Fifty

Fifty

I never thought I’d make it to 50.

Fifty years old

Fifty
Five-O—the police
I never wanted to be that.

Fifty was for old people:
your grandmother
Santa Claus
God
Pharaohs
The bitter white habit-wearing Rosary Society nuns at the St Vincent Ferrer catholic primary school library on Glenwood Rd who hit me and scared me away from books but expected me to read them

Fifty was old. And so were 40 and 30. They seemed like unachievable ages where I grew up.

20,000 people live in the 59 Vanderveer Estates’ six-story orange brick buildings that span several blocks across 30 acres. The apartments had been cheap. Amenities included long black trash bags stacked like body bags on maroon blood-spotted sidewalks, broken front door locks, out-of-order graffiti-tagged elevators with smelly piss puddles and flies, failing heat and electricity, roaches, rats, drugs, guns, and gangs—from namesake Vanderveer International Posse (VIP) to Crips.

Many notoriously corrupt slumlords including mafia gangsters mismanaged the property since it opened after WWII, continually racking up thousands of active housing-code violations. The current landlord is a top tenant-evictor who owns the Downtown Brooklyn building that’s rented to the city for housing court. In 2004, the Vanderveer Estates deceptively were rebranded as Flatbush Gardens. Although Gardens sounds less impressive than Estates, neither of those exaggerations could conceal its decades of drug-epidemic danger.

The buildings’ stairs posed unpredictable risks—encounters with an angry drunk, a ruthless crack dealer, a fiending crack head, boisterous dice-rollers, edgy stick-up kids—any of them territorial and ready for a fight. The biggest risk was being one of them.

I walked through the courts of the Veer to see friends and frenemies who lived in those buildings, proving I wasn’t soft. But that’s all I had to do. I was fortunate to not live in the Veer, unlike everyone who lived—and died—there.

Front Page and Back Page stretch 6 blocks along Foster Ave between Nostrand and Brooklyn Aves. The names came from newspapers: Sensational crimes were published on the front page of the paper. And they were committed on the Foster Ave court of the same name. Back Page by me was less reported, but just as violent. I grew up in a small house a half block south of Back Page on E 34 St and Farragut Rd—the last page before the end.

Annual Fourth of July firecracker explosions easily were distinguished from daily gunshot blasts we had more time to familiarize ourselves with. Bullies, blades, and bullets were common, and you had to be on their right side, balancing staying out on the corner long enough to show you weren’t a toy, but not long enough to get caught in a beef or be vicked. West Indian East Flatbush was and still is slightly less lethal than the Killing Fields of neighboring East New York, but both are far away from East Hampton’s rich white quietude.

When I was four years old, Ronald’s older brother, Mario, stole my small bike from our front steps and painted it with white house paint in their driveway down the block.

While my mother thought I was going to church on Sunday mornings, I’d explore the desolate industrial part of the neighborhood in the forties that was sliced diagonally by the freight train tracks.

One winter Sunday, after throwing someone’s empty Red Stripe beer bottles from the night before against the gray concrete wall of an abandoned construction site for the thrill of the brown glass exploding in cold bright sunlight dazzle, I sat in a partially stripped abandoned car to hide from the wind as I killed time on E 43 St between the cement block factory and the garbage dump sprayed with fake clove-scented rat deterrent. The front passenger seat had a black plastic shopping bag full of interesting, small steel tools that I didn’t realize at the time were surgical instruments. The back seat was filled with larger, heavy clear plastic bags. I recognized their contents faster: bones and frozen slabs of flesh, all human-sized.

In the fourth grade, I found a .45 magnum on Brooklyn Ave as I walked to school. I showed it to my older brother in the school yard. He made me turn it in to the principal, who asked how I knew how to unload the magazine of bullets. Didn’t I know how dangerous it is? If I kept the gun, it probably would have been used in my brother’s daily fights with me.

Phillip from E 39 St gave me a two-two for settling a score with Durrel in the Veer. I couldn’t find him, and gave back the gun so I wouldn’t get caught with it by the roaming 67th precinct police.

That year, I temporarily stopped shoplifting because I wasn’t good enough, and was caught stealing a can of Coke from a deli on Ave J, and ran from the cashier. I resumed stealing with more calculation, and was never caught again. The one thing I needed most but couldn’t steal was safety.

Ricky’s younger foster sister, Tawana, pushed a TV in a shopping cart around the corner back home after visiting the child molester on Farragut Rd to get her adolescent dress torn. Teenage aspiring muscle man, Stanley, lived next door, and angrily warned us against going down to “that faggot’s” basement. He probably learned that the hard way.

Stanley dived behind a young juniper tree when there was a drive-by shooting targeting him and his brothers as they sat on the short narrow stoop of their parents’ semi-detached, compact brick house. They survived.

