I’m Not Langston Hughes

by Alexandra Reiss

The subway comes above ground on 96th street. Where

men’s Jockey shorts cling damply to the curb, defying dignity. Where

beer-battered boxes, cardboard constructions, stink outside

on sidewalks: houses in front of houses. Here,

immigrants rush to fill the cracks of the

rickety pre-war brownstones with memories of the old country and

the smell of ethnic food. Who, here,

remembers the Cotton Club? These houses now

just relics. Skeletons

of some brown-and-out bebop heyday.

On the corner a shopping cart doubles as a spit, and a man

with plastic bags over bare feet, roasts a pigeon on a wire coat hanger. He

hands out scraps of meat to a convoy  of similar carts and

rickshaws. Bits of bird are accepted as sacraments. Here,

where church is held on the sidewalk and where bread exists

only as an abstract notion. Unattainable, like

money to pay the rent.

Perched mid-block, on a crate that used to hold oranges, a gypsy

sells batteries and makes no attempt to conceal the conspicuous absence of

a right eyeball. The empty pouch:  not sad

but tired.  Here,

someone else continually makes plans to build some new

luxury high-rise apartment complex.  No one ever

breaks ground.  Of course there is the inevitability of

the urchins, scrambling through any opening wide enough in the scaffolding. They

steal steel beams and pipes. They

melt them down. They

turn them into money.

Painted cement pillars separate brownstones from rowhouses and lack of

clapboard siding – even if last week’s paper is plastered wet to the column, as if

it will protect the peeling paint from the indecency of

some bum’s 3AM relief.  Tonight,

everybody is over at the A&P. Tonight: $1.69

per pound of cube steak.  Outside weathered blue police blockades, left over from

some parade, are stacked up against the chain-link fence surrounding the

“community garden.” Here,

a sign on the fence reads: “No Dumping” and

makes everybody laugh.