The Killing Floor

Teaching Self-Hate is Not a Pathway to Self-Respect

What kind of late 20th-Century garbage is this, and what is the Black Mental Health Alliance of Massachusetts?

Full Text:

So you think you look pretty good wearing your pants like that, don't you? Underwear exposed. Hip hop style. Well there's something you may not know.

You can be fined up to $300, be placed in a state prison for up to 3 years, or be placed in a county jail for up to 2 years.

You still think it's cool? It's the law. Pull up you pants. Respect yourself.

This message brought to you by the Black Mental Health Alliance of Massachusetts.

Nonsense like this is something I react to viscerally. Even though I first encountered it in Conor Friedersdorf's cebebral article calling it out for racial profiling and violations of civil liberties, this was my first reaction:

My second reaction was that this has the tone of some paternalistic The Final Call-era Nation of Islam dogma gone horribly askew, so I googled the name of BMHAM's President "Dr. Omar Reid" with "Nation of Islam". Jackpot:

Reid, 44, grew up in the Nation of Islam and spent 14 years working as a psychologist in Boston Public Schools. He recently earned a doctorate in psychology, and has a practice counseling private clients and contracting with schools for educational assessments.

I guess all those years listening to WILD on its deathbed and reading The Final Call in barbershops has finally paid off for me. Not only is Reid the founder of BMHAM but he's also a founder of some nebulous "mental health clinic" called Pyramid Builders Associates Inc. and is associated with The Osiris Group / The Osiris Institute. If you were one of the 13 other people in the 617 listening to WILD in the 2000s you'll remember that Larry Higginbottom and The Osiris Group ran those commercials offering to tame your wild children with discipline and were behind the patriarchal Sunday afternoon call-in show "Famlies Do Matter".

If you weren't, suffice it to say that what they sold was a very conservative cocktail of order by way of traditional gender roles (male and female) and pride by way of an over-simplified "Nubian" past. In other words, it's pretty consistent with Respect yourself! Respect our community! Pull up your pants!, which is also consistent with you kids get off my lawn! and "Riots, melees and disturbances of the peace are against the interest of all our people and therefore cannot be permitted."

For the record, I think the saggy pants fashion is stupid. I didn't like it when I first noticed it in my neighborhood around 1990. I disdained it once I got to junior high and it became so mainstream that the white kids ragged on me for having tight jeans. I think the posture surrounding the fashion statement is most often immature and reeking of false bravado. I thought it was going to die a long time ago.

Some things that I dislike more than baggy pants, though, include: racial profiling, enforcing status offenses, perpetuating stereotypes, and people who keep instigating against cultural acceptance after the battles have been long-decided. In respect to these, I have a few questions for Reid, Higginbottom & Co.:

1) Why, as a group ostensibly advocating for better mental health care policy and access, does BMHAM give tacit support to a law that could place criminally innocent people into a corrections system that is notorious for woefully inadequate mental health care?

2) Why, if you describe the group as (emphasis mine) "the primary and collective voice of Black Americans, ethnic cultural groups and poor people who may not be represented at the mental health policy table" is it simply called the Black Mental Health Alliance of Massachusetts?

3) Are you aware that plenty of people who are not black wear their pants in this fashion? If so, why are both of your ad models black?

4) Are you aware that there has been a trend in hip hop for years towards form-fitting pants? If so, why do you specifically call it "hip hop style"? If not, why are you speaking publicly from a position of ignorance?

5) If BMHAM, The Osiris Group and Pyramid Builders collectively believe that "Blacks have been damaged from slavery as well as the American Apartheid" and "[black people] have to educate [their] children about how to keep [their] own power by creating [their] own opportunities" it is right in line with the NOI doctrine of Black separatism. In light of that, how can these organizations put their moral support behind incarcerating people of color into a prison system built upon the pilings of the American Apartheid system?