Fire truck sirens and spinning white and red lights woke me up on a cold January night when the next door neighbor’s 90-year old wooden house was lit ablaze after Glenn supposedly knocked up a light-skinned Latina who’d come by looking for him, belly before her. When his family moved back in after fixing the damage, Glenn would leave the house with a big boom box playing DJ Red Alert early hip-hop compilations, but not a baby. Maybe he wasn’t the father, wasn’t allowed to be the father, couldn’t be a father. Maybe she had an abortion.

Later, across the street, a fire on the plank porch of the Dorisant’s red and white craftsman house didn’t get as far.

One block over, on the corner on New York Ave, above the B44 bus stop, Angelo’s mother’s apartment was torched after he brandished his pistol at a bashment Derry was DJing, antagonizing a mechanic from the Albany Ave Sunoco gas station Angelo and Derry robbed a month after Angelo jumped out of a car he stole while being chased by cops; he broke his arm but didn’t go to municipal Kings County Hospital, where his mom was a nurse.

Derry came out of his father’s E 35 St house in handcuffs and into a police car that disappeared him.

Further up New York Ave at Newkirk Ave, Chester’s dad couldn’t wait to move back to Trinidad. He retired to Canarsie before leaving the country.

My small switchblade didn’t scare away the young gang armed with pipes that ambushed me on Brooklyn Ave and pushed me off the BMX bike I used my mom’s crescent wrench to assemble with spare parts from my bike thieves chop shop when I was 12.

In front of Larry’s bike shop on Flatbush Ave and Ave K, I stole an unlocked chrome GT Performer to replace it. That premium freestyle bike was the best I had; it lasted less than a year. Frederick from Farragut Rd sold it behind my back or traded it for drugs, weapons, or a debt when I foolishly lent it to him. He stole me a whiteboy’s cheaper Mongoose as a replacement that I got jumped for by its owner’s friends who surrounded me as I rode it through his Mill Basin neighborhood.

I told them I bought it from a dude in front of Larry’s bike shop, and barely escaped a beat down that would revisit me in the same neighborhood at 14 years old when I bit the frozen Utica Ave pavement in front of the Fairyland Kiddie’s Amusement Park parking lot of small, dilapidated carnival rides under the thrust of kicks and sticks, after being chased by a carful of older white jocks yelling “Wigger faggot!” on a drunken New Year’s Eve. Denis from E 37 St and my older brother escaped since they ran faster, and left me behind.

After I got caught with the stolen bike from Frederick, he stabbed Ricky on my block over Ricky’s no-name bike. We never saw Frederick after he was arrested. Carlos lived next to Ricky, but was tight with Frederick. He attacked me an hour after Frederick was arrested because he thought I told the cops who stabbed Ricky.

“Everyone saw because it’s a Saturday afternoon in June,” I shouted in my defense as I punched him back. We thought violence would make us look more straight than we were. My black grease-stained fists showed I wasn’t a pretty boy, a scared pussy masisi, even though I was scared. These dangers defined manhood and kept closing in.

My leg was broken in a hit-and-run car accident on New York Ave a day after I graduated from eighth grade.

At the under-funded Kings County Hospital emergency room, I laid next to guys in bloody shirts, handcuffed to gurneys as a doctor lifted my leg by my toe three feet in the air and dropped it, asking if I felt any pain. July was spent immobilized in a body cast that failed to hold my bones in place as an alternative to surgery. I spent two days in a hallway waiting for my leg to be sliced open so a metal plate could be screwed onto my broken femur to hold it together—after the head orthopedic surgeon was fired for complaining about dripping pipes, crumbling moldy ceilings, and flies in the operating rooms. After a sleepless night, I dozed off, but was awakened by the tickle of a cockroach crawling across my neck. My eyes opened to see it go down my chest into the cast.

Anesthesia quickly knocked me out in the operating room. A screeching electric saw woke me up in a swirling gauze of dust back in the hallway. Sawing off the cast in the OR released a storm of fiberglass splinter fallout lasting into the next day.

At 8 AM every Tuesday, I hobbled on crutches into the orthopedic clinic to see long, silver, steel rods piercing bloated, discolored ankles on strangely angled shuffling feet, kids in pairs of left and right leg casts laying in reclining wheelchairs, swatting flies, and bristling through hours of children screaming while saws sliced through their casts and flesh, waiting to be told I couldn’t walk yet, which seemed obvious, and eventually, at later visits, have a few of the 51 staples pulled out of the scabs encrusting the foot-long wound splitting my leg in half.

The metal plate had to be excavated from under regrown bone 29 years later when its screws dug into my iliotibial band tendon and painfully prevented my quadriceps muscles from contracting.

New York City struggled to recover from near-bankruptcy in the 1980s, and was overwhelmed by the malignant rampage of crime. Annual murders averaged 2,000, with East Flatbush ranking as one of the top five fatal neighborhoods citywide. AIDS and crack multiplied the daily threats.

