Pop, Pop, Pop

Many times Maggie thought she heard gunshots when they were only fireworks, lit in the streets, far too long before and after the Fourth of July.  Did anyone lighting those dumb things even feel remotely patriotic, she wondered, or just playing at war or arson.  Real gunshots didn't go on for as long.  Real gunshots didn't seem to echo as much.  Pop, pop, pop.  Triplets.  One, two, three.  One broke the glass.  Two cracked a mirror.  Three killed a baby.

What would you name your town if you could rename it?

We lived in the city when they first started experiencing sewer problems, like the sinkholes.  I remember Main Street being blocked for repairs, and we even walked by one further up, in the nice neighborhood.  I would stand as close to the curled down blacktop as I dared and try to peer inside.  I even hopped on the edge a little, hoping I could get part to fall in.  Though every day the hole expanded, I couldn't get it to move with my body weight.  Knowing now what happened, it sure was foolish of me to jump near a hole.  I get chills when I think of how ignorant I was, we all were, before the collapse.

How did you develop your sense of morals?

I have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and I feel shame.  I'm not religious, it's just that the idea fits my situation perfectly.  I know about religious stuff from the old guy who lives on the fifth floor.  He recites, or shouts, stuff from the Bible at me as I walk by on the stairs to my eighth floor walk-up.  I'm fourteen, but I can call it my apartment because I pay the rent.  The landlord doesn't know that, of course.  He'd be obliged to call social services, and they would ruin my ruined life.  It's ruined.  I see it now.  But it's my life.  Sticking me in foster care again, or forcing me into a children's home, would mean I'm not in control.

The Tree of Knowledge has shown me the lousiness of my life.  The first thing eating from that damned Tree showed me was my smell.  I remember getting into a fight with Candy Booger (real name Bourgan) in fifth grade when I actually hit a girl.  I knew it was bad to hit, but I didn't know it was extra bad to hit a girl.  She said that I smelled, and I punched her.  While I waited outside Principal Morgan's office, I tried to notice smells.  The copy machine next to me smelled like warm paper.  The secretary who walked past smelled like acid flowers.  I kept sniffing and, finally, I smelled it.  Piss.  Body odor.  Maybe mold?  God, save me, Candy Booger was right, and I had punched her for it.  Nobody appreciates the messenger.

What question have you never been asked that you want to answer?

I have a great apartment.  Crappy, but great.  It's in a terrible part of the city, but it's the entire second floor of a commercial building.  My mother thought I'd be assaulted and raped every day, but I've not yet felt very threatened, even late at night.  Inside is sanctuary, if a bit sparse.  It's an open floor plan and has high ceilings, which means I essentially live in a giant brick box.  I bring my bike up one of those old-fashioned service elevators that I dreamed of ever since I saw Flashdance in the theaters, twice.  I have to bundle like an Inuit from late fall through spring, putting on more winter gear inside than out.  To turn on my computer, I have to unplug everything in my kitchen, but it's worth the slight hassle to have the freedom of the place, and the giant windows looking down on the street.

In high school, I was a dope.  I guess every teenager is a bit dopy simply because of the learning curve, but I look back and have complete and total awareness of my dopiness.  I lived in the suburbs and the sidewalks were rolled up by 9:00 pm.  I had terrible insomnia brought on by thinking about the miserable state of my love life, and about how I wanted to be taller and blonder and more fit, and about how I wanted to live an adventure like I saw in the movies.  I would crawl out of my little twin bed and sit on my dresser to look out the window.  I would crank the casements open and wrap myself in a comforter so the radiant baseboard heat would keep me warm.  I'd even take out the screens so I could look out clearly, just in case.  In case of what?

In case Jason from sixth period Government would finally have succumbed to his desire for me, found my address, and ridden his bike over at three in the morning to whisk me away.  I wanted to be ready.

In case Bill from third period Chemistry would ditch his weird obsession with my friend and instead walk the streets of our town, calling my name, and wishing as badly as I did that I would hear him.