This kind of stuff is destructive because focusing so harshly on imaginary "problems" with some black people is always at the expense of fighting institutional racism and celebrating the astounding strides black people have made in the face of such debilitating adversity. In no way do I mean to diminish the immense struggle still facing the Black Underclass, and I understand that self-sufficiency and discipline have yielded positive results for black society since at least the days of the founding of the HBCUs, but telling young people that innocent pieces of their culture are disrespectful engenders more feelings of inferiority and more resentment toward the people who are trying to help them improve their psychological and socioeconomic conditions.

By wagging the finger like this BMHAM implicitly places blame on black kids, puts them in the same class as drunk drivers, reprises the zero-tolerance/tough-on-crime racist tropes from the 80s and 90s and legitimizes law enforcement thug tactics like racial profiling and stop-and-frisk. In doing so it goes against over a century-and-a-half of Black Americans using affirmation of self and affirmation of culture to fight for better conditions in America. In my own study I have seen this as early as the 1850s (Sojourner Truth delivered her Ain't I a Woman? speech in 1851 and Frederick Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave was published in 1852) and I have seen it repeatedly since then, in literature:

"The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves."

in protest:

and in music:

Not only that, but for every Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ralph Abernathy, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Ella Baker, Afrika Bambaataa, Amiri Baraka, Erykah Badu, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Jim Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Common, Bill Cosby, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Medgar Evers, Curt Flood, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Marvin Gaye, Althea Gibson, Peter Gomes, Lorraine Hansberry, Alex Haley, Lauryn Hill, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., KRS-One, Talib Kweli, Spike Lee, John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall, Curtis Mayfield, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Toni Morrison, Mos Def, Huey P. Newton, Charles Ogletree, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, Sidney Poitier, Colin Powell, Richard Pryor, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Chris Rock,  Bill Russell, Bayard Rustin, Gil Scott-Heron, Al Sharpton, Fred Shuttlesworth, Nina Simone, Sly Stone, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Alice Walker, Denzel Washington, Cornel West, Isabel Wilkerson, August Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Richard Wright and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz there are untold numbers of doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, professors, teachers, social workers, journalists, postal employees, accountants, bus drivers, retail managers, custodians, community organizers, caretakers and caregivers who are all just as unapologetically black and dignified. This very list demonstrates the amazing diversity of style, political belief, socioeconomic background and sexual orientation found among the most successful in the black community, a scope it seems groups like BMHAM, The Osiris Group and Pyramid Builders cannot fit into their narrow conception.

Instead, from that camp we get comments like this, from Sekou Mims, co-author and co-founder of Pyramid Builders:

"The bottom line is that 'We need to 'de-niggerize' [sic] our folks so that they can move ahead, organize, and find success. "First, [sic] Black folks need to eat right so that they can physically develop a healthy body and mind. Then, they need to eliminate the stereotypes presented in the media and truly examine the facts about who they were, who they are now, and who they need to be. Next, they will need people who can help them learn how to walk again, think again and act again..."

Call me crazy, but if you want people to respect themselves you probably shouldn't say they need to be "de-niggerized" and tell them that they don't know how to walk, think or act. Instead of preaching something as inane as self-hate as a path to self-respect it might be better to remind them that the history of their people in the United States is centered around making something out of nothing, that there are many different recipes to do it, and that every single one of them already has the stuff inside to make it happen.

Time Capsule: Letter + Where Compassion Stands

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Dear Mike Mellor:

It’s a bit before eight in the morning up here in Portland, where the overnight low was five below. In the kitchen with blinds shut across the bay window, I can still make out brittle dogwalkers faithful to their unenviable task. Venice Radio is tossing the B-minus work of François Devienne (1758-1803) across waves trying to lighten, if not warm things up. However, three baked potatoes, one sweet in the oven since seven help raise the temp. Needless to say, we’ve given thought to, said a prayer for, & hope others out there today offer compassion to the homeless. At this moment I have a particular couple in mind, what with her heavy under five layers with some kind of magnifier constantly held before her eyes & face like a veil under her hood, while the guy manages all the belongings in a double carriage, she follows blindly. They know all the heating grates in the city.

