A few months ago, I moved from a very nice area in East Sacramento to a place next to Del Paso Heights, one of the more notorious parts of Sacramento. Not only that, I moved into a house that was in foreclosure. And I knew it was going in. So, house in the hood, could be kicked out at any moment. Why in the hell did I do this? Well, I was reading A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, and a couple of sentences really hit home. The author, Dave Eggers, is explaining why he is taking a trip to his hometown, the place his parents died.
This trip is about the fact that things have been much too calm in San Francisco- I am making enough money, Toph is doing well at school - and thus completely intolerable. I will return home and look for ugly things and chaos. I want to be shot at, want to fall into a hole, want to be dragged from my car and beaten.Maybe that's why. For the first time in my life, things seem rather stable, jobs good, moneys good, no one's died recently, no drama at all really. So maybe I was looking for some. Maybe chaos is my comfort zone. Probably not, but it sure sounds good.
Anyways, it has been an interesting experiment. While I'm not loaded with money or anything, living in the hood has been a choice for me; I can leave anytime I want. A lot of the residents here have no such choice. This is home for them. I'm just a visitor. Still, you notice certain things. These things aren't news to anyone who's had to live in a lower income area, but they were new to my relatively privileged ass.
For one, there are no convenient major supermarkets in the immediate area. There are however, tons of smaller markets and corner stores, whos prices make the already high supermarket prices look cheap in comparison. It's not like I can blame the major supermarkets either. I have been told there used to be a Safeway, but they had to close due to all the theft. I don't know if that's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. I have no answers, the situation just is.
The post office is a complete joke. It doesn't even have an after hours drop box or one of those blue bins. It's almost an afterthought. Sad, really.
For an area with as much crime as DPH has, there's certainly not a heavy police presence. Around the corner from me, there's a pretty obvious open air drug market, which no one seems to care about.
There is however, a large church presence.
This is a sign down the street from me.
False advertising. Like I said, there's an open air drug market around the corner. And I've gotten a little too used to gunshots. You know it's bad when you have company over and a conversation geoes like:"Was that a gunshot?"
"Yeah"
"OMG OMG"
"Dude, relax, they aren't shooting at us."
So all of this probably paints a pretty bleak picture of my hood, but it's really not so bad. One time, there was a guy going through some stuff out in the garage, but he thought the place had been abandoned. Then there was the tweaker.
Oh, the tweaker. I get home at about 11pm, and at the end of my drive way I hear a woman's voice repeating, "excuse me sir." So I go down to find out what she wants. A ride. She explains that she's my neighbor and used to know the owner of the house (the one I'm "renting" from). She needs a ride to pick up some stuff from her "other" place. That doesn't sound good, but I'm in a dilemma. If I was away from home, I would say, sorry, can't help ya. But she lives next door. Bad enough I live next to a tweaker, do I really want to live next to a tweaker with a vendetta?
So, she gets in the car, and as we drive she proceeds to describe to me an awful depressing life. But she describes it as if it's completely normal and I should somehow relate. She tells me quite matter-of-factly, but in the mile a minute cadence of the tweaker, of how her boyfriend is in jail for a few months for beating on her. "You know how it is." Uh, sure.
So we get to her scary "other place" and she gets what she needs, a rotary phone. What the fungus? I have no idea. On the way back, she jokes that maybe she should make me her boyfriend, except she kind of looks to see my reaction, like perhaps she's serious if I appear to be down. I nervously giggle and immediately change the subject to god knows what. We get back home, she offers me money, I refuse and we part. I survive.
Knock knock. Oh Christ. I open the door, there she is. She's smiling. There's a weird silence. I'm guessing she has a porn soundtrack playing in her head or something. When I say, "Can I help you?" she kind of snaps out of it and asks if I happen to have a phone cord. I am so praying that "phone cord" isn't some tweaker sexual innuedo. Then I remember the phone sh got at the other place. Nope. Sorry. No cord for you. Proudly cellular only since 2004.
She scurries off into the night, never to be seen again. In my time in one of the worst parts of Sacramento, that's the worst thing that happened. Not so bad really.
I'm not about to star in Boyz N The Hood II or anything, but I've now been street tested, mother approved. Word.
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