Leah's Basement

October 1, 2007

I keep thinking about Leah’s basement. Cinderblock walls, cement floor, no windows, and by the washing machine, a smaller, soundproof room with a built in bar. An old speakeasy, Leah says. Empty now, and waiting.

Nothing motivates me more than underuse. Give me a boarded up house, a discarded toy, a blank page, and I am compelled to rebuild it, re-furbish it, refill it; to pour myself into it and remake it as a reflection of myself. It’s a rather fascistic impulse, really, and I fear it undergirds my interest in the class that’s giving me so much grief this week: Housing Law & Policy. Today’s class was a presentation on HOPE VI, the federal program which funds the demolition of the most decrepit, crime ridden & unpleasant public housing projects and their replacement with new, safer, cleaner communities. We saw pictures of the derelict MLK apartments in Philadelphia before HOPE VI, with graffiti covered stairwells, and narrow slivers for windows. After HOPE VI, in its place stood MLK Plaza, a block of townhomes and new trees fronting the street. The buildings look nice, but there were few pictures of people.

Residents of the housing projects remade under HOPE VI have a “right of return”, but many do not take it. “Some get a voucher for Section 8 housing, and they like it so much that they decide to stay there,” my professor said. It seems too obvious to mention that the place they left behind isn’t there to go back to, for better or for worse.

When I have to come up with a password, I still use the number of my first apartment. That place, East 11th Street -- “the worst neighborhood in Austin,” as one of Jamey’s old co-workers put it – now looks like MLK Plaza. But back then, I joked, it was like living through the plagues of Egypt. There were ants. Then rats. Then rains. There was no heat, and the kitchen tap water was brown. But still, I was afraid I’d get kicked out. When crazy George moved in across the hall, he got it in his head one night to rip up the carpet. I went over to check out his handiwork, and stood in his threadbare apartment, the splinter-y floors pocked with nail holes and industrial stapes. “Don’t make it too nice,” I told him, “or they’ll raise the rent.” I needn’t have worried – soon after, a cigarette discarded carelessly during a long night of domestic turmoil started a fire which scorched his apartment and charred the hallway. “Your building smells like barbeque,” my friend Scott said, months later.

When the new buildings went up on E. 11th Street some 3 years later, only Ms. Williams and I came back. I visited her new beauty salon, with shiny linoleum floors and a modern shampoo station. I told her about my new house, just a few blocks away, and we shared our pride. “This relocation was the best thing that ever happened to us,” she whispered to me, somewhat conspiratorially.

Who knows what the revitalization of our block did for everyone else. I heard that one older man bought a big car and a house in San Antonio. The last holdout from the old neighborhood – Freddie, a homeowner on the adjacent block – told me that the old guy would drive up from time to time to visit his old stomping grounds, which was considered somewhat miraculous because he always arrived drunk as a skunk. But last week, I heard that Freddie is moving. His nephew needs surgery, and the house upkeep is too much for him anyway, so he’s going to sell and cash out. One of the last things he’s doing in the neighborhood is starting a petition in support of the organization that was charged by the city to carry out the whole revitalization project. They’ve done a lot of good, he says. Even though he won’t be around to enjoy it.

My professor is proud of her work with the Philadelphia Housing Authority, and rightly so. They took this housing of last resort, broken down and beat up, feared and avoided, and remade it into a vibrant, healthy place. No more defaced hallways, no more plagues of Egypt. There residents there now choose to live there, and not because they are afraid that they have nowhere else to go. And the people that were there before have new places, and old memories. It is, my professor says, a remarkable change.

Thinkin' About Drinkin'

April 30, 2006

I've been buying winter clothes these days -- sweaters, gloves, a puffy black coat. Actually, my main projects recently have been shopping for warm clothing and potting cacti. And making margaritas. Most evenings, I admire the salvia and lantana landscaping on my way home from the gym, suck in the bbq smoke from Ben's as I turn onto my street, and enjoy a cool margarita and a warm sunset on my porch. I am going to miss everything here so much. People keep asking me, "Will you come back?" and I don't know what to say.

I am just so overwhelmed with sadness today. Even a Blizzard -- a French silk pie Blizzard -- cheered me only momentarily. Do they even have Dairy Queens in DC? I know they don't have cactus gardens, year round 68 degree natural springs, six months of summer.

I'm searching for DC blogs that will make me excited about the city. The City Paper is really not doing the job -- that rag must be staffed by the most negative people in the nation's capitol. Seriously, every issue has snarky articles about how crappy the city is. Like, lots of them. Here's one I found a few weeks back. Wouldn't you know it, I've already lined up a room in a rowhouse in Columbia Heights. The pictures looked nice, and now I really can't wait to meet the neighbors. Where's the tequila?

Building A Better Blawg

Thursday, April 06, 2006

I don't really like people. But I lam very curious about them, their motivations, their lives. There is a big hotel close to my house, and when I bike past it, I look up at all those floors of identical windows and wonder what's going on behind each one. One night, I saw a guy standing at one of the windows watching the street. I couldn't say that our eyes met -- he was at least 7 stories up -- but I knew that he was looking at me just as I was looking at him.

This is why I love blogs. I read them compulsively, even though most are terrible. I jump from blog to blog, just hoping for an interesting one, a funny one, one that mirrors my life. When I was remodeling the house, I searched over and over for other stories like mine, other ambivalent urban pioneers. Google: house repair, blog, stories. Gentrification, experiences. Inner city, remodeling, ghetto. The closest I found was the journal of a minister who relocated his family to inner city Detroit to work at a youth ministry. I eventually started my own blog to fill the vacuum.

