Neighborhood

The apartment is in a gentrifying neighborhood.  It is gritty and charming.  On the weekends children play soccer in quite streets since all the bankers are safe in their suburban apartments.  Generations of parents push strollers and children in homemade Halloween costumes walk the streets in search of candy weeks after Halloween.  A group of old ladies patrols from a porch stoop with their scruffy dogs drinking beer late in the days.  A prostitute works the corner dresses like the 80s vomited all over her chats with neighbors as someone selling papers might.  She is Michael or Coco and is a he.  Michael is part of the neighborhood kindly helping children cross the street and scolds speeding cars (or is trying to hail customers).  Once a new prostitute moved in on a greasy stained mattress set on a corner under an awning of an abandon building.  Dirty and callus looking she and her pimp were gone the next day.  I suspect the Old Lady patrol ran them off.

 

Each year for Carnival neighborhoods compete to participate in the parades.  Forty community drums of different sizes and shapes are brought out for people to practice on while marchers in front wave flags and an old patriarch dances in front with women and children.

 

Squatters across the street live in a shanty of debris.  The father, a large man hardened by manual labor works the night shift at the docks is putting his two boys through college.  They study music.  He pays the light and water bills and is never late.  In a few years the property is his.  He will build a proper house once the deed is his.

A block over people huddle in the ruins of the dynamite house (where dynamite was stored in the old port era) shooting smack or huffing whatever they can find.  They wonder the neighborhood broken and desperate.  I want to help them with money or food but try not to attract their attention in case they need a fix and see me as a target the next time their lips are cracked and coated with dried white foam.  The crack smokers power-walk fidgeting while talking fast always with something to do or somewhere to go.  Long term users are shells of people with hallow faces and mismatched shoes.  As a contrast two blocks the other directions stores are filled with clothes so expensive I could never justify buying them and the Culture Heritage Center of Spain hosts free art shows, movies, fancy coffees/treats and music catered to the rich. 

Transvestite hookers with signs of heavy drug use search faces desperately at dusk.  Young addicts who probably only shave weekly have bony frames filling out women's clothing as if hanging on a coat hanger.  They travel in pairs, friends in addiction and trying to kill a life of pain.

I was warned about my neighborhood and many recommend I move.  At times I am scared shitless of the bankers in their fancy clothes snacking on high end food while taking a break from stealing money through high interests and predatory loans, crushing the middle and lower classes with no remorse while demanding bailouts under the guise of too big to fail.  The junkies, prostitutes and street people remind me we all have problems.  Children playing and drum practice make me feel part of something, giving me hope for the world.