a dark, sinister and forgotten underworld, everyone living as if buried underground, in a hole, not even at the end of the line, but under the groaning of the tracks.
The moon hangs in half, in a black sky, over the projects, those big brown high rises in the distance, and the train tracks outside seem liquid and milky grey, later frosted, and my eyes close with tiredness.
I take some pain killers, and another valium (to block out the noise), and my mind wanders to the Broadway of Manhattan - the great and grand glitzy theaters of up town, designer shoes clicking into pink nail salons and small groomed pets more pampered than me.
My head bangs from the last valium come down before this next one hits, and in between, I let out a deep cry thinking of the Brooklyn known as Williamsburg - where the kids only get tattoos to go with herbal tea and croquet, and “artists” all live in warehouses, with colourful graffiti, a LARGE but friendly dog, a free found TV, and cheese and wine.
Well fuck them! It’s the fucking hipsters that say Bushwick it’s cool! Well, fuck them, for I’m talking about the ghettos.
From the smeared windows of fleeting taxis: shifting traffic lights, people hanging to corners, dented cars swerving over unrepaired tarmac, stolen cars pulled over to the side, hand cuffed kids up against the wall; it’s not a style choice, not a life choice. These are families that can’t afford any other option yet seemingly aren’t deemed worthy of a humanitarian environment without poverty stricken environmental disadvantages. But, yes, you will have running water, for this is New York City. This is America. And on Saturdays you can always eat a low calorie avocado salad or do yoga and breathing.
According to the NYPD’s crime reports, taking into consideration it’s small area, where I now find myself, which is in fact, more precisely, between 73rd and 81st precinct – thus that that borders the edge of Bushwick on the West, and heading into Bedford Stuyvesant, known more commonly as Bed-Stuy, on the east, both are statistically the highest rating precincts in NYC for weekly and monthly numbers for all crime and including the weekly homicide and rape count.
I’m speechless there is even a “weekly” homicide count, and a higher weekly rape count, and as it glares back at me from my laptop screen, I start worrying my valium prescription for a long haul four engine transatlantic jet plane is not going to be enough.
“You can’t be frightened by statistics,” Wolf and I try to say, and, “It’ll be much further East than us,” which is true too, and then a train rattles us off mid sentence, and I stare in disbelieve, holding onto Wolf’s arms as the floor vibrates.
I wonder if it is a terrorist air raid attack, until it finally gives way, and is replaced instead by the terrible wailing of sirens.
I drink duty free wine, duty free gin, duty free champagne, and then realize eventually, when it has ran out, we will have to go out.
The clouds gather purple and mauve, and then seem to just stop moving.
Looking back, there was a definite dullish backlight in Wolf’s eyes that now tells me the area may be bad by even his standards. That could have been the clue to that final trigger to the coming depression, the destroyed apartment, the complaints, the internal madness, maybe, anyway, but darkness closed in too quickly and made it too difficult for me to see.
Instead we locked our eyes steady on one another, swaying gently, very much knowing love, and then naively, asked one another:
“I mean, exactly how bad it can be?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Almost three months later, to the day, on a prickling, hot, humid June New York evening, one block before the Chinese takeaway, three blocks from our home, there will be a drive by shooting.
At 7pm when the sun is not nearly yet down, a car with four gang members will cruise past, exactly as one of the most wanted men in NYC, will be out standing and smoking, on the corner of Kosciuszko subway station, chatting with two 14 year old barely dressed girls, and in the amber light of the sinking sun.
The man standing out on the sidewalk is wanted for multiple homicide, possessions of armed weapons, narcotics, charges of rape, and the organization of illegal gambling and fighting rings.
The car will drive past slowly, roll down a window, and then speed off, only after having shot him down on the street with three bullets and one fatal one to the head.
The girls will vanish into the thick warm air, not even bending down to survey the scene, and the streets will be still and deserted as his body lies bloody and limp on the littered sidewalk. The trains will rattle on over him and as they do, small drips of humid muddy water will splash through the tracks and gently onto his face.
The NYPD will be grateful for the news, because they have been trying to get the job done themselves for over 5 years.
But, unlike you, we don’t know this then, and so we brave out into our first New York cool night with our collars turned up and the wind whistling from under the tracks. We pass the high green barred up steps of Kosciuszko subway station, and onwards to the Chinese take away four blocks east, ordering chicken and sweet corn soup, and spring rolls with sweet dip through some bullet proof glass.
“Al Cantio de un Gallo”
The distance a rooster can be heard when he crows - for which you have no idea until you go close enough to the place (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, NYC, Spring 2011
A train roars through the room like a loud angry phantom, displacing the darkness, and I watch Wolf’s teeth gleam electric blue reflected off the flashes of silver metal.
We are living in a newly built block next to a mental home, where the crack addicted methadone junkies, who have forgotten their names and lost their families, sit along the railings, and shake in time with the trains.
By day, by night, there is no divide here. Vibrant Puerto Rican music blasts out of cars, shops, cafes, mixes with the sirens, and the screeching brakes, and every day of the week and night.
