In the ghet-to

"Hey! Hey Mister!"

My mind swims through the hazy late afternoon heat towards awareness. I'm napping on the ratty couch.

"Hey Mister, you awake?"

My eyes come open to see a young black woman standing in my doorway. She's probably about 18. A little heavy, not un-pretty. She's wearing a yellow and white striped tube top and shorts, her hair in a short 'fro. Her friend is peering over her shoulder. She sees I'm awake and strides confidently into the room. Her friend still lurks behind.

"Uh, yeah, awake, yeah, I'm awake" I manage.

"Well you shouldn’t oughta leave your door open like that in this neighborhood if you're asleep. Somebody come in and steal you blind."

I file this away for future reference and get to my feet.

"Hi, my name's Sharon," she informs me, "and this here's Darlene." I introduce myself. She's looking around. I'm just moving in and what little I own is in boxes and trash bags around the apartment. There's some furniture that I got from the cheapest classified ads, I probably could have done better driving around with a truck picking up stuff people had abandoned. The kitchen is still filthy from the previous tenants. Sharon and Darlene aren't real impressed. "You mind driving us to the store for some smokes?"

"No, sure, fine, glad to help!" I'm being as cheerful and helpful as possible. Partly, that's my nature, partly I'm so far out of my element as to need absolutely every friendly gesture I can get. I carefully lock up the place and drive the girls in my 1974 Pinto to the nearest place for cigarettes.

This is my first apartment after college and if I had the slightest sliver of a shred of a clue I would not be here, but I'm an idiot so here I am.

My room mate, James, is out of town; he'll be moving in after a week. He's visiting his family in Modesto for the last week before school starts. Although I've graduated, I'm really not ready to cut the ties with school and really go out on my own. James and I were good friends through most of school.

Well, not really. James is an asshole. Everyone pretty much knows it, especially his friends, but James has a twisted charisma for losers like me and his other friends. James (don't call him "Jim") will look you in the eye and say, without the slightest irony, "I'm here to live the true and intense life, to experience absolutely everything with unflinching intensity." The word "intense" is his favorite word and comes up a lot. Almost everyone listens to him for five minutes and knows he's an asshole and avoids him, or openly mocks him. Me? I'm enchanted. I'm in the fan club. I'm the only male in the fan club; I'm also probably the only one in the fan club who hasn't slept with him. I'm his bitch, though, all the same. No mistaking that.

We'd decided during the summer to get a place together to start the next school year, and I'd done some ad-searching and phone calling. Somehow James was never around to look at the good places, but I found this cheap place not too far from campus. I'd called on the ad, and the owner/manager Mr. Johnson had us over a few times to talk about it. The place in the ad was gone, but he was going to have another place available real soon. Any day now. Real cheap.

Johnson had a heavy duty barred screen on his front door. That didn't worry us, everybody's gotta be careful. Johnson said that he was evicting the people from the place he wanted to rent to us. That didn't worry us, he'd clean up before he gave us the place. Either of these neon scarlet red flags should have warned us away, but didn't.

We were idiots.

The apartment complex was in the middle of a decent if declining neighborhood down by the freeway overpass. The neighborhood was not too bad. It was just a few miles from the fancy neighborhoods up by the college. The apartment complex, though, was a little bit of ghetto right there in our own backyard. The only white faces in the neighborhood were James, me, and friends of ours we could convince to visit.

Here's the standard disclaimer: I'm not a bigot. I'm consciously as open minded as I can be, but I grew up with mostly white faces around me, white or Hispanic. Blacks were a curious alien species to me, to be treated kindly and with respect, but I couldn't help the curiosity. And maybe a bit of fear. Yeah, fear, definitely.

And I was there by myself for the first week. Sharon's warning to lock the doors even when I was there asleep in the front room didn't help my confidence measurably.

I took Sharon and Darlene out for smokes, and I came back to the apartment. I had some broom sticks and other braces that I used to block the windows shut. I'd unpacked the kitchen enough to have a pan to cook top ramen in. I had some bottles of wine that I'd gotten cheap from work. So, ramen and a glass of wine for dinner.

It was still hot, especially with the windows closed up, so I left the door open while I enjoyed my feast. I guess this was an invitation for the neighbors to drop by. One by one they did, I met Marcus and Big John, and Alfonse and Joey. Sharon and Darlene came around. I started opening bottles of wine, which made a party of it. We all sat out on the blasted bit of dead grass between my apartment and Marcus's and drank up three or four bottles of it.

