The
man who got in the elevator with me had a scar on his upper lip,
a scar so deep that part of his lip moved independently when he
spoke. Our conversation lasted several minutes, but the first
thing that always came to mind when I remembered it later was
that upper lip. He had said something –perhaps about the
weather- that was pretty normal for elevator conversation in the
freezing cold at two in the morning, but as soon as I finished
answering him, he changed the subject: “Oh, by the way,
this is a stickup.”
That
was when I began studying his lip. “You’re kidding,”
I replied, and my eyes traveled downward from his lip, looking
for his hands.
They
were in the pockets of his jacket. “You’re fucking
kidding me.” I watched his lip again as he explained that
he was holding a .38. “I’ll fuckin’ cap you,”
he said, stepping forward.
After
living in New York for 11 years, it was my first time being mugged.
The neighborhood had been a landmark drug dealing area for decades
before, and my elevator had been a landmark drug dealing elevator,
but nothing had ever happened to me until now, until after Mayor
Giuliani’s police force “cleaned things up”
and scared away the friendly cocaine dealer who had used the elevator
as his office. “Bon,” as he was called, had had every
interest in being on the best of terms with the residents of the
building where he worked, so having him in the elevator was almost
like having a doorman, except that you didn’t have to tip
him at Christmas time, and if you ran into him at the store, he
usually offered to buy you a beer. A roommate of mine had once
observed that the wave of incarcerations around our neighborhood,
rather than eradicating the drug trade, had led only to its fragmentation,
or “Balkanization,” as she called it. Bon’s
replacement by a random criminal who was threatening to kill me
seemed to support this theory rather well.
I
fumbled under my coat and handed him a dollar. “I know you’ve
got more money than that,” he said, letting the bill fall
at his feet. I reached down to pick it up for him and he jumped
back, looking a bit nervous. He wasn’t very big. We reached
my floor and I thought about knocking his head against the rusty
steel door behind him, but I had had a few beers after a hell
of a long day at work, and what I really wanted was to go to bed.
Giving him whatever was in my wallet seemed like it would be easier
than trying to get the better of him, and there was a slight chance
that he actually did have a gun. I thought it over, then took
out my wallet. “Yeah, man, gimme those fuckin’ chavos,”
he said excitedly when I took out the 50 or so dollars that I
had. He demanded more money then, and I began to worry, but after
a bit more discussion he went away.
For
my first five years here, bursts of gunfire, with some seasonal
fluctuation, could be heard about once a month. Gun testing was
apparently an important science practiced on the neighborhood
rooftops, and it occasionally served a festive purpose as well,
but people were sometimes injured or killed when shots were fired
in anger. There had been a debt-related execution of a man dining
at El Típico, there was the man who opened fire from a
window on some cops trying to make an arrest across the street;
and then there was the entrepreneur who tried to sell two-dollar
crack on a designated four-dollar corner. According to legend,
the competition shot him three times in the chest, but he got
up a few minutes later and dusted himself off because he had expected
trouble and wore a bulletproof vest.
The
variety of such stories was endless, but it was understood that
people who weren’t involved in the drug trade had nothing
to fear. Well, except for the woman who walked out of the bodega
when the Purples and the Yellows were fighting. A stray bullet
got her in the ass, but her ass was so fat that she just kept
walking as if nothing had happened, or at least that’s what
everybody said. People were laughing about it for weeks.
The
Yellows worked under the living room window, shouting “Yellow,
yellow, yellow!” all night to identify themselves to potential
customers. They sold crack in yellow-capped vials, and their song
sometimes reminded me of an old Harry Belafonte record that tells
the story of men working on riverboats in the Mississippi who
would throw a rock tied to a piece of twine into the water, and
then call out the depth to the captain. According to Belafonte,
these men gradually turned “marking on the twine”
into “mark twain,” and stretched the words out across
several measures of improvised melody. The yellow cap song on
Columbus Avenue had many variations as well, especially when dawn
was approaching and the guys were bored. Sometimes their voices
cracked into falsetto “Yellow yel-loouu!” One day
a few years later, the New York Times reported that the Yellows
had been rounded up in a massive sting operation, and were called
YTC, which according to the Times stood for Young Talented Children,
but I had never heard that name before. The article didn’t
say a word about Mark Twain.
