TRUE BLUE: THE "YOOTS"

Cynthia: So tell me more about the area back then.

Dad: Well, that was just before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the riots. And I remember them putting us on Nordstrom Avenue and down towards Atlantic Avenue for crowd control. There were three of us. The emergency service truck came around and gave everybody 200 rounds of ammunition. Fifty rounds in a box. They gave everybody four boxes of 38 caliber bullets, those were the guns we carried, 38 revolvers, and we said, “Why do we need all these bullets?” Well, about a half an hour later, there were wall to wall people coming up from Fulton Street rioting. Bats, rifles, bricks, breaking into stores, turning cars over, starting fires. And there must have been about 1200 people, estimated, coming up, looking at us. And there the three of us were standing, there were just three of us, I don’t think there were four of us, there were three of us there. We said, “There’s no way we’re going to stop them.” (Laughs) So we all got together and we thought we should do a tactical retreat. We went down the side streets, found a school, and got into a school and barricaded the doors, because there was no way we were stopping 1200 people. They had more guns than we did. So, that was the Martin Luther King Jr. Riots. And there were several riots in Brooklyn. They use to do them every summer. It was just an excuse to break into stores and loot. Liquor stores, furniture stores… and it was usually the youths, or the “yoots” as they say in Brooklyn.

UNDER THE ROSE ZINE: CALL OUT FOR SUBMISSIONS

Under the Rose: A Compilation Zine on Unknown New York is an idea that's been floating in my brain for a while now. The post-industrial wasteland of the city has always been a romantic notion of home to me, but I wouldn't consider this zine city-centric by any means. I'm also interested in the stories beyond the tri-state area, the places you sought soundless refuge or idiosyncratic secrecy, that make up what you call home.

undertherosezine@gmail.com

TRUE BLUE: BUBBLE GUM MACHINE DOME LIGHT

I conducted an hour long interview with my father about his time on the NYPD in East New York from 1968 - 1989. I'll be posting chunks of the interview as I continue to transcribe it.

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Me: Tell me about your first week on the job. What was that like?

Dad: Oh, it was horrible. Coming from Long Island, my first week they stuck me in the 8-0 precinct, my very first precinct, in Bedford Stuyvesant. I worked with a guy on a night shift, which was midnight until eight in the morning, and his name was Freddie Holmes. Really nice guy. Black cop, well seasoned, and he had about 5 years on the job. We had all dark blue uniforms then. I remember him stopping for some ribs on Pacific Street and Nordstrom Avenue at about 3 o’clock in the morning on Saturday evening. Bedford Stuyvesant on a Saturday night at three in the morning is jumpin’. Everyone is out partying. So he left me in the police car...the old green white and black ones with the bubble gum machine dome light… and he went in to get some ribs. And an elderly drunken women, it was in the middle of the summer, come up to the car, my window was down, leaned in the car, grabbed me by my police shirt, and planted a kiss on my lips (loud kiss sound) and she says, “Honey, you’re new here… and their gonna kick your ass!” And I was ready to quit, I was ready to quit. I says, “If she knows I’m a rookie cop, the guys on Nordstrom Avenue are really going to kill me…” So, that was my first week on the job. And Freddie came out of the rib place, kicked her in the ass, and told her to get on her way. And I was ready to turn in my shield and gun. I said, “I ain’t gonna make this. I am not gonna live in Bed Stuy."

MONOLOGUE OF A PROTAGONIST THAT ISN'T TOTALLY ME

I recently found out that the reason blue eyes are more sensitive to the sun than brown eyes is because the blue irises scatter and transmit more unwanted light into the retina than brown irises. Those first five minutes of walking into the sunlight are hard as hell. I shield my eyes, groan, and complain to my brown-eyed friends. They always respond with, “If only I could be so lucky…” and I think this is an interesting choice of words because good luck never looks my way.

I inherited blue eyes from my mother. Her eyes are currently sewn shut, dried out, and six feet under ground (are they even still blue?). Every morning when I wash my face and look in the mirror, I can’t tell if I’m looking at my eyes or hers. I brush my bangs out of eyes and say, “Oh, there you are. Good morning.” I then pull open the cabinet mirrors so that they are facing each other to create an infinite amount of mirrors that line a never ending hallway. Have you ever tried that? It’s like looking into another dimension. It’s terrifying. I like to do this and think about what is going to be at the end of the hallway: an open doorway spilling light, an alternate version of myself doing the exact same thing, my mother. But you can never see the end.

I also recently discovered that the blue pigment is created by means of Rayleigh scatter, which is the elastic scattering of light by tiny particles that are smaller than the wavelength of light. I hardly know what that means, but basically it’s the same optical phenomenon that makes the sky blue. With this information I think of my eyes as puddles, left behind after a harsh storm, rippling the blue skies above. Or the eyes above.

LIKE A DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR

NOTEWORTHY

I found this little note on the street this past Friday:





I found this second note Saturday morning taped to my car. I am curious to know how this stranger knows so much about me, and more importantly, if they could please let me know about this "nanny parking lot" because it sure would make my life a lot easier.

TWO FOR TUESDAY

My post about Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines on the For The Birds blog was linked from NYU Press's blog From The Square. You can check it out here!

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The Dance
(an excerpt from a much longer piece I've been working on)

In the blue-black shadow of the backyard, a piece of gutter hung from the house like a hang nail. It bounced playfully in the wind at the top of the backdoor. Next to it leaned a ladder. The gutter shared custody of the ladder with the unlit Christmas lights that limply hung over the front of the house. He looked up at the house from where he had collapsed in the cool spring grass after trying to sucker punch his son.

“You’re killing her, Dad,” his son had said before the blow. “Did you see her on that goddamn ladder? You’re working her into the grave while you just hide in your office.”

His wife had little to say except to shake her curls at the ladder. His daughter ripped handfuls of grass from the ground as she sobbed. The gutter wailed as it was pushed away from the house by the door being opened and he walked underneath his inadequacies.

He dragged his suitcase, filled with clothes still on the hangers, into his office and slammed the door. He stared at the doorknob and cursed its absence of a lock. He thought of his daughter, constantly employing the lock on her bedroom door every time she walked through it. That sound of metal twisting on metal broke his heart daily. He opened his office door, but only a crack.

The clock read 2:29 AM when he heard moaning in the backyard. He got up from the computer and parted the blinds with one finger. The palpable shadow of his daughter was stretched across the yard in the wake of the motion censored light. She lay face down in the black grass, and as he looked at her the window pane seemed to be streaked with rain, but it wasn’t raining. He picked up a screwdriver from his desk and began removing the door to his office one hinge at a time, the sound of metal on metal like a sonnet.