When I was growing up, friends and I occasionally played
D&D in a sporadic free-fire zone. Not out of any sense of desire or
excitement. Rather because that’s where our best, most imaginative DM happened
to live.
My friend lived in public housing. I’m sure a few of you are
now nodding your heads as if that explains everything and is all you needed to
hear. This was in Cocoa, Florida, not Cabrini-Green outside Chicago. But that
didn’t mean there weren’t issues most of the players in our gaming group had never
dealt with before, or likely since.
First and foremost was the 2 o’clock news.
Being in high school, we tended to keep late hours. Many of
us worked part-time in restaurants, so our weekend free-time rarely overlapped.
When it did, we would sometimes game late on a Friday night. Often, we would
game at my friend’s place because his was the most warm and inviting, and
tolerant of our odd, extended hours.
His family’s unit was on the end of the row which meant it
faced two streets, with a common green space behind it between their row of
apartments and the next row over. All the streets in this section of the
neighborhood were named with either a number or a letter, which even then
struck me as either unimaginative or contemptuous. When I’d first met my
friend, he’d lived in a slightly larger unit in a slightly better section where
the street was named after a flower. His family had been forced to move when
his sister had moved out. The family was apprehensive about the new area as it had
a worse reputation than where they had been. To my middle-class ears, that
trepidation spoke volumes.
Still, theirs was a place I could drop by unannounced at
midnight, as long as I followed two simple rules. First, rap softly on the back
door to see if my friend or his brother was still up. Second, step back and to
the right, into the light his mother’s bedroom window looked out onto and wait
until I saw the curtain move. That meant she’d identified who I was. I’d been
told in no uncertain terms there was a loaded .45 on the other side of that
curtain so not to mess around. His mother had a well-earned reputation in the
neighborhood that meant she could guarantee that no one would mess with the
random white boys who darkened her door at all hours. Her precautions stemmed
from how she’d earned that reputation. But that’s a story I may have already
told.
One particular Friday night, the stars had aligned. All of
our merry band of adventurers had piled into my friend’s tiny living room. It
was just large enough for a couch and a coffee table with a couple chairs
dragged in from the kitchen. Most of us were content to sit on the floor. Behind
the couch was a head-height window that looked out onto the street facing the
front door.
This Friday night was unusual. For whatever reason, we’d
gotten started early, something like seven or eight o’clock. Which meant my
high school girlfriend was with us. She had just recently joined our group and
was only an intermittent attendee. While the rest of us had been hanging out
here for years, public housing was a completely new experience for her.
Once we started playing, our exact location didn’t matter.
It wasn’t quite the large dining room table most of us had started around but we
held our character sheets in our laps or rested them on notebooks. We rolled
dice on the coffee table or the floor. Little did some of us know that this was
good practice for when we moved into college dorms a year later. By those
standards, this location was palatial.
I don’t remember the adventure we were on, or even who was
running it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. All I remember is that we’d all
gotten into character and were enjoying each other’s company. We knew we didn’t
have much time as my girlfriend had to be home by midnight. Our surroundings
faded pretty quickly as the fantasy world sprang up in our minds.
Sometime around 11:30, in the middle of what we knew was
likely our last encounter of the evening, we heard first one sharp bang outside
followed by a couple more. Pop. Pop-pop.
I was sitting on one end of the couch, another friend on the
other, my girlfriend between us. Without even looking up from our character
sheets, both he and I slid to the floor to get our heads below window level
like synchronized swimmers diving underwater. Nothing new, nothing that needed
comment. Almost no one else reacted except for a quick instinctive glance to
check that we all had cinder block between us and the street. We knew the
routine.
My girlfriend didn’t. She immediately turned and popped her
face into the window, peering in the darkness outside intently, scanning the
street for what had just happened.
“Were those gunshots?” she asked.
My friend at the other end of the couch and I again reacted
simultaneously. We turned in tandem and each grabbed a different shoulder,
physically hauling her below the window.
“Yes, those were gunshots,” we confirmed in stereo. That it wasn’t
really a good time for prairie-dogging went unsaid.
The friend whose living room we were in casually added, “I
guess the two o’clock news started early.”
The rest of us just nodded sagely and turned back to our
characters. We knew we’d just been granted a little bonus time. Then we noticed
that my girlfriend’s face had gone somewhat ashen.