What I wanted to address up front is that we’ve been at this collaborative venture of Time Capsule for exactly four years now, four years two days, to be exact, since you invited me to write on Obama’s first inauguration. Initially we posted something bi-monthly, what with you coming up with images & music to enhance the texts. Soon after, posting weekly. Granted, it wasn’t as arduous as writing daily for two years two days in the Log, November 24, 2007-November 25, 2009, but it has taken a certain dedication on both our parts. I jumped ship back in 2009! What I propose here is a to request an unspecified hiatus. I expect to work with you, again, just as we began long ago in the library. Right now, however, I need to recharge the battery, which thank goodness isn’t hooked to a pacemaker, yet.


Yours Gratefully,
Robert


P.S. Let’s leave the few readers we have at this point with a piece written during the winter five years ago reflecting similar concerns expressed today:




Where Compassion Stands

Welcome pain of the furnace not kicking in on the coldest Monday of the year, forcing one to stand next the homeless in the winter-cold shower. That’s all I could see this morning, the men shifting back & forth in more meandering lines than the straight ones waiting for a bus in the nation’s capital, you remember, DC? The real of the real problem in the yet-again-Republican-run country is lack of compassion. I don’t know where compassion stands among the grand list of Buddhist virtues, but the cold this morning placed me right there among the lowliest of the low, where poets belong. Spare change, madam, trickle down unemployment compensation, mister?

FURTHER STUDY:

Empathy dirty word to RNC Chairman Michael Steele
François Devienne

The Cash Money Millionaires Started Reporting On the Ray Nagin Story 9 Years Ago

It looks like C. Ray Nagin is finally going to get what's coming to him:

"[I]nstead of breaking corruption's hold on City Hall, Nagin, who became the face of the city in the tragic aftermath of hurricane Katrina, allegedly got caught up in it. On Friday he became the first New Orleans mayor ever to face corruption charges, which consisted of 21 counts of bribery, conspiracy, money-laundering, wire fraud, and filing fake tax returns."

If you follow this story going forward you're sure to read about how, running on a  pro-business and anti-corruption platform, Nagin relied on support from white and more affluent (read : creole) black voters to get elected in 2002 then made an about face and appealed to blackness for post-Katrina re-election in 2006. You'll also read how his unfulfilled promises made him increasingly unpopular in his second term.

What you won't read in coverage of this story is that the black community of New Orleans was suspicious of this motherfucker way before Katrina ever happened, was unrelenting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, and that this unrest was even expressed in major-label rap songs.

From today's Christian Science Monitor:

"The mayor's once-soaring popularity plummeted amid a bogged down hurricane recovery, and as it became clear that many of his big ideas for the city had foundered. Yet when facing reelection in 2006, Nagin, the grand jury alleges, began doing favors for businessmen in exchange for bribes and political support. One such deal was orchestrated with a building supplies company, where Nagin is alleged to have helped kill a proposed requirement for the company to hire local workers at higher wages in return for the company buying granite from Nagin's family."

Bogged down hurricane recovery in 2005 made him unpopular? Then how do you explain this radio call-in skit song from Mannie Fresh's 2004 album The Mind of Mannie Fresh:

Caller: In my opinion, dude, I think you messin' around
And all the projects, why is they shuttin' 'em down?
And what would make you move the people Uptown to Downtown?

Mayor: Well, that's not my department, that's the Housing Authority. Sorry, I can't help you with that.

Caller: Housing Authority says it's you. You say it's them. I think all you sheisty bitches pimps.

Host: Sorry sir, your time is up.

Caller: So you don't know what's goin' on, dude? What the fuck?

One commonly held belief is that the government started closing and demolishing New Orleans housing projects after Katrina. In fact, it started in the 1990s and never stopped. Again from the Christian Science Monitor:

"But the indictment also came as a bitter blow to many of the city's majority African-American voters, who had supported Nagin in large part because of his expansive promises, including vowing that New Orleans would be rebuilt after Katrina as a "chocolate city." African-Americans largely reelected him in 2006 despite widespread misgivings about his Katrina response and rumors about backroom shenanigans.

"'Whether he was really committed to the interests of common black folks or just woofing is a matter for debate,' writes New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry. 'But one thing was clear even before Friday morning's [indictment]: He did not bring honesty to Perdido Street.

