Hope (Despite the Times)

What would an Obama presidency mean to the ghetto poor? Would teenage dealers suddenly drop their weapons and apply en mass to Harvard Law? Would the lure of making serious money just outside your door be dumped in favor of serious deferred gratification?
I doubted it too. But in the Philadelphia neighborhood (black and Puerto Rican) where my cousin has taught, one thing at least happens.
Academic achievement, while never cool, may at least seen in a better light with Obama. We need to get to the point where scholastic efforts are respected by kids, and are not seen as "acting white."
It's difficult to ask Obama to carry history's burden. He might be seen as neglecting whites (Oh God help us). We've been looking at myriad problems of the ghetto since blacks moved from farm to factory in the 1940s-1980s. No one has come up with a magic wand to solve them.
But maybe one black man's presence at the top can mean a start, a start to the end of all that.

Extreme Irratation

Have to respond to The Rambler's pox on the term "extreme." Just to set the record straight, I bought a tube of Crest marked "Extreme." Upon finishing my brushing I fashioned my own Bungee cord out of old clothes and rubber tires and jumped into the Grand Canyon, climbed a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, and skydived out of a satellite reached by a hang glider.
I can't wait for Ultimate Extreme.

Bukowski, the Ultimate Aphrodisiac

I never used to believe those letters in Penthouse Forum. Until one day, something incredible happened to me. Walking across campus back in college, tattered volume of Bukowski in my back pocket, I was stopped in my tracks by the most beautiful girl in my English class.
"You like Bukowski?" she said. I nervously said that I did.
Suddenly she let out a low moan and closed her eyes in ecstasy. Then she ran her tongue along her lush lips. I thought she might be coming right there. "Bukkie makes me so hot. Come back to my dorm with me, right now."
Our lovemaking was intense, what with my shouting out verses and lines, as she squealed with delight. Then she made me cover my face with a Bukowski poster on her wall.
Afterwards,we shared a bottle of something. She finally passed out just like her literary hero.
I walked back across campus on a cloud. I told my roomates about it, but they just called me a total bullshitter. I resolved to meet her someplace so that they could see that she dug my badass rebel intellectul stance.
Finally, I saw her in a cafe. My roommates went in with me.
Overnight, it seems, she had forgotten about me. She was cold and uninterested. "What about all we had," I said? "What about my "Bukowski Comes Alive" album?
"Oh yeah," she said with a bored expression. "I've moved on to John Grisham."

Ratso Rizzo Doesn't Live Here Anymore

We might as well has had targets on our clothes. Three suburban teenagers just off the Port Authority bus from Princeton.
As soon as we hit the street, the incantations started. "Smoke, ID, switchblade," they said as we passed by. Finally, a Ratso Rizzo type pulls us aside and said he could make the best fake ID's around.
We stopped in front of a porn theater on 8th Avenue. Ratso dissapears into the building. He comes back and says, "everything is cool. You just need to give me twenty each (The rough equilalent of fifty now)."
Even we weren't that stupid. We rejected his offer, then he asked us who we thought we were fucking with. We said we didn't know.
"You're fucking with the Mafia, man," he said. Even we knew that no one goes around talking about how he was in the Mafia.
We ditched Ratso and walked along the Deuce, 42nd between Seventh and Eighth ave. The guys approaching us became funny to us. Until one time a black man of a large build responded to our laughing.
He went up to Will, the most demonstrative, and said to him, "you a wise-ass motherfucker. I should get my boys on you."
At this point we gave up on quality fake ID's and went to Playland, an amusement parlor in the heart of the square. They simply asked how old we'd like to be, then gave us these absurd "college" ID's. I think mine was from North Central Southern Baptist College of the Holy Angels.
I tried that ID once, in DC, and the liquor store manager gave me a sincere "I'm sorry" look. Hey, I was a student in one of the most prestigious fake institutions in the country.

The best part of 42nd Street's clean-up was when they shut the porn theatres down, and replaced their street signs with odd bits of haiku and poetry on the marquees.
Scum couldn't figure out the street's new avant garde artistic direction, and largely went elsewhere.
I kind of wish they would have kept the poetry. Very New York. But commerce marches on.

Worse than Godzilla?

Remembering a National Geographic from the 1980s. An article on New York. A photo of Japanese tourists peering out from behind a glass wall, with expressions of awe and fear at the spectacle of Times Square.
The caption explained that the tourists were safely behind glass, because the Japanese were "unaccustomed to urban crime" in their country.
The city has now expanded the sidewalks and the areas in the middle of the square because so many tourists now encroach on the street. They pose for pictures there, which is good because it gets them out of the way of others not lurching along like elephants.
For me, and many others, the area is now basically a blank space given over to tourists. When thinking of a decent bar or restaurant, the mind passes right over the square, until you hit the gastronomic (and generally cheap) jackpot of multi-ethnic food on Ninth Avenue.
When I was a tour guide, unless asked I would generally not tell the tourists about how you could travel over a block from 8th Ave. and easily find a decently priced and flavorful restaurant. The city needs the suckers to patronize the bullshit theme places. Good for the economy.

