Margie

I.

I always say I grew up on 108th Street. I never say Manhattan. I even forget to say New York City. I always just say 108th Street. I guess I expect people to know exactly what I'm talking about.

15 West 108th street, apt. 5. It's between Manhattan Avenue and Central Park West. It's a neighborhood called Manhattan Valley. It's two blocks from Harlem and about five really long blocks from Spanish Harlem.

Manhattan Avenue between 107th and 108th Street was a whole row of abandoned buildings and water was always running inside one of them. I remember so clearly the sound and horrible smell.

The neighborhood was rundown. Our building often smelled of urine. People would throw garbage out of the back windows and it would just pile up like a dump. But that block was my world and even though I haven't lived there in more than twenty years it doesn't seem so far away.

The neighborhood was mostly black and Hispanic. The only whites were the number runner Tony and his two daughters, and of course Helen West, a 400-pound, red headed, former prostitute who always sat on the stoop, every day, seven days a week, my entire childhood. She was married to West, a black mechanic, who was a former pimp and my father's best friend. He used to call me "Smiley." Helen had a dog-named "Nina" a small, skinny mutt who was always beside her.

When I was about nine, Helen started bringing out a "chuck-a-luck" board. She made it out of a piece of linoleum wrapped with brown paper and wrote the numbers one through six on it. She placed the board on a milk crate and for a quarter you could take a chance. You'd place the quarter on any number, Helen would then shake her round, Quaker oats box with two colored dice in it. If your number came out you'd double your money. Sometimes my sister Margie and I would gamble our allowance, which was a quarter a day but most of the time we just watched. Sometimes she would draw a big crowd but when the cops would come around Helen would hide the board. I never saw a big woman move so fast.

There was always at least seven people hanging out on the stoop. People always knew your comings and goings. When you came home from school, you had to be ready to say hello to at least a half a dozen people. "Hello Pauline, hello Helen, hello Bessie, hello, hello, hello."

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when my sister Margie and I were growing up, heroin was the fad. Druggies were nodding off on the corners all the time. In fact, our teen-age sitter Miriam who taught a chubby, 4-year-old Margie how to do the twist, the swim and the jerk, became a junkie when I was about 8. It broke our hearts because we looked up to her. We thought she was so cool but even we could tell that she was really messed up. She had these dark scabs on her skin and her arms, man, she looked so out of it. They were real glassy and bloodshot. It used to scare us when she came around which was often because she used try and hustle money off my mom.

She'd stumble into our house, mumbling, "Ramonita, I need to talk to you." Margie and I would watch our mom nervously go through her purse, sometimes she'd give her a buck or two but most times she'd say she was broke and send her on her way. It broke my mother's heart, because she loved Miriam and her grandparents so much. Pablo and Juanita had raised Miriam because her mother wasn't interested.

Miriam's teen-age husband, Hector, also became a junkie. I remember seeing him and his once very cute brother, nodding off on the corners. It...