The neighborhood didn’t empty out through the day, not like the suburbs everyone left behind to work in the city. It wasn’t a place people used only for sleeping. There were young families, old retirees, and everything in between. Every morning, Mrs. Hayden, whose husband died back in the sixties in a Pennsylvania mine cave-in, would walk past our front porch on her way to the corner, where she would buy her morning paper. We thought it was sweet when Mrs. Hayden said she started buying The Metropolitan in honor of Sarah, but it was a mixed blessing, because Mrs. Hayden would invariably stop when she saw Sarah out on the porch to point out grammatical, factual, and spelling errors she’d encountered in that week’s various editions. And sometimes the crossword was all screwed up.
But Sarah was used to this sort of thing. She would explain patiently to Mrs. Hayden that newspapers must gather, interpret, and present thousands of facts in a very limited time, and what was amazing, to quote one of the paper’s esteemed and now deceased editors, was not how much newspapers got wrong, but how much they managed to get right. And Mrs. Hayden would listen politely and say, “But why doesn’t your political cartoonist know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’?” Sarah would then ask Mrs. Hayden if she would like a cup of tea or a glass of cold lemonade, and Mrs. Hayden would invariably say yes.
One of our neighbors was an actor who did a lot of TV series work and shared stories about Oliver Stone after getting a minor role in one of his movies, and the man who lived behind us was an artist with an attic studio illuminated by skylights. One block over was the extremely famous woman who’d won that incredibly prestigious literary prize for that book everyone raved about even though I’d never met anyone who’d gotten to the end of it. You’d see her occasionally down at Angelo’s, or carrying home some Chinese takeout. One day, Sarah saw her in the secondhand dress store. “What did the paper say she got for an advance on her last book? One point two mil? And she’s looking through five-year-old DKNY stuff?”
We only had one car when we lived on Crandall, which could sit for several days behind the house, depending on which shift Sarah was working. When she was on days, she’d walk down to the end of the street, hang a left, and catch the subway two blocks away. It dropped her off within three blocks of the paper. She’d take the car if she had to work evenings. She’s a lot less paranoid about personal safety than I, but even she recognizes the risks associated with hanging out at bus stops and on subway platforms late at night.
It was a great place to live in so many ways. Culturally and artistically rich. Architecturally diverse. A place where you knew your neighbors. Convenient to schools and transportation.
Then the needles started showing up.
Discarded plastic syringes on the edge of the curb. You’d hear noises under the streetlamps after you’d gone to bed. You’d look out the window and see half a dozen young people huddled around a lamppost, not sure what they were doing exactly, but you suspected it wasn’t anything good. The next morning you’d go out, and maybe there’d be a scratch down the side of your car, or a back window smashed. I went outside once, around one in the morning, when they were gathered at the end of our driveway, and from about twenty feet away asked them to move on. One of them turned slowly and looked at me with eyes that were at once sleepy and menacing, and invited me to come over, drop to my knees, and perform an intimate service on him.
I turned to go back in, but as I did, I could sense a stirring within the group, a heightened level of conversation, as though they were formulating a course of action, and there was every reason to believe it involved me. I didn’t want to break into a run, figuring that would attract them, the way sudden movements will provoke a pack of dogs to attack. I tried to walk faster without appearing to do so. I was climbing the three steps to the porch when I glanced over my shoulder and saw them moving, as a group, in my direction, so I bolted the last couple of steps to the door, flung it open, and yanked it shut behind me, the slam loud enough to wake everyone in the house and probably everybody on the street. And my pursuers stopped and began to laugh, high-fiving triumphantly, congratulating themselves at how easily they’d intimidated me. My heart was pounding, my face hot with shame.
And there were the hookers. There was an area they worked fairly regularly, three streets to the east, and after that neighborhood’s residents’ association appeared before the city council and embarrassed the mayor into doing something about it, the police swept the area for several nights in a row. The residents proclaimed victory. They had driven the prostitutes from their streets. What they didn’t know was that they’d driven them three blocks west over to ours.
A woman who lived down near the corner who was a lot more politically active than I’d ever been got the ball rolling, drawing up a petition and getting nearly everyone on Crandall to sign it, but not before the street was littered with used condoms, and several Grade 2 students on their way home from school got an education in oral sex when they spotted a man getting his money’s worth in the back of a Jetta. So the police did a sweep of our street, and the action no doubt moved westward again. At this rate, in about four months, the hookers would be working out of the Glen River and have to trade in their spike heels for hip waders.
The principal at our kids’ high school, using a massive set of bolt cutters, snapped the combination lock off the locker next to Paul’s and found two handguns that had been used in a home invasion. The kid whose locker it was gets his daily instruction in a different institution now.
One day, Angie said she was followed home by a guy in a long raincoat. We drove her to school for three weeks until the cops arrested some old guy for flashing.
Another time, a sixteen-year-old broke into Mrs. Hayden’s place, punched her in the face, and made off with her purse containing eleven dollars.
I guess that’s when I began hounding Sarah and Paul and Angie to make sure the front door was always locked. Not just when we were out. All the time. I demonstrated how, when anything of value was left near the front door, like a purse, anyone could step in, grab the item, turn around and be gone, and no one would hear a thing. Certainly not if we were upstairs, or in the basement. But even in the first-floor kitchen, you didn’t always hear someone come in. We could be on one side of the wall while some stranger ripped us off on the other.
And don’t leave packages visible in the car, I said. Angie had a backpack she would leave on the front seat until she needed something from inside it later. “Someone’ll smash the window to grab that,” I’d tell her.
“There’s nothing in it,” she’d say, convinced I was a total moron. “It’s not like I get some huge allowance. There’s no money in it.”