So it is no surprise that I've been spending a lot of time perusing law blogs, or blawgs, as I find they are called. Lordy lord, how some of them suck. Paragraph long re-tellings of blockbuster movie plots (you mean, Richard Gere's reporter character and Julia Roberts' runaway bride end up TOGETHER at the end of the film? Amazing!) and rosters of imaginary baseball teams. Reports on boring classes and even more boring cases. Updates on which suit makers Scalia prefers and Chief Justice Roberts' family life. Goddamn, people! I thought an interest in the law meant you liked to discuss Judas Priest's liability for backwards messages in their music, or read reports on the grave-robbing Texas couple busted for life insurance fraud.

Well, folks, that's what this blawg will cover. Sensational, diabolical, and sometimes intellectual musings related to my life and studies as I start law school in Washington DC. I hope you'll read it, enjoy it, and find that it speaks to you.

A Cheerleader's Baton

2.01.04

Early last summer, I decided to apply to law school. So since June, I have been spending a lot less time writing Lovenurse essays and a lot more time studing for the LSAT, taking and re-taking it, and working on law school applications. Since my numbers -- my LSAT score and undergrad GPA -- are not that impressive, I have been focusing on my personal statement, a two page essay that is supposed to convince the admissions officers that I am an amazing, motivated, intelligent person who will add greatly to their school's 2008 graduating class. I got the feeling that these essays are supposed to be pretty concrete, and a couple of people advised me to make sure I included at least one sentence that states why I want to go to law school. But my writing, especially when it's about my life, is rarely so clear cut. I write to express my confusion, confliction, my experiences at the crossroads of longing for and fear of the future. If I can't express these feelings, then is hard for me to find the motivation to write at all. So I struggled with this one, and ended up with about 20 versions of this essay. Below is one of the better ones; please try to read it as if you have never read anything else I've written, as if you came upon this sandwiched between other applicants' essays about how their life was changed by taking a summer trip to Honduras, working for a public defender or raising two kids. How would this stack up?


There is a cheerleader's baton buried by the storm drain where I plant flowers. It is one of the many items I find while gardening around my house or clearing brush from the vacant lot next door: car parts, pieces of furniture, a woman's purse. At first, I relished removing this refuse piece by piece, depositing it in the garbage can, to be carted away forever at the end of the week. But there is always more, waiting to be discovered by my shovel, caught in my rake or exposed by the next heavy rain.

Hortense, who supervises the community garden seven blocks away, says that if nothing else, gardening will teach you patience. I spent two years saving money to buy this house, biding my time in a run-down apartment, clearing up my credit and searching for a property within my budget. Remodeling took four months, every free minute consumed with replacing crumbling sheet rock, sanding layers of paint, agonizing over plumbing bids. Countless afternoons I worked in the house alone, struggling to follow step-by-step instructions on removing an old water heater, scraping browned popcorn texture from the ceilings, taping and floating, sanding, floating again.

These tasks, though difficult, have finite ends and immediate rewards. I gained an improved credit score when I paid off my college debt, a deed of ownership when I closed on the house, and a smooth white ceiling to stare at when I lay in bed at night. In the two years since moving in, however, I've found that outside the house itself, change in our neighborhood is incremental, and success is measured more subtly. Gangs, drugs and prostitution don't become soft and pliable like vinyl tiles under a heat gun. Poverty and desperation cannot be pried out with a crowbar. I now value the number of consecutive nights that pass without a prostitute working the park, the growing attendance at neighborhood meetings, the crack house boarded up after intervention by the newly reactivated neighborhood association.

My neighbors often use the term "relief" to describe the goal of our community activism: relief from crime, violence and poverty. Many of my neighbors are pioneers. Celia, the Flower Lady, maintains a slew of colorful plants outside the house where she has lived since 1947, when she was one of the first residents of this neighborhood, originally developed to house families of African American GIs after WWII. Noel's family, down the street, came more recently from Central America to establish a new life. Jolene, around the corner, built her own house with the help of Habitat for Humanity. Relief seems an uncharacteristically plaintive word on their lips. It reflects the pain inflicted by thieves who kicked in my front door, streets that lure kids into delinquency, junkies who steal even the Flower Lady's hanging baskets.

I am a new kind of pioneer: young, liberal, white. When I first moved in, some people asked me why I bought this place. The decision was pragmatic: because I wanted a home I wouldn't be forced out of due to rent hikes or landlord caprices; because I felt home ownership was the best way to make an investment and build wealth; and because this was one of the few properties that I could afford. Into this 600 square foot house, I have poured all of my savings, countless hours of effort, and grand dreams of financial growth. It is a lot for a little place to hold. This pressure, of big dreams in a confined space, of little money and lots of expenses, of ongoing frustrations and finite reserves of energy and compassion, defines life here. It wears on me, when I find the inspection sticker stolen from my car windshield, or when footsteps in the adjacent empty lot drive me to the back door, straining my eyes to peer out into the darkness. But it also motivates me, not only to pick up litter in the park and to join a nascent neighborhood watch, but also to find ways to address the systemic causes of our pain.

At neighborhood meetings, we talk increasingly about how to solve the problems in our neighborhood instead of pushing them on to another area. But the solutions - equal access to education, better employment opportunities, drug treatment options - often require more time, financial capital, and knowledge than we have at our disposal. My experiences teaching in a nearby housing project, working in my neighborhood, and building police-community partnerships in Austin, TX have shown me that the benefits of computer camps, litter cleanups, and prostitution stings are real, but they treat only the symptoms of communities sick with segregation and injustice. Addressing the real illness requires engagement with the slow moving process of national change via political representation, legal advocacy, and policy reform.

