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Crack House Diaries: Ghetto Music
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7072 Reads
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 The sounds of my neighborhood:
A typical day begins with the sound of roosters. They start âsingingâ, as tradition would have it, at the crack of dawn. This means that we wake up every morning at the crack of dawn, if only for a few minutes, to cuss out the damn roosters.
On weekends, the roosters are followed by the tamale lady. Her sounds begin with the distant rattling of her metal shopping cart on the pot-hole strewn streets, followed by the cry, âtaMALeee-taMAleeeeees!â For one dollar, she will reach into her Styrofoam cooler and pull out tamales de queso, carnitas, pollo and carne. She laughs at my stilted attempts to speak Spanish, but seems to appreciate the effort. The tamales, hot and delicious, are the perfect start to a lazy Sunday morning.
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A weekday morning begins with my daily trek to the west side. The low din of the 110, already backing up with the morning commute, fills the house with gentle white noise. We arenât close enough for it to drive us crazy â just close enough to feel connected to the rhythmic vehicular pulse coursing through the cityâs concrete arteries and veins.
From home I drive to the local YMCA, to sweat for an hour before I put in my time at the office. The YMCA, like the neighborhood, is about fifty percent black, fifty percent Hispanic. The older gray headed black men are the heart and soul of this neighborhood institution. They fill the echoing tiled locker room with politics, art, philosophy and laughter. These educated men have conversations that wander from the results of a local church-sponsored flea market, to the tragic genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan, to an upcoming display of African antiquities at a downtown museum. Like a School of Athens, the young soak up their dialogue, grounding themselves in the wisdom of an older generation.
After eight hours of work, if I am lucky, I leave Marina Del Rey behind and drive back to my beautiful family and beautiful home in the heart of South Central Los Angeles.
The sun begins to set as my â90 Corolla struggles up the ramp from the 405 to the 105. From this perch I have the cityâs best view of the string of incoming airplanes, hanging like miles of Christmas lights in the sky, fading into the eastern smog. They remind me of many of the homes under the flight path, decked out in year-round Christmas lights, where the bedroom windows of children rattle from the overhead traffic until it leaves them to sleep in peace some time after midnight. Our own home is slightly south of the flight path, and far enough east that the planes are still quite high when they pass overhead. Still, Asaâs bedroom window has a clear view of the airplanes, and I tell him that he is a lucky boy that he can count them each night as he falls asleep.
The airplanes are not the only source of noise pollution from above. Several times each week, the men and women of L.A.âs 77th precinct coordinate with the local news stations to reenact the chopper scene from Apocalypse Now. These valkyries or âghetto birdsâ descend from above with twitchy spotlights and cameras. They scan the streets as their whirling blades thunder and shake the houses below, drawing men in pajamas and women in slippers to their porches to look for the source of the commotion.
On weekends the days and early evenings are filled with the *oooomPAH-PAH*oooomPAH-PAH* of blaring campesino, which transitions into the *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* of over-amped hip hop at night. At all hours the *BOOM* *BOOM* cars pull up to the house on the corner, beep their horns, and exchange bundles of who-knows-what with the people inside. Watching from my porch the bundles look like laundry. I imagine a pseudo-exchange of words, âGood sir, here is my dirty shirt. Please take it and launder it. I will return for it tomorrow.â âYes, good sir. I will launder it post haste, but I am not the kind of man who would take the shirt off of anotherâs back. Here, take this shirt in its stead.â âThank you, kind sir. Your generosity matches your manners, both signs of a refined upbringing. Very well then, I will now be off.â âGodspeed good sir. Until tomorrow.â âYes, until tomorrow.â The driver would then role up the window and resume the *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*, and the corner âlaundry serviceâ would wait for the next customer.
Drugs and people are not the only contraband being smuggled into the U.S. through Mexico. A steady stream of fireworks and firecrackers stretch the Fourth of July festivities into a year-round celebration. Judging from my streetâs persistent rocketsâ red glare, and M80's bursting in air, I live in one of the most patriotic neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles.
Of course not all of these explosions are from firecrackers. The neighborhood experiences a tragic amount of gunplay and arson, much of which goes unreported. I have personally witnessed the consequences of this violence, and have yet to find the words to appropriately describe what I have seen. I suppose I will write a very somber post some day when I find those words.
The neighborhood also has prostitutes, who have their own set of soundsâ the clicking of heels on concrete and the histrionics as they call out to potential Johns. Driving up Figueroa, I try to pick out the working girls, who make themselves known with winks, nods, and blown kisses. Empty wrappers and used rubbers, the residue of the other sounds of their trade, show up on the streets, sidewalks and alleys.
And then there is the late-night ice cream truck. Susanâs students swear by the urban legend of a drug dealer combing the streets of South Central in an ice cream truck. Truth or myth, a damn ice cream truck drives through the neighborhood streets, blaring its insipid jingle, often after ten at night. Who the hell buys ice cream after ten at night? Is the driver the South Central matchstick girl, who wonât be allowed home until she has sold all of her wares?
If our neighborhood were an orchestra, the police, fire and ambulance sirens would make up the string section. The bass would come from the *BOOM* *BOOM* cars and house parties. The pulsing percussion of the freeway would provide rhythm, and all would be backed by the morning-to-midnight cacophony of our local canine chorus. Children choreograph their play to this music, performing street-ball grand jetes and sidewalk pirouettes.
In spite of all of this music, whenever I ask the neighbors about what they think of the neighborhood, they always say, âOh, itâs a quiet neighborhood.â Oddly enough, the longer we live here, the more we tend to agree.
Previous:
Crack House Diaries - 911 Is a Joke in Yo Town, part II
Crack House Diaries - What Are We Doing Here?
Crack-House Diaries - 911 is a joke in yo town, part I
South Central Living: Introduction
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| Posted by: RoganFerguson on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - 10:14 AM
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