Crosses To Bear

I was raised to believe I was raised at the lustrous vertex of a congenial port city periodically trespassed by crushes of wheezy befuddled migrants still sopping from their slapdash easterly joyrides. The story goes that motley flotillas were swayed by Nueva Jersey's blushing sirens to bend with the trade winds and mango mingle in the dissipating crosscurrents until the unseemly psalms of the passengers' febrile motherlands tailgated freon gases into the ether. Preachers, principals, aunts, and the graybeard derelicts dueling at speed chess and dominoes naturalized these kinked-out processes to the extent that mind-forged historical curiosities such as triangular trade and Operation Bootstrap were plugged out of the grand pluralist equation. Our majestic city's cosmic pollination was deemed a true and living peephole into paradise's peacefully integrated capes n' colonials census tracts. The sloppy pudding proof of a divine diversity was said to flourish in the washy but jostling marketplace squares, the pageantry-swelled plumed transepts of Lent, and of course the butter pecan, sweet cider, brown sugar, cafe con leche, honey-dipped blended young ladies cursing us playfully through glossed-out pursed-lips for the cool romantic stretch of the Dia De Los Tres Reyes Magos parade route.

Our tidy low-rise, privately owned but publicly subsidized middle-income building slouches on a triumphant intersection with seven other residential complexes. Together, these spots constitute an undeclared hamlet that encompasses nearly every architectural style and zoning type found elsewhere in the larger municipality. To make matters more sordid, the populations and thus perceptions of each structure, along with their legal and social statuses, shift with exhausting frequency. The facades have undergone only the most minor cosmetic surgeries, so the kaleidoscopic nature of life in drowsy "Crosstown" is a local secret unless you wander by and scrunch your clammy earlobes against the concrete. Who could guess that the transient, dissonant rhythms of life in Elizabethport, Jefferson Park, or Midtown were also getting burn in this little northside 'hood smugly nestled between the palatial mansions of Westminister, a series of Jewish cemetaries buffering Newark's riot haunted Weequahic sector, a million and one uptown dope spots, and surly old Newark International Airport? This locale afforded my parents perennial opportunities to proselytize newcomers with a brand of repressively liberating Protestant revivalism very imperfectly grafted onto a Catholic-animist family tree.

I became strung out on holier than thou exceptionalism years before MTV deified superficial heterogenity. Our parlor was an all-hours cascade of illiterate, jobless, star-crossed, asthmatic, and neurotic folks who, owing to their births in either Santo Domingo,  Bucaramanga, Port Au Prince, or Quito could not easily access the new-fangled technocratic solutions to poverty distilled by licensed government professionals. We were outwardly proud of our grass roots outreach even though it obliterated the plausibility of normative familial privacy. My mother engaged the women through tile games and needlepoint while my father preached to the men over lager and cigars; this was work they volunteered to do after finishing ten hour off-white collar shifts in dingy municipal offices. Somehow, messages of spiritual uplift, lessons in English as a second language, and sensible suggestions for the pursuit of employment and housing opportunities were delicately smuggled through the chatter. As the years passed my role in these interactions was upgraded from errand running to the intimate services of English tutoring and armchair head shrinking for every shade of young woman and precocious teenage girl drawn to our open house, many of whom stayed overnight in lieu of a safe or convenient place to rest their heads, knowingly and sadistically driving me to the brink of unfair hormonal chaos.

By high school, I was an unthinking and irrational creature, blissful in my recklessness. Half the time I initiated or invited the kisses and caresses that distracted from gerunds and split infinitives; either way my mack was a little too real to stop them from progressing. Reflecting on ethereal concepts like power relationships or propriety would have to wait. My mother, with her searing third eye vision and madly prudish disposition, was consistently unforgiving. She saw no reason why the forwardness of these girls, (half of whom had been coerced to fuck for bribery just to land on our sacred shores and all of whom wore their daddy issues like white gold custom nameplates) should be called upon as evidence in my favor. With every observed mutual lascivious gaze and less than coincidental brush-by in the hallway, my mother damned me and my unintended coquettes to a more degraded circle of hell, eventually decreeing that I spend as much time away from the kitchen and parlor as possible. This left my bedroom, when it wasn't being occupied by impromptu counseling sessions or fresh off the boat rag dolls using my desk to study for their GED tests.

And then there was the streets of Crosstown, linked to the rest of existence via NJ Transit and positively pulsing to the firmament with one-night skeezes, date rapes, adulterous contortions, romantic misadventures, prostitution of every imaginable stripe, and enough blistering pornographic graffiti to be divided into four glorious gospels.