Over the past few years, I have reconsidered how I can most effectively contribute to this process of change. When I found the cheerleader's baton buried by the storm drain, my first instinct was to dig it up. I strained my back trying to pry it from the ground, but finally left it there. The flowers I plant around it bloom anyway. Our neighborhood association meetings end with a prayer and sometimes, a hug. Kids practice football in the park. Bobbie, next door, commends my landscaping and tells me she's glad that I bought the house. As I turn the soil in the garden, the crabgrass in my yard, or the dirt by the storm drain, I can imagine a future where we all feel some relief, and I am invigorated to pursue a career in law, government, and public policy where I can best use my talents to help realize that day.

Amazing Things

10.14.04

Two amazing things happened today. First, the neighborhood association meeting. Until today, all the neighborhood meetings I have attended have been held in various churches, in vinyl tiled multi-purpose rooms with cheap folding chairs, or more frequently, in the community house of one specific church. The community house is a little building around the corner from me, not too different from my place prior to remodeling. The ceilings are low, the walls thick with paint, once white, now tinged with brown. The carpet is dark, matted and bald in spots. The floor slopes to the east. The windows are barred, and covered with thick curtains. Half of them do not open. The bare light bulbs don't really illuminate the living room, which smells musty. Recovery pamphlets about various drug are displayed prominently on wire shelves: What You Should Know About Methamphetamines. Overcoming Crack. Heroin Addiction. There is a Bible on the otherwise empty bookshelf, and no other reading material on display. Despite the positive name, the community house doesn't offer any false promises.

I think a lot about false promises these days. I was listening to "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed a few weeks ago, and it was a minute before I remembered that he was singing about junkies. "Wild" is the furthest thing from my mind when I see James, a neighborhood addict. He stands on his corner, head bobbing anxiously, craning his neck, looking down the street. His features are made sharp by the taughtness of his skin, stretched across his bones. His pants are stained, his shirt, open. He doesn't have full control of his jaw when he talks, his mouth often hangs agape. When I drive by him at night, he stares hard at my car. Hoping, he raises his hand to wave and then drops it quickly when he recognizes me. He swings his long arms in frustration. He's not waiting for me.

Michael, whose family lives around the corner, is another addict. When he got out of prison a while back, two neighbors came by specifically to warn me about his history of stealing anything not nailed down. Soon I began to notice the increase in traffic to his house. Skinny, skinny women who tiptoed to his back door, avoiding eye contact with neighbors, hoping to be invisible. Doors slamming at all hours, cars coming and going. I asked his son, Anthony, what was going on. He looked me straight in the eye. "I have a problem," he said. "My father is a crack addict." He brought me into the house, and showed me how he had put a padlock on the back bedroom, to prevent Michael from entering the rest of the house. "He steals my dishes, my clothes. I can't cook because he sold the pots and pans," Anthony said. Anthony restricted his father to the rear of the house, and made his father's friends enter through the back porch. To avoid Anthony, they would cut through my yard to access the property. I confronted Michael the next day, told him I didn't want any more of this trespassing.
"You can't stop me from partying!" he retorted. Over the next few months, he lost weight. His skin sagged around his jaw, and he aged quickly. One day he was caught stealing computers from a neighborhood after school program, and was subsequently sent back to prison. Party over.

In contrast to all this, our neighborhood meeting tonight was held at an art gallery and studio space on the fringe of the neighborhood. A far cry from the community house, it is a modern space, kind of industrial, but in a clean way. Ceilings are high, walls are bright, and there is a lot of exposed metal and wood. The art is unusual, postmodern, and it is not clear what it means. A performance piece was to happen in the parking lot later that evening, and young artists in costume paraded around. The neighborhood association meeting was well attended, we ran out of chairs, even, and about 1/3 of the residents were young newcomers to the neighborhood. Walking home afterward with a friend, I took a fresh look at the streets. One house I'd never noticed before had its front door open, and inside I could see a bright, modern kitchen where two men were cooking dinner. A few houses down, a woman stood in front of a newly built house, talking to a friend on a cell phone, the house next door, also new, had striking native plant landscaping. "A gay guy just bought that place," my friend said. "He did all the yard work himself." She gestured to the agaves and salvia and laughed. "There goes the neighborhood!"

Back at home, I sat on my stoop and looked out into the park. From the direction of the art gallery, I could hear dance music. Next door, Bobbie was staying late at her salon, and the laughter of her last customer rode on the breeze. This month I will celebrate my third Halloween in this house. I looked around at all the flowers I'd planted in front of the house, the thick grass that now covers the front yard, the year old crepe myrtles in the park. It was hard to remember what the block had looked like when I first moved in, and I struggled to recapture the feelings of fear and loneliness I used to have so often when I sat out on the porch at night. James has been gone for a few weeks now, caught in a drug sting. His corner is empty. How quickly things can change.

The second amazing thing that happened today is that I trapped the cat. There are many feral cats on our block, their proliferation aided by our senile neighbor who feeds them daily, but will not spay or neuter. When pregnant, they come by our house more often, seeking extra food and a quiet place to rest. This particular cat had kittens over the summer. We found the first, a newborn, dead under our garbage can, and a few days later, found the mother with a second, alive and nursing, on our stoop. We fed both kitten and mama, hoping to socialize the pair and find them homes, but the week I planned to put an ad in the paper offering them for adoption, the kitten died. That Monday morning I came outside and found the kitten lying in the sun, bloated and stiff. There was no blood, no sign of stress, it just didn't make it. We buried it next to its sibling in the corner of the yard. Since then, we struggled to trap the mother to get her fixed. One week we succeeded in cornering her in the house, but she leapt out of the kitty carrier, scratched Jamey, and then became so panicked she threw her body against the closed front door, desperate to escape. Our friend lent us an actual trap, which I baited nightly, but the cat seemed to sense the danger and came around less often, until tonight. Tonight, it was easy. I put the food in the trap and was walking into the kitchen when I heard the cage door swing shut. At first, the cat was confused. She turned around and around in the metal cage. Then, she was distraught. She pawed at the door, struggling to pry it open. Eventually, she gave up, and crouched in a corner, waiting. I know she is scared about the uncertainty of what will happen next. When I look at her, I feel her contagious panic clench in the pit of my stomach. But I exhale, and tell myself that it really is for the best.

