Enter the perfect literary climax. An authentic cliffhanger amid a layman�s life, and I�m watching it all happen from the inside.
I was moving away from New York because I�d failed to find a job, and in the very hour when my truck was fully packed and ready to go, I got a job offer. Admittedly, it was nothing spectacular, a shitball position at an educational institution starting next week, but it was something.
It was a start.
But with a truck loaded with all my stuff and no place to put it, I had no choice but to drive all my crap back home, unload it into a basement and catch the next bus back to New York in order to be at work that Monday. And so, after only two days in exile, I returned to Brooklyn with a pillow and a suitcase in tow.
For the first time in over a year, I was officially homeless but semi-employed.
This was the first step in a long crawl towards security. A temporary job I could use as a springboard for gainful and rewarding employment. A source of income with which I might acquire a home. A place to start.
A beginning.
Thankfully, it only took one call to secure a couch to call home, and I could easily spend the next two months looking for more stable employment and a permanent living situation with little impact on my gracious hosts.
And so enters a new, menacing character in our tale, the temporary home.
Up Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, past the art museum, there�s a little community boarding the dark side of Prospect Park. In an attempt to gussy up shabby digs, Realtors have conspired to call this hole in the ground �Prospect Gardens�.
Its one of those gardens where you throw a bunch of trash around, sell weed and shoot guns.
This would be my new home for the next few months. A section of ghetto comprised of Jamaicans, Dominicans and various other Caribbean hate groups.
When you step out of the subway station in Flatbush with a pillow under your arm, trailing a rolling suitcase, you stick out like a sore thumb...a big white sore thumb, and the residents aren�t afraid to point that out to you. Some stare cautiously while others offer intentionally menacing leers. The youths tend to utter racial slurs under their breath while the older thugs don�t use such discretion.
�Here comes Casper�
�Uh-oh, Bill-Collector�
And let us not forget the stand-bys of �Cracker� and �Honkey� spilled across your path like black daisies to soften your tread.
These are the Ghetto�s finest. The future leaders of impoverished America. A thousand Tuck�s Medicated Pads extinguishing a thousand points of light.
To clarify, I was not welcome here. My quiet, neighborly respect would be unappreciated. My Honkey dollars would be accepted with disdain, and my polite smiles will not be returned.
This was Flatbush, and they hated my white ass.
My chums welcomed me to their apartment, a Cracker outpost deep in hostile territory. They were sharing a newly renovated space with a growing family of rodents, but there was always room for one more Honkey on the couch.
The neighborhood was well stocked with nail salons, a few Laundromats, and two Kennedy�s Fried Chicken restaurants situated just two blocks from each other.
I joined the party late. Nick, Bill and Sandy had been living on the cusp of a brewing race war for nearly half a year before I arrived, and they bore their hardened sneers like prison tattoos.
Nick, the most bespeckled and goofy of the three, generally received the majority of the abuse. A quaint throwback to the torturous days he spent in Junior High locker rooms, mitigated only by the constant use of a Walkman.
If you�ve got the Dropkick Murphy�s blaring in your ears, you can at least pretend to operate under the illusion that you don�t hear the threats tossed in your direction.
Despite their occasional drug use, the constant consumption of pizza and unquenchable thirst for Malt Liquor, Bill and Sandy were usually taken for undercover police officers.
The old Chinese woman at the Laundromat assumed we were all brothers, despite the fact that we weren�t remotely similar in appearance. People in the neighborhood couldn�t understand why three white guys would live together instead of staying at home with their mothers and siring countless hordes of fatherless young, so it was generally assumed that we were all gay.
Racism at its finest.
Lacking better options, the apartment became an oasis of security amid a hostile desert of race relations. The boys placated themselves with brutal death metal, weight lifting and endless viewings of Demolition Man.
By this time, Sandy had fully developed his inhuman drinking routine, virtually demanding the onset of liver failure. On a casual day, he consumed two 40�s and a couple of slices of pizza before bed. On a bender, he would drink four Guinness�s, six Coronas, four 40�s of Malt Liquor and half a liter of straight vodka.
By the time he got to Vodka, he was usually skateboarding alone around the darkened city streets.
Several times he woke up naked and bloody from some forgotten destructive impulse, and often he would blackout and crawl into the wrong bed, prompting the theory that some subconscious homosexual fantasy was driving him to seek the comfort of his friends. More likely, it was because his bedroom was the farthest from the bathroom, but I digress.
Everyone talked about Sandy�s depression, but no one quite understood what to do about it, and thus nothing was done.
Like a fresh wind from the east, my arrival in the apartment was met with great joy. I washed dishes and cooked on occasion, but it was my brave efforts to clean their bathroom that won unending appreciation. Three hairy guys make for a dirty, dirty bathroom, and I was the only one foolish enough to tackle the task.
More then anything, the lads appreciated having another person there to endure the struggle. Another witness to the stunningly miserable treatment one could receive in the short three-block walk to the subway. And because I was new and fresh to the situation, I didn�t harbor the deep resentment they�d regretfully embraced. I could go outside to get beer without frowning. I could walk to the corner and drop off my laundry without cursing the path between. I could stand in the Pizza Parlor while countless young thugs cut in front of me in line and still hold the door for people as I left the Bodega.
That was the charm of a new roommate. The inherent innocence of ignorance.
Where reactive hatred flickered bonfire heat within them, it was but a smolder in my heart, ready to be ignited or extinguished as the weeks crawled on. And so the sociological experiment began with one burning question: How long would it take for me to hate?