“'There's no need to feel ashamed,' Mr. DeBerry continues. 'Yes, embarrassed and angry that yet another politician has allegedly contributed to the city's roguish reputation. But not ashamed.… We weren't the accomplices, we were the victims.'"

Juvenile wasn't buying that commitment to black folks shit. From his 2006 album Reality Check:

(Talk to 'em) Your mayor ain't your friend, he's the enemy
Just to get your vote, a saint is what he pretend to be
(Fuck him!) Listen to me, I got the remedy
Save your money up and find out who got 'em for 10 a ki'

Did you see the three kids in the masks: Nagin, Cheney and Bush? Now don't tell me Nagin was popular with black folks.

So how did Nagin get about 80% of the Black vote in the 2006 mayoral election, you ask? Let Tulane Professor Lance Hill explain:

"So what happened in the months following the controversial evacuation and rescue efforts? I think it’s clear from the people I have been talking to, both in the city and those still displaced, that by the primary, a consensus had developed in the black community: that white people were attempting to take the reins of city government to remake New Orleans into a whiter and more affluent city. This fear was disparaged in the local media as the “so-called conspiracy theory,” but one event after another occurred that left little doubt that there was an open and organized movement to prevent poor people and their neighborhoods from returning.

"Thousands of poor blacks were evicted from their homes. Utility companies dragged their feet on reconnecting black neighborhoods; Ninth Ward residents were not allowed back into their neighborhoods until May. White “good government” groups fought to deny building permits in the flooded areas, which they hoped to bulldoze into oblivion. Jobs that had been traditionally held by black workers, such as roofers and painters, were given to itinerant Latino laborers. And white neighborhoods effectively prevented FEMA from bringing in 30,000 trailers for displaced people, mostly blacks.

"It then got worse..."

Nagin, having lost the voting bloc that got him elected, figured out the only way to stay in office was to play racial politics:

"Only one person with the requisite power took a stand against these exclusion policies: Ray Nagin. The mayor ignored the recommendations of his own Bring New Orleans Back Commission and allowed building permits in the flooded areas. He rejected the plans to turn the Ninth Ward into a park and promised to bring back all neighborhoods. While many white uptowners openly told the national media that they hoped for a whiter city, Nagin, in his infamous Martin Luther King Day speech, attempted in a clumsy way to assure blacks that they would return in the same numbers as before – that New Orleans was going to remain a 'chocolate city.'”

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the (overwhelmingly black) poor folks of New Orleans decided to stick with their disreputable brother rather than hand power over to a group of people attempting to forcibly remove them from their homes. You can't blame them one bit, but that doesn't mean they liked Nagin or were under any illusions that he wasn't going to fuck them over, too.

And if you'd been listening to rap you might have been knowing this for years by now.

Time Capsule: Balancing Weight & Lightness of the Feminine

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


Photo by Flickr user Guanatos Gwyn

Balancing Weight & Lightness of the Feminine

A stillness keeps all three hands of the clock from moving: snows one wakes to finding limbs, wires, roofs, roads, windshields, balustrades, fire escapes covered in glistening magic, once sun rises. Lime-green of the house diagonally across the way subtly seeping out of the all white. White smoke chimneys. For an extended time, since time disappeared, snow-covered earth drowns out clamor & woes of the twenty-first century. Right now sun reflects off topmost attic window of the lime-green three-story. Yesterday, shoveled drive & sidewalk back down to bare ground, then drove through storm to the library in search of the Feminine, wanting Woolf & Cixous. Truck jackknifed on highway in opposite direction. Decided to take lesser Route 1 on the way home. Only patron in halls of the academic building. Pleasure to deal with those most erstwhile of students, homework spread out on circulation & reserve desks, work-study kids who need to work to supplement tuition. However, when hoisting a shopping bag filled with eighteen books, receive a condescending, powerful stare from a man not quite my age, someone in power, obviously, behind the desk, taking out his own book or books. I’ve met before, & recognize that glare, which in youth might snarl back at, but now simply ignore, but do not smile. While the student checks out the stack of books, I check out the new book shelf: Joyce Johnson’s The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac is the volume Peter Anastas wrote to say he’d given himself as gift for the holiday, & here becomes cosmic gift balancing weight & lightness of the Feminine. Books can be conversations, especially when opening pages randomly, hermetically. Hélène says in Coming to Writing, “You just can’t get rid of femininity. Femininity is inevitable.” Virginia, in January 1933 attends a performance of Pomona at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, set design by Vanessa Bell, she describes as “Fra Angelico against a background of Cassis…” It’s my lime-green seeping out of Timeless white. Time just reentered, slowed down, though still more rapid than its absence. Joyce has Kerouac recall a drive “one night in North Carolina, he had seen the face of a black man… illuminated by the headlights of the car – a face that instead of showing terror as the car full of white men passed him in the dark had a mysterious look of ecstatic ‘gladness.’” At the same time, immersing himself in a text by Dostoevsky, “I studied it carefully & found that he begins with ‘ideas’ & then demolishes them in the fury of what actually happens in the story.”