Here, the rubbish and alcohol bottles litter the avenue, worse on what clearly is “come down” Sunday and Monday, where men and women, with their bellies out, brown skin flaked, just lay about, slumped on stoops, zips undone, drinking beer, passing out in the heat.
From where I live, if you turn right off Lawton Street, you are immediately under the looming bridge, with it’s dark rigid greenish metal, at a large intersection, where here the sirens whirl. Where at night, between the trains, and between the sirens, women’s screams can be heard carrying on the cool sultry air.
In the small, cold, ghostly hours, when the trains are less frequent, and the air is electric, and real, in our room, those screams are so brutal and feral, they make you fearful, shuddering and gasping yourself, four floors up. Breathing is trapped in panic as you call the cops at 4.30am, “There’s a women being attacked at the junction of Lawton and Broadway, come quick”
Night after night, the pallid moon spills out it’s ashen light only enough to see the dust hanging to the room and nothing else. Yet, those intrusive long animal like screams, will give you nightmares in the dark to come, and the darker months after.
Each morning after such sleepless nights, I check the local “Bushwick News (it won’t be in any national papers), that lie on the counters at the Bodega’s, searching for answers: reality, or another demented nightmare? And that is when I can roughly pinpoint the beginning of the terrible undoing that is to question ones own sanity - and in the face of this strange underworld… “Girl raped/ mugged/ sexually assaulted” is more common than not, but sometimes, there is nothing. There is nothing. Yet, you can still hear the echoes of the screams, which now must belong only to your self or your dreams.
Cars flash past at night with blacked out windows, booming beats, and blue illegal lamp lights that blind your eyes. They don’t stop for any traffic light, or any crossing person, and there are often reports of hit and run.
The drug deals happen on every corner. I dread the busy, hustling intersection, a few blocks west, at Myrtle Avenue, where the J and Z line meet the M line (call M for methadone – should you want the codes to drug dealing). Here it heaves with thousands of thronging people, where I feel ridiculous in my pale faded skin, where everyone is coming and going: men with grey fuzzy beards carrying old fashioned brief cases, youngsters trailing too white sneakers, with pulled up hoodies, and everyone talking loudly on either out of date cell phones, or the latest iphones in glitter diamante encrusted cases, with their studded fingers, or patterned acrylic nails in swirls of pinks and blues, and the young girls with many a brown bouncing baby, in hoodies and tiny too white sneakers too, and then the overly fit toned boys with smooth lean torsos, shining skin, low slung jeans and jersey tops worn in the back pockets of their jeans, their silver chains around their necks.
Further up Broadway, towards our house from Myrtle Avenue, here women with hair falling out, teeth falling out, are falling from doorways, falling out of the world, in mismatched clothes, clinging to you, clinging to nothing at all, muttering some shit. To someone or other, that is or isn’t around.
The walk home alone from the Myrtle subway stop is fraught with danger and fear, and at best is accompanied by one of these skinny rather warped women from the mental home, or no home at all, who stagger with you part of the way, loose like a shoe lace, slurring through gaps in their teeth, and digging in on your arm.
“You know my baby? Yes, Mam! I have a baby. I’m a mama. I’m a MAMMY” or, “White girl. You gonna get me on your ass. I’m sorted. My son is gonna look after me, once he done his time” or “need me some money first. you give us some money, aint too good for here y’know, I’s sorted here t’is!” and often, “I’m a GOOD Ma-Ma me!”
While they round off with some clicking noise through their lips into the thick air, all the way home I start to grind my own teeth and my heart beats at a speed that reminds me of too much cocaine.
But you learn to hold it out, because soon they forget you’re there, and go another way, onto someone else that’s usually not there, while you side step those that are there digging in black plastic trash bags left out on the street.
Just off to the north, past a large bill board that is crooked and falling down, and reads in huge black letters “DIVORCE ONLY $300 rapid service,” comes the next street running parallel to Broadway Avenue, which is Bushwick Avenue.
It is also a wide road, but with no train tracks above, where on either side there are large daunting houses that are bleak and rundown, and have great verandas that are all barred up, like prisons, with rusty railings on every window, on every level, from ground to roof, on every house. Not once did I ever see a soul sit out. Here, iron mesh and barbed wire line the streets, and some trucks come and go.
A few four wheel drive cars trail ominously round junk yard corners, with no number plates at all, they’ll cruise a bit, then speed off suddenly. As they do, aggressive pit bulls hang out of the open cracks of back car windows, their salivating jaws scratching on the glass, clamped in metal head locks, pumped with steroids and ready to fight.
If you follow the tracks further out in a South East direction along the looming rigid hood of the J and Z line through Bedford Stuyvesant, (Wolf tells me Jay Z named himself after these lines and about other famous rappers like the Notorious BIG from here and the slogans “Do or die in Bed-Stuy” and I instantly take this on board and think I’m going to die) then, you come to Brownsville.
This is where they bred the Murder Inc corporations of the 1920s, that then formed the mafia, and where now, there is the largest number of projects and public housing concentration than anywhere else in the United States, where gangs, similar to The Crips and The Bloods of Los Angeles, named the Wave Gang and the rival Hood Starz gang, all live on top of each other in a single square mile, in 100 different buildings with 873 stories each.
