White Trash
Tuesday, June 9th,
2015
9:49 PM
Yiruma – River
Flows in You
“… maybe I’m
just overwhelmed with moving out but I haven’t been able to find a space to
write in my room. I feel creatively suffocated in there. It’s been a blessing
to stay in this house, seriously, I couldn’t have asked for more but I cannot
say that I am unhappy to be leaving.”
“You don’t like
this area?” She asked me as we walked past the corroded junkyard cars that were
parked on the rusty gate that separates the railroad tracks from 26th
Street.
“Not really.” I
looked over at the bed of budding flowers that were growing in the small ally garden,
which seemed to be totally out of place among the rest of the environment.
“It’s an up and
coming neighborhood but sometimes it feels so trashy, particularly on this
side. I never thought it was going to be like this… The neighbors are so loud
when they talk outside at all times of the night with their irritating accents,
some of the people walk around the streets with nothing on their feet – a true
sign of how dirty they are, and the rats just up and die on your back porch for
poor, for innocent dogs like Tay to sniff and get sick from. No, I do not like
it. Honestly, it was my first real experience living around what my roommate
and her friends refer to as ‘white trash’. When people think about Baltimore,
they immediately refer to The Wire and the drug abuse and murder rate that is
causing the government to cut school funding so that they can use that money to
continue building more jailhouses for our people. No one shows this aspect of the city.”
Kori and I made
a right on Hampden as we walked home from Terra Café on 25th and St.
Paul. It was a little after eight and the sun was going down. The stench of
alley cats in heat was about to be temporarily soused by the rainstorm that we
could smell emerging in the air. There were a few elementary aged children,
white, Black, and Black and white, tossing a football back and forth to one
another. A little blonde girl, who kept pulling her denim shorts up to keep
them from falling down, was throwing and catching the ball with more accuracy
than the boys. She looked filthy with her bruised knees and dingy, white, no-named
sneakers. She probably smelled like she looked at this point in the day but she
was still very pretty, especially when she laughed, while taunting the boys
every time they would incomplete one of her tosses.
Kori and I were
halfway through the block when the sound of shattering glass clamored
throughout the street.
“WHO THE F*CK
DID THAT?!”
I looked to see
where the voice was coming from. I saw the broken window but I couldn’t figure
out where the shouting was coming from.
“WHO THE F*CK
DID THAT?! WHO THE F*CK DID THAT?!”
In the doorway,
there he stood, a stout-bellied white boy who couldn’t have been any more that
seven years old, yelling at the children as if he was their father. The top of
his red head barely reached his mother’s upper thigh. She stood behind him and
joined in, vociferously yelling at the kids, who scattered to run into their
own homes.
“WHO THE F*CK
DID THAT?! I ain’t askin’ y’all lil’ f*ckers again! I hate livin’ here! I hate
you stupid kids! Y’all ain’t good for sh*t! All y’all ever do is steal my sh*t
or break my sh*t! F*ck that! I am calling the cops on y’all’s little dumb asses
right now!”
Baltimore, like
many urban cities in this country, is known for having elongated streets such
as York Road or Park Heights that are filled with abandoned homes, closed
recreation centers, and an unnecessary multitude of liquor stores on one end,
while immense mansion-sized homes, owned by the well-off and wealthy,
shamelessly lie on the other end. Hampden Avenue isn’t as long as York or Park
Heights but between 26th and 27th, the homes and caliber
of people living on that block are clearly in a lower class than those on
Hampden between 27th and 28th. One can compare something as simple as the
entrance doors of the homes on both blocks and notice a big difference.
Last week, I was
sitting on the stoop in front of my house, waiting for my professor to come by
so we could meet about my classroom-based documentary that we have been working
on. Right before she came, a middle-aged white woman who lives on the other
block came running down the street screaming about a man owing her six dollars.
She threatened to kill him. Ten minutes later, she came back around the corner,
much calmer. She walked by a younger woman who looked like a bulimic dope fiend.
Even though she was pregnant, she still looked bulimic. Her bones were
protruding through her colorless skin.
“Why the hell…”
she paused mid-sentence to take a long pull and blow out the smoke of her
freshly lit Newport, “…are you having another baby girl!?”
This was the same
woman who was about to murder a man over her six bucks only five minutes
earlier, causing a commotion in the middle of the street, with a person that
was nowhere in sight. Here she was again, appearing to be talking to herself
because the woman who was pregnant did not respond. Though, it didn’t seem to matter
to Ms. Six-Dollars, she kept on going with her tedious monologue.
“How you going
to have a baby and you still out here tricking? You still out here getting
higher than Jesus rising from the dead! That’s a f*cking shame. You know damn
well you shouldn’t be having no damn kids. You ain’t even taking care of the
ones you have or taking care of your f*cking self!”
She walked across
the street, still ranting to herself, while the pregnant woman almost wore the
skin covering her knuckles out, knocking and knocking on the graffiti painted
door, until a young man wearing an Oriel’s cap on the other side opened it and
let her in…
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