FURTHER STUDY:

Hélène Cixous
Joyce Johnson

Time Capsule: What I Remember Most, Apart from that Sea + Sea & Albertine

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Donne al bagno (Girls Bathing)
[Bernardino Luini (Italian, ca. 1480/82–1532), ca. 1520-1523
fresco transferred to canvas, 135 x250 cm.; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan]

What I Remember Most, Apart from that Sea

In January, a hundred & six years ago now, Rilke is in Naples with Clara touring cells of what were once depths of a penal colony. He observes the crucial difference of the place reemerging into daylight: the interminable minutes inside. It’s a pleasure to find him in the notebooks without the need to elevate language into poetry or artistic prose, that prerequisite outlined in his essay on the poet’s materials, where he stipulates no word can be the same as that word used in ordinary communication. As I read the report of the couple in the museum marveling at the painting of a swimmer in the water, while two women wait upon the rocky shore, I recalled how anxious I was to get to Capri, get out of Naples, held up there by the horse-drawn funeral carriage right out of Rilke’s famed era. A month later Rilke’s in Capri observing three different seas: the distant one black & heavy; the middle one constantly rising & churning, dark-bottle green; the near one smooth: one layer of chalk-white foam pushing across the rest. It is not a poem, granted, a notebook entry. Not long before he hears the wind in olive leaves extends the tonal scale… I recall that sea & those trees, when I spent time there sixty years later. Dove into that sea every day to get clean. Watched all of Monte Solaro burn one night in the distance. During ten days there, never slept in a bed, never sat at a café table. Despite the gaggle of young girls dressed all in white leaving the glove factory on their lunch break turning my way, giggling; despite the woman from Boston & girl from Santa Cruz; what I remember most, apart from that sea, is the brutal combination of being alone mixed with a sense of freedom, & an overriding minute-by-minute desire to write something equal to it all, remains with me today.

Sea & Albertine

Why wouldn’t Beckett in his miniature, laser-fine study of In Search of Lost Time concentrate on the character of Albertine? Examining the lightning-struck love Marcel exhibits for her, finds it sprung from his own young sadness. Revisits her first appearance in the novel within an orgiac band of cycling Bacchanti. Marcel wonders if she is not mistress of a racing cyclist or champion boxer. Beckett, astounded at her transformation, wherein the beauty mark, first noted on her chin by the narrator, moves on second observation to her upper lip. So in love is Marcel, that even the name Albertine is inadequate to her image, if not the immensity of her Feminine affect to the extent that a name like Homer would be insufficient to encompass epic making, & the word sea do such vastness no justice. Beckett sees Albertine as crucial symbol of Proust’s oeuvre. She is none other than Goddess of Time, into whose faith & worship all mankind is born. She will demand sacrifice, & as with any sacred figure of her realm cannot be possessed.