Then, at the end of the A line, having changed at Broadway Junction from the JZ line - another intimidating intersection, where if you are attentive, you can see anonymous hands change briefcases, passing wordlessly, at the top of stairs in rush hour and despite the increased police presence lining the walls - there’s a small inn called The JFK Inn. It’s near the airport and at the end of Far Rockaway metro line. It is here Wolf said if we go out on the streets even in daylight we will be shot, and then later when it was dark, said he was off to buy some fags, but then I held him down and on the floor
So now, you know where I stay, and where I am near. Now you know why, now, almost a year later, I still jump at my own shadow and sometimes struggle to breathe.
And slowly here, the seasons began to change, the coolness in the air became momentarily bright, clear and warm, perhaps filled of hope and promise, but if so, it vanished too quickly, instead replaced by a galvanizing heat, an electric fuzz, a dulling confusion, until soon, I would feel suffocated with an immense thick choking fog of humidity and sweat.
“Las Cosas se Pusieron Color de Hormiga Brava”
Things turning the color of fire ants – used when describing a serious situation, meaning things have gotten tense, (economically) tight, serious, or strict. (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, NYC, Spring 2011
The pressure built up into the summer like a steam cooker all around, hot, and damp and bristling on our skin.
For me, I felt an urgent need to gain control, but I’m not sure of what. On the streets, you sensed that something had to give, a desperation mounting, yet as the seasons collided, and the shiny smooth backed roaches clambered up the sticky walls, the rising temperatures were in fact all that changed. But, intensify is a better word.
Relentless arguments had already started. At first over seemingly refuting some vague idea of every society norm, breaking rules, or laws, not knowing if there were laws and rules to break, reforming boundaries, re-breaking them, and then over seemingly nothing at all, but all of it, driving us further away from living on a breadline of any sort.
A seemingly constant search for death in darkened unexplored alleys, refusing to cash in on any genuine talent, refusing not, to just ban corporations, or the stealing exploiting conglomerates, as you’d expect from a genuine artist, but refusing to commit any talent to anyone that was part of any living stable society whatsoever, wherever that may have been, and which we soon then clearly lost sight off anyway.
Fueled instead, on chaos and despair alone, and the harrowing factors of living in the worst possible areas of life, self-destructing in order to afford to self-create (art in the first place).
It was a deathly grip, cold and almost unnoticeable at first, then later shaking your bones like a fever, making you bare your teeth like dogs with rabies left out in the heat.
Paranoia and imagination confronting the fight of the true fear that was reality, our defences heightening between us in the foreboding doom, and each in denial of anything at all, like drug sick flunkies, hounded to and by the other, and by our positioning here.
But, at first we tried; we really tried.
“it’s going to be ok” he said
“it’s not going to be” I said from a heap on the floor.
And then the sky was burst open and bleeding and only in nightmares, and up the walls, and across the floors.
“Hacer de Tripas, Corazones.”
To make from guts, hearts: to make good out of a bad situation (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, May 2011
The sky was burst open and bleeding in a luminous pink hot glow.
We gather with the locals by our junction, where multi-coloured flags hang from every window, and where the lorries chugging by honk and whistle.
There, perhaps, we let the sun on our face, outside the Puerto Rican Bodega, which is always filled with cheerful music and where salsa blares out, and 40’s are often drunk, and here, every morning we happily buy our coffee for 50 cents.
Of course, later, we realize they serve us last, leaving us standing every time often for long, and then later still we realize they’re charging us more expensive prices to the locals, “hell, white gal!” indeed, and so, we have no choice, but to cross to the other side of the junction, to the all American deli to buy instead of rice and refried beans, Philly steak rolls and sticky carrot cake, and with some of the truckers.
We surely make friends (well they serve us) at a local Puerto Rican restaurant where they serve whole juicy chickens on a spit, and white fish, and tripe and guts in orange soup.
We cool down drinking Guanabana’s, made from the fruit from the Soursop trees which are native to Central America, here frozen, and then, by mixing the sweet white fleshy juices with milk and ice cream. We buy spicy empanadas from the vendors on all the corners, especially near Woodhull hospital, where outside they sell a lot of junk, such as plastic sun glasses, and plastic shoes, and plastic rings of every saint.
And we listen, from the street, amid the ambulance horns and police sirens, amid the trains, to the rising voices, and clapping, from the gospel choirs of the black churches all along Broadway, resonating with rhythm and grooves that fill the streets with energy and love.
“Hey Mami!” the local folk shout in usual friendly greeting, and I know I am happy buying coats and furs, if they’re not too soiled or damaged, from the “Save the African Children hospice” for only $2 a piece - so that I wonder if they actually can be saving the African children at all.
I buy home baked bread each day at the bakery where outside on a blackboard scrawled with chalk is a sign saying “we have 2 day old bread $1 inside!” And once I make the girl who serves me smile.
Then we’ll try to drink with the commuting hipsters at Blue Mondays and get lost in the dusty books on the wall and stagger the one block home, not fitting into anywhere in this world at all.
