The Colt 45 Chronicle #64

Like Chronicle #58, the letter below is to addressed my wife's grandmother who lived in Joplin, Missouri. Though I didn't slather on the Tom Sawyer persona quite as thick in this one, it is still annoyingly present. What is worthwhile about the communique is its fairly disinterested description of my first career-track position, an entry-level position at the pseudo-prestigious Foundation Center.

The Foundation Center was a truly miserable place. Nothing in my six years at the university prepared me for the horror -- the pettiness, the hatred and bitterness -- of everyday workaday life in an office. Imagine Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and you get the idea of what I felt about the place. But none of that makes it into the letter to the grand dame. I obviously tried hard to keep an "Aw, shucks!" upbeat tone, right down to playing up the generosity of the poverty wages I earned.

Autumn 1988

Dear Esther,

I want to thank you for the nice letter you sent us. It arrived on election day as we marched off to vote. Thank you for the entertainment funds. They'll come in handy. Ashley has harvested a bushel of friends, quite nice people, in fact, and there always seems to be something astir on the weekends.

So how is life around Joplin these days? For my part, New York is always getting a little more like home. I've already developed a routine. Up at a quarter to seven, make my lunch, and out the door by a quarter to eight. I hit the subway and ride 150 blocks downtown. I arrive at work by 8:30 AM. Work is fine. I'm what they call an assistant editor at a place called the Foundation Center, which is a foundation set up by a lot of other foundations, like Ford and McCarthy and Mobil, to record and monitor how much money they donate and what kind of programs they fund. I work with IRS tax forms and computers, and I do a bit of proofreading. The office is on Fifth Avenue, but it's too far downtown, 15th Street, to be part of Midtown's glitz and luxury. 

Manhattan is a big place, even though it really is small; it is only about fifteen miles long, and, at its fattest, five-miles wide (probably less total area than Ashland). I like it fine though, and I particularly like our neck of the woods, Washington Heights. It's almost all Hispanic, except for the hospital, medical and nursing Schools, psychiatric and neurological institutes. And even though there are a lot of drug dealers and nobody speaks English and a cop recently got killed up here, it has a peace and vitality and homeyness that is preferable to the "nicer" parts of the city.

The one big drawback about living in New York City is how expensive it is; but even in this, Ashley and I are doing okay. I bring home a pretty good entry-level salary, enough to keep food coming in and rent paid, and with what Ashley gets, we can pay the bills and live lean but with comfort.

I've got to thank you again for what you did for us this summer. You really did help us out. We had been on the road a long time and with a big load. Then we pulled into your driveway. You fed us, great coffeecake and eggs and bacon, and we got a good night's sleep, and everything was great. I'll never forget it.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #60

Last Saturday I participated in a march and rally for the $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle. It was a pleasure, probably the most fun I have had a political event in a decade. There is energy in this movement, thanks to Kshama Sawant's leadership. Her victory against an odious placeholder on the city council was the springboard. But to her credit, Sawant didn't hunker down and try to find her place within the council structure; she immediately set to work keeping her supporters mobilized and growing the movement to achieve a $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle.

One of the things that was such a pleasure about last weekend's march was seeing the faces of union activists with whom I was friendly and familiar over a decade ago. Some appeared not to have aged at all. They were in the minority. Most had grayed and carried crimson in their countenances. I imagine aging has a lot to do with diet. A meat-based diet combined with alcohol will zap a person, and good. Best to cut down on meat intake and eliminate alcohol altogether once we get into our 40s. Couple these dietary changes with an exercise regimen of some sort -- movement! -- and one should be able to age with a degree of dignity.

The letter below, like #50 (which, based on the number of hits, is for some reason the all-time most popular post of this blog), is addressed to my father-in-law. I wrote it after about six months in the Big Apple. It is a fairly accurate description of Manhattan from the perspective of young man forced to work in its skyscraper canyons -- "Sequestered away in a fluorescently lit office twenty-five stories up with no windows, you begin to feel your masculinity drip away. But not just masculinity, life."

There is of course the backward-glancing reverie about life at the university, which, if you have read any of these "Colt 45 Chronicles," you know that beer-induced nostalgia for campus life is to be expected. I do get off a decent riff about respect being the true foundation of a happy relationship.