"The Rotting of the Big Apple"

It was these words that were splashed all over the front cover of Time magazine in the late summer of 1990. Brian Watkins, a twentysomething tourist from Utah, was with his family on a 7th Ave. subway station when a gang set upon his mother. Like any other son, he tried to defend her. For this, he was stabbed fatally in the chest.
It marked a nadir for the city's self-image and its reality. Murders were peaking in the crack wars, and public spaces had been taken over by the homeless and illegal and illicit activity. Bryant Park was impassible for most, and it was hidden from the street by high hedges and walls.
That's why the most impressive things to happen in the past 20 years has been the reclamation of parks and public places in general.
Last week, having been semi-stood up at a bar in Flatiron (The Olde Town), I encountered a beautiful evening in August.
I had walked from Washington Square Park, three-quarters of which are under a renovation. Union Square was redoing the northern half of the park. Madison Square featured a huge line to the improbably hip Shake Shack in it.
Bryant Park is now a great public space, having taken the playbook for great spaces from the urbanist William Whyte and applied them - movable chairs, concessions, a running fountain, and a well-patronized restaurant and bar at the base of the library.
It was dark by this time, yet no one seemed afraid. Instead, it felt like a European public space.
The biggest fight, of course, was Tompkins Square Park. In the late 80s it had been the scene of rioting between police and occupants of the park that did not observe the new closing hours.
I must admit I felt like a badass just going there in college, what with the self-styled anarchists and punkers and the like. I used to freely drink there and get in loud, drunken political arguments with a friend. At about 2 or 3 in the morning.
Later, in Guiliani's crackdown, I literally got caught with my pants down pissing in the bushes. The cops let me off with a warning, instead of an enforced $50 ticket.
So Tompkins Square is now more a sunning spot than a hotbed of dissent. The only rotting going on in the Big Apple now is in unsold super-luxury condos.
But I always felt that there should be a discreet memorial where Brian Watkins breathed his last while defending his mother. Far away in Utah, there probably is.

A River Drowned

The names of the places where the civil rights movement in Alabama mounted anti-segregation protests, to the point where sometimes it meant death, have become standard High School history in this country: Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham.
Yet the northern Alabama hill country where I stayed there is little of this haunted period in evidence. Instead, they drowned a river.
The Tennessee Valley Authority blocked up the Tennessee River with dams to provide electricity to areas so poor people lived in unlighted shacks. Now the river is split into artificial lakes. On the weekends they are filled with people jet-skiing, boating, and catching Bass.
Wealth has come to the South. No surprise there. The lake houses stand empty most of the time, as Huntsville, 20 miles away, has prospered after the US rocket program was stationed there. There is a huge tower that was used somehow in launching the Saturn spacecraft.
The only reminder of segregation is the courthouse square in the center of Scottsboro. Like most other towns of its size, the square is practically empty most of the time, the commerce having spread out to the highways.
The Scottsboro Boys case was initially tried there. This was a series of trials of black young men that were accused of raping two white women. This was aboard a boxcar, yet somehow the conducter was summoned by some white youths that had been beaten up by the black men.
There was a lynch mob already forming in the next town. The governor of the state calmed them down by saying, essentially, let the state kill the boys (the penalty for rape of a white woman was death).
The case went on and on in the 1930s into the 1940s when, incredibly (with the behind the scenes aid of a New York Jewish lawyer), everyone was found innocent.
But look around today, there are not many blacks around, there in the heart of Dixie. The hill folk had little interest in defending the plantation owners to the south in a civil war. They had no slaves. Now the best evidence that you are in the rural South is the number of structures that are some kind of church (Christian, of course. Even Papists are suspicious).
On the up side, you can buy alcohol and guns at Wal-Mart, in one easy trip. And if traveling through nearby Ft. Payne, you must stop and pose with the larger-than-life statues of the 1970s country band Alabama.

Those of you who know Chris, he seems to be getting into the lifestyle there. We shot air rifles at cans, and went bass fishing a lot (Chris eventually caught a two-and-a-half pound one, which put up a hell of a fight). His mother is living with her (second? third?) husband.
In a scene out of Vonnegut, me, Chris, and his mother drove up this heavily wooded small mountain in Huntsville. At the top was a "golf community." This means that the houses are right by the painstakingly maintained immaculate course.
We had lunch at the hill-top mountain clubhouse, looking down at the sprawl of Huntsville. Peasants.