Then, at night, the flashes of white electrical light just like the storms, from the shadows of the bulking trains, will spill out across the street, and I photograph the skies that are filled with doom, but perhaps I am filled with hope at the press of the camera to recreate it all.
Our landlord reappears, (only this once before the incident regarding his sewn up jaw) with some class A powder, and confirms, “Oh it’s totally safe, nothing gonna happen here, k” And then, as we did not know this was coming from a man that will be later stapled together from the inside of his mouth out, and with gums sewn together, maybe then, for a moment, we told ourselves we were starting to relax.
The landlord takes photos of Wolf half naked, with an expensive Polaroid camera, against a black screen, which he hangs from his ceiling, and with the only remaining film that has double exposure in the world. He stocks it in his ice cooler, while he is here to remove his clothes from the apartment (that he inadvertently forgot to do so before), and seemingly is to forget again.
“Oh fuck it, just TAKE IT,” and some goes in the bin, some he parades as if on the catwalk then dumps in the corner, and by the time he leaves, the apartment looks like a jumble sale and just as full, and you can here him sniffing down the halls.
Before he leaves, clearly high, clearly very generous, clearly a very decent photographer, he shouts, “break all the furniture for all I care…just take care of the cameras and water the plants, I’m totally rock and roll, au fait with it all!”
And, it’s around then, despite the trying, the last desperate hoping, I become aware of tension headaches and pains in my gut, and then, you see, the problem is, inadvertently, without intentional malice, and over long lover’s discourse, that’s exactly what we do: we break all of the furniture, and only the camera’s and the plants survive.
“Las Ventas de Carajo”
In the vicinity of hell: anyone sending you there is not happy with you (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, May 2011
The sky is heavy with another great turbulent storm that is brooding in from the west, looming over the projects, before battering hard at our trembling windows. In doing so it will leave murky puddles in each of the corners of our room.
How do you feel? Someone asks me, but I’m damned if I know who it was. I answer into the dark.
Panic, anxiety, fear, angst, omens of doom, feelings of badness, all around me, in me, certainty of imminent disaster, the definite knowledge of terror, striking, white and sore, my mind like the visible haze of a searing hot day. On good days a general malaise like a thick fog on large moors, on bad days the urge to flee or fight just to survive it all, running from something I cannot see, yet staying to see things I don’t want to see.
Along with the crime rates, I start filling questionnaires online for every personality disorder possible, scaling highly likely for pretty much all of them - paranoid, histrionic, borderline, narcissistic, moderately high for dependent, anti social and obsessive compulsive. I immediately consider taking myself into Belle Vue to hand myself over, and instead have to take more valium to stop the gnawing compulsive panicking about my own sanity.
And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, so it becomes.
The world takes strange ugly faces, beneath the paving stones, in the cracks, among the drains; twisting contorting images, that grimace, and wince, and attack, their words bristle my skin, knotting my hair, catching my clothes, like an erratic wind.
Wolf on the other hand is calm at first, well, calmly drinking himself almost to death. I find him hidden behind ashtrays. But life becomes filled with dead ends, and promises and plans that all break easily like the surrounding glass. I’m fearful to leave the house, fearful to stay in.
Drinking more, then?
To block me out? To block the world out more like.
Valium? Oh yes! The pain, it dies before me.
Until one day there is none, and no one is calm, and no prescription, and then the only thing for sure was the absolute sense of foreboding, and the catastrophe finally coming down.
And, at first, still nothing gave - with a stability we never had, always somehow, the night broke to day, again and again, with the same hellish screams, and the fucked up dreams, and there was blood on my hands, on my face, on the walls, on the streets, all around, and the vultures were there now, in the room, on the sidewalk, tearing us apart.
We would lie out on the floors, both bruised and tired, until my tooth fell out, and Wolf put in a missing person report it took so long at the ER and he thought I was raped. Therapists were on sliding scale, and money we had none, so we fought about that too, and the only things consistent were the convulsing trains, the broken guitars, the deadly screams, and the big thick brown-bodied moths.
Just like the turning colours in a bike wheel spiraling down a hill, the world wouldn't slow down, not despite the screams that grew louder and louder, and not where I was trapped in those four walls, crying for it all to stop, but not knowing what. I felt tricked by time, that felt hard and frozen, yet never stopped surging, that I wanted to push backwards and hold it out, before it finally washed us up and out like a mammoth tidal wave.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time the US government announced they had killed Osama Bin Laden on May 2nd, and while some said it was just lies, and the college kids gathered at Ground Zero throughout the night, and as they rampaged like hooligans drinking from beer cans that they then tossed on the ground, almost rioting in celebrations, and I’m not sure they even understood why, and while some in the background, clung to the railings, and wept on their knees and on the ground, I became acutely aware I was in fact consistent with a clinical diagnosis for panic anxiety disorder.
“You’re the scariest thing on this block” Wolf would say to reassure my fears, and me to you, just so you know I really wasn’t very well, and the bed sheets were on the street again, and there was glass in our feet.
An omen I should have heeded, but now it’s too late.
