I didn’t tell you the other part about the weekend, the part that is not so nice as pies.
Saturday night, about midnight, I was watching Jay Smooth’s videos on connectedness and rejecting the thug aspects of commercial hip-hop when the shots started. Two bursts of several shots, loud and very close, then a car screeching off. I turned off my lights, crouched for a couple seconds, ran to the front of the house to find my sister. Found her crouched in her room in the front, calling 911. We waited a couple more minutes, until we heard a man calling for help and saw a neighbor come out. We went out to see what happened.
More of our neighbors were out on the corner, forty feet from our house, looking at the car crashed into the parked cars. They’d been driving and a car came up fast behind them, shooting into the car until it crashed, screeching off ahead. Two men were shot. One walked to the ambulance. One was wheeled on a stretcher. We don’t know if he’s OK. There were a bunch of casings in the gutter at our feet. Oh.
The rest of the night was a little surreal. You know, for a decidedly not-street person, I feel like sitting on my porch as police work through the night is getting too familiar. I’ve done it four or five times now. The nephews woke, so we sat on the steps, the littles on laps tucked into our sweaters. They were somber too, and we quietly discussed the police cars, the flashing lights, that everyone was sad because some people hurt some other people, what the yellow tape was for.
Telling Anand about it today, he worried that we must have been so scared. So here’s the part that I don’t like. No. I wasn’t so scared, not once the shots were done and we knew that the shootings were a drive-by intentionally directed at someone. Once I knew it was related to the Section 8 housing down the street, I wasn’t scared anymore. Because things that happen in those lives aren’t things that happen to me. So I was detached enough to think abstractly when I saw two women screaming and crying and rushing the cops, asking to please please tell them if that was her husband. I thought, ‘oh, women’s grief, to be afraid it was yours that got killed.’ I thought, ‘you know, considering how much this is adding to the commotion at the scene, you’d think the cops could include information gathering and dispersion in their procedures.’ I thought, ‘they’re not helping, with the frantic crying and shouting and trying to push past the cops. I bet they’d get a lot farther if they approached the cops with composed requests.’ But I didn’t think, ‘oh no oh no, which of my neighbors got shot tonight?’ I didn’t think ‘oh god, what if it were one of us?’ Because really? It isn’t going to be one of us.
That’s what makes me sad. The apartment complex with the Section 8 housing is half a block away and we live parallel, non-intersecting lives. The white gentrifying hipsters all came out the next morning to gawk at the smashed cars, introduce ourselves and point to our houses. We talked about hearing the shots and lost sleep. I’m sure we will talk to the people we met again. I have no idea how the apartment complex reacted to the injuries of two of theirs. Even when gun battles break out on the street in front of us, even when our neighbors are shrieking with grief, that is for them. We watch until we get cold, then tuck the babies back into bed.
Because those lives seemed so separate, it took me half a day to remember the fundamentals of community. Oh yeah. When your neighbors are hurt, you take them food. My sister was ahead of me; that afternoon she baked and brought them banana bread. But people from those apartments haven’t been community. They’ve only been neighbors in the sense of geography.
One other neighbor came out that night, equally disconnected from everyone human. A brazen raccoon walked calmly past the police line, went partially up the stoop across from us, then stopped when he saw our neighbors out. He crossed the street in the changing yellow and blue shadows, approached our steps and stared at us. He left again, equidistant from tragedy and watchers, unconcerned about either. I don’t feel any need to befriend the raccoons. But I should do better about connecting to people who live right next to us.