106th Street and Amsterdam

Neighborhood Girl

I’ve never spoken to her.

I have watched her for years. I am aware of her and she is aware of me. I don’t know her name and I’m sure she doesn’t know mine. We have, on a few occasions made brief eye contact and perhaps exchanged wan smiles. I wouldn’t do more than that—I wouldn’t give her a full smile—that would open a door for her to speak to me or ask me for something (although I don’t think she would.) It’s really just that I don’t want to know her any more than I do and I honestly wish I wasn’t aware of her at all. She makes me very sad. She is a “crack whore”.

There used to be a lot of them on my corner—logical, as there was a lot of crack being sold on my corner. I would see them on the streets late at night as I walked home from my bartending gig at The Abbey Pub around the corner. Sometimes I saw them leaving my super’s apartment as I came in after closing the bar. They were mainly black and Hispanic, and all very skinny. They seemed to embody crazed desperation. I tried not to look at them, tried not notice they were there. 

One night, a short black woman who looked well over 40, but may have been much younger, followed me into the elevator and tried to mug me. I knew I was in trouble when she got in, but wasn’t sure how to get out the situation without seeming "racist”. As soon as the door closed she said, “ I need some money, you know what I’m sayin’?”

She was so obviously crazed that I was scared, cramped up with her in the tiny and often malfunctioning elevator. I decided to try and stall her until we got to my floor.

“OK, well, I don’t have any money, but maybe my boyfriend does. Maybe he can help you out,” I said. 

“I don’t wanna know nothin’ about your boyfriend, and you don’t wanna know nothin’ about my knife,” she said.

She had shoved something under her t-shirt and was pointing it at me. It wasn’t a knife—most likely a set of keys. But it was now a direct threat. And I had all of my tips and wages from the bar in my pocket.

“OK,” I said, still trying to hold out for the elevator to creep its way to the sixth floor. I took my change purse out of my bag.

“Here’s what I’ve got,” I said, giving her a few quarters.
“That ain’t all…,” she said.

“Here then, take it all,” I said, giving her all the coins just as the elevator finally stopped at my floor. I kicked the door open and screamed.

“David! David!,” I yelled my boyfriend’s name. She bolted and fled down the stairs before he even got out of the apartment. I was rattled, but unharmed. I never saw her again.

But the woman I’m thinking of now was—is—different. For one thing, she is white, which made exactly two of us on my block when I first noticed her more than a decade ago. She is also kind-of pretty. She’s probably very pretty, it’s just so hard to tell underneath the worn look and manic expression that the cocaine gives her and that she wears most of the time. She’s probably my age, mid-30s now, early-mid-20s then. The other striking thing about her is that she was—is—always well-dressed. She wore stylish outfits and changed them often. Sometimes she would disappear for a few weeks and when she turned up again, her clothes were new and she looked rested and fed. It made me think she must have a family nearby that cared about her, but was helpless to really help her.

I actually saw her “at work” one night. Again, I was coming home from work after closing the bar. David was with me and we were walking the longer, safer route across 106th Street. She was on her knees in one of the building’s recesses, some guy standing over her. We just walked past as quickly as possible.
Once she sold her boots to my super for $5. The next day, she showed up with five bucks and asked for the boots back. They were an obviously expensive pair of cowboy boots. I saw her leaving my building carrying them. Jerry (my super) was standing in the lobby. 

“She is crazy,” he said in his thick Haitian accent. “Last night she say she want to sell them. I give her $5. Today, she want them back. I give them back.”

“Nice of you,” I said.

“I don’t want to have them if she want them back.”

Jerry was a good man. Lonely, I'm sure, but I think he was as often the victim of the "neighborhood girls" as the other way around.

Then I didn't see her for awhile. I can't say that I really noticed she was gone, although I may have. But it had to have been more than a year because the next time I saw her she had a baby. It was in one of the Duane Reade drugstores on Broadway and I was in line behind a blonde woman with a baby carriage. She was buying a bottle of nail polish. She bent down into the stroller to deal with the baby in some way and when she looked up I saw her face. She was very pretty now. The dark circles were gone, her skin was clear and her eyes were sparkling. She saw me, too. She looked me straight in the eye and she smiled--a full smile. A happy, proud smile. I smiled back at her.

I couldn't wait to get home and tell David. A happy ending to an otherwise awful story.

"I saw her David--that girl, the one with all the clothes. She has a baby! She's clean. You wouldn't believe how good she looked."

He was skeptical: "Well, let's see if she stays clean."

I saw her once more, maybe three months later on the #1 train platform at 96th Street. She had the baby with her. After that, in my mind, she was happily living in a pretty little apartment in Queens, maybe, far enough away from the memories of the Upper West Side, watching her child (I don't know if it was a boy or a girl) grow up. Many years went by.

I eventually went through a very painful break-up with David. Shortly after our final separation I met another man and very quickly thereafter found out I was pregnant. I was reeling from all of the changes I had gone through so quickly and eagerly anticipating the baby being the answer to everything when I saw her again: on the street, skinny, and high. She didn't see me or at least didn't seem to recognize me. We were both much older and I was showing. She was hanging out with a couple of guys, darting from spot to spot in that erratic, cocaine infused way. I crossed to the other side of the street and I went home and cried.

Later that day I tried to tell my new boyfriend about her. I couldn't quite communicate what she meant to me, how I cared about her in some way although I only knew her from a distance.

"You're very sensitive," he said.

"Yeah, but that's not it," I told him. "It's...well, maybe you would have had to have lived here back then."

"Well, it's sad, it's a sad story." he said.