Out of Africa

6.13.04

My parents' house in the suburbs of Washington D.C. was always cold in the summertime. Open windows and doors would let out the air conditioning and let in bugs, two intolerable possibilities. Fresh air and the sounds of nature, especially at night, were reserved for vacations at the beach, weekends spent at a friend's country house, or summer camp. Maybe it is because of this that I like to keep every window and door open as much as possible here, listening to the crickets chirping, an occasional stray cat howl or dog bark, and on Sunday evenings, the gatherings of the family around the corner, and the clink of the horseshoes they throw in their backyard.

Living on the edge of the park, bordered on one side by a vacant house, on the other side by a one room hair salon, gives me a lot of solitude at night. "I once owned a farm in Africa," begins Karen Blixen in her memoir, Out of Africa. As I tend to my plants, or clear weeds from the lot next door, or wander through the park picking up litter, I often feel that this is my little farm, my urban finca, my postage stamp sized ranch. I once owned a house on the Eastside. I say this because it will not be like this forever, and because melodrama and soft focus are crucial when writing a romance.

Each neighborhood has a life cycle of its own. This one has descended into infirmity over the past 40 years or so, beset by one illness after the other: racial segregation, divestment, poverty concentration, substance abuse, crime. But an infusion of funds from people like me has functioned as a new treatment, slowly working through the bloodstream, pumping life back into this area one property at a time.

I was gentrified out of my old apartment, located above a hair salon, next to a drug dealer. Around the corner was a cluster of tiny dilapidated houses, occupied by more people per dwelling than seemed possible. Afternoons would find the residents grouped on the corner in battered plastic chairs, drinking beer or playing cards, cursing at toddlers who inevitably rambled towards the street. It was picturesque sometimes, when I woke up on Saturday mid-mornings to the smell of meat smoking on the grill, party music and the rattle of my neighbors playing craps on their porch. My friends smile at those stories, and people who move over here recount the dominoes games they've witnessed. There is some pride in the exotic beauty of it.

Everyone likes a romance. They melt in the mouth, like cotton candy, carefully crafted with just the right amount of tears to diffuse the warmth that builds in places it shouldn't. This story, though, is not really a romance, even if sometimes I try to pretend that it is. In the old apartment, there were lots of fights. Fights between my neighbor and her boyfriend which would spill out of their apartment and into the street, her screaming at the top of her lungs, their two kids, around age 5 and 7, standing in the doorway, listening with pinched faces. The fights between another neighbor and his drug addicted wife, culminating one night in a stabbing, police cars and ambulance sirens. But by far the worse was the couple a few houses down, if they could even be called a couple. Their times staying together were brief and intermittent, their fights loud and ugly, laced not just with regular cursing but racial epithets from the Hispanic woman and misogynist diatribes from the Black man. These were not lovers quarrels; these two people hated each other. One night in particular they went at it ferociously, and as usual I could hear only enough of it through my open windows to know that I didn't want to hear any more. Suddenly there was a brief silence, then only the woman, yelling incoherently. Soon after an ambulance arrived, loaded the man in, but refused to take the woman, who was crying and begging to go to the hospital with him. The ambulance wailed away and left her standing on the sidewalk, where she stayed for over thirty minutes, crying out loud with self-pitying sobs that echoed in the otherwise still street.

But all of those buildings have been sold or torn down now, those residents dispersed. Now I am alone at night on my new block, quiet except on the busy nights, when cars drive by every few minutes, stopping at the less lit places on the street, waiting until I come outside and stare hard at them, urging them to move on. I prefer to be alone, with my newspapers, books, quiet music, computer and sometimes, tequila to keep me company. The air is soft, the pine floorboards worn smooth by bare feet, and when I step outside, the concrete front steps are still warm from the day's sun. The computer keyboard clicks delicately, "Clickety-clack," Jamey mimics, and calls it "the sound of loneliness." That may be true in a way. Even in this urban area, with small houses on tight lots, people are more self-contained than I expected. Partially I assume this is because I am an outsider, and for this reason, avoided by some neighbors. But I also think some measure of self containment, both physical and emotional, is a self protection measure on the part of those who live here. I read about a study of inner city single mothers in the 1990s where half of the women were moved out of their ghettoes and into the suburbs. The new suburban mothers complained of loneliness and isolation, but no more so than the urban mothers, who had stayed in their own familiar environments. The researcher concluded that the ghetto can also be emotionally isolating, despite the density of humanity.

On a quiet night like tonight, I don't feel lonely, or scared. I imagine myself as Karen Blixen, a stranger come to town, considered a positive force by some, a usurper by others. I didn't move to this neighborhood to win a popularity contest, I remind myself sometimes. I am here on the make, investing my money and time in this house, hoping that it will increase in value as the neighborhood changes. What that changed neighborhood will look like I can't fully imagine, or maybe I just don't want to know tonight. I plan the future in soft focus, when I will look back on these days, and remember not the challenges of crime and the frustrations of poverty, but the crisp smell of dirt in the garden, the exhale of a breeze over the trees in the park, the sound of horseshoes and soft laughter.

