My mother moves into an apartment on my tenth birthday without telling me with her new boyfriend while I am away at camp.
I know something is wrong for it is the first time my mother has not written me when I am away.
Larry is horrible to me, he is prejudice, and has a hard time with the Habib family.
He finds my intelligence threatening. I hide the first year or two in my room while he blares the tv and country music, not easy to do in a small apartment.
The apartments (Eagle Rock being the ones I move into) as they are called by us all are just another project slightly out in the suburbs from the inner cities of Newark, Hoboken, Bayonne, East and West Orange, Passaic, Patterson, etc.
The garbage cities that line the coast outside of New York.I say this not because of the strong cultures that hold each of these cities dear, but because of the chemical factories and refineries outside these cities polluting them with giant smokestakes giving everyone in them cancer.
I try to find pictures of these places (the apartments I used to live in) on the web, but despite their size there are few, it is hard to romantize them no matter what the angle or blue sky, patch of green grass they are two story red brick structures as far as the eye can see filled with poor families paying way too much money.
I did find a review of it on Apartment Ratings.com it was rated at 22% while the other listings on the page were much higher.
One reviewer wrote:
"When someone complains about a leak they wait till the ceiling caves or a tenant mentions calling a lawyer before they do anything about it, totally unacceptable.
I would never recommend this place to anyone, even my worst enemy. I don't understand how some have lived here for years. "
I lived in the Apartments for 5-6 years. It would take a mountain for you tell me what I experienced there, suffice to say I survived. I doubt I could say that of Newark whre many of my friends who came there had escaped from. That is not to say that there were not drugs and vilence of plenty, but only the ferocity and the gang behavior was lower, people came to the apartments to escape the life to varying degrees.
They were better than the original apartments my mother looked at the year before where we were the target of a sniper attack while viewing the apratments. ( The gunman hit and wounded the man showing us the apartments and another child before turning the gun on himself. I was 9 years old, and already acoustomed to high crime from my time in California, but not shootings.)
Newark had not been yet restored from the 68 riot, six to ten story burned out aparment buildings stalk into the sky filled with people living there that hang out their wet laundry out the window in the winter.
Despite my travels through the "third world" I witnessed some of the most desperate poverty going through these cities as a child.
These children and their families in droves along with new immigrants would populate the apartments, assuring that there would be constant conflict between Larry and I as all of my friends and boyfriends would be multi-cultural and he would be white.
I am a girl between worlds, most of my friends are African American, as are later my boyfriends, who are the brothers of my close friends. When I do try to date white boys they are rude and inconsiderate to me. I do not understand why I should date such rude and declasse people who have little lovleiness to their skin.
There are so many heartaches and pain, due to the racism of the suburban school system against the outsiders who are mostly students of color. They wanted the tax revenue but not the people. There will be 4000 students in my highschool, but only half will graduate, by and large the white half from outside the projects as we are increasingly targeted.
My mom freaks out when a boyfriend from a wealthy Jamaican family housing himself and his sister in their own apartment so they can get an American education for college (engineering) begins courting me and calling every day asking for my hand in marriage.
Newark New Jersey
On the right is Richie now 16, my uncle Jim now a county prosecutor in Philadelphia, my beautiful aunt Judy, Richie's mother, my mother, me, shirking, my grandmother supporting me.
I remember this trip because it was 1982 and Pat Benatar ca,e pit wotjh a hit called "Hell is for Children" as my uncle Jim played it nin his car whle I cried looking out the window I was apt to agree.
The day is on eof my only escapes from Larry whom my grandmother now despises and the rest of the family is suspect of despite my mother's prostrations that he is "a good guy."
My grandmother will later say that after they are married my mother has once again married beneath her for reasons she can not comprehend.
Richie gets a car at 16. His father is well off so this is fine.
When I turn 16 there will be no car, in fact I will have to leave high school a punk rocker with a blue mohawk and move in with my boyfriend Paul Deiter first in Richmond Hills on Jamaica Avenue in Queens above a Chinese food restaurant with cockroches covering the walls, which shakes the whole room when the subway passes.
THis will end up being too rich for us and soon we will be sleeping on park benches in the Lower East Side and then moving into Apt. X.
At first I am a model, then a telemarketer than a bike messenger a job I love.
I was actually successsful as a model being brought in by anagent to Eilleen Ford herself, but I will be decided to not have the body but a good facsimile of a Russian face. It is 1987 and the Wall has come down they need Russian faces.
I blow off a contract with Ford Faces out of irresponsibility.
My first day as a bike messenger it rains, snows, sleets and hails.
Please wait...