“Uh,” she said uncertainly, beginning to pack up her
character sheet and dice, “I think I’d better go.”
We all just smiled and shook our heads, not realizing that
she hadn’t been through this drill before. Like walking into Mordor: one
doesn’t simply wander outside in the middle of the 2 o’clock news.
Like many people, we all worked the kind of jobs that got
paid on Fridays. As did the people in my friend’s neighborhood, many from
regular, low-wage jobs, some from public assistance. Like any working-class
neighborhood entering a weekend, that meant people had a little jingle in their
pocket to unwind from the stresses of the week with a little alcohol or other mind-altering
vice of their choice.
But unlike our middle-class neighborhoods where most people
preferred to get their party on behind closed doors, this neighborhood was more
social. People liked to hang out on stoops and in driveways, catching up on the
week’s events. Picture a southern version of Irish Boston, or Italian New York,
or any other somewhat closed community of your choice.
And like people everywhere, once tongues were well
lubricated, people began to gossip. As their filters wore off and their
self-censoring inhibitions disappeared, rumor and inuendo began to fly. Like
the worst kind of high school whispers behind the bleachers or in the bathrooms
most of us are familiar with.
My friend said you could learn everything you needed to know
about what had gone on in the neighborhood during the week just by listening on
any given Friday. Who was into what, who was fighting with who, who had cheated
which deal, whose kids had broken into what car, who had good drugs or bad, who
had a new job, who was back on public aid, who was in or out of jail, and who
was sleeping with who. Kind of like a PSA meets CNN Headline without any of
that pesky double source confirmation. Think Fox News.
Sometime after midnight, the long knives came out from old grudges
or new grievances that had been stropped to razor sharp. Inevitably, tempers
flared when someone crossed a line until someone else decided it was time to issue
a few retaliatory warning shots, which often brought the street party to an
end. Often, but not always. That crescendo usually came around 2 a.m. just when
the juiciest bits of gossip were being served.
The 2 o’clock news.
“You’re stuck here for the duration,” I informed my
girlfriend. “We may as well keep playing. It could be a while before things
clear up outside.”
“What do you mean?” she replied with a mixture of suspicion
and incredulity. “Won’t someone just call the cops?”
We all looked at each other uncertainly. How to explain that
we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Or in her parents’ Indiana where they literally
shot prairie dogs from the front porch for entertainment.
My friend stepped in to salvage us. Someone may or may not
call the cops. Likely not for a variety of reasons if no one had gotten hit.
Even if someone called, CPD wouldn’t arrive for at least half an hour, after they
rounded up a couple two-man cruisers from more important duties. They didn’t waste
much patrol time in his neighborhood. If they didn’t just do a drive-by, they
would likely hassle everyone indiscriminately. No one would talk to them, at
least that night. If they did, it might end up as a community bulletin next
week. But in general, very few people trusted CPD, who at the time had a well-earned
reputation for being racist, indifferent and heavy-handed. Kind of a rock and a
hard place situation.
Once my girlfriend figured out that we weren’t trying to
scam her into breaking curfew, she settled down. We convinced her to call her
parents and tell them she’d be an hour late. That we were in the middle of
something. Generally, our parents only wanted to know where we were, when we’d
be back and that we were safe. In our minds, she was definitely that. As long
as she waited for the street to clear. Which it would in about an hour, one way
or another.
When it did, we would all escort her to her car, and convoy
her out of the neighborhood if she wanted. Hell, I could drive her father’s
truck and have someone ferry me back. That was extreme. In an hour people would
have calmed down and gone to bed. The excitement was over. Again, this was
Cocoa not South Central. We were just waiting for the all clear, which was a
little more art than science.
She eventually called her parents and we kept playing. But
by then, the game spell had been broken. When we disbanded for the night, we
admonished her not to tell her parents exactly what had happened fearing she
wouldn’t be allowed into my friend’s home again in daylight or in darkness. She
didn’t listen, with predictable results.
But that’s not the point of this story.
At a party a couple months ago, a friend and I got talking
about gun control.
When I told this friend that I had been in neighborhoods
where guns were necessary to protect yourself because you couldn’t rely on the police,
his immediate answer was, “Sure, but don’t export it.”
I found that statement troubling but didn’t pursue it. It
was a holiday party after all.
