- THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU IN THE SHADOWS OF DOUBT SONG FULL
- THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU IN THE SHADOWS OF DOUBT SONG CRACK
He talked a blue streak, leered a little bit and generally made the women uncomfortable, but on that day, he was delivering Mets tickets. His name was Chris, a young Puerto Rican dude who lived downstairs. Maybe I should have been wary, but I was enamored with the living, breathing version of the Sweathogs rapping on Mr. Lentil soup was served.ĭay 3: Mid-afternoon, a man with a mustache came climbing up our fire escape. Things quickly returned to whatever counted as normal on Andrews Avenue. The cops promptly showed, but the kids had all scattered after the single shot. “Call 911! Say shots fired! Always, always, always, say shots fired! Otherwise the damn police never come,” she said. Luke’s School on 138th Street, took control. All manner of “Holy shit, I live in the Bronx” was filling my head when stern Sister Pat Howell, a you-don’t-fuck-with-me-nun from St. I ended up being the only voyeuristic asshole staring out the window when the gun went off, ignoring the fact that bullets can travel six stories up. The target ran off momentarily, only to return with some sort of sawed-off gun. Kid had trouble swinging it, but it could’ve done damage. Two boys, thirteen at best, got into it verbally, then physically, then one ran and got a big length of metal pipe that was twice his size. As we went around the room exchanging pleasantries, a fight broke out across the street. Lentil soup, if I had to guess–it was always lentil soup.
THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU IN THE SHADOWS OF DOUBT SONG FULL
Veracity be damned, I’m a better man for the Bronx and this is how I remember it.ĭay 1: On the first full day in my new apartment, all of our respective bosses came over and we made dinner. I know there was joy, there was pain, sunshine and rain for that matter, but mostly, there was love. But other than a few snapshots, it’s all I’ve got. The brain, it bounces, it slingshots, it clarifies, it fades. In a specific Bronx sense, it was an incredible one-off experience that comes to mean more and more as I clearly recall less and less.
In a broad sense, it was the gateway to a lifelong love of New York City, a place I’ve more or less called home ever since.
THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU IN THE SHADOWS OF DOUBT SONG CRACK
During the day, the asphalt of certain out-of-the-way blocks was festooned with the previous night’s Carnival colors: reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens-all the pretty little crack vial tops, a rainbow leading to whatever’s the opposite of gold.Ģ277 Andrews Avenue, my home for the year.Īt the two-decade mark, I’ve been ruminating on my first year in the Boogie Down. On Andrews Avenue, the only nighttime traffic consisted of zombie crackheads on foot and their suburban car-owning counterparts zipping off the Deegan to score, leaving with baggies in the glovebox. With six times as many murders citywide as there would be in 2013, talk of a Gotham renaissance didn’t yet go higher than 96th Street. The neighborhood we lived in, University Heights, wasn’t the apocalyptic end-of-the-world South Bronx scene of the 1970s, but in 1993 the horrible embers of the crack era still burned. As spelled out in “ The Message” by native sons Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the borough was like a jungle sometimes. Different times.īefore I joined the after-school education and recreation team at Pius XII North Bronx Family Services, I “knew” what you probably “knew” about the Bronx: the Yankees, buildings aflame, abject poverty, bombed-out blocks that looked like Dresden, KRS-One, the Bronx Zoo, and the overall sense that no sane person would ever go there if they didn’t have to. We too took a vow of poverty, as our monthly stipend left us roughly $20 a week spending cash. We were all members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, an organization that sent fresh-faced college grads to help out in underserved communities, just like those rouge cats in the Society of Jesus. I grew up with three brothers, so living with women was as mystifying as anything in the ‘hood. My room was in the back, away from my four roommates, because they were all of the female persuasion. Bronx kids cooling off in our local playground. For the first time, this Billings, Montana, native touched down at what would be my home for the following year, a four-bedroom sixth-floor apartment in the Bronx.
I dodged the legions of kids cooling off in an open fire hydrant as I made my way to 2277 Andrews Avenue. A mélange of faces: Puerto Rican, Dominican, African-American, even a few older white folks wandering out of their never-give-it-up rent-controlled apartments to the half-stocked corner shop that pathetically passed for a grocery store. On August 24, 1993, I pulled off the Major Deegan Expressway, headed up Fordham Road and took a right onto Andrews Avenue. In 1931, Ogden Nash published this famous couplet in The New Yorker:
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