American Apartied

5.21.04

I visited Diehle's, the sketchy convenience store, for the first time tonight. My upstanding neighbors usually walk the extra four blocks to the cleaner, more legitimate Quick Stop Market, where they don't get propositioned out front and it looks like people actually buy the merchandise on the shelves. But craving a cigarette, and feeling a little tipsy and reckless, I walked the 2 blocks which I otherwise never stroll. The regular suspects were hanging out on the corner, in varying stages of fucked up-ness. The guy at the counter at first told me they didn't have my cigarettes, which was obviously untrue. Being drunk, I asked for them again, pointing only with my chin, "No, I see them, Marlboro Light 100s, right there." Price: $3.50. Matches: unavailable. He asked me for ID, and smiled a little when he examined it. Was he surprised by my address? My age? Just the fact that I'd come in and completed this mundane transaction? The place was dingy inside, the ceiling low, the candy dusty and overpriced. I was glad to leave, but not sorry I went in.

The Fugees reinterpretation of "No Woman, No Cry", my least favorite Bob Marley song, made me think tonight. How hypocritical am I, to deride the culture of the neighborhood in practice, when I celebrate it in songs, culture, and concept? Watching a Missy Elliott video on TV, I thought, you know, she is beautiful. Hip hop is beautiful. America, and intrinsically, the contributions of people of African descent, the contributions which are so often overlooked in the history books, is beautiful.

I wonder if the neighborhood is some kind of Zen test. When you accept your other, they will cease to be your other. I am reminded of the book "Black Ice"; the inner city black kids integrating St. Paul's Academy struggled with segregation from the opposite side, and eventually assimilated into the upper class, white mainstream. It worries me that we live in such a segregated culture, with so few situations that force us outside of our separate areas. Race seems to divide us so much. Here and there, I get a glimpse of a different world from the person who addresses me forthrightly, who talks to the "me" beyond the white girl surface. And again, in more troubling way, from the guy down the street who hisses at me in some hostile courtship ritual that all women in the neighborhood are subjected to. It is a small comfort there that race has been transcended. In his eyes, we are all lowly women: it doesn't matter if we are black, brown, white, or some combination thereof.

What is race, anyway, but an accident of pigmentation? What is ethnicity, but an accident of birth? A friend of mine was trying to explain the benefits of living on the Eastside last week to a mutual friend, and she fumbled a little upon articulation. Why is it inherently better to live next door to a black person than a white one? We are all people, aren't we, why must we be defined by the pattern of our DNA that makes one lighter or darker than another?

But if your goal is to break down the barriers of racial segregation, maybe it is important to live with people of different races. Certainly it is hypocritical to decry segregation, but seek housing in a neighborhood with few or no black people. I am reading a book about the history of residential racial segregation in the US, and the premise of the book is that residential racial segregation is at the root of all other problems of the ghetto - poor schools, environmental hazards, concentrated poverty and the resulting crime, substance abuse and family structure problems. Studies cited in the book demonstrate that African Americans overwhelmingly prefer to live in neighborhoods that are 20-50% African American. Whites, however, prefer a 10% or less African American presence, and when a neighborhood integrates past 20% black residents, whites actively try to leave. How will residential segregation ever be overcome, if white people avoid neighborhoods with more than 10% black people, but blacks fear living in neighborhoods that are 90% white?

Not that every integrated neighborhood should be like mine. Actually, there is a strong possibility that the current level of integration in my neighborhood is fleeting, and that the neighborhood revitalization and accompanying integration slowly creeping East is actually neighborhood replacement. It is hard for me to imagine a stable, racially and economically integrated neighborhood. I have never lived in one, for certain. Somewhere between Diehle's and St Paul's Academy, there has to be such a place.

Motion

5.20.04

The neighborhood seems to wake up in waves. Due to my nocturnal schedule, I only see the early risers when I stay up all night. From 5 to 6am, the nighttime sounds of crickets, cars on 12th Street and the errant night wanderer give way to the rumble of pick up tracks, ferrying men out towards the main arteries that lead to highways and jobs. From 7-8am, women make a beeline for the bus stop on 12th Street, often wearing uniform tops and pleated pants. Then, around 9am, Lee, the barber, and Miss Bobbie, the hair stylist, open for business. Construction crews arrive at one of the new in-fill houses springing up on empty lots, city employees come by to clean up trash or mow grass in the park.

If I go to bed early, I will catch this last wave of day workers upon waking, and it is with them that I am most familiar. I open my front door, still in pajamas, to pick up the paper and check the weather, maybe to water my plants. I stretch, wash my face, get dressed and if I have time, run on the track before heading to work at noon.

The track is well populated in the mornings, often by older people who walk laps in groups, talking to each other, laughing as they stretch halfheartedly. It's not my style of exercise, but their stately pace has a dignity to it. Running in the daytime is a hassle for me, wrapped in all manner of fabrics to avoid the sun's rays, sweating profusely and suffering through morning shows on the radio.

I prefer to run as the sun sets. The businesses are in the process of bedding down as I walk the five blocks to the track, Little League games are beginning in the park and I am moving against the grain, out of the residential blocks and across 12th Street, to one of my favorite oases in the neighborhood, this state of the art rubber composition track which circles a manicured football field.

The track, sunk into a hillside, is below street level to the east but above on the west, which affords a beautiful view of the downtown skyline and sunset. It is not lit at night, so as I run I absorb the last of the daylight and when I stretch at the end of my run, I search the sky for the first star. Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight… My wish is always the same, and I can't tell it to you, or it won't come true. Sometimes, though, I feel a twinge of sadness at the thought that it might. I leave the track happy and serene, unbothered by the beer cans in the gutter, or the cars which slow to stare at me. I feel at home under this dome of sky. I walk back to my little house, glowing from within, and my boyfriend is in the living room practicing blues licks on guitar. Outside, Little League kids squeal as their teammates round the bases and cars inch along the crowded street, their engine sounds overwhelmed by the bass in their stereos, which as always, seems to propel them forward.