In case Indiana Jones would ride up on a motorcycle and ask me to join him in the sidecar because he needed a companion on his next trip to Egypt.

God, was I a dope.

What's worse is that I'm still a dope.

Here I sit, the same goddamn comforter wrapped around me, in my ill-advised open window at three in the morning, wishing something would happen, someone would need me, I would have somewhere to go.

Who do you think is responsible for the U.S. energy crisis?

Niagara Falls, New York doesn't have a whole lot going for it, excepting one of the natural wonders of the world, that is.  The city dug itself into a hole with mobsters, corruption, and the giant sucking sound industry makes when it leaves.  Yeah, a giant sucking sound helped dig a hole; this is a picture being painted, and it's not Rembrandt, but it should be enough for you to see.  Empty houses turning into empty lots.  Weeds and garbage.  Gangs and alcoholics and psychos.  Leftover goomba "businessmen" who don't even live there using empty buildings as tax breaks and the people who do live there turning them into public urinals.

The last of the owners who owner-occupied died of old age.  Renters begged and scraped until they could afford to get out, too.  The rash of disturbing killings gave a lot of residents the motivation to get out.  Tourists still came, but they stuck to the path of light and shopped on the Canadian side.  Nikolai Tesla's statue was always a favorite of tourists, which is probably why they moved it out of Niagara Falls.

Tesla.  It's why you're reading about this forsaken city.  Stan was the reincarnation of Nikolai Tesla.

On the cover of what magazine would you most like to appear?

It was a candid shot, taken out of disbelief.  A girl--possibly a lady--being assaulted on the street.  It was dark and still wet from earlier rain.  I was hurrying back to my apartment from photographing wet pavement on the neon-lit streets three blocks over.  Pretentious and hack.  Maybe worthy of stock photo work.  I had my camera around my neck, like an idiot in this bad neighborhood.  I heard her scream, cut off.  I saw them clearly.  Woman and man.  Man wrapped around woman from behind, her feet losing the ground for a moment.  His hand blocking her air.  I lifted my camera and started snapping.

If you were a crayon, what color would you be and why?

The nightly cacophony of sirens, thumping, whining music, and shouting were muffled when Lora was finally able to slide home the metal door on the alley side of her squat.  The building was brick and it had been cemented blind decades ago.  The roof was only partially collapsed, but the place was four stories tall, so the upper floor made a good enough roof.  Lora had been lucky to find it still empty, and she kissed her fingers, touching them to the door in blessing, before cranking her hand light.  Her ritual ten cranks would give her enough to add security to the door, though the alley provided much already.

Lora had only squeezed down the alley because she was trying to escape the Yard Dogs, the gang that had taken over her former street and caught her out after dark.  It was tight, and full of garbage, and she prayed it was not a dead end.  Feeling her way blindly, she touched the metal lever for the door.  Hearing the Dogs howling, she was frightened enough to try to move it, and by a miracle, the door opened.  Hoping she wasn't stepping over a threshold through a collapsed floor and to her death from a long fall or a basement drowning, she managed to close the sliding, metal monstrosity and wait, panting, tense, until the morning.

Without any light inside, Lora had to keep risking opening the door.  Eventually, it was light, and she saw where she was.  The building she was in was the oldest, and the brick hulk next door was built right up to hers, without regard to any of the windows or doors already in place.  Her building had been closed for much longer, and nobody much cared to access it, so, they didn't.  The alley was narrower than she had initially thought, and the scrapes on her shoulders proved it.  Adrenaline had allowed her to push though, but in the future, she'd turn completely sideways.  Lora left the mouth of the alley filled with garbage, occasionally supplementing it when it began to look trampled.  The alley was uninviting, and she made it more so, with nasty-smelling bags left near the entrance.

