Tuesday, February 10, 2004

WinoHunt

I live in a neighborhoodly neighborhood.  Pretty much all the time, day or night (except the wee hours of course), there are families and kids and old folks strolling around, shopping at produce marts and playing in miniparks and just gathered on the sidewalk to chat while they wait for a table at a restaurant.  The streets are full of life and I revel in it. 

But there are a few places where the street life is not uplifting and where the community suffers for it.  One such place is a fast food franchise where a menagerie of bedraggled winos congregates on a sidewalk sticky with ketchup to beg for change.  Yet even here, the yammering and inarticulate bottledwellers often say hello to me in a friendly voice, ask about my dog, wish me a good morning. 

Far more inimical to the local vibe is a particular storefront cybergaming parlor. It’s a dark room with three long rows of noisy computer terminals where people - mostly teenagers and childish adults – engage in on-line interactive battles.  Outside, there’s usually a knot of 8 or 10 teens and tweens, frowning and spitting and talking loud trash, dressed in a disaffected uniform of jeans or black chinos, oversized athletic shirts, prominent clip-on cellphones, and shades.  They smoke ostentatiously and scowl fiercely at everybody.  A few months ago a kid walking past them got jumped and beaten badly enough to need hospitalization. 

The face of this storefront, with its utilitarian lack of detailing and its large naked window opening onto a murky interior, is a gaping visual vacuum on the street; the noise pounding out the door is a cacophony of machine guns and explosions, and those nasty kids turn the very air around them sour. 

A week or so ago I walked down this stretch of the boulevard on a little errand in the shank of the evening.  Heading out west I forded the fetid crowd around the parlor door, giving those little poseurs a look at a real scowl; they parted and let me pass without acknowledging me or interrupting their noisy conversation, show-smoking, and prodigious expectoration.  I’ve got nothing against kids, but these punks are another story.  It’s not that I felt unsafe - they may be young but they’re not stupid enough to interfere with a scowl like mine.  I just don’t like being around them. I even considered crossing to the other sidewalk for the return trip back home, but then I forgot and came back the same way.

What I saw warmed my heart.  The little crowd on the sidewalk had migrated indoors, where four or five of the noisiest, pushiest delinquents were gathered around one side of a small circular snack table near the window.  Opposite them sat three men from the sidewalk in front of the fast food joint.  The three older men weren’t talking much, their hollow dulled eyes sunken in the grizzle of their weathered faces, their lips pursed against the dehydration of weather and booze.  They wore black denim jackets - profusely stained, and grimy blue jeans or work pants - long, long past their prime.  Their shoes and boots were worn and shoddy.  They perched on tall stools like greasy seagulls on a traffic signal that flashed “caution” in all four directions. 

There were cards on the table, and a pile of change.  A kid threw down with a triumphant hoot of laughter and a conspiratorial glance to his support group behind him.  Across the table, a wino laid out his tattered cards and, without cracking a smile, gathered up the change.  I could see that the kid wanted to curse him out, shout at him.  The winos nailed him with expressionless faces.  The kid said nothing, gathered back the cards, and started to shuffle them again. I walked home and drank a bottle of wine all by myself.