The Hill and the Jungle

When I was a kid, I had a friend named David who lived in the hi-rise coops over on Hillside. "The Hill," as we called it, was considered the "good" part of the neighborhood; the public housing projects, where I lived, was not. Most of the people in that area were professional types, teachers, engineers, lawyers, etc. There were no visible barriers segregating one side of the community from the other, but the Spartan presence of private security patrols on The Hill sent a clear message that said "If you don't live here, you're not welcome here." By contrast, people from the coops rarely found reason to enter the projects, which they often referred to as "the jungle." They believed the area was overflowing with drugs, crime and low-income minorities, even though back in those days the projects were probably more integrated than most New York neighborhoods. Although David's parents strictly forbid it, periodically he would come down to hang out in the projects anyway. Most of his friends lived there. Occasionally he'd drop down and hide behind a hedge bush or a parked car when his authoritarian father cruised along the avenue in his black Ford four door, looking like an undercover narc. His father was a revered high school principal, a local community activist, and a respected member of the coop board. His mother was a popular teacher at a nearby elementary school where she had taught neighborhood children for fifteen years. And in spite of whatever private beliefs they held about low-income minorities, David's family succeeded in maintaining an air of civility in public. However, their worst fears were not completely unfounded.

During the time that I lived in the projects, I saw a number of people lose their lives at distances that were often within arms reach. Most of them were not prime time newsworthy, nothing sensational or spectacular, just another poor, faceless paycheck-to-paycheck slob clocking out via car crash, or hit and run, or maybe a sudden heart attack while climbing the stairs because the goddam piss stench elevator was out of service for the third day in a row. Most times, death was easy to handle from that distance, and it came to our neighborhood much the same as it did anywhere else on any given day. But there were times when a death in the projects could turn your blood into a Raspberry Slurpy and you could feel the icy chunks scrape the inside of your veins as they raced to chill your heart. Like when Anthony's manic-depressive mother teetered on the ledge of their fifth floor window for twenty minutes before finally pushing herself out into the warm evening breeze. She was small and beautiful, and tragically, just thirty-three years old. One of the emergency services cops who had tried to coax her back inside wept openly when they lost her. He felt like he should have been able to save her even though the guys in the truck didn't have enough time to set up a blow bag down below. She landed on the concrete walkway in front of the building with a heavy off-key splash of flesh and bone, a flat thud that reverberated in our chests like the deep kick of a bass drum, a sound that still resonates in my head even today. After they took her away, we watched as the maintenance guys soaked the walkway with high-pressure hoses to wash off the ragged pattern of blood, hair and skin. All of us kids who witnessed it had the same recurring nightmares for days, and for weeks afterward, no one could walk by Anthony's building without being affected by the pile of flowers and makeshift cards that lined the walkway. Anthony was one of David's best friends, but oddly, they stopped hanging out together after the incident.

Then there was that day when one of the older guys named Errol shot his ex-girlfriend five times with a nine-millimeter in broad daylight. The entire incident lasted about a minute, but in that murky underwater permutation of time where the thin line between reality and a dream becomes a hazy blur, the events seemed to go on forever. Stacy emerged from her building with some guy she had been dating for a while, and as they reached the sidewalk, Errol slid out of a parked car, approached them casually, and without a word, shot the guy twice in the chest. He chased Stacy for half a block as she screamed and pleaded into the wind, consumed by fear. She stopped suddenly, holding both hands in front of her as though she was praying, and with tears glistening on her face, Stacy pleaded for her life. Errol shot her once in the head, which brought her down like a fallen tree. Then he stood over her and put four more into her torso as she lay on the ground, her white blouse jumping with tiny bursts of wind as each blue gray eruption from the gun barrel raised scarlet mist from her motionless body. David and I were thirteen years old, and as Errol brushed by us on the way back to his car, I could see that David was paralyzed with horror, wide-eyed and trembling, naked with fear. Errol wasn't able to drive far enough to escape his conscience because just three hours later, while parked on a side street in Brooklyn, he put the semi-automatic in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There was no poetic justice in his death because by all rights he should have been allowed to experience the terrifying agitation and emotional distress of knowing that someone else has their finger on your off switch. He should have been permitted to count the seconds remaining in his pathetic life, and be made to beg and plead like Stacy, and to know the immeasurable panic and helplessness that she must have experienced in those last few moments. Instead, Errol was able to leave this world like footnote to some larger event, and on his own terms.

After the shooting, David didn't come down to the projects often. His parents were quick to point out that things like that just didn't happen on The Hill. And for the most part, they were right. I don't believe David ever really got over Anthony's mother's suicide. Stacy's murder was just another emotional stone stacked on top of it. We were standing just ten yards away when the whole thing went down, and I saw how it affected him. Something happened inside of him that day, I believe, which made him see life differently. He began running around with a couple of long haired guys who hung out down by the bridge. They were known druggies and petty criminals, social misfits who valued nothing that didn't cause others some degree of anguish. In the space of one year, he was arrested twice for shoplifting, once for marijuana possession, and narrowly escaped a DWI, but only because the cops who pulled him over knew his father and decided to cut him a break. He dropped out of college after just one semester, but continued living at home, siphoning money off of his aging parents. Over time, the light in David's eyes slowly went dim. Everyone who knew him noticed it. When you were with him you got the clear impression that he just didn't care about anything. Not long after his twentieth birthday, David was questioned in connection with the murder of a young woman in a mall parking lot. He proclaimed his innocence, but the police firmly believed he was the killer, claiming that he fit the description given by an eyewitness. There was no tangible evidence, nothing linking him to the victim, and since he had his mother as an alibi, he was never formally charged. But the negative attention generated by David's increasingly bizarre behavior ruined his father's career, and soon afterwards, his family moved out of The Hill. I'm told that his mother once blamed me for being a bad influence on her son. If that's true then she did a really rotten job of parenting. My influence just wasn't that strong.

A woman I know who still lives on The Hill says that David's family is now living near Denver. I'm not sure how she knows this, but since she is recognized as a major player in the neighborhood gossip network, I believe there may be some truth to it. Last year, my mother put in an application for an apartment up on The Hill. According to her, The Hill is still a good place to live, part of the "nice" area. But the projects, she says, have never been worse. It's still a jungle, even for those who live there.