It was the longest she had ever been able to stay in the same place since she was a child, and she warned herself every day not to become complacent.  Lora added rituals to her locking and checking and booby traps and intruder indicators.  She followed her rituals every time she left and every time she returned.  Making her way up to the second floor, she checked her intruder indicators--twine strung, dust undisturbed.  She made sure her "alarm" system was in place--boxes and tin cans, crunchy gravel and thin metal sheets.  Finally, she made it to her nest.

Lora kissed her fingers and pressed them to the room she had made from materials found in her building.  A precious sewing kit had allowed her to create luxuries, like cushions stuffed with old clothing and even blankets.  One patchwork blanket made a roof over her crate and scrap wood nest.  Others lay on the floor or folded neatly in the corner.  Ducking in through a flap, Lora knelt down and removed her shoes, untying the scavenged laces carefully and putting them on her shoe mat.  There was another ritual she followed that had nothing to do with security of her body.  It was, instead, security of her memory and her heart.

Kneeling on her blankets, she removed the coat she always wore.  She had sewn in special pockets on the inside, carrying her memories with her, in case she couldn't come back.  Lora pulled out a grey packet of cloth, and laid it on the cushioned floor of her nest.  Cranking her hand light twenty times, she perched it on a low pillow.  With her right hand, she unfolded the first flap.  With her left hand, she unrolled the packet.  With her right hand, she unfolded the top, bottom, and remaining flap.  Inside were the only connections to her former life: a four-inch real graphite pencil, no point; a tiny piece of a formerly yellow blanket; two, one-inch pieces of red crayon, no label; and a folded photograph, one-inch square.  Lora arranged the items in a line then picked them up one at a time, holding each to her nose, and reminding herself of who she was.

What do you look for in a role model?

In Grand Park's Magician's Corner, mages were allowed to busk, license prominently displayed, of course.  Licenses were cheap, but not easy to come by as there were a limited number given each season.  Auditions were held every year, and everyone had to reapply, even the veteran performers.  Sometimes they didn't get in.  Competition was fierce for those spots, and some years, fights broke out in the audition lines.  Magicians were known to have disappeared after not getting in, too.  Sometimes they reappeared other years, and sometimes... they performed the ultimate vanishing act.

Holly loved to take her lunch breaks from Nova, the upscale clothier, in Magician's Corner.  Grand Park was only a five minute walk from Nova, which was in line with the other major clothiers on Parkview Avenue.  She was a relatively new salesgirl in Gloves, brought on when Messiah Blanchett wore long, elegant gloves to King's Court.  Messiah was always fashion-forward.  But Holly had been coming here far longer than her most recent job.  Her grandfather had been Maurice and Magnificent, back in the day, and performed here in his youth, before he hit the big times, which was decades before Holly was even a glimmer in her parents' eyes.  She had adored Papa Maury and followed him like a puppy.  Holly learned a lot about magic, the art of performance, and magicians.  She still kept in touch with most of them, and they waved or said hello or stopped by to show off their most recent creations when she sat on the steps of Benedict's Statue to eat her bagged lunch.

Today was the third day, however, that Holly came with butterflies in her stomach, hoping to catch a glimpse of a new magician.

Pageant Question: Which freedom do you value the most: life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness? When do you think these rights should be taken away from a person?

People officially started calling the neighborhoods "Camps" when I was eight, but they were already camps long before I was born.  My family has been living in the same Camp for five generations.  Fences went up in my great-grandmother's time, and my grandmother was the one who told me the history.

Grandma Nonna, at eighty, was the oldest person in our Camp.  Life expectancy was in the sixties, so Grandma Nonna was revered for her age and wisdom.  She told me that when the Camps were "neighborhoods", the houses stood shoulder to shoulder, and only family owned each house.  A single family lived inside.  Grandparents lived in their own homes.  Aunts and uncles had others.  The use of so much space for just four people seemed outrageously decadent to me.

When she was small, Grandma Nonna said there were still roads and even some cars in her neighborhood.  Once she told me about roads and where they used to be, I would wander our Camp and look for signs.  I found hidden curbs and even, what she called, a "manhole cover".  That sounded dirty.  I found a rock that she said was probably rubble from a road.  I carry it with me.