I wish I could remember that conversation. I'm sure I expressed my naiveté and curiosity with astute questions like, "So what's it like to be black in America in 1981?" but I didn’t write down their answers. I'm sure we talked about the "what kind of work do you do?" and the shitty store that I worked in was looking like a shrewd career choice by comparison. Marcus was the only one with big plans, he was going to take the exam and get a job at a prison. That's good money. We didn't talk much about the college I'd just finished.

We drank on into the evening. Somebody brought out some beer. Alfonse came into the apartment with me while I got another bottle of wine. He looked at my room and said, "How come you ain't got one a' them gals spending the night with you?" and I didn't know what to say. It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be possible to get one of them to sleep with me, and it seemed pretty late in the evening to start trying, if I could even think of a way to start.

Pretty soon it was midnight, one am, and people started drifting off to their own places. Big John said, "I'ma stay right here. As long as I've got a beer can to use as a pillow, I’m perfectly fine." and as far as I know he slept the night on the grass.

I staggered in and carefully locked the door. I went to bed on my classified-ad mattress with the big blood stains in the middle. How naïve I was: I assumed that the blood stains were from a woman having a menstrual accident once or maybe a few times. It actually looked more like someone had given birth on the mattress, or maybe been stabbed on it.

That night was about the best time I spent in that place. I was drunk, people were outgoing and friendly, patient with the idiot white college boy. The rest of the time I was there, my mind told me, "it's fine, I'm safe if I pay attention and keep my wits about me." but I was scared. And, we now know, I had no wits. I wasn't in school, my shitty job didn't occupy me at all when I wasn't there, I couldn't afford entertainment. So I just sat there, read books, talked to the neighbors, and tried very hard not to be scared or to feel poor.

When James finally got there, we had huge fights. I just had to get out of there, I spent as much time as I could up at the college with my girlfriend, who'd also returned for the school year. "I spent two hours trying to scrub that kitchen floor!" James would scream. "Where the hell were you?"

I just looked sheepishly at the floor, I couldn't explain. He didn't understand that I needed a break from the place. He was pissed that I wasn't there for him when he needed to adjust to the place.

"Fuck you, I don't care if you don't hang out here with me, I had a fine afternoon flying kites in the park with Marcus!" James was pissed that I wasn't hanging out with him during the days (I guess he'd forgotten that I had a job).

James was pissed that I wasn't his bitch anymore.

"Alfonse and I went up to campus today." James told me one day. "It was kind of funny, campus security was on our ass, I think it's because he's black. We just ignored them, though. I had to tell Alfonse that campus security is a joke" James doesn't seem to share my concern that teaching young out of work black men from our neighboring ghetto that campus security is a joke may not be the greatest idea.

A few weeks later, the apartment got robbed. James had brought in a cheap tv he'd borrowed from a friend of his, and had lost some cheap stereo equipment. Net value probably wasn't over $50. James was furious. He called the cops, tried to get Mr. Johnson in on busting the bad guys, I think he even had some sort of sting going at some point, trying to buy hot goods to light up the "bad guys". James was pissed that I wasn't outraged and helping him get his stuff back. The cops didn't seem that interested either, unless James could use his pissant loss to help them bust some of the known bad guys in the complex. Of course, James never got any of his stuff back, or helped bust anybody at all. He's lucky he didn't get his ass kicked.

To me, his outrage was a bizarre waste of time. You don't belong here, white boy. You are tolerated. Nobody here trusts anybody, not even their friends, and you ain't a friend. If you are extremely careful about locking the doors and blocking the windows, you may be able to keep from getting robbed blind. If you value something, if you can't chain it to the plumbing or find some other way to make it safe then don’t even bring it in the door. Only an idiot would get upset about it. You play, you sometimes lose. In this place, pretty much, eventually you lose.

We moved out a few weeks later. The boxes of our stuff that we took away had hitchhiking cockroaches, it was two moves later before I finally saw the last of them.

I never told anyone that I always wondered if the guy who came onto campus a few weeks later and raped a woman I knew might have been taught that campus security is a joke by James. I'm sure it never occurred to him, so I have to feel guilty for both of us.