“Vamos a Ver si el Gas Pela”
lets see if the gas peeks: a taunt: “lets see what happens when push comes to shove” “lets see who’s right” (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, May 2011.
The days were now viscous and fully menacing with no respite.
Wolf would vanish for days, and I would pace back and forth in time with the swaying lamps, and rattling pots, thinking about death, waiting for nothing.
On the celebration of Cinco de May I made Wolf tacos, but he was three days late, returning smelling of stale booze, and smoke, and his coat all bloodied, his hand half chewed off by a pit bull bite.
We’d have no choice but to hold one another in the silvery moonlight, eating the stale hard tacos, as I’d bandage his hand, throwing out cards scrawled with anonymous addresses, and then send him to the only place we could afford for a free tetanus jab, which I’d rather not think about. It was clear he was lucky to have his thumb on his hand.
I urged him to report the dog, but he didn’t want it put down, so he spoke to the owner who assured him it stayed in a basement and was rarely let out.
For Wolf’s birthday I ordered him a vintage cherry sunburst guitar that I bid on ebay for, and just like the one he had been hoping for, and that I spent the last of my sanity on, (some panic anxiety of internet and pay pal), but on the day, he refuses to open it, and says I shouldn’t have. We couldn't afford it. Then later it is broken anyway.
Resolutely, I pull myself out of bed each morning, my insides quivering from the vibrations, sick and giddy, and apply for acting jobs, feeling like a down and out junkie that never got any junk.
I make the journey into Manhattan for three auditions, not expecting to get any of them, and by some twist of irony I got all three parts: one playing a street hooker in a motel in new jersey, one playing a high class escort in a 5 star uptown hotel, and the other playing a victim of post traumatic stress disorder. All lead roles.
“You’re incredible!” say all three directors, and as the wooden bed at The Hudson Hotel begins to go up in flames.
And then, because things can always get more demented, when you think it is hardly possible - Wolf announced he was in fact awaiting the delivery from overseas of a first grade incredibly rare diamond.
I eye ball him into the wall, as he informs me, he has had it guaranteed, it is not a blood diamond, but one of rather incredible value, and that he is, therefore, having shipped from Ireland, to a random address - somewhere in the state of New Jersey that he’s found online on Google map, in order to avoid the high New York state tax.
There’s a time in life when one can be paralytically dumbstruck. This was one of them. Then you must add the panic anxiety disorder.
“It’ll be fine,” says Wolf, “I’ll just sit on their garden wall and wait for the postman to come.”
For a moment, I consider we are in a rural heaven I didn’t know existed anymore, and for once have no reply. And off he went one morning, between hitting JFK back and forth, for duty free cartons of fags to sell on craigslist, to collect his rare diamond shipment to an address that was not remotely his.
I stay in the covers downing gin to silence the noise in my head, but not in enough time to make my dear friend visiting us run for his flight back across the dark oceans between, and for whom I have not heard since.
And of course, indeed, in the meantime, out of the 574,000 United State Postal Service workers, Wolf intercepts the one in particular delivering a purposely, discreet envelope that actually contains a rare diamond, somewhere in New Jersey. He shows his passport, collects the ***** dollar diamond, purchased with all of his royalties, receives the GI certificates from the Gemological Institute, and then, even though we’re hardly speaking, he takes it to a prestigious boutique gallery, right in Soho, called The Belenky Brothers, who are renowned for their designs worldwide, and here, he has it firstly re-valued and thus insured, and then, finally, insists that we have it set in the most beautiful antique style hand crafted gold band that ever you saw - and when he took me, once he had persuade me to leave the covers in which I had buried myself, and like a mole, and from the institute of Ground Zero, we chose it together, and it made me blush, and believe in forever.
“Better get back busking,” he says afterwards, his back damp and bent from the weight of his guitar.
I know I should have said more, but my throat was dry, and my eyes were dry, and my knees were dry. I was exhausted, the extremities of emotions making me crash. I should have said I love you. Instead, I said, “but why does it always have to be this way?”
“Así se Baila el Mambo”
That’s how the mambo goes - "That's the nature of the beast” It is how it is whether we like it or not (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto, Summer 2011
One night, I must travel alone from where I have been filming on Varick St downtown playing a hooker called Genevieve.
It’s late afternoon, and the air is yellow, torrid and sticky. As I get off at Kosciuszko subway, from the top of the stairs I hear a racket of banging drums, screaming and shouting, cries and whoops, horns and sirens, and an energy that is bursting through the wood covered floorboards.
It bristles through my skin and makes my feet shake on the ground. The blood rushes below my knees, and my frail hands grip the cold metal stair railing. Someone darts past me and pushes me, telling me I better move it quick.
I know I am in serious danger.
The Puerto Rican parade had started at 10am that morning, the police had already closed many of the roads, and had set up observation surveillance vans all up Broadway, due to the rise in crime and shootings that plagues this area on this day each and every year.
I didn’t know.