Pageant Question: What is your favorite charity and how do you help their cause?

The Friends of Night People is a soup kitchen downtown.  The dining room is small, only about ten cafeteria-style tables with long benches attached to each side.  They turn a brisk business every evening for dinner.  The people who come for dinner eat fast and they don't linger.  Clear the seat, wipe the table, and it ready for somebody else.  You can also pick up bags of non-perishable food to go, or "shop" for clothes in the jam-packed donation room.  Whatever you do, you hardly ever get a good dessert.

I promised myself, if I ever got out and really made it the way I wanted to, I would donate the best damn desserts to The Friends of Night People.  Fresh cakes, brownies, cookies and ice cream with all the fixings.  No more quarter slice of a rock hard blueberry muffin, I'm talking real desserts.  It was what I missed most when I found myself down and way out.

Pageant Question: Tell me a joke.

It was the fourth time the city inspector had been out, and it was wearing on Joshua's nerves.  Every time the guy showed, there was another repair that needed to be made, urgently, and with a follow-up required.  Joshua had purchased the Victorian mansion at auction, and it had been a mess.  It had been chopped up into seven apartments and was suffering from being uninhabited for three years while in the city's dubious "care".  Replacing windows, plumbing, electric, hot water tank, furnace, and roof had taken Joshua a long time and a lot more money.  He managed to pick up the surrounding lots, emptied of their houses years ago, for only a dollar apiece.  Now he was trying to become self-sufficient and was building himself a rather large garden, complete with chickens.

Mr. Giambro, Joshua hadn't learned the man's first name, paced around the enclosure intended to hold the city's maximum allowed five chickens.  Joshua had built it himself and was rather proud.  He realized it was part of the reason why he felt so annoyed right now; the inspector didn't "ooh" and "ahh" the way his friends did when shown his handiwork.  Mr. Giambro instead made notes and made ticking sounds with his tongue.  Joshua bit his lip and waited.  The inspector looked out of place in the garden, wearing his wrinkled brown suit and vintage 1980s loafers, and pacing off the distance from the house to the enclosure.  He paused, then took out a small measuring tape and circled the enclosure again, making more notes on height, length and width.  Mr. Giambro peered up at the house.  "This is a multi-family?"

Joshua took a breath.  The inspector knew full well he had converted it back into a single.  "No, I..."

"Oh, wait, yes, I see it here."

Joshua felt his jaw muscles straining.

"It appears as if this complies with 341-11 through 341-14.  It will have to be approved by the City Clerk, of course."

"Of course."  Joshua rubbed his face muscles and tried to loosen up.

The inspector walked back over to the enclosure and unlatched one of the doors.  "Do you know why chicken coops have two doors?"

Joshua was surprised by the question.  Was he supposed to prove his knowledge of chicken husbandry?  Now?  He took a gamble.  "No, Mr. Giambro.  I don't know why chicken coops have two doors.  In case of fire?"

"Because," Mr. Giambro latched the door.  "If they had four doors, they'd be chicken sedans."  Joshua's jaw loosened enough to hang open.  "The City Clerk should make a decision within two to three weeks."  The inspector picked his way carefully out of Joshua's yard.  "Have a nice day."

Pageant Question 22: If you won the lottery for ten million dollars, what would you do with it?

Niagara Falls, New York is a natural wonder surrounded by a slum.  The city used to be a jewel brilliant enough to match the dramatic setting, but no longer.  After the closing of many companies and selfish mismanaging by mobsters, people moved out.  Homes and buildings and general infrastructure aged without repair.  Out of town businessmen own properties, but hold them empty and crumbling, possibly for tax deductions, but also because they're asking ridiculous amounts of money for them.  The City of Niagara Falls has been left to rot.  Most people remaining, either living in the city or running it, are struggling.  City managers recently called for a meeting, asking for ways to bring Niagara Falls back from the brink of poverty and despair.  I firmly believe the answer lies in two areas: helping those who are living in the city to stabilize their homes, and getting faster turnover of empty properties into new owners' hands.