Spring 1989

How's the ballgame going Pete? It's been a year since we've seen you. Seems more like two or three. At night you can see the Yankee Stadium lights from our living room window. They reflect off the windows of this big ass concrete government building sitting over there to the east of Harlem. The stadium is just across the river in the Bronx. We walked there last summer; took St. Nicholas Avenue down. Harlem looked good, people had nice faces; it had a comfortableness to it, like a sofa on the porch. I haven't made that walk since then. I was gonna go today (I wasn't working), but the weather was bad and the game was supposed to be televised. So I took a rain check.

I got a new job today. The bad part about it being that it's down in the Wall Street area, which is a very long subway ride from where we live, about thirty minutes longer than the ride I made to my other job. The good part about it is that the work is much steadier, a solid 40 hours a week, with an opportunity to earn some overtime. My other job was only a couple days a week, and sometimes not at all; it depended on the amount of proofreading that had to be done. Yep, that's right.  I'm a proofreader. And I'll tell you, it's hard to accept at times. Sequestered away in a fluorescently lit office twenty-five stories up with no windows, you begin to feel your masculinity drip away. But not just masculinity, life. The women who make these high-rise offices run are the deadest-looking people you have ever seen -- sullen, gray, tortured, tired. Hell, I used to be a teaching assistant, with strawberry blonds in every class; I used to walk the sunny campus greens and stop and chat with friends and drink coffee as the birds whistled songs overhead in trees; I used to haul sheetrock, sucking in the bay fog at 8 AM, skipping lunch and working straight through to the can of beer at the end of the day. Well, that's all over with now. But it's all part of the picture, and it's good because you got give something up sometime. You just have to keep telling yourself that everything is okay and that God is Love and all the rest of that hogwash that only makes sense after you've put your nose to the grindstone.

New York City, like everything else that is truly great, is a well-crafted illusion. The people who make the big money and run the city don't even live here; they're out in Long Island or Connecticut or New Jersey. Greenwich Village can be okay. The West Village is mostly commercial and expensive; the East Village is solid, good places to eat for cheap but not that many good bars. Nothing jumps out and grabs you and says, "We're here!"

I've worked pretty much all over the city, except for post-Uptown, which is where we live. Uptown stops, or people stop talking about Manhattan, around the 90s; and, to give you some indication, we live between 169th and 170th. After the 90s the neighborhoods start to get poor. From 100th to Columbia University (not the medical school, which is where we live, but the actual campus -- 116th) the neighborhoods are black and Hispanic, with a student population tossed in for good measure. After Columbia, Harlem starts. After Harlem, around 150th, Washington Heights starts. That's where we live, or that's what it's called. It has a reputation for being the best place to buy crack in Manhattan; all the big boys sell there. We live a little ways up, smack dab against the Hudson. We have nice safe university housing in a family-oriented Hispanic community. It starts getting exciting about five blocks down. I've been down there a few times very late at night to get some fried chicken, down around 161st, and sure enough you get some royal treatment. People can't imagine what you're doing there at that hour except to buy what they have to sell. The only thing I took exception to was how aggressive they were. I had to fix 'em square in the eye and brush chests just to assure then that I all I wanted to do was get something to eat down the road. But once they perceived my drunken sincerity, they were decent and good-natured and nodded me a goodbye and I was off on my way towards, like I said, the best fried chicken and french fries I've had, and I think Ashley might agree.

I'm still drinking the Coors, but more and more I find myself moving to Colt 45. Ashley and I have a few friends, though nothing like Berkeley -- they're not that close. Ashley and I spend a lot of time together, probably more than since we were first living together, back then in the dark golden ages of the early 80s. We still respect each other, which, if you ask me, is the only thing in any relationship -- the only thing to keep a relationship a relationship and not a servilityship or tortureship.