My
only interactions with the Yellow guys happened when I got home
late at night. If one of them happened to be standing in the doorway
of my building, all I had to do was pull out my house keys, and
he would jump out of the way, apologizing profusely. The Purples
seemed even more professional, though that might have been because
they didn’t work right below our living room window, so
I wasn’t privy to their ups and downs, but they definitely
had a clearer division of labor. Their crack also sold for two
dollars a vial instead of four, so they had to deal with a higher
volume of customers by giving them numbers as they lined up. There
were lookout men a block away in all four directions, and if cops
appeared, the line quickly dissolved into a milling crowd of skeletal
figures, who would instantly snap back into place as soon as the
cops went away. A friend of mine saw the Purples kill a customer
who grabbed a handful of crack vials and tried to run, and another
friend saw one of their leaders, recently back from Gulf War I,
stomping a youth who lay in the street while a little boy pleaded
with him “Please don’t hurt my brother!”
The
police didn’t contact me about my robbery for a week or
so after I spoke to them, but the guys in the bodega the next
day solved the crime almost immediately. As soon as I mentioned
the scar on the guy’s upper lip, Ernesto said “Oh,
that was Pinky” and everyone agreed. Then a short man, black
and very muscular, said that if I were a real Dominican, I would
have knocked Pinky out. He also said that “the boys”
had already “spoken” to Pinky about what happened
the night before, and that it wouldn’t happen again. Pinky
had just gotten out of prison and everyone knew he wasn’t
worth a penny, the man told me. “What did he go to prison
for?” I asked. “For everything.” I was intrigued,
but the man said he had already told me more than enough. “Make
friends with Pinky,” he told me, and he went to get another
beer.
Several
nights later, I ran into Carmen in the lobby. When I told her
I had been robbed, she immediately said “I knew this would
happen when they stopped letting people hang out in the building.”
She herself had been a recent target of the neighbors’ crime
fighting zeal because of her drug use and because she still hung
out in the building with her homeless friends, even though she
and her two little girls had been evicted from an apartment across
the hall from me.
“Who
did it?” she demanded.
“Well,
they tell me it was this guy named Pinky, but…”
“Pinky!”
she yelled, and stormed out the door.
“Pinky!”
she ran across the street, before I could stop her, grabbed the
guy by the arm and brought him to me.
“Wait,”
I protested, but it was no good. “Did you hold this man
up?” she asked him. She grabbed his collar. “Because
if you did, you’re going to have a problem with me.”
He was retreating up the street as she screamed at him, waving
her finger in his face. “By my daughters, you’re going
to have a problem with me. This man is my husband!”
A
few hours later I came back and it was late at night again, and
there was Pinky. He ran toward me. “Yo, don’t go around
telling people that I robbed you, I don’t do that shit.”
We talked for a while about whether or not he was the guy. He
had some stuff for sale. Some of it was white powder, some of
it had formed lumps and there was some stuff that was supposed
to be pot as well. When I didn’t buy any, he asked me to
take him to the bodega and get him a beer, but I went to bed instead.
When
the cops called me in to see some photos, Pinky was hard to recognize
without his baseball cap and hood, and in the photo the scar looked
different than when he was talking. He had lived with his mom
in the building next door to mine for the three weeks since finishing
his 12-year sentence. It was scary being around so many cops.
Over the years I had heard stories about them robbing the bodega
across the street, harassing my neighbors or throwing my friend
Chocolate into the Tombs for three days after an undercover agent
persuaded him to buy an illegal cable TV box.
Two
weeks later, the police called again. The man who robbed me had
been “picked up” after two identical “jobs”
in another building next to his, and one in his own building.
When I went to talk to the detective, I was very reluctant about
the idea of pressing charges. He called another detective into
his office, closed the door, and asked “Do you use drugs?”
My jaw dropped in disbelief. My heart was pounding in fear. They
had asked Pinky why I had called the cops, and Pinky said it was
because he had sold me some “bad shit.” Because of
Pinky, I was sitting in front of two guys who really did have
guns, and they looked angry.
