Some parts - well, some parts were third world countries really not like the glitz in the advertising charts. Unpolished banquets of flea markets on blankets selling broken light bulbs, a bumper, watched over with a bagged liquor gulp and a mutt by the side that when lucky was fed a slice from the corner. Chain link fencing behind the stench dented, climbed, hubcaps displayed on ‘em. The broadleaf weeds, the miserable trees their only nature’s gem.
Yeah, some parts - some parts were cruel and shifty. Far from the jewel presented on a postcard and a 15 cent stamp - wonderfully ******. The city back then gathered up washed-up teens or young adults on the Lower East Side not even knowing why they were there. Misfits really not fitting into a family or town - no money. Perhaps once church-going girls who knew more than the native what a pine tree was and plus, this is the place where stars are born - now working, squeezing, cocking, paid to do what they were disgraced to do: parloring to get the moan, ******* to produce the white honey. And this was before the crack and vials crunched on the steps of the subway.
Men would squeegee for cents and cigarettes - Marlboro or Kent. A mix of Lincolns, Jeffersons throw in an Eisenhower, a Washington. A decade before Broken Windows and a lord mayors attempt to take back control of parts lost to appease the nobility.
Yeah, there were sections - sections that you brought a gun to deliver milk. “Protection.” And people carried things: broomsticks cut down, crowbars in a city in neighborhoods with the motto: “Do what you gotta do.” “Wrong place. Wrong time.” Where grandmothers would be mugged on the subway in a city on the verge of Chapter 11, a city of pushbacks and organized crime where everyone seemed fit, gang patches before Angels wore red berets and offered a hint of safety in light or dark and guarded a canvas of moving steel plastered with graffiti and grime and the cement crime sublime. Where one could still dream in a city of bleakness before, good or bad, it all went theme park.