The Advancing Fairy Army

5.13.04

Painting by Paul Resika

The drivers of the #6 bus hate me. Biking home after work, I hug the curb and block access to their stops along 12th Street. I feel them rush to overtake me, to beat me to their stops. The bus wheezes to accelerate and creaks when slowing down. The drivers are instructed to stop at the railroad crossings, which I know they hate. Few trains cross these days, stopping to look both ways at the tracks is a mere formality.

I saw a country band tonight, of course they had a song about trains. Let the midnight special, shine a light on me. I think the story goes that if the light between train cars would shine on a convict in the chain gang, for that brief moment, his soul would be free. It strikes me that the bus is my train, and that perhaps as it lumbers by me, and I see the harsh lights and numb passengers inside, some extra freedom shines into my heart. Because I am on my bike, able to stop and investigate the black snake flattened on the shoulder, allowed to inhale the wind, embraced by the warm humid night. My freedom is the opportunity to intermingle with nature in a way that brings me out of the neighborhood, away from the garbage strewn streets, beyond the grievances of the ghetto.

Beyond the grievances, there are good things about the neighborhood, which I will probably reminisce about more once I move out. Even the rhythms of the drug trade can have a romance, if you can distance yourself enough to see it. Last night, for example, something was going down. I felt it as I turned on to 12th Street from Comal. Unfamiliar faces, loitering by the corner store. Three cop cars passing me in 2 minutes. Traffic, unrelentingly flowing east on 12th, dog-legging down my street, turning again on 13th. Jamey and I sat out on the stoop, drinking lime soda and tequila. Don't the junkies realize how transparent their excuses are, as they wait for their pick ups and drop offs? "I'm just waiting for my cousin." "No, I'm meeting a friend here." "Yeah, my car just needs some water… no, there's nothing wrong, I'll be moving on in just a second…" and the most audacious one of all, the plea for fix money, which comes up remarkably regularly: "My mother/sister/brother just died in Brackenridge Hospital, I just need $5 to catch a bus back to San Antonio, can you help me out?" So let me clarify... your family member dies, and you decide to walk for a half hour into the poorest part of town, the opposite direction from the bus and train station, to try to bum enough change to amass what has to be at least a $30 fare? I guess it's like the first grader who imagines he's the first person who ever thought to tell the teacher, "You see, Miss, the dog ate my homework."

Listening to their excuses is exhausting. And that is not the good part. There is a good part here, I'm just having some trouble locating it tonight. Maybe the good part is when I sit on my stoop, and watch the lightning flash in northwest Austin, illuminating the sky over the forest at the far side of the park. The raindrops start, like tip toe feet of an advancing fairy army, rustling the leaves of the newly planted trees across the street. Someday these trees will be as big as the ones that line the avenues downtown, and I will be far, far away from here.

Sweepstakes Winner

5.09.04

Tonight I have lots of contests to enter. I enter them monthly, after I receive Lucky magazine, which features giveaways in the back of each issue. I won a pair of shoes once - around the same time I won a $500 travel gift certificate from work, when I thought I was on a roll. That was at least 6 months ago, and I have yet to win anything since. But still, I am compelled to enter, and to dream.

My therapist told me to stop and smell the roses more often. Focus on being in the present. But I have never lived in the present. I remember waiting for my brother to get out of soccer practice and playing one of my many imaginary horse riding games - I was maybe 10 at this time. My mom asked me what I was doing and I tried to explain. "I always live like I'm riding a horse or writing a book," I told her. One night during college, dancing at the Oberlin disco I had a flash of realization that I was not doing this -- that I was enjoying the moment, not pretending to be doing something else. For a second, I felt naked without my make believe scenarios, my imaginary horse, the distance of a third person narration.

The rose plant I have was cheap, a $1.99 impulse buy from the grocery store. It seemed stunted after repotting, and suffered through a fungus that discolored its leaves. For the first six months I waited for it to die. The leaves now seem healthy, and it blooms continuously, although the flowers do not smell. The leaves from my tomato plants, so green and fuzzy almost to the point of sharpness, do. They smell a little like soil: verdant, brisk and alive. The tomato plants grow quickly, the unripe fruits already weighing down the vine. The constraints of the pot cannot stop them. My basil also smells strongly, wafting around from the back porch, scenting the air but not flavoring my margaritas. Do I need to mottle it, like mint? It strikes me that a basil margarita might be the perfect drink to sit on my porch and enjoy the twilight with, before coming inside to the computer and on-line contest entry forms.

The twilight is beautiful, it is my favorite time of night. Traffic on the block is minimal tonight. It seems to ebb and flow, like tides governed by a moon I cannot see. 12th Street is always busy, a never ending current of cars, rolling along like waves, their noise consistently washing up on the sidewalk beach. A car turns off 12th Street onto my block and I watch its headlights approach as I sit on my stoop, basil margarita in hand. The bass from the car stereo sends a muffled pattern of thumps into the night. The song is like a quiet Morse code to me, like Braille, and I cannot recognize it. My friend Joanna teaches at a close-by inner city school and prides herself on knowing the hottest urban hits. I comb thrift stores for Brooks Brothers suits and imagine how I would decorate my office in a corporate law firm. Turn left onto 13th, I will the car. Leave me alone with my plants, my cocktail, the chirping crickets, an occasional firefly. The car obliges, and I feel a little victory, like when I ordered a prostitute off the block yesterday. I was surprised by how quickly she acquiesced to my demands that she meet customers somewhere else - 13th, 14th Street, anywhere but on my block. "All right," she said, and set off briskly around the corner. "Have a nice day," she called out over her shoulder.