But that answer niggled at me. The longer I thought about
it, the more I found it to be the worst kind of pearl-clutching privilege (and
in general I despise that word). To me, it implied that we just need to keep that
over there, wherever there is. Those poor neighborhoods. Not in my suburbia. Or
god forbid my exurbia.
Ok, that’s probably more than a bit unfair.
This was not what you would call a safe neighborhood. My
friend didn’t. It was a poor neighborhood. It grew out of a legally mandated,
segregated neighborhood. This was a neighborhood where the annual MLK parade
drew angry KKK protestors on the way in and the way out. A neighborhood where
many of its students were bussed to distant elementary and middle schools but
couldn’t get proper funding or maintenance for their own schools within walking
distance. A neighborhood where the cops were more likely to hassle you for the
state of your car as you drove to work than to protect and serve. A neighborhood
where if you called said cops, they might or might not show up in a timely
manner for what most neighborhoods would consider pretty serious crimes. Or if
they did alone, on a very bad day, they might find themselves trussed up in a closet
by a local drug dealer who would then issue very serious threats against
whoever called. A neighborhood where you could be working your second job
restocking a walk-in freezer in a convenience store and emerge to find your
cashier freaking out because she couldn’t remember how to open the register
while someone was screaming at her and pointing a gun at her face.
Do I want to export all that to my neighborhood or any
other?
Obviously not. In fact, I don’t want it to exist at all. But
I know it did and still does. And likely will in places for the foreseeable
future.
It’s not about exporting it, it’s about correcting it, one
piece at a time as we are able. But as we do so, those of us inclined to do so,
we need to remember there are unique circumstances which we may not share,
understand, or really be able to relate to. And yet they are real and must be
taken into account.
It only took our circle of friends a couple years to become
inured to the situation. The 2 o’clock news had become normal to us, not even
particularly threatening. Just something that made you slide to the floor
without comment and keep going with whatever you were doing. But we were young
and we were tourists, only visiting on evenings and weekends. We may have
internalized it but we didn’t live it, not 24-7-365.
So, what do you do with that?
Here’s the thing. I witnessed my friend’s family struggle. I
caught all the veiled prejudice and not so silent judgement directed their way
growing up, some unenlightened, some very purposeful, all of it unrelenting. I also
heard the tales of the levels of bureaucracy they were up against on any given
day. That’s not an excuse. It’s a reality. One that you and yours have hopefully
never seen.
What we call Welfare isn’t a monolithic, overarching
program. There are dozens of federal, state, and local agencies, each with
their own bureaucracy and regulations. To give you an idea, there was federal
housing administered by a local authority (not free, supplemented down to your
income level), programs for winter heat (but not summer AC), various nutrition
programs (including SNAP, WIC, free and reduced lunches), pre-k and
kindergarten programs, public assistance (what we call Welfare with various
limits and restrictions), mandated busing (for his neighborhood, not mine)
plus all manner of other social services (some of which you do not want to run
afoul of if they show up at your door).
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my
head. Each program was intended to address a specific problem. But no one had
an advocate to ensure they were being treated fairly, or even received any
benefit they might qualify for. Everything was DIY and OJT. Most of it is
Byzantine by design to discourage people from accessing the aid they need.
I’ve just barely scratched the layers of intertwined
complexity. There is no way to fix it all at once, not by passing a single
piece of legislation or addressing a single aspect of the problem. We’ve been
trying for fifty years with only moderate success. In the context of gun
control, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for my friend’s mother that would
have made her safe.
Did owning the gun make my friend’s mother safer? You can
bet your life it did. When that curtain moved at midnight, I knew she was dead
serious because of the stories she or her sons had shared with me. She and her
family had been threatened by some very sketchy people in her life. People she
rightfully feared, with no one to protect her. But I also knew I was safer in
her house than I sometimes was at home.
In short, my friend’s situation was bigger than the 2
o’clock news. Addressing that alone works at the symptoms, not the underlying
condition.
So, as we try to untangle this situation, and many other
hot-button issues in this country, we need to be mindful that our solutions do not
to make the problem worse for people just trying to get by. Because some of
them are unlikely mentors. Like my friend’s mother and brother have been for
me. Without a doubt, I would not be the same person without them.
And that, my friends, concludes this very middle
class, suburban, equinox edition of your 2 o’clock news. I am Noddfa Imaginings,
and you have found sanctuary.
©
2020 Edward P. Morgan III
