When our son Dessalines was coming of age, we had to get him out of the South Bronx. A decade plus later, the South Bronx is still his home. Khalil Gibran reminds us parents:
“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
On a bitter frigid night on 149th st., Dessalines came back home Christmas after sixteen months away upstate. It was good to build with him & just walk through the hood saying what’s up to the old-school characters and hustlers on the corner who remembered us from the boxing and street days. Having my son, one of the human beings I most love and admire, back home, reminded me of so many survival and love-life lessons. I wrote this to my sons:
Hustling: All Day, Every Day
I love the hood. I gave everything for the hood. But the hood is a double-edged sword. It will take you under; it will elevate you. It will suffocate you; it will breathe life into you. It will drown you; it will eternalize you.
The block is schizophrenic and it makes you schizophrenic. It steels you as it dismantles you. It builds you up as it knocks you down. You’re so caught up, you can’t see there is something else out there. The perennial quest for survival produces a certain narcissism, dressed up with a fitted baby blue NY Yankees hat and tan timbs.
The backdrop is grim. A shoot-em up man in search of ghetto glory took out five people on 153rd and Courtland. There were NYPD helicopters in pursuit and dozens of police cruisers crisscrossing every block. This is what my son came home to? A war zone built to destroy us. A ghetto obstacle course. The warden and CO’s release you out the gates like:
Welcome home kid.
Here’s five bucks.
See what you can do now.
Don’t let anymore of that candy go up your nose.
Do the right thing kid!
This is home! An Black August night with Dead Prez bumpin’ in and out of double parked cars on the block. St. Mary’s Park hosts hundreds of families. The children run free. Hot food, cold beer and love are plentiful. The 90 degree air is electric.
Tempers flare and gunshots can break the peace at any given moment.
Block to block, you zigzag in and out of the horror. The herds of the homeless and fallen…the fentanyl, the street mechanics, the unwashed, the unseeable, the unheard, the paper bags, the shopping carts, the survivors…
Surviving, Always surviving but when do we get to live?
The mothers, the Sunday outings, the fathers, the cousins, the reunions, the laughs, the magic, the memories, the births and funerals.
Family is everything in the South Bronx.
Puerto Rican flags, Red Black and Greens, Dominican flags, Mexican flags, Honduran flags and American flags decorate bodegas where everyone knows your name.
The police brutality and neighborhood shootouts hover over our family affairs and holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve are times of merriment, cheer and church. The laughs, the memories and the nostalgias pile up from over the years. We unwind in the presence of our loved ones.
We Let Go
We Let God
We Let Good…
Mental illness?
What’s that?
We don’t have such luxuries.
There is no room to entertain weakness. You bully or you get bullied. We have seen dozens of grown men and women defecating themselves. Do you want to see us among the most alienated?
We lick our wounds, tighten our timbs and move on.
These streets and their overseers are the ill ones.
Who are we but
Spiritual burglars
Soul survivors
On 1 4 9, mental illness is nothing more than brokenness with twenty fancy white, petty bourgeois euphemisms. Pharmaceutical companies and rich people cash in on the very destruction they cultivated. A savage merry-go-round. Hop on board. Where else you going?
Forget about visiting another state or country homie, I am trying to get off this block…
In the words of Bertolt Brecht, “our very survival is a miracle.”
Understand: all this is designed to break us…black people, brown children, little girls, poor whites… the chicken spot, the liquor store, the churches, the broken glass, the talk shows, the laundromats, the leering glares and smirks from the police invaders…
What escape do we have?
The lure of hustling…the ghetto trap. To lay it all on the line like there is no tomorrow.
A hustler is the ultimate Buddhist; all he has is the present.
Tomorrow promises sirens, handcuffs and ten years long gone, Upstate, locked up in a box. You think I’m a be worried about what girl I’m talking to? Or whose wife she might be? Got more pressing concerns homie. The urgency is me.
There is a fire deep within me Unsettled Unsettling the weight of the historical drama vent-up trauma unfinished unblemished tough to shake so watch me move this weight.
I stay lean and mean
and sell this right here dopamine.
My name is a Danny
I am an addict
My middle name is denial
and I am a professional escape artist.
Cauã and Dessalines
Trauma is being unheard and unseen
There is a fire deep within me.
Beyond the bookshelves, the analysis, the penmanship, the comrades & the grand vision, there is a young boy who if left to his own devices, would stay in the streets. He’d rob every tycoon and privileged mansion. He’d dish out every pill, poison, expensive brand-name shoes, purses, Nikes and Victoria’s Secret. Who doesn’t dream of being untouchable? A ghetto great who pulls up with the most beautiful woman on his arm.
It is not about hurting no one else, it is about getting your own. The American way… But of course, you are dishing out damage and pain.
Hustling is capitalism’s bastard offspring. You left us nothing but parade the world in front of us. Watch us make our own bread outta the crumbs you left behind Catapulted to new heights Elevated before my children & peers
Shadow Boxing with fear
Playing possum with the police
Moving forward on tomato cans and bleeders.
The South Bronx burns deep within me.
Once you get a taste of that high. It is Irreplaceable. Just to stack up money in my pocket. Can’t nobody touch this. Tax free. Instant gratification. From nobodydom to somebodydom in the wink of a transaction. Finally, I don’t have to listen to no one’s stories about their new job or financial success. I can finally do for me and mine. But it could all be gone in the blink of a rat’s eye…
Sullied money
The ephemeral eraser of envy…
Resentment is the number one offender; but so is poverty.
To catch something…a midnight fisherman…a feeling of invincibility. The night will never end. Fleeting. So, you have to keep making moves. There is no such thing as enough texts, enough bread, enough women, enough drama, enough tragos.
"Enough"
&
Gratitude
are two words
I never heard
in the streets.
We only had the moment
Instant Gratification
and We seized it
with all of our might
and momentum
Left
to pick up the pieces
in a not so distant
future...
You are on your way to this block, already knowing the next move. Your girl’s texts come through forcing a resynthesis of midnight.
It’s endless Unending internalized psychological warfare perpetually perpetuated on to those I love the most ..... my mirror image
The block
Can't stop
Won't stop
Punch forward around the clock
Insomnia breaks night
Stealing
the last breath of tomorrow...
Written on January 3rd, 2016
Nice, all true! 💯
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
A nice insight into a world I’ve come to understand many judge harshly.