Far Rockway

 Far Rockaway

 

Tired after shoulder therapy and sore from the effort of trying to get just a little more motion from my damaged shoulder, I got on the express bus back to Bay Ridge.  I noticed right away that the driver was talking out loud, complaining about traffic and pedestrians to no one in particular.  A couple of stops later a woman in her 60s in the suit skirt and dress shoes of an office worker got on, and I didn’t hear what he said, but she said, with traditional Brooklyn grammar, “I’m here, what are you, taking attendance?”  “I’m following you,” he replied which could have been a reference to our social media obsessed times, but wound up sounding creepy from a man his age.  “Actually, we’re following you,” she retorted, turning the statement on its head.  He went back to driving and muttering about the heavy traffic and I fell asleep before we had reached the FDR.

Back in Brooklyn, I had just finished serving the Mariner’s Catch while various noses tried to get to the food before it hit the dishes, when a message popped up from S.  He doesn’t message me very often, and when he does, he is usually in crisis.  He’s been struggling with drug addiction, his physical health and his mental health, a particularly dangerous combination.  

Like many of my clients is he in “supportive housing” for mentally ill homeless people, but his housing program is anything but.  They can’t pay enough to get anyone really skilled, and the few people who try to