FURTHER STUDY:

Clara Westhoff
Monte Solaro
Proust (Beckett essay)

On David & Inhuman Humans

One of the inhabited cubicles in the flophouse.
Credit: James Estrin/The New York Times

Some humans ain't human:

“On the Bowery, on the second floor of an ancient flophouse, nine men pay less than $10 a night to sleep in cramped cubicles topped with chicken wire. Half the stalls in their shared bathroom are missing doors, and their halls are lined with spooky rows of empty cubicles whose last occupants either took off or died off.

Directly above them, on the third and fourth floors, stylish young men and women pay $62 to $129 a night for a refined version of the gritty experience below. Their cubicles have custom-made mattresses and high-end sheets. Their shared bathrooms have marble sinks and heated floors. Their towels are Ralph Lauren.

The alternate worlds within 220 Bowery rarely intersect, although the hotel’s flophouse aesthetic is meant to create a 'living history' vibe that is 'equal parts museum and hotel,' its developers say. One of them, Sanford Kunkel, goes so far as to describe the men below, living in walk-in closets, scraping by, as 'an asset to the property.'”

I knew one of those assets to their property, or maybe I just knew of him. Either way I'll never forget him or the big life lesson he taught me.

Fresh off dropping out of college at 19 my boss found enough shelter under the department budget to give me a minimum-wage job at the library where I did work-study. With a dividend exactly enough to cover first, last and security from a dead grandmother I don't remember and the promise of a job paying $960 a month (before taxes) my friends and I signed a lease for a flat on the third floor of a brick building at the bottom of Mission Hill.

The Mission Hill of a dozen or so years ago was not the Mission Hill of today. Since 2000 the "non-profit" universities and medical centers have fully established their aggressive development plans and the students and young professionals they attract are buying into the schemes of gentrifying real estate investors. This undoubtedly works to the detriment of the established community, much of which resides in the four housing projects that anchor the boundaries of the neighborhood like turnbuckles in a ring.

Back then it didn't have the Bank of America / Citizens Bank / JP Licks / Stop & Shop / T.G.I. Friday's / Walgreens / cubicle space Megaplex dominating Brigham Circle. Instead there was: one of those markets—halfway between supermarket and bodega—that only managed to serve a clientele that enjoyed slimy gray meat and Price E. Hunt potato chips; a pharmacy that smelled more like the piss-and-clorox of a dive bar bathroom than a place where medicine was compounded and dispensed; and an industrial-sized laundromat with a parking lot bigger than a football field, despite the fact that nobody using it owned a car. My next-door neighbor a block down Huntington Avenue was a condemned bowling alley until they demolished it and left a fenced-in gravel lot. The gastropub across the street was at that time the Choppin' Block, a bar of ill-repute full of day drunks, crack addicts and junkies until its late last call brought the britpop hipsters (they existed in 2001) in from the bar around the corner. The current owners so throroughly gutted the place that the bar itself is completely new and the front door is on a different wall.

It was in this landscape that I knew David, a regular street bum that floated between the street, the homeless shelter and the halfway house two blocks down Tremont Street. In terms of annoyance he was one of the better neighborhood beggars. He didn't approach you everyday like a complete stranger and try to sell you stolen goods. He didn't lay the homeless sympathy shit on you like one dude who I knew lived in the halfway house (I drank with one of the house employees regularly). He only pulled the unsolicited-doorman-at-the-7-11-schtick during the day when the suckers were hospital employees and not neighbors. Most of the time he just hung out with his dispossessed peers in the circle of park benches we affectionately referred to as Bum Island.

In the very first hours of one bitter, raw day I saw David outside the 7-11. It was one of those nights just too warm to snow with blustering winds blowing shards of freezing rain into the skin of your face. His hoodie obscured much of his head and the darkness obscured his eyes, but his greasy red hair and disheveled beard poked out. His castaway winter jacket that used to be white and coral green was the color of dirty tap water and seaweed. The sleeves stopped about two inches before his wrist bones.

We were in the late-night magic money-making time in between one o'clock and two o'clock last calls, when he could hit up bar patrons stopping in the store with drunken cravings for salt, sugar, grease and nicotine. That’s why I was there and I expected him to hit me up, but he didn’t go to hold the door and he didn't have a cup in his hand. When our eyes met we were the only two people on the block. He came up to me.