An Asian taxi driver working for Bushwick cars, would later tell me, as I pay him to drive me away to stay with a friend, and as he moans that all the roads are still blocked, “Crazeeee. Every year same. Puerto Ricans here crazeeeee. No think. Very dangerous. No sense. Crazeeee. Always shoot. But one another. That not celebration. That crazeeeeeeeee!” and he drives me down back ways muttering more to himself than me.
I didn’t know.
I rush down the steps and look towards The Chinese takeaway, the one I was told so many months ago not to go past, and where very soon, there will be the drive by shooting on the corner, but right now, coming up from that direction, is a huge rampaging screaming young black male crowd. It is surging forward, some stopping only to jump on vans and lorries, and rocking cars. Many have painted their faces the colour of the Puerto Rican flag: red and white horizontal strips and a blue triangle with a white sole star. Some are wrapped in the flags and they bellow out behind as they march forwards: a terrible din, coming towards me.
Black women holler at me to get inside with them, and momentarily I do, but in an instant, I am adamant not to be trapped in another building like the time protestors tried to petrol bomb the building in Morocco at the start of the year. Terror rackets through me, but somehow, I ask them to unlock the door and let me out.
If I could make five blocks, I was at my front door, 4 floors up and off Broadway Avenue. Five long blocks.
I walk pressed to the sides and close to the walls. I’m shaking. The crowd surge in on me, the air disappears. I have no idea if I am breathing. Everything is loud. Shouts and cries, screams, horns. A wild heat approaches like an inferno. Stamping. Banging. Yes, lots of banging now. Three blocks to go. The crowd is now passing directly to my right. We’re level. Everyone is shouting and glass crashes. My legs still carry me. Like I’m being lifted over water as a small child.
Then! I hear it. Everyone hears it. It is like a clear sharp ringing that clears the air so everything is silent, frozen for a moment, as a shot rings out.
I hold myself pressed to the wall. Time did stop I am sure, and then that suspended moment broke down into a deranged madness.
The crowds become impacted and dense, and I can’t see what they are stampeding about. Everything now happens fast and at once. Five police cars with wailing sirens screech in from every possible direction like vultures, swamping the scene, and literally in less than milli seconds, such is the surveillance, and everyone is squeezing in to see. At first the police presence and the focused attention to center of the crowd where they are, gives me strength to continue. Two blocks. My legs are like wet paper.
The cops break up the packed crowd slightly and now I can see. In seconds five young men are lifted by the police, picked out from the crowd, and are all flung face down on the gravel, instantaneously, by different cops, and as I walk slowly, one foot slowly in front of the other, trying to be invisible, I can clearly see the cops kicking them with might to stay on the ground, and then, even when they are down, with their hands handcuffed behind their backs, the police stamp hard and violently with their feet upon their backs.
The crowd is now frantic, and close, in and around on the police again, shouting and chanting and challenging, filming with phones, all phones are out, and now other police react pushing teenagers violently back into walls, who in turn gathered to rock cars and turn over metal bins and throw bottles.
The arrested kids are dragged and pushed aggressively into the back of each of the cop cars. The crowd is surging now at the police cars, until they are swept away by the NYPD, and all of this happening in minutes.
And while it did, I don’t know how it happened, but I just slipped by, half with my eyes closed like a child, that meant I was only half there. I made it inside, and it was then a physical pain in my chest struck me hard. I knew I was not made of any such substance to live in this type of world. Maybe not any type of world.
As the sounds of fire works mixed with the sounds of gun shots below, I called a taxi to get me out, and they sent me the only man working in the area on that day, the Asian taxi driver.
Even in the distance, all night I lay in a cold sweat, alone, and listening to the over kill of sirens and screams and collisions of a particularly violent and crazy night.
"Quien a buen árbol se Arrima, Buena Sombra lo Cobija"
He who takes shelter under a good tree gets the best shade - If you want to succeed, you have to be close to successful people. (Old Spanish proverb).
Temporarily leaving the Ghetto, June 2011
As the temperatures in the city, started to rocket far into the 90s, an energy was building on the streets like a sticky soft blanket laying over bubbling molten.
The police doubled their surveillance vans all the way up Broadway, and at all the major intersections, and sometimes, you could watch the non uniform cops stepping out, thus giving themselves away, to buy coffee and donuts at the corner stores, and dressed in lose baggy jeans and t shirts, and with their guns tucked in the back inside belt of their jeans.
On the side streets, kids of all ages, mother’s and babies, not coping in the heat and with nothing to do, gathered by the yellow water mains, loosening off the tops, until the jet sprays high, pumping out at full force across the street; for the rest of the summer, here the cops will turn a blind eye as the street floods and large groups crowd around playing in the water, trying to cool down as the tensions rise.
And then, with the heat, too the junkies flaked out on the pavements by day, became far more aggressive and intense in the feverishly night, and the general restlessness became steadily more and more volatile.
I ask Wolf, “What in gods name do I do with a diamond here?”
“It’s going to be ok” he says, holding my hand, and we try one last time, to make it work, to get away from the stifling heat, the noise, the building tension.
We desperately take trips out as far away as we can packing bikinis with egg mayo sandwiches, and poems by Anne Sexton, and I read Laughter in The Dark by Vladimir Nabokov as the tides on the East coast change.
