Bouncer and I got off the Thruway at the Utica exit and proceeded
south to the Cornhill section of the city.
“The first place I want to see is my old
neighborhood,” I said with quite a bit of enthusiasm. My mood had lifted tremendously since leaving
Saugerties a little over two hours before and I was excited about seeing where
I lived as a boy and also the house in which my grandparents lived when I was
quite young..
But what
a tragedy Utica has become. We scooted south down
Genesee Street and promptly got lost somewhere over Bagg's Square, which isn't really
there any longer. It's somewhere beneath
a traffic ramp that flies over a few hundred years of history and lands at the
foot of John St. You get dumped on John St. only if you aim for Genesee St. and vice
versa. I wondered if that was the city’s self constructed omen.
We drove up through an
empty intersection that was called the
Busy Corner. The Hotel Utica sat
quietly off to our right a few blocks away. I wanted to stop the car in the
middle of what used to be a very busy thoroughfare, get out and shout,
"It's OK, everyone can come out now! We won't hurt you! We bring greetings
from another planet." But Bouncer
talked me out of it.
We continued up Genesee St., myself driving.
“Have you seen that
tractor trailer that’s been following us since we got off the Thruway,” Bouncer asked.
“Not really,” I said.
I was too busy watching the storefronts glide by as I hoped to recognize at
least a few names amng the businesses.
There were none that I remembered. Bouncer scrunched down in his seat and looked behind us.
“It’s an older woman
wearing a Boston Red Sox hat, “he said.
“That’s nice, I
replied,” but I wasn’t really listening.
Where the hell was that ice cream shop we used to go to after school
when I was a sophomore?
At the top of the
hill, we turned left on Eagle Street and that's when I began to realize the Cornhill before my eyes in no way
resembled the Cornhill I remembered.
Half of the homes were gone, burned down I had heard, some by residents
and some by the city.
How does that happen? An
entire section of the city that once housed working men and their families,
church goers for the most part who kept regular hours, who took vacations in
the summer, bought books for their kids as well as movie tickets and tried to
raise them to be responsible adults. How did it all disappear, to be replaced
by poor families, many of whom accepted social welfare benefits as a right
rather than a loan? What rights did the current residents possess that men and
woman of our parents’ generation did not have?
What society or government had allowed it to happen? And why?
We stopped the car on Steuben Street in front of my
grandfather's small bungalow. The man
had died there in 1948 and Grandma came to live us. A black man sat on the
front porch. I saw him reach his hand under his jacket and leave it there as
the two of us got out of the car.
"Hi, we're
religious brothers," I said unnecessarily, since we were wearing our
robes. "We stopped to look around. My grandfather lived in your
house," and I waved to indicate the house.
The man on the porch
said nothing, but continued to look from one to the other of us.
"Many years
ago," I continued. "They lived here back in the 1940's. And Thirties
and Twenties ...."
No response came from
the porch. I looked up and down the
steet and wondered when was the last time it was filled at mid day with
children playing. Girls drawing
hopscotch diagrams on sidewalks and boys darting in and out of driveways and
down the sidewalks on their bikes.
"What do you
want?" the man finally spoke.
Under his breath Bouncer
said, “Gun, Jesse.”
"Uh huh,” I
answered. Then louder to the man on the
porch, “Nothing, Thank You." I was watching where the man’s hand had disappeared
under his jacket and I didn't plan to take my eyes off that spot.
"Well,
Thanks," I said. “We’ll be going now.”
It was then I heard the
tractor trailer engine roar to life and an air horn begin to blast.
“Take this with you!”
screamed the man on the porch and I could see something in his hand glinting in
the sunlight that I assumed was a gun. Bouncer
and I stood frozen as the truck pulled up behind us.
The man on the porch
swung his warm around behind him as if he was winding up for the greatest
baseball pitch of his life. When his arm
came down he caught his gun hand with the other and stood in the classic firing
pose, slightly crouched, arms extended out in front of him, aiming at us.
A terrible sadness
crept over me as I watched the agent of my destruction prepare my death and I
could not tear my eyes away. Behind me air exploded out of the brake cylinders
and the pads slammed down inside the wheels.
Bouncer stood slightly ahead of me and I could see he had turned to look
at the truck.
“Holy Shit,” was all
he said.
The man on the porch
fired off three shots in quick succession and I heard at least one of them
strike metal behind me.
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus,”
Bouncer was murmuring. We were both
still standing and I didn’t think either of us was hit. The man on the porch
turned and ran in the front door of the house.
The sound of a truck
door slamming behind me brought me back to earth. The tractor trailer crunched
into first gear as I turned around and it slowly began to move away down the
street.
“Did you see her? Is she OK?”
I asked Bouncer.
“Was it a woman?” he asked.
“What did you see,
Bouncer?” I asked as I grabbed his arm and turned him toward
me.
“I don’t know,” was
his reply.
I tried a few times to
get Bouncer to describe what he saw that afternoon on Steuben Street, but he would
shrug his shoulders and remain quiet.
I’m convinced he witnessed something sacred and indescribable.
“I don’t want to ever
see anything like that again,” he said, out of the blue, as we were returning
from the village not long ago. I
immediately knew what he was referring to.
“You probably won’t,”
I said. “We always worry about events
repeating, but it turns out the important things in life only happen once.”
“That’s probably
true,” Bouncer replied.
“I think so,” I said,
“the good and the bad.”
Back In The USA
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