Tops and bottoms: the two most important parts of any building.  Neglect the roof, and you ruin the structure.  Neglect the foundation, and you ruin the structure.  These are also the two most expensive parts of a house to repair.  In a city like Niagara Falls, most of the housing is well past the point where they have needed new roofs, repaired gutters, stabilized foundations and improved drainage.  Most of the homeowners cannot afford such repairs and, therefore, let the homes deteriorate past repair.  My proposal would start a "Tops and Bottoms" homeowner grant to make these repairs before more properties are destroyed.  Another path to property destruction is when a property is in the hands of the city itself.

The City of Niagara Falls allows properties under its ownership to crumble.  Their negligence has allowed thieves to vandalize properties and to steal basic house systems, making the homes unaffordable.  Their negligence has allowed roof and foundation problems to slide for years making demolition the only option for many properties.  I believe that unfocused solutions and lack of foresight on the part of the city government has exacerbated Niagara Falls' problems.

365

Tyra had left their group ages ago, so long that they had just about stopped wondering what had happened to her.  The relief of her being gone had been enough for them to discuss for days, but days to weeks to however long it had been meant the stories about her had run their courses.  Once in a while, Jen might snipe at Baxter, or, perhaps, Ross would put on a superior air, and the others would call a "Tyra" to diffuse the situation.  Nobody wanted to be a Tyra.  Though she had been tiring, annoying, and even dangerous, they still felt a sense of guilt when they found her body lodged under a cement pipe outside a crumbling, half-completed construction.

343

We watched from inside the house, my sisters and I, as people came and picked through the piles of garbage we had put out earlier that day.  It was expected that some would show up to go through what we had sorted and left on the porch as "good", but what we hadn't expected was that grownups would dig into the bags and boxes at the curb, stuffed with trash.  One man, cigarette dangling from his mouth and coughing into the frigid night air, loaded the garbage onto a tarp and dragged it across the street to his small house.  My younger sisters were horrified and wanted to yell at them to go away.  "Don't they know we put the good stuff on the porch?  Why isn't anyone looking up here?"  Annabelle was probably mad that all her hard work wasn't being appreciated, though she had done the least of the three of us.

317

The neighborhood used to be wealthy, and well-to-do families had lived in their grand city houses, sipping iced tea on their wrap-around porches and walking downtown to watch the boats glide down the canal.  Once traveling by boat on the canal was replaced first by trains and then by the thruway, the city had experienced an exodus of wealth.  The grand city houses became rundown apartments, chopped into bits with flimsy walls and crammed-in kitchens and baths.

It was easy to tell which were apartments without even counting the number of electric meters on the side.  The apartments were painted in whatever had been on sale in order to comply with housing codes that didn't want peeling.  The attics were often a different color because the ladders only went so high.  The carved porch balustrades and railings of old had rotted and were not replaced in kind, but rather with two-by-fours.  Porches sagged, chipboard patched, and windows shrunk, surrounded by unpainted, mismatched wood.  You could also tell by the strollers on the lawn, the upholstered furniture and rugs covering holes on the porch, and the small, cheap yard decorations clustered and broken near the cement replacement stairs.  Trash and mud clung to the yard.  Because inside doors leading to different apartments had been installed in what had used to be magnificent foyers, the front doors remained open to the elements.

313

Imagine a city where more than half its population has left within the past forty years.  The people who remain cannot afford the upkeep of their houses, nor do they even wish to keep them at all.  If a family still lingers in the city, they will dump their home at the first chance.  A house, for example, in the middle of what had been a thriving part of the city, was dumped for $12,000--more than $50,000 less than assessed value, which was already tens of thousands less than what it should have been.  The house was snapped up by professional landlords and stuffed with tenants, including a family of ten in an illegal apartment in the attic.  The attic burned.  The house emptied.  Although it was salvageable, who wanted to invest in a partly burned home on a street where anyone could easily purchase crack?  Windows were broken and the house was pillaged of materials.  Eventually, the grand, 3,500 square foot house, built in the 1800s, was torn down.  A weedy lot remains.