We go to Coney Island and take photographs in the sand, we explore Staten Island, where wolf is happiest riding back and forth on the Staten Island ferry, and we spend sunny days on the deserted beaches at Far Rockaway awaiting official opening on Memorial Day. We kiss under the sun, and stare across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Here we know how to love, to dream, to hope, to care.
But then too soon, at the end of each day, we must make the long, eerie journey back into the boiling cesspit of humanity, and before changing at Broadway Junction, and on a half empty train, and on the A line from Far Rockaway, a 14 year old sits opposite me, and wanks himself off into his baggy half hanging pants.
We try to spend as much time as possible in Manhattan, meeting friends who are artists and make installations of abandoned Barbie dolls dumped in buckets which instantly appeals, and experimental film makers from LA and we plan new films, we sit in China Chalet with dear friends down town and drink Dark rum until giddy with the hot night air, and we sell our clothes and books on Bedford Avenue to the fashion crowds to afford eating tacos with lime from the taco van.
Wolf plays at Solar Sounds and as they applaud we steal the champagne, we visit Miss B at the new Virgin studios and we attend the LOVE magazine opening.
On my birthday, when later we will eat fresh soft shell crabs that are then in season, we find outside our door, in the ghetto, a large box of about to be trashed books. The one on the top is Children of Albion Rovers by the Scottish poet Paul Reekie – a dear friend of a dear friend, who plays on Wolf’s album, and sadly took his own life last year.
I take it as a sign of something mystical, a creative nudge for both of us, and as I miss dear friends back home, my mind lingers on the ocean I saw the day before.
While I film, wolf busks each day, in front of heavy summer crowds in Central Park, bringing in more than either of us have earned in a year, but then at 10am on a Sunday morning, in the bushes behind, a 13 year old girl is raped and the police must guard the area 24 hours. This means now he can’t play to make his doe he's learnt to hustle for. For John Lennon’s memorial area is a quiet only zone.
And each night comes the perilous journey home in the small devoid hours.
One time we decide to walk, always depressed, back to Brooklyn, the longest way possible, and across the Brooklyn Bridge, only to find with dismay it is now all bordered up, the view blocked out by huge 7 ft metal shutters on either side, and nostalgia sets in, and makes me think of Grizzle up there years before - when you could see out on a million stars and a million twinkling skyscrapers, and Grizzle was up there, climbing the metal rods in a red frock coat and Parisian beret and slugging from a bottle of plonk and toasting the world. The cars sped fast below.
It is then, at home, we found the message, our friend, Gustaf Kjellvander, from The Fine Art Showcase, had died. As I’ve told you before, I fall to the floor and wail, as the neigbours are sure this time they can evict us. RIP our friend.
We walk along Broadway, along Graham Avenue to Williamsburg, through the city, all the way up 5th Avenue, with it's tall glass fronted skyscrapers and golden plated arches; we sit in the shade for sometime at Bryant Park almost listening to the sound of birds for the first time, and then we walk home again, in silence, all the way back, to and in, the misery of life, hand in hand, tears in our eyes.
“El Oso Blanco”
The White Bear: refers to the old and notorious Puerto Rican Island, Rio Piedras State Penitentiary) because of the colour of cement. (Puerto Rican saying)
The Ghetto Summer 2011
It was the drive by shooting that finally closed down our street, and we arranged to leave.
In doing so it brought us the landlord.
To be honest, I’m not sure of the details of his jaw. I know some scuffle took place at the all night Macdonald’s on Delancey near the Williamsburg bridge crossing into Brooklyn that resulted in a broken jaw, I’m led to believe, along the lines of:
“You faggot”
“You nigger”
But you never know. You never know for sure what is true, not there, not here, not anywhere.
I know we would visit him in the hospital where they’d sewn his mouth up by mistake, while he was under the anesthetic, and when he had not signed the legal papers for them to do so. I know, afterwards he would need to speak to a lawyer and by defect be unable. I know he would be seen in the after months going between apartments in New York City carrying his blender and muttering through closed teeth, “So, how the fuck do I suck cock now?”
And so when after, he would come to express his anger on the small matter of the apartment, which was obviously colossal, the words would only come out squeezed and muffled, hissing through the cracks of his teeth, adding a further annoyance and causing his eyes to pop. His lips and cheeks would stretch out wide like a pulled purple rubber band, and past the point of any irreversible elasticity.
“Farm animals” I offered, “mentally ill”
“Both!” he hissed, his lips expanding side ways, almost like a smile.
For you see the truth was, actually, he was to be evicted anyway, for he’d spent our monthly rent money, on what I'm not quite sure enough to say, but before ever handing it in to his landlord, meaning we could argue that he was the one, that had we not left, would have had us evicted anyway.
Later, of course, he would threaten us with general tactics of black mail - to shop Wolf into United Nations for acts of terrorism, and in a bid to terminate all our rights as visitors to his country, he said, “ever again”. This of course would be all via mail, as obviously he couldn’t speak.
The great United States of America, I thought.
