 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
Remember the alamo?
My celebrated appraisal of what things go "bump" in the New Haven night.
Wednesday, 2004-08-18 | Classic Gin, New Haven, NPC Encounters, Social Studies
I finally stepped out into New Haven on my own tonite--just me, my trusty Jeep and the latest version of Fenix Down (RC1). A night or two ago, Matt Brent asked me what it was like--he speculated that it would be like an Ivory outpost in the deepest, darkest heart of Africa.
He was about right.
Those of us for whom the city of Chicago has been home understand institutionalized racism: certain streets go certain ways and certain ways only, 'natural barriers' like man-made parks and large industrial parks insulate certain neighborhoods and so on. Here, in New Haven, they've not got anything so subtle.
When you're within the perimeter, you can tell; you're standing in a well-it area, the sidewalk is free of debris and the grass hasn't got any garbage on it. When you're on the border, it's like the episode from Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends wherein a man marvels at how it can rain profusely on one side of the street while the other remains dry.
New Haven's stark divisions are like the commercial for that one movie where there's monsters trying to kill people but the monsters can't come into the light--you stand within the light and you can hear the mewling and scraping of the hoodrats just beyond the limits of your vision. When you stray into the dark (i.e. make a wrong turn), you can see full well how they huddle and crawl upon one another like despondent shades on the musty shores of the horrible Stygian marsh.
And once you're off the path--Ovid's line concerning the 'pathless way that slopes downhill, all Gloomy with Funeral yew' comes to mind unbidden--it takes incredible luck or a veteran's aptitude to find your way back to the light. The streets in the blighted areas surrounding New Haven are a diabolical linguine plate of one-way streets and dead ends designed to pen the denizens of the tenements in.
The corner bars, 'food marts' and strip malls along the pathless way writhe and twitch with life. On one corner, two mulleted men burst forth from within a dilapidated tavern and stumble over a rotting mattress that has been left in woefully overgrown front-yard to dissolve into its constituent elements. It has become the color of the surrounding concrete. Men sell drugs from corners, standing beneath street lights and shuffling their Lugz. A few blocks later, I narrowly avoid certain death at the hands of enraged locals as I screech to a stop to avoid striking three boys wearing comically over-sized t-shirts and riding deformed caricatures of bicycles who make a point of peddling straight for my front bumper. I see women of the night, conversing with one another in between the buildings, certain parts of their deliberately accoutred, malnourished and overfed bodies frozen in sharp relief by the dizzying pitch that seems to gush from the alleyways and door fronts--awash in that reeking blackness, I watch them as they ply their filmy corpulence with the guile, poise and purpose of the walking dead.
And then I cross a street called Division and the wrenching, squirming personal agonies of the dark heart are behind me and no more dangerous than a sealed jar of flies left on a desk in a cool, dry place.
It's calm again. But just beyond where the ivory light falls, I can almost make out the distorted shapes and hear the crawl of skin.
