Part of my job is adding mileage to my car.
This town is like so many other California towns (it’s almost a city but lacks any sense of culture, though they make the attempts - the museum, the handful of art galleries, the jazz festival, some good restaurants). You go a block and you’re in a bad neighborhood.
I was driving through old town and looking for the auditorium where a friend’s recital was going to happen, took a left turn, and ended up smack in That Part of Town. There are several of those here. I knew it was That Part by the distinguishing characteristics of:
1) no greenery. No grass, no trees, no shrubs. Patchs of bare sandy dirt that are packed down by lots of feet crossing it, or possibly cars parking on it.
2) bare, boxy apartments and houses with bars on the windows. Parts of the walls are coming off. The paint’s in lousy colors - peach that’s faded, white that’s filthy and gray, brown like something you scraped off your shoe.
3) Kids in bare feet and clothing in the wrong sizes, running amok with otter pops bleeding down their arms. Close shaven hair, no adult in the vicinity. One of them trying to get a cat with a stick.
4) The groupings. One corner, six guys, baggy clothes, holding bottles or butts or mp3 players, standing around looking that way. It’s sort of a vigilant, yet lackadaisical air, standing at the ready to do whatever’s necessary yet they also affect a nonchalance that says “I ain’t takin that, yo.” They mill around parking lots and corners like they’re on patrol. In a city with seven major gangs they probably are. Black, hispanic, white - they seem to group along racial boundaries.
5) The cars - beaters, with the occasional Lovingly Restored Classic Mustang or Lexus. New cars are all over town. People who can’t get the kids new school clothes buy speakers for the ride, too.
As hard as we try, people seem to live up to their own lowest common denominator. It’s just culturally not done to take the nonviolent route, in some cases. I have kids from That Part of Town brought in by concerned mommas, and get to talk to them about how their fathers consider the beating of a classmate to be a normal rite of passage. And the momma has to take the bus cause poppa took the truck to buy beer. And that’s the way it is.
Sometimes kids move from That Part of Town and become judges, doctors, lawyers or successful contractors. Sometimes, most of the time, they stay. Family’s there. It’s just the way it is. I can’t go to college, I gotta support my baby momma. The notion that we can change this is looking to be false - you can educate them, tell them about other options, offer them tools and scholarships and point them at the open door of state university. You can’t change the way they think about themselves to get them to walk through.
I can see how civil service employees experience such an incredible rate of burnout. You go to college, volunteer for field work hours, go to all that trouble only to be confronted with a great crowd of apathetic poor people who resist your every attempt to nudge them toward self actualization.
All this to say - I’m tired. Too tired to blog much. Too tired to think much. And the writing was going for a while, and it still might, but it’s so very hot these days that I tend to sit in front of the fan and drink cold tea instead.