I wanted to talk to David. He would understand because he had watched her with me. But talking to him had been impossible since we'd broken up. I didn't understand that anymore than I did my feelings for this woman. There was no one else who "knew her" and who possibly cared about this woman in the same weird way I did. Jerry wasn't even the super anymore, having been tossed out by the landlord a year earlier and I only saw him occasionally in the neighborhood. So, I put my feelings aside as best I could. She became a regular fixture on the block again and I resumed my aloof observation of her.

When my son was about six months old, I was preparing to leave on a trip to visit my parents in Maryland. Infants require a large amount of gear and I was struggling to carry the baby and the baby stuff I would need along with my luggage and get the car loaded by myself. I put the baby in his car seat and left the back doors open while I tried to organize the trunk. She must have been watching me for awhile from the corner, but I didn't see her until she began walking toward the car, staring wistfully and intently at my son. She stopped a few feet away and stared for a long time--just staring at my beautiful baby boy and obviously caught by her own memories and loss. The guys she was with yelled a few jeering comments at her, but she seemed not to hear them. There were no tears in her eyes, but their dryness conveyed a million tears already cried and never completely dry.

I puttered around with the stuff I was arranging, not wanting to jar her. But finally I had to leave and I had to step into her line of vision. I gave her only a sad half-smile. Her expression didn't change and she did not meet my eyes. She continued to gaze at the baby and was still standing there, her eyes following him as we pulled out onto Amsterdam Avenue and away.

Liza Case

Copyright 2006

All Rights Reserved

Truly, Madly, Deeply

“This is starting to look fishy,” my (now) ex-common-law-husband said to me as we walked up Amsterdam Avenue holding hands on a hot night in June of 1991. We were on our third date, walking and talking after seeing Truly, Madly, Deeply at the Loews Theatre in the old Gulf and Western Building. We were now above 96th Street and he was referring to our proximity to his apartment. He didn’t stop talking or walking (he pretty much kept it up for the full 13 years we were together) and soon we were on his corner: 106th and Amsterdam.

We stood for a moment on the corner, which was composed of a Chinese take-out restaurant (still there); a bodega (also still there); a furniture store of sorts (also still there and I still can’t figure it out); across the street was a bar, the Cathedral. “Let’s get a drink,” he said. I agreed.

It’s hard to say which was more bizarre to me, the street life or the scene inside the Cathedral. Outside, Latin music was pounding from an unseen source. Every stoop was covered with people—some with groups of teenagers, the boys frowning, looking tough, the girls made up and in tight clothes, acting indifferent. Some with families, the adults drinking rum from Dixie cups while children played on the sidewalks in front of them, although it was already close to midnight. Small groups of old men sat at card tables set up on the sidewalk and played dominoes. Everyone seemed very festive, except for the pack of teenage boys who stood on the corner in front of the bar. There were three or four of them, all Hispanic (the word I would have used at the time) and wearing the gigantic, droopy pants that teenagers wore throughout the ‘90s. They didn’t seem festive at all; they were quite serious. One of them made eye-contact with my date who quickly ushered me through the corner doors.

Inside, I felt even more conspicuous than I had on the street. Me: 5’10”, blonde, 21 years old and very white. No one inside was white. Everyone seemed to be short, brown and well over 30 (including my date). I guess it was their brownness that was so strange to me. Coming from the South I wouldn’t have found a roomful of black people as foreign—although it may have been equally as intimidating, depending on the circumstances. But these people were neither black nor white, although some of them looked black, but not quite. “Hispanic,” I thought, although I couldn’t tell you now what that meant to me at the time.

The bar lined the back wall of the room and was populated with old men. In my memory, I am the only woman in the room, but that may or may not have been the case. Sometimes I think I remember seeing a fat woman in her 40s wearing in a tight black t-shirt, laughing, but I think she was actually from another evening, much later and perhaps even another bar. The rest of the room was taken up with the kind of large wooden booths you see in Irish pubs, and a few scattered tables. Although the majority of the clientele was older, the atmosphere lacked the morbidity that usually accompanies old people at dive bars. The place had a rowdy feel, like a college bar but without the crowds and with a different soundtrack. The music was loud and with a fast tempo.

I needed to go to the bathroom and I remember asking David if it was safe. I actually said, “Is it safe to go to the bathroom?” although I’m not sure if I actually thought I would be accosted or if I was just worried about sanitation.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll get the drinks.”

The bathroom was tiny and filthy, but the only trouble I had was refastening the ties of the ridiculous pantsuit I was wearing—they crisscrossed in the back, a style that was popular in the late ‘80s. I ran a brush through my hair and reapplied my lipstick in the dirty mirror. I hold that image of myself to this day—it’s the before shot of the before and after I “met my husband,”. My turning point. I didn’t know it at that moment. I thought I was starting a summer fling, as all the others has been.

David was seated at a booth when I returned. I sat down and lit a cigarette. He resumed his analysis of Juliet Stevenson’s performance and we drifted back into that place where new (or soon to be) lovers go where nothing and no one else exists.

Six months later on New Year’s Eve David would ask me to move in with him over "one last drink" at the Cathedral—and I would. A few years after that under seizure threat from the city marshall, the bar’s owners would move everything out (every old booth, chipped glass and beaten up barstool) in the middle of the night. The place would open and close as a deli (really a front for crack dealers) several times before becoming what it is today, Mama’s Pizza (which serves a pretty good slice for $1.50).

Back in June of 1991, our glasses were empty and the conversation had run out.

“So,” David said, “You wanna come upstairs and see my etchings?”

“OK, “ I said.

He took my hand and led me across the street and upstairs to his apartment. In any true way, I’ve never left it since.

Liza Case
Copyright 2006
All Rights Reserved