Needles, Blood, Bullets: Life on "Unfriendly Lane"
Still adjusting to the newly discovered danger of my neighborhood. Death in the streets. The head shop half a block from my house where the young Latino man was shot dead on the sidewalk is now open, mourning period more or less over. Sidewalk cleaned, doors opened, glass pipes and water bongs now available at a discount rate. Nature doesn't mourn, has no courts of law or justice. $5000 dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of...
Then, just the other night, walking out of a liquor store with a fat can of Foster's lager, I look to the ground and see a needle on the ground, the grubby, scratched up tool of a junky. Little tube used for injecting heroin or meth or coke into the bloodstream. Hopefully no blood is lost in the transaction.
When I used to live on 5th street in downtown San Jose, I saw many things, highlights and sights of inner city depravity and squalor: a man and a woman on the side of my house, she on her knees, him leaned back, until I, in a fit of rage, opened my window and said, "Not here!"; an undercover drug bust, guns drawn by cops sticking into the necks of drug dealers, whose unfortunate faces pressed into the asphalt of the dirty city street; my first night in the neighborhood, a man running at a small pickup truck that was speeding away from the scene, holding baseball bat which he tried in vain to swing into the windshield of the truck, missing, hitting the hood and falling as the car almost runs him over.
Just last week on my street, during a very mellow Sunday afternoon, I hear the loud WOOOoooo of a police siren, and look out the window to see a cop car pull over a red Jeep Cherokee. Didn't think much of it. They were roughly a half a block away from my house. I turn around and continue my business of cleaning my house when I hear a screeching noise. I look out the window and see the guy in the Jeep flooring it, speeding away as fast as he can in front of my house. Then, the cop in a state of shocked delay, or perhaps radioing his colleagues, finally hitting his gas pedal and speed after the car.
I used to hate gated communities, but now they seem like not so bad an idea - keep out raw, savage, unmediated human nature.
Still adjusting to the newly discovered danger of my neighborhood. Death in the streets. The head shop half a block from my house where the young Latino man was shot dead on the sidewalk is now open, mourning period more or less over. Sidewalk cleaned, doors opened, glass pipes and water bongs now available at a discount rate. Nature doesn't mourn, has no courts of law or justice. $5000 dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of...
Then, just the other night, walking out of a liquor store with a fat can of Foster's lager, I look to the ground and see a needle on the ground, the grubby, scratched up tool of a junky. Little tube used for injecting heroin or meth or coke into the bloodstream. Hopefully no blood is lost in the transaction.
When I used to live on 5th street in downtown San Jose, I saw many things, highlights and sights of inner city depravity and squalor: a man and a woman on the side of my house, she on her knees, him leaned back, until I, in a fit of rage, opened my window and said, "Not here!"; an undercover drug bust, guns drawn by cops sticking into the necks of drug dealers, whose unfortunate faces pressed into the asphalt of the dirty city street; my first night in the neighborhood, a man running at a small pickup truck that was speeding away from the scene, holding baseball bat which he tried in vain to swing into the windshield of the truck, missing, hitting the hood and falling as the car almost runs him over.
Just last week on my street, during a very mellow Sunday afternoon, I hear the loud WOOOoooo of a police siren, and look out the window to see a cop car pull over a red Jeep Cherokee. Didn't think much of it. They were roughly a half a block away from my house. I turn around and continue my business of cleaning my house when I hear a screeching noise. I look out the window and see the guy in the Jeep flooring it, speeding away as fast as he can in front of my house. Then, the cop in a state of shocked delay, or perhaps radioing his colleagues, finally hitting his gas pedal and speed after the car.
I used to hate gated communities, but now they seem like not so bad an idea - keep out raw, savage, unmediated human nature.
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