Recently, I got the following entry (I'm just editting for space) in my guestbook:
"It is amazing what different memories we have of the area although we may have listened to the same radio stations and shopped in the same stores... We don't even seem to have the same view of the Westside but I lived in the area between LeRoy and Riverside and I would guess that your apartment is on the other side of Rec Park..."
Hm...
Okay, okay, okay... I have to pause here for a minute and explain something: da Wes'side of Binghamton, NY, is NOT as bad as I have made it sound. It's mostly a residential area, except for Price Chopper plaza, which is a grocery store and some other little stores. There are a lot of minorities and a lot of college kids, and a seemingly disproportionate number of retarded and handicapped people, but none of that is really anything awful. I mean, in the first neighborhood I lived in, I didn't have any neighbors under the age of 74, and they all spoke Polish or Czechoslovakian, so whatever. And in the second neighborhood I lived in, I had no neighbors within walking distance. And at college, the girl next door was a junkie and stuffed my keys in the sanitary-napkin disposal box. So. Da Wes'side, despite a few retards and some black kids who honestly think of themselves as "thugz" just because they listen to DMX, is fine with me. And people are nice -- they'll give you a light if you want one, or bus change if you need it, or they'll stop and ask if you're all right if you're crying and staring off the side of the Bridge.
I live in probably the nicest house on my street. My street isn't very long, but my house IS the nicest. It's white and it's got the beginnings of flowers growing up against the side of the house. We live upstairs, Peter and Jeff and I; we live in the entire upstairs of a fairly large house. We even have a backyard -- a fairly large one at that.
Across the street is a boarded-up crackhouse. Across the street NEXT to the board-up crackhouse (which has birds living in the rafters), is a large apartment-type building in which house parties, crack parties, frat parties, whatever, take place with some frequency. In general, it's not THAT bad; the worst of the damage has been finding broken bottles and a crack vial on the sidewalk in front of my house, and once seeing a guy barf off the front porch of the apartment-building-thing. That was just GROSS. Still... I haven't seen any violent fights in my neighborhood. I haven't really seen anything but a lot of drug use and some people who think they're All Dat, Dawg. Those things aren't THAT scary.
As a matter of fact, I feel FINE walking around my neighborhood at 3 in the morning. There are parts of town I wouldn't walk through at 1 in the afternoon, but those spots are few and far between.
Peter and I were having a discussion last night, shortly after I finished my journal entry. We were sitting together in my room. It was an emotional sort of discussion, and I was kind of crying, and he was sort of upset, and--
--gunshot--
"Was that, um...?"
"Yeah, Peter, it was..."
"...a gunshot?"
"Yeah. It was."
We crept silently and in the semi-darkness into the living room. I wrapped a blanket around both of us. We sat at the window, poking our heads out into the night, watching cop cars swarm silently at the end of our block. Whatever had happened, it must have happened on our road.
"Wes'side," I whispered, making the "wes'side" hand-signal.
"Ghetto..." whispered Peter.
We started giggling. "You think anybody's bleeding?"
"Yes."
"Heh heh heh... WES'SIDE!"
It didn't quite seem real. We sat at the window, waiting for sirens and ambulances and fire trucks and killers dashing away on foot, and bleeding people staggering around... All we saw was that swarm of cop cars at the end of the block. We couldn't even hear anything. The cops didn't turn their lights on, nor their sirens, just sat and talked to each other and drove around the block... Peter and I snuggled into each other, sort of scared, sort of giggly. Finally, convinced nothing else was going to happen, we fell asleep watching reruns of "Will and Grace."
...But when I walked to the bus-stop, past semi-rickety houses, a broken bottle or two, and some nice bushes, I still kept my eyes to the ground, warily making sure I wasn't stepping in any blood stains...
Love,
~Helena*
"There's a killer on the road..." --The Doors, "Riders on the Storm."