Right
after they let me go, I ran into Carmen again, who, surprisingly
enough, told me I shouldn’t hesitate to press charges against
Pinky if I wanted to. “Maybe you should talk to his mom,”
she suggested.
“Wouldn’t
that be a little awkward?”
“No,
no, you don’t understand, he robbed her, too. He also hit
her.” Carmen explained that Pinky’s mom wanted Pinky
to go back to prison, not only because she was afraid of him,
but because she thought he might get killed for selling “bad
shit.”
A
lot had changed by the time the DA called me to testify a few
months later. Gulf War II had started, and I had witnessed a sham
court proceeding in which a three-judge panel upheld a ban on
marching against the war, citing an “Orange Alert.”
Several days after the hearing, while police tried to prevent
people from getting to the permitted, non-marching rally on First
Avenue, they began clubbing the protesters at 62nd Street and
Second Avenue who had made it through the barricade, while the
rest of us gathered in a huge crowd shouting “Let us through!”
As it started to look like I might get clubbed as well, I remembered
the lawyers and judges discussing national security and the Orange
Alert, and suddenly their absurdity acquired a new strength. The
angry crowd surged forward and the poster board I was holding,
with a lopsided peace sign scrawled on it, disappeared under thousands
of marching feet as we overran the barricade. For the rest of
that freezing cold day, we were repeatedly corralled, bullied,
chased and threatened by the cops, but they never quite managed
to erase the memory of that first victory at 62nd Street.
Back
on my block, almost everybody wanted Pinky locked up again: his
mom, my Balkanized neighbors, some people I knew from back in
the day, even a few guys at the bodega. The cops asked me, a few
weeks later, to go to the police station again and pick him out
of a lineup, and I began to complain. Pinky had spent most of
his 40 years in prison, I explained, and it obviously hadn’t
done much good. I didn’t want to annoy the police again,
though, especially on behalf of a guy who had stigmatized the
community by selling bad shit, but when the detective showed me
the lineup, I said, “If I do this, that’ll be the
end, right?” He said yes, so I fingered Pinky. “We’re
finished now,” I said pointedly, “right?”
But
that night there was a subpoena under my door, ordering me to
testify in the morning.
They
introduced me to the Assistant DA, a young guy named Wolfowitz
or something like that. “I don’t want to do this,”
I said immediately. He argued that Pinky had “terrorized”
my neighborhood. Wolfowitz didn’t say anything about bad
shit, but he told me about the sentence Pinky had finished serving
only a few weeks before, for pleading guilty to two out of the
eight robberies he had been charged with in 1990.
Then
they took me to see a touchy-feely guy in another office, whose
job was apparently to persuade people to testify. He told me about
how he himself had been a crime victim, and afterwards had remembered
what happened over and over again, and was full of rage, wishing
he had fought back. When I told him that I, too, had experienced
those feelings, his face lit up. “We’re doin’
great, Alan, we’re doing just great,” he wanted to
hold my hand while I worked myself into a patriotic frenzy and
sided with the police, but when it hadn’t worked after 45
minutes or so, they apparently decided to change tactics. The
detective came in and the others quietly left the room. He asked
me who I had been talking to, the defendant’s mom, perhaps?
Telling him about 62nd Street didn’t seem like a good idea,
so our discussion continued for a while, but went nowhere. He
gave up. “I still think he sold you some bad shit,”
the detective said finally, making a last, half-hearted effort
to provoke me. It didn’t work. The touchy-feely guy came
back, then, and said “You’re going to have to live
with this decision for the rest of your life.”
“I
realize that,” I replied, struggling to conceal my delight.
Eventually
they had to let me go, and I headed for the elevators with a bounce
in my step.
The
last time I ever spoke to Pinky was only a day or two before he
was “picked up.” He was standing on the corner at
about ten in the morning, swaying slightly, and his chin was turning
orange from a bag of cheese puffs he was finishing off. I shook
his hand, even though it was covered with orange crap. We stood,
watching the cars go by for a moment, then I nudged him and said
“Hey Pinky, can I borrow 20 dollars?”
“Wanna
buy some crack?” he replied.
“Aw, come on, Pinky, lemme get 20 bucks.”
“How
come you don’t buy my crack?” he asked. “What’s
the matter, you don’t smoke?”