April 29, 2004
Stop and Cop
It's strange what triggers old memories. Memories like the taste of Sealtest Vanilla Ice Cream on a summer Sunday night with Wild Kingdom on the tube, or the smell of stale urine in one's diaper from way long ago. Pinstrokes do, I'm told, and so does Dax, on occasion. He was reminescing on the Inman Park Festival, and it triggered a pinstroke memory.
I lived in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982 as a struggling grad student with a bride, and I was quite jealous of the yuppies a few years older than me with some fresh coin in their pocket. They were buying up old homes in Virginia-Highlands, and Inman Park, and Little Five Points, and creating vibrant new neighborhoods.
I checked my wallet, dispersed the errant moths, and determined to gentrify on the cheap. I took my VA benefits and bought a $19,000 house about four blocks beyond where any civilized peoples would ever live. Call me a racist if you want, but have you ever lived in a neighborhood where you were the only white person within a half-mile radius? I have, and my idealistic self felt very noble. I was a trailblazer, I say.
I was game. My immediate neighbors were very cool, and we had each others' back. But I moved to an upscale condo near Piedmont Park after six months or so, after a burglary deprived me of my father's .45 Colt from WWII and my stereo (all I owned at the time), and I caught some reprobates free-basing in my crawl space.
Where am I going with this? Oh, yes. The Stop and Cop. Two blocks north of me was a seedy intersection where the locals would sell small manila envelopes of so-so reefer. The funny thing was there were 3 young punks on 3 of the corners, and an old man in an orange vest on the fourth. The old man was fearless. He'd scream "You can get it here!" at the top of his lungs, waving his envelopes, and totally nutting up the youngsters, who would assume you were The Man and melt into the woodwork. That old man owned that corner. He was an entrepeneur par excellence.
Now, I'm not saying we were on a first name basis, or were sharing the new Beaujolais vintage over runny cheese, but we had a relationship. A relationship based on mutual trust, and distrust, and hand signals, and furtive nods. Okay, I was a regular.
My father-in-law came to visit. Being naturally embarrassed that I had his Princess ensconced in what would generously be described as a fucking ghetto, I decided to show him how close we actually lived to the gentry, to Emory, to the clean folk. I forgot about my Main Man as we drove north. When I stopped at the intersection stop sign Mr. You Can Get It Here strolled up and slid three nickel bags in my slitted window, then stood defiantly, waiting for his $15.
That was my undoing. That black bastard knew I was never good for more than a nickel at a time, but figured since I had a guest I would take the three out of pride. My father-in-law was saying, "What's he doing? What's that? Why is he holding his hand out? Is that Drugs?"
In a quandary I shoved the three nicks out the window and sped off, muttering something about "stupid niggaz". For two weeks after that, as I went through the intersection, Mr. YCGIH and I would give each other the finger. Then, of course, good old-fashioned commerce, supply-and-demand, resumed.
I think about that fellow from time to time. I drove by my old house in 1989, and it had become a crack house. Steel door with a slit in it for transactions. Too sad. Hard drugs take the tradition out of a neighborhood.