A FORMER DOMICILE

As seen on the convoluted route home from dialysis on Friday: 50 Ocean Parkway, the building where Glenn Greenberg and I shared an apartment between 1995 and 1997. I pass it on the highway every morning and can see it, but it's always too far away to photograph. This was taken from inside the Masada car as we passed by it. I was the only person of color in the building and maybe even the neighborhood, and I often got the suspicious side-eye from the locals.

Worst of all were the Russians who lived in the building. One day when I was coming home loaded down with groceries, I waited for the lobby's elevator, and when it opened a Russian woman and her daughter stepped out. The mother's eyes went wide when she saw me, she covered her child's eyes as she hastily herded her out into the lobby. All the while she dressed me down in Russian, which I could not understand. Upon making it into out apartment, as I put the groceries away I told Glenn of what had occurred. Suddenly, our doorbell rang and Glenn went to answer it. He called to me and said "It's for you" with a note of confusion in his voice. I went to the door and it was the Russian woman, only this time she had brought several people whom I assume were several members of her family. She pointed at me and again let fly with a torrent of Russian, and from the context I gathered that she was a neighbor on our floor and that she was pointing out both me and where I lived for the benefit of her kinfolk. It was a stretch to think that she had some sort of magical Russian negro-detecting sense, because she did not follow me in the elevator, so I guess she must have previously observed me coming and going through her apartment's peephole. Anyway, I never saw her again, which was no loss whatsoever.

I wonder what the neighborhood is like now. It was the kind of neighborhood where everything closed by 9pm, even the local conveniences stores/bodegas, so there was pretty much nothing to do there after the sun went down And from the look of it, I think the old video rental place is long gone, which leads me to wonder what became of its owner. He was a stereotypically flaming older guy who attempted to cruise me whenever I was in there. Good VHS rental place, though. It had a lot of hard-to-find out-of-print items, and it. was where I first saw and fell in love with SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975).