So what I want to say is that you should come visit us. Anytime you want. We'll be here for the next three-and-a-half years. Another year from now I'll have this city down pat, even better than I do now, of course, because time is time. But I'm doing my research; I'm learning this beast. So when you have the money to pay for a ticket and say $100 spending money, you should make the trip; I'll pay for beers we drink at home. But then again, you wouldn't be missing much; you'd only be shifting your frame of reference, which, I guess, isn't so bad; in fact, it's probably the only thing that's noble, truly selfless, in this life.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #3

Married student housing was, and probably still is, located at 60 Haven Avenue, a part of Manhattan that is the island at its narrowest, just south of the George Washington Bridge. The building was, and probably still is, far taller than anything else in the Washington Heights neighborhood. My wife and I lived on the 22nd floor with excellent views to the south, east and west. From the living room one could see all the way past the verdant shire of Central Park to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, where I would be working not too long after writing the letter below, the third installment of letters from a string-tie folder of letters labeled "summer of 1988 to the spring of 1990." This letter like the last is addressed to a friend who was living in Madrid teaching English. 

During the holidays the medical complex cleared out. My wife, as she always did during Christmas and summer, traveled, while I, as always, stayed home with the cat. Downstairs and up Haven Avenue half a block was an excellent small deli; one could always get a good chicken cutlet sandwich on a hoagie roll as well as quart bottles of Budweiser, Miller, Coors and Colt 45.

Beware. There's plenty of preening below from a schoolboy who is chock full of Bukowski and suffering from cabin fever. I don't think I fully grasped what Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about on the most basic level and concomitantly what it means to be chivalrous -- be true to your word. My confusion in this regard presaged decades of woe.

Christmas 1989

Green corduroy topcoat -- that's what Gary was wearing when I ran into him on the street of 168th on my up to Broadway and the subway and another workday and another Friday crossed off the calendar. I shivered in my 49ers hat and Harris Tweed and looked on at Gary's quarter-inch-length beard growth and all his high tide and good cheer, he, with just one more exam to go and then off to history-making Berlin for eight days, a solitary life-exuding hipster outfitted in a pretty Arabian cap and handsome green corduroy topcoat (not new cardboard-like corduroy but corduroy that has been sweated on and loved in and cleaned and toiled over and sweated on and loved in and then cleaned again). He looked like Mendoza -- bubbling, effervescent, giddy, boundless Mendoza back from Morocco and Spain and habitats of sand and rail -- but with one exception: he was clean. He was clean, and therefore, not too much real. Where Mendoza was jock itch, hair grease and dirty Levi's, Gary was spotless, colorfully immaculate and snifter scented -- he was the Bloomingdale's, the Macy's version of the world beat globe trottin' get funky middle-twenties young man boho. But that was enough, especially seeing that green corduroy topcoat: it was the nail in the coffin, a symbol for my distraughtness, a searchlight of trust and hope and joyfulness cutting through the fog that was me. Oh my. There I was slinking off to my office job in the below-freezing morning looking like a vampire at daybreak and out of the pale blue I'm intercepted by a happy-as-happy-can-be green corduroy elf. What a slap in the face! What a stake to the heart! All I could do was simper and shuffle my feet and think about the time when I used to be full of life, when I giggled and bubbled with the best of 'em, when happiness and hope were part of my day and distraughtness was beat by two aspirin and a catnap. Finally he left, telling me that he'll be back on the 23rd and that we ought t'get together for Christmas dinner. I say sure, I'll be around. He says we'll have to smoke some weed. I say sure, and tell 'im that I hope he spanks the monkey while I sit grinning in his living room. Then I'm off again, slinking to the subway, worried that I might be ten minutes late for work.

Oh what a grievous ungreen unreal mess worklife is. 

This Saturday morning while puttering around the bedroom I found some of Ashley's discarded yarn. One fragment was ruby red, a prodigious clump, the other was emerald green, a smaller share. I gathered 'em up in my palm and clutched tight. What should I do with 'em? I thought about throwing 'em away. But that seemed anal and unromantic. What could I do with 'em? Bookmarks? Desk ornaments? Ashley would just tell me to toss 'em out. So I marched into the bathroom and popped 'em into the toilet. The yarn floated nicely, resting on top of the water and executing little lazy pirouettes -- red on green, my own Christmas decoration. I didn't get to appreciate it for long though because Ashley called me out into the living room to sweep the floor. In about fifteen minutes I had finished sweeping and had to take a piss (I'd been drinking a lot of coffee); I walked into bathroom, lifted up the toilet seat, and let 'er rip. Mid piss I looked down and realized that my yuletide achievement was groaning and boiling in urine -- I had forgotten that the yarn was in there. No problem; it felt good, like this was the way it was meant to be. I sharpened my aim and really shot the fragments to hell; I submerged 'em completely: red and green crawling down to the mouth of the cave. I flushed and they disappeared, violently. Totality, yessiree. 