I just want them - the hookers, the johns, the drug dealers, the junkies -- out of my sight. Leave me my shaded, grassy yard, my plants, my park across the street. There are kids biking through the far edge of the park, beyond the fence that demarcates the community baseball diamond. The wheels of their bikes are obscured by the solid part of the fence, I can only see their hunched torsos, gliding along like ghosts though the night. They don't come down my way, maybe because they see me out on the stoop. I wonder what the neighbors think of me. The bitch, carping at people drinking beer in the park. The racist, gathering her white friends behind fences under burning tiki torches. The crazy woman, gardening in an Asian sampan, covering her pale skin with long sleeves and oversize sunglasses. "Why do you want this place?" my first Eastside landlord asked me when I called about the apartment I used to live in.

"Are you a student?" The hairstylist in the unit downstairs inquired. She was stumped when I said no. "Well then what…" her voice trailed off. "What are you?" seemed to be the uncompleted question.

Maybe I am naive, to have bought a house here. Maybe I am presumptuous, to try to change the neighborhood. Maybe I am kidding myself that I have made a good investment, that someone will soon rent this house and pay my mortgage, that I will buy more property and be free of these shackles of poverty someday. My 30th birthday is 5 months away and I want to celebrate with a luxury vacation. Hot springs in the mountains, a spa in the hill country, facials in the desert. This, I think, will bring me peace, satisfaction, relaxation. It is time to go inside and start on the sweepstakes entries.

Ghetto Beach

4.22.04

Image from sweetmilke.blogspot.com

I divide the days into Ghetto Beach and Ghetto Blues days. Neither is wholly bad or good, but in general the Ghetto Beach days are when the neighborhood looks sunny and humanity is intriguing, Ghetto Blues are the days when the streets are garbage strewn and people, myself included, hardened with frustration. Today was another ghetto beach day on the Eastside. Overcast, breezy, but warm and humid. Biking down 12th Street to work there was just enough sun to make sweat roll down the back of my neck. I call it a Ghetto Beach, but 12th Street actually looks more like a river than an ocean. Like aerial photos of the Amazon, from a distance I imagine the street looks muted and smooth. But the ghetto beach hops. Manikins outside Hi-C Apparel have big butts, tight clothes and no heads. Their skin is glossy and preternaturally white. The lanky woman sitting at the steps of the Ministry of Challenge says, "Hey lady, you got a dollar?" The guys outside the barbershop laugh and joke to each other. Their low pulled baseball caps make it hard to know if they are looking at me. But the school boy getting off the bus is. His bag is heavy, he lets the corner drag on the pavement. I stand out on my bike, with my gym bag stuffed in the basket, wearing huge shades to prevent wrinkles. "What's up, player?" he laughs at me.

"You just don't give a damn!" exclaims the man outside the Starched and Ironed dry cleaners as I fly by. I don't. And I don't have a dollar, I am no player, and I am late for work. The cars cruise on, shoppers idle at the Stop-and-Get walk up window, people scramble from one patch of shade to another. The sun is getting strong now and the sidewalk is hot under our feet.

I met W. and J. for dinner tonight and talked about W.'s Graduate Program. Urban Studies, Community Development, City Planning, some combination thereof. He is full of conspiracies. Five anti-apartheid activists murdered in Greensboro in 1981. The cops say it was the Klan. W. believes the FBI put them up to it. Bush should be arrested, he says, for insider trading. Or for destroying the Constitution. Is that even a crime, I wonder? W.'s professor is writing a book about academics who create projects for wealth building among residents of poor communities. Do these projects ever work, I ask? Of course, he says. In San Diego, they are building a shopping mall and all the area residents were given shares in it at the IPO. But first they had to strike down a law that made it illegal to give stock to poor people. And how does the law define poor? I wonder. Cash poor? Currently poor? Impoverished for generations? Downwardly mobile by choice? Habitually broke due to drug addiction? People often see the road from poverty as a lane at the track set with hurdles. If given the proper training, a person could clear the hurdles and break through the ribbon at the finish.

W. talks about community organizations poised to use grant money and academic consultants to recharge their neighborhoods. I can tell he is filled with excitement at the possibilities, but I feel deflated. What will the organizations do, start a day care center, a community garden, remodel houses? That's what they've done in our neighborhood. Then the hookers steal the construction guys' lunches out of their trucks, the junkies throw beer bottles and razors into the day care playground, and rats eat the tomatoes in the community garden. Right now I feel that if people in my neighborhood had shares of stock worth anything, they'd sell the stock and rent a house in the suburbs. Or buy a Cadillac. Or dope.

I wonder if people in W.'s program can relate to the frustrations of people in the neighborhoods they seek to transform. The ribbon at the finish is not the end. We are still on the track, going round and round, or on the ghetto beach, the banks of 12th Street. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, we are boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Feels Blind

4.13.04: Feels Blind

I am obsessed with the cars again. The cars that park between our yard and the neighbor's at all hours, that I know by their license plates, makes and models, but not by their passengers, who are often invisible. I look out the window and a car is there, vacant. The passengers are not visiting me, not visiting Bobbie next door, they have no business with anyone on our street. They have disappeared into the night. An hour later, the neighbor's dog barks, a door slams, the car is running, and quickly, gone. I keep a log of these cars: when I noticed each one, when it disappeared. Once in a while I catch a driver, ask him what he is doing, why he leaves the car there. All of their answers differ slightly, but most claim to be meeting a friend. For various reasons, they do not want to park their car at their friend's house. No, this spot, this no man's land, an unkempt patch of bramble between street lights, between houses, is the place. Sometimes they are hostile when asked why they choose this spot. Sometimes deferential. Sometimes they move their car if asked. Sometimes they refuse. All insist that they are doing nothing wrong. But once confronted, they rarely come back. Instead a different car arrives in the night, noted only by the neighbor's dog, bark, bark, barking at nothing.