At time of writing, we will still be in contact, but we will be down and out in South America and he will be somewhere in the Bible belt. We will owe him still for a vintage 20s chair that he said was worth more than my insurance company said it was, and I guess somehow we still find a way to pay.
And so, there it was finally. We packed up all our moth-chewed clothes, and as we left, we had a final coffee at the junction on Broadway. It was calmer than I ever noticed it before. Yet, still I glanced the local news, one last time.
Flashes off the past three months rampaged my mind, and my hands shook as I thought back over the period:
Two men found murdered in a basement just round the corner at Pulaski Street, off Broadway in Bedford Stuyvesant, brutal death of a 2 year old found with puncture wounds and strangulation marks on Putnam Avenue apartment along the border of Bed-stuy and Bushwick, a shooting of a 23 year old woman outside a bodega on Bushwick Avenue who simply stepped out of the shop door when the gunman approached and killed her for no reason at all, this happening on the day that NY Time noted that Labor Day weekend violence was “13 people killed and 67 injured in 52 shootings since early Friday,” where four teens in ski masks invaded a home in Bed Stuy in broad daylight in which the invasion “degenerated from armed robbery into sexual assault of a women for over an hour after trailing her 24 year old boyfriend into their apartment at gun point,”…oh, and if you’re still wondering about gentrification for the artist – don't forget the college students/ musicians who moved into a cheap apartment in Bed-Stuy to be robbed at gun point of thousands of pounds of musical equipment and beaten with pistols, “Do you see me? Do you see me?” He said, “And I say “yeah” and bam! He beats me in the face with his pistol”
My mind was in fragments, like old forgotten clothes in a far away place, and we held hands as we took the J train once more, from Myrtle Avenue, and finally out of Brooklyn, and as the sun goes down over the tracks behind us, Wolf holds me tightly to his chest.
"Ése Salió Por Lana y llegó Trasquilao"
"This one left for wool and arrived sheared." A comical phrase meaning that a person went for something and came back worse than when the person left. (Puerto Rican saying)
RVT Camper Van, East Village, NYC, July 2011.
Five days later we’re living the all American dream. We’re living in an RVT camper van, an old top, parked in East Village in downtown Manhattan on 3rd street and A, with no electricity, no water, but wifi. Wolf is painting houses in between busking, now at his subway spot on 53rd & 5th, and while I film.
At night, this time, drunken obnoxious college kids climb on the roof at night, knocking at the windows “do you think anyone lives in there, man?” Or fighting outside, or sticking their fingers up some girl they’ve picked up…and because of where I’ve been living, college kids or not, each night the fear creeps over me like their dull shadows on my skin.
But the days are better and more welcoming, yet still hot and intrusive. I work hard on my roles, and get feedback that makes me stronger, clearer, inspired.
We drink coffee at The Bean and hang out with the yuppies, the musicians, the models, with their TOM “it’s for charity” rip off shoes, and their small dogs that are now definitely more pampered than me.
I can wash my hair every other morning, when The Turkish place lets us fill our plastic bottles with the water from their restaurant, and somehow I wrap three films, while someone graffiti’s the van with LOU REED and PATTI SMITH in big silver paint in the night so we have to scrub it off.
The temperatures soar further again, this time, into severe issued heat warnings across the city, and emergency water tents are set up for the homeless.
We make love, and hold each other, and life is brighter, but as is the disadvantages of a mobile home parked in one of the busiest cities in the world, in downtown Manhattan, we can’t open the windows for security of our things, which lets not forget now include electric guitars and an incredibly rare diamond.
We become trapped in insufferable heat without running water and through the night, like two animals neglected in a disused car.
24 hours later, I end in Beth Israel hospital ER with exhaustion and kidney infection, and I am put on a saline intravenous drip.
And that was my last evening in New York this year.
-------------------------------------------------------
It takes two months of a European summer mainly in the sun, taking long walks in the country, visiting wolf resorts, reading Marquez over and over, and the soothing poems of Christina Rossetti, and painting on large canvas, to feel recovered, but I don’t believe my mind was ever the same. For life spirals into darkness in a way that can remain eternally bottomless.
It was a cooler windy grey day in early September in rural France, when the tress were still green, but the sun was lower and night time was creeping in, that out of the blue Wolf told me he had applied for a job.
“A job?! Where?” I ask.
“South America,” comes the cool, cool draw.
And half a year later, when South America did take it’s course, it will take, almost, my mind, my love, my light, and for sure, most of my foot. And where I will be grateful it was my foot and not my life.
It would be the darkness I had never come close to knowing yet, and it would be the closest to death I would fall before something had to change: to save life once and for all.
But first we boarded, Paris Charles De Gaulle, via Toronto Pearson, to Chile Santiago, on to Buenos Aires.
And the turbulence would not bother me at all.
This is written for the love that is my wolf, not that he should agree with everything here, but who is there always in the darkness that allows me to write.
Also please remember this is only a semi autobiographical framework, mainly geographically. For example, I don’t have a personality disorder of any sort, and I’m not suicidal, not yet, although I do now have a therapist who says I’m addicted to chaos, and Wolf actually only drinks himself half to death.