I wanted to tell you that I've recently finished reading SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. It's nothing special; it's pretty good though and it does seem to be consistent in theme with the rest of this doggerel. Recapitulation is a heavy burden though and one that's made considerably heavier when drinking quarts of Miller (because they had no Coors at the deli) that keep foaming up and shooting out of the glass and onto books that rest innocently on the table; that and the fact that work looms large and unhappy and eight hours away (it's close to midnight); but Ashley has left for Oregon and I'm alone and Snuz is asleep and I'm working on one of the last Cubans and as Miller says in THE AIRCONDITIONED NIGHTMARE, "God is Love"; so put all that together and here goes. Well, come to think of it, it does seem like too much to do right now. But I was going to say something along the lines of this: THE GREEN KNIGHT is exactly about what I was beer-dribbling on in that last letter I sent to you: time and sin. Time is sin, the possibility to sin. But where I was convinced that there was no way around this, Gawain shows that there is, and that's by being timeless -- he doesn't sin (he does fuck up once though by accepting a girdle from a devilish queen in the hope that it'll protect him from a deathblow of the Green Knight's ax; so he isn't truly timeless; anyway, it's all ideal, it's all written -- that's the best we can hope for). You know the tale? The Green Knight comes stomping into Camelot on New Year's Day and offers anybody that wants it the first punch. Everybody who's anybody is there in Arthur's big feast hall slugging down wine and exchanging gifts when the Green Knight bursts in and makes his challenge. The catch is that a punch is not a punch but an ax blow to the neck. Gawain, a nephew of the King, jumps up and accepts. The Green Knight has just one condition: that in one year's time -- next New Year's Day -- the knight who accepts the challenge will travel to the Green Chapel (nobody in Camelot has ever heard of the Green Chapel) and receive a return blow. Gawain agrees, thinking that the guy is a shithead; that he'll chop of his head and that'll be that. The Green Knight hands Gawain the ax and Gawain swings with mighty force and the Green Knight's head falls to the floor and bounces underneath a table. The Green Knight steps forward (a giant man all garbed in green) and picks up his head. People can't believe their eyes. Gawain is shitting his pants. Nobody makes a sound. The Green Knight, his head in the nook of his left arm, jumps on his horse and clatters out the door hooves sparking. That's where the story begins. And Gawain has to spend the next three-hundred-and-however-so-many days shitting his pants and getting ready to die. 

We turned our backs on academia. Thank God and let's make it count because you can't go back home.

Crime in the City

John Tierney has an excellent, substantial story from this past Saturday about the remarkable and thoroughly debated year after year decline in New York City crime. There is a lot of information here, for instance, New York City crime continues to drop even though there have been reductions in the police force whose expansion in the 1990s is credited with creating safer streets in the first place:

Elsewhere, studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.

The thinking is that if you have a physical police presence at "hot spots" -- areas of high crime -- you see significant decreases in crime citywide. The criminals don't just pack their bags and set up shop in a different neighborhood; in other words, crime is more spatial than characterological.

Nonetheless, the hot-spot strategy was initially met with skepticism by police veterans. 

“We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there.

But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010 Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.

“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”

After more than two dozen experiments around the world, criminologists generally agree that hot-spot policing is “an effective crime prevention strategy,” in the words of Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Harvard and Rutgers who led a review of the research literature last year.

There's more in Tierney's story; it's also an argument for rerouting money currently spent on incarceration back to policing. He traces the boom in prison building back to an article published in 1974:

New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.

Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.”

An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.

Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.

My time in New York City, spent predominantly in the 33rd Precinct, was during the last several years prior to the expansion of the police force and the crackdown on petty crimes with the enforcement of a broken windows theory under Giuliani. I suppose what I saw while living in Washington Heights from 1988 until 1993 was the end of era.