"Hey, man. I'm trying to get the hell out of here. Can you help me?"

"Where are you thinking of going?"

"I don't know. Maybe New York. It's too fucking cold here."

"It's not much warmer there, man."

"I know, but at least there are options there."

When he said it was cold he wasn't talking about the weather, and when I realized that something profound sunk into me in a way those frozen rain shards could not. Stung by the situation—the wet, the wind, the darkness, the aspects of poverty shared and unshared—my place on the continuum of humanity seemed static at that moment. I was poor myself, probably one ladder rung below the one I was raised on, living in a neighborhood similar to the streets of my childhood in a community I understood intuitively, growing a few of the bad habits so readily associated with poverty. But I had never lived on the street, nor had I ever gone hungry beyond inconvenience (thanks many days to a sacrificial girlfriend or to carefully scouring the campus calendar for catered events). I had a safety net of a stable two-parent and two-grandparent working-class white family, something not afforded my neighbors past or present. It clung to my soul that, though I may forever be in the proximity of the bottom, I have never been and probably never will be at the bottom of the world.

I asked him if he knew about the Fung Wah, the now-famous Chinatown bus that was then $10 and picked you up in an alley behind a bakery on Beach Street. He didn't, so I told him where to pick it up and gave him the $10 for the bus and the 85 cents to catch the first T downtown in the morning. The look he gave me, that admission of gratitude from a place where a man never does another man a solid, was worth $100 and $8.50 to me, and I still had just enough money in my pocket to buy the cigarettes I went there for. It validated an allegiance to humanity—and therefore in American society an allegiance to the bottom classes—that I haven’t wavered from since.

That was twelve years ago this month. In May of that year I hopped the Fung Wah down to New York and got a (very different kind of) cubicle in a hostel on the Bowery for $25 a night, which was just about all I could afford. As I walked up Bowery from Canal Street passing all the kitchen supply stores and old human warehouses I noticed the sprouting of art galleries, artist’s lofts and condos; it was one of the earliest examples of hyperdrive gentrification I had seen. Where will we all go? I thought When the real estate fire scorches the entire Earth? Where we gonna run to when the world’s on fire?

Twelve minutes up the road I was at the hostel. When I opened the door I stepped in the lobby and saw a red-haired man with a cratered face and seemingly black irises sitting at a table playing dominos. It was David, clean-shaven with short hair and clothes that fit. I was astonished, rendered mute until I could summon the courage to ask the desk attendant some questions.

“Is this just a youth hostel?”

He looked nervous. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t get me wrong, man, I’m not a shrinking violet. They don’t bother me, but those two don’t look like youth hostel people.”

He paused, choosing his words carefully. “The third floor is the youth hostel and the second floor is a rooming house.”

“A rooming house? A flophouse? Not a homeless shelter? Not a halfway house?”

“It looks just like the hostel units upstairs, but people live there.”

It’s very rare that a good deed goes rewarded with the knowledge of success, and exceedingly more rare that a bum does with your money what he promises. Only David knows for sure if he took my money and my advice down to Chinatown that morning as I was passed out drunk in my bedroom, but I saw him clean, calm and housed, with at least some semblance of control over his life. Before walking up to the third floor I took another long look at him. He noticed and looked back without showing the feintest sign of recognizing me or acknowledging that we may have changed each other’s lives forever. That was just the way I wanted it.

Time Capsule: Not Far into 2013

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Not Far into 2013

Out there in the new year, where so much Beauty literally surrounded me above below side-to-side, the only difficulty to take it all in at once, what with clouds sky sun on water snow below ancient cliff stones harking back ages in evidence. I took it. Beauty not without scars & pain, but searing, penetrating, ethereal earth. Not long before its inevitable opposite entered stage left: ugliness in the form of man against nature, his & her unleashed dogs gnashing teeth & barks, if not their own human indifference seeing none of the above & only their own Narcissistic images in mirrors like chain-link fences topped with barbed-wire & broken coconut shells cast far from tropical origins. I took it. Swallowed the good & spat the rest out.