The Vanderveer was hot with rocks and related violent crime then. City-run housing projects like the Veer stay lit through sunrise with diesel-powered telescoping cop floodlights on their streets and in their courtyards. The intensely bright white lights turn on automatically at dusk with a loud rumble of generators and invasive stench of acrid burned diesel fuel, snowing heavy layers of soot like nuclear fallout of the drug war. These lights are born from slavery-era “lantern laws” that required Black people to be illuminated at night so they could be watched by distrusting white vigilantes.

My oldest brother and I separately were robbed at gunpoint. The desperate gunmen got more disappointment than cash—only $2 from me. My brother was pistol-whipped and became suicidal.

Warren Pharmacy on Glenwood Rd at E 55 St hired me as a cashier at 15 because I was white like all the other employees. The first Saturday I worked at the drug store, the owner told me to pour generic prescription elixirs into empty name-brand bottles to sell at higher rates to customers who medically required brand versions. The biggest sale was a banned mini Uzi for $1,000. The boss celebrated by closing early to get blown by an addict he gave Valium.

Damon on E 40 St lit an M-80 in his mouth, but it didn’t end his life or self hatred. His scarred face swelled with rage.

Denis took after his dad, and became an adolescent Budweiser alcoholic by the time Father Farrell’s vile cigarette-rotted mouth exhaled closer than it should for a pedophile priest.

Charles, who lived across from Derry on E 35 St, went mad, high on crack as he started high school.

Garvin moved into Front Page and was greeted by a headbutt from a cinder block. HIV and pancreatic cancer moved him out—forever.

Before I left high school, Reggie, who lived with his mom and older brother on the first floor of a Vanderveer apartment up the block, was shot dead.

Matt’s cousins sold crack through a window in a similar first floor apartment on the same court.

Michael K Williams escaped those buildings, but was haunted to the grave by their drugs.

Cops walked Ronald out of South Shore High School in handcuffs the week I graduated a semester early in December, 1990. I saw their blue-striped white cruiser pull away on Ralph Ave as me and dozens of students defiantly left the building in the middle of fourth period afternoon classes to join a few hundred student protesters marching loudly up Flatlands Ave in opposition to the US military invasion of Iraq. Rumors of a student walkout circulated throughout the morning and roused us.

I was leading a chorus of “no blood for oil” from the top of a blue mailbox when the police yanked me down by my ankles. Like Ronald, I was driven, handcuffed, in the back seat of a cop car to the 63rd precinct, fingerprinted roughly, and released with another dissenting classmate after a few hours of being condemned as commie fags. Charges were dismissed or never filed. The charade didn’t scare me into obedience, but reminded me how white people are forgiven, unlike Ronald.

On my final day of school, I cut class for the second time to avoid a skinhead who burst into my classroom the day before threatening to kill me as his other skinhead friend in the class (who seemed to respect me) said nothing, and years later as a successful heavy metal singer, grew long hair and became the genre’s first transgender front woman. Harry the hippie said he’d fight for me, but lost his mind on a bad acid trip before he finished school.

My mother has lived in this same neighborhood her entire life, as its names and demographics changed every two generations. It’s officially Little Haiti now.

Her house cost $20,000 in 1965, but would sell for over forty times as much despite structural deterioration. It was burglarized twice. The front door glass window still has bullet holes in it. She said she’ll leave when her small brown shingled house with its “Resist” flag draped over the porch banister goes up in flames—the way Glenn’s mom’s house did next door.

She tells me of recent goings-on: how a guy on the street she’d not seen before asked if she had two sons (she has three) and introduced himself as Frederick, how Ricky emerged from years in the bottle after Frederick stabbed him and now leads Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the basement at their church, vengeful fights, the young mailman next door being hospitalized after he was beaten for sweeping the sidewalk close to guys lighting fireworks at 3 AM, daytime shootings on the block and around the corner over girlfriends and $60, shooters brandishing their guns at murder witnesses to guarantee their silence, dealers selling drugs out of the dollar van they live in, permanently camped opposite her house, a few cars away from the flashing blue and red roof lights of cop cars parked in shifts on the corner, roaring dirt bikes tearing through midnight’s relative silence to a rented garage close to Glenwood Rd, neighbors who lost overpriced homes to greedy mortgage banks—houses later squatted by violent dealers, gunmen, partiers, and sex workers, and real estate developers demolishing turn-of-the-century rambling Victorian corner houses and small clapboard homes like hers to erect new expensive apartment buildings with tall, wide windows for young white kids with money who would never ride the 2 train to the last stop and walk these streets generations before already-gentrified northern neighborhood rents skyrocketed.

Last year could have been her last. A car pulled out of a neighbor’s driveway and knocked her to the ground before driving off. She needed three staples to seal her scalp.

My mother will be 83 this year.
Short, wrinkled, white-haired, and white.
What helped us stay alive more than any strategies, hope, or luck is being white.
That’s the other violence I’ve seen all my life.

No wonder I made it to fifty.