I keep a log of the cars that park, the people who loiter, those who I find at the baseball diamond when no games are going on, sitting on the bleachers, waiting for someone or something. Dates, times, license plate numbers, descriptions, names when I can get them. An accumulation of data detailing the secret life of the neighborhood, the comings and goings that wish to be unnoticed. I am hoping to find a pattern, a Fibonacci sequence, a key to the underground rhythm.

Even before our house was burglarized, one of the frustrating things about the neighborhood was not knowing about the people around. Friend or foe? Inquiring neighbor or scouting robber? Crack head or idiosyncratic coot? Seemingly nice people walking by the house would hurl an insult, hostile old men would turn out to be neighborhood stalwarts. After the robbery, I had a great distrust of everyone who passed by. Was this the person who forced the door lock with a crowbar? Who kicked in the front door? Who stole the VCR and a pillowcase from the bed to carry it away in? But all I can do is watch and wait for things to make sense. There is a language to this shadow world which I do not know. Common vocabulary comes first, then phrases, sentences and one day, the numbers, letters and juxtapositions align and comprehension takes place.

The Lovenurse Files

4.11.04

After spending much of 2003 chronicling the remodeling of the house I bought (see This Old House It Ain't: Home Remodeling With A Complete Amateur") I decided to re-start the journal today, expanding my musings to include journal entries and essays about topics beyond my property line. Although Jamey and I are fully settled in to the house and all of the interior work is done, we are still finding our place in the neighborhood. "Finding our place" is a bit of euphemism, actually. I am struggling with the aspects of the neighborhood that I did not understand when I bought the house - the poverty, the racial segregation, the flourishing underground economies of drugs and prostitution. I focus my home improvement energies these days on the yard and the neighborhood. Grass, planted from seed, has filled in the dirt patches on the north side of the house. Native plants fill limestone edged flowerbeds in front. An unconscientiously water-needing bougainvillea grows at the SE corner of the house and an impractical sapling pear tree leans precariously near the front fence. Potted plants crowd the front and back stoop. I have cleared the weeds and dead tree limbs from the back yard and even from my neighbor's yard next door, I have a plot in the community garden 5 blocks away, I am meeting more neighbors and am participating in neighborhood association meetings.

My friends admire the place: the aquamarine bathroom and the front flowers are the most frequently praised. And since the house was cheap, Jamey and I spend only a small fraction of our incomes on housing expenses. But I often feel like the psychic costs of living among poverty and desperation are high. We had a burglary last August, and since then I have installed a locking fence to discourage trespassers. Junkies and prostitutes are fixtures in the neighborhood, and I find myself amazingly hardened to their plight. I worry that I am becoming a Republican, on the surface disdainful of the nearby desperation, but underneath terrified of succumbing to the ghetto lifestyle which seems to engulf too many of the neighbors. I spend a lot of time thinking about my future, my career ambitions, my financial aspirations, about my place in this neighborhood and this neighborhood's place in the capitalist system.

I have been thinking a lot about purpose recently. About the path I am on, the path I want to be on, the chasm between the two and how to get there from here. It seems that there has been a natural path leading to everything I do now, where opportunities opened up spontaneously to meet my needs and ambitions. For example, I was interested in music, so I got involved with college radio. Then in Austin, I found KOOP. A slot came open, I moved in. A DJ I knew started working at KUT, the NPR affiliate station, and got me on sub rotation there. Eventually I got my own show. But as one path opens before me, I feel the need to beat down some new paths. I was offered the opportunity to host a TV show on the Austin Music Network, which I took. From there, decided to try my hand at video production, and am now conspiring to write a grant to further fund this project. Similarly, with the house, I started out just looking for a place to live, and ended up with fixer upper taking nearly a year's worth of repair. Now that that is over, I'm making plans to buy another house. It seems that I'm just never happy with anything for long. When the path through the forest gives way to a gravel road, I start thinking I'm going the wrong direction. I get impatient to find the super highway to satisfaction. I get sick of little rocks digging into my feet. I head back to the bushes to beat a new path.

The one path that didn't open was the writer's path: the Chronicle job that never went anywhere. The Lovenurse columns that didn't get published. The goals to write everyday that fell by the wayside. This, I think, is the rough path. The machete in the Amazon style path. But maybe I am the kind of person who needs to be hacking down jungle in order to feel satisfied. Or the person who is not satisfied with success. The compulsive risk taker? That makes sense. But a pragmatist as well. I tried the writer's path and it didn't work out. Struggling through meaningless day jobs, inadequate pay and creative frustration is not what I want. But this is the writer's path, at least for most writers, for most of the time.

So guess I'll try again to write again, about the stuff I know. My daily life, which often is focused on the house or the neighborhood, as well as my other in sundry interests: music, radio, TV, law, sociology. My myriad and often conflicting future plans: an academic career in the social sciences, making a living off real estate sales and development, law school and work in public policy, raising children. This journal, like the house, like life, is still a work in progress. Feel free to email me at angmill08@hotmail.com with questions or feedback, just make sure to put "Lovenurse" in the subject header so I can tell your message apart from the Viagra spam.