Parenting. Selfish choices that affect your child's health. I don't know how you can write about this honestly without making yourself look bad, but here goes.
The first time I heard my daughter real scared - and I was too - was at The Terminal Hotel in New York City in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record. "Is that the bogeyman?", she whimpered at the sound of crackheads rattling bags of cans up and down the halls all night. “No honey, go back to sleep, those are just good folks trying to make a living.” I mean what do you say to a two year old in that situation?
Her mother and I had just moved to the city and were renting a room for 23 bucks a night. We had had a Mexican standoff about where we were going to live three months earlier. Our daughter Alice was born on the West Coast but Elka's father was dying of AIDS and he lived in central New Jersey. She told me if I wanted to be a part of my daughter's life I'd have to relocate to the East Coast. I told her there was no way in hell I was living in New Jersey, so that's how we ended up homeless in New York with no jobs looking to miraculously get a room in a squat. Great plan. As first-time parents in our early twenties, we had imagined that we could be the ultimate hippie-gypsy family and nothing bad would ever happen to our kid as a result. This was one of the worst places that philosophy had brought us.
From our window I could look out and see the transvestite hookers on the corner of 23rd street in the freezing snow. One tall black girl dressed only in white underwear and one pale white girl in black lingerie. They did a brisk business with long stretch limos pulling up at least every 15 minutes. I was impressed by my first exposure to their essentially NYC moxie. They must have been miserably cold, but they never showed it, stalking back and forth, gossiping loudly and snapping their fingers in the air, putting on a show for the passing cars.
Every morning we would barge our stroller down through the rotten snowdrifts of the Lower East Side trying to find some people I had connections with. I had heard they lived in these abandoned buildings that had electricity and running water. They were 'legally' home-steading them under an arcane New York law called 'adverse possession'. Mainly the law stated that if the city supplied utilities and didn't evict these squatters for more than seven years, they were essentially given permission to live there and may even have rights to ownership. This was violently disputed by mayor Giuliani and his police at the time, but that's a different story.
This was well before cell phones so if we wanted to get in to these buildings we had to yelp up to the barred windows or just hang out in the park in hopes that some of my friends would show up. For long, this was way too cold , so we spent most of our time in the public library reading Dr. Seuss to our daughter. The head librarian was a real grump and didn't take too kindly to us being there all day so whenever she was on patrol we got to play fun games like 'lets hide under table or behind the shelves!' Alice loved it but the librarian didn't, so eventually we were kicked back out onto the street.
Job prospects were dismal and we ran out of money, so I had to go up to St. Mark's Place and literally put a cup out for change. That's how all the beggars on the strip did it, you sat there shaking your paper cup and putting on your puppy eyes. You had to have enough change in the cup to make some noise but if you had too much or a dollar in there no one would give you shit. On a good day there was enough sheer numbers of people passing by that you could make about 25 bucks. Not enough to live on obviously, and we were desperate, so I called my parents.
“What's my plan?”, bluh...”Well I don't know, Mom. We're gonna get into one of these squats eventually but in the meantime there's like this book storage unit across from where I beg that's renting for only $300 a month! I mean it's like a 10x10 with a shared bathroom in the hall, but all we need is first and last. The owner says he might have a job for us selling incense, so we can pay you back in no time at all!”
The owner, Al had spotted us from across the street at 48 St. Marks Place. I had noticed him too. With his bright gold front teeth and hawk eye you could tell that he owned the block. This was one of the busiest crossroads in New York; every corner was jammed with tourists and street vendors haggling over high end art books, porn of every variety, and thick smoky incense with names like 'Black Love' and 'African Queen', pouring from golden amulets bouncing over thick-blanketed tables all covered in vaguely erotic-moroccan eye-candy. People in New York are always in a hurry and you'd never think that they'd have time to stop at those tables, but there are also a million tourists in Manhattan every day, all of them looking for crap to buy. Al made a lot of money off these suckers.
When Al took pity on me he was kind of cruel about it but it was what I needed to hear. “Look kid, you're pathetic over there begging with your cup. You need to be a man and provide for your family. I'm gonna save your life and give you a chance, mon. I'm gonna rent you my book box and give you and your wife a job at one of my incense tables and you can give me what you make every day until the rent's paid. Ok?”
Al was no fool and he had me right where he wanted me.
I thought it was a brilliant idea myself, I could spend the $400 my parents had sent us on food and beer, and I was sure that selling incense on the street would be a grand adventure.
The storage room was shelter and not much else. When I ask Alice about it now, she says her very first memory is watching us yelling at each other, having no space to get away, just running round and around the room. What I remember that kinda makes me cringe is the night watchman Frank who slept on a cot in the hall. Frank was alright in a Lennie from 'Of Mice and Men' kind of way, but you had to step over his cot and his gigantic feet sticking out to get to the bathroom. Frank would get drunk and masturbate and you'd have to keep checking back to see if he was done and snoring before you could go piss. Sometimes the sound of that damn cot rhythmically scraping and bumping against the concrete floor would go on all night.
Although I applauded Al's attempt at diversity in his workforce, we quickly found out that I could actually make more money begging with a cup than selling incense. Despite looking for something exotic on their trip to the city the tourists couldn't quite wrap their heads around the oddity of this scruffy, white couple and tow-headed munchkin trying to sell 'Sex on the Nile' and 'Midnight Musk' on the street corner. No matter how loud we barked, “check it out-check it out- Check. It. Out!”, and wafted smoke down the avenue into their faces - like all the other vendors - none of it worked. They absolutely expected us to be Jamaican.
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