Now, put a natural wonder nearby.  So nearby that in the quiet of the night, from that weedy lot, you can hear the thundering waters of nature, cascading over a mighty cataract.  Welcome to Niagara Falls, New York.

302

My upstairs neighbor whispers into his floor vents.  I don't think he knows that anyone can hear him, but he does it every day and when I'm home, I sit and listen to his secrets.

His name is Jerome Stahl, which I got from the mailboxes in the lobby, but the rest of his life I've been getting from him.  When Jerome feels bad, he describes why and wishes for help to feel better.  When Jerome feels guilty, he agonizes over his failure and begs forgiveness.  When Jerome feels overwhelmed, he lists his undone to-dos and pleads for strength.  When Jerome wallows in self-pity, when people are rude to him, when he was embarrassed, I hear it all, whispered into the vent that opens into my living room.  When Jerome has naughty thoughts, I get those, too, but I try not to listen, even though he uses euphemisms a seven year old might use.  Recently, I've been getting worried for him.

294

The city streets were quieter than anyone could ever remember hearing them.  It was impossible to tell how many people were in their homes this evening because the lights were out and all the curtains drawn.  Lights normally powered by the city hadn't been on in more than a year, but when the sun went down, no one else put their lights on, either; it was easier this way.  There had been warnings, first on television, then announced in the streets, then with the short-lived sirens, to turn off lights.  People obeyed once a quarter of their city had been bombed into oblivion.  The sirens stopped working after just a week, but by then everyone knew not to light the dark.  Lights became targets.  Targets became rubble.

259

She had to get indoors and soon.  Even more than that, she needed someone to give her advice, or, at least, take the news she had from her so she wasn't the only person to carry the burden.  Professor J, she thought immediately.  Even if he didn't still live in this old neighborhood, she would still have wanted to go to him.  Her walk turned into a trot and she scanned each dark space between the houses and in the empty lots and near the parked or broken cars.

A light was on somewhere far back in Professor J's house.  The kitchen, she thought, picturing the eccentric man steaming a chai to keep his fingers warm as he worked late.  He wasn't old, but most people thought of him as having been around a long time.  It was difficult to imagine him as young, at least.

She could see though the partially-closed curtains through the living room and back towards the kitchen, and yet she was still a little nervous going to Professor J's house so late at night.  She was sure he'd help.  He'd have to.

She went to the side porch, clutching her bag strap that pulled across her shoulder, and knocked firmly on the wooden screen door.  A moment later, the many locks rattling, the door opened, warm kitchen light framing the professor in his loose work clothes and always disheveled hair.  "Katie?  What is it?"  The screen door's spring creaked as he pushed it open for her.  "Come in, come in.  Are you hurt?"  Professor J peered out into the darkness as Katie entered.  The screen door banged shut twice and the professor closed and relocked the interior door.  Professor J took in Katie, with her bag and flushed cheeks, standing practically on tip toe.  "Sit, and have some tea while you tell me what's up."

252

The neighborhood was a toothless, tired old beast with patchy fur and ruinous bones.  Houses clumped in twos or threes, and every other house still standing was empty.  It wasn't really a "bad" neighborhood anymore because there was hardly anyone still there.  Gangs didn't roam because there was nowhere to roam to.  Burglars didn't bother because there were no more pickings.  Empty houses had quickly lost their copper pipes, water heaters, furnaces, gas meters, radiators and doorknobs.  Inspired 20 and 30-somethings may have once imagined urban farmhouses, turning empty lots into productive land, until they tried.  The houses that once stood had not been removed thoughtfully and empty lots were not really empty.  Basements had been filled with rubble and the dirt that covered them shunted from other projects in better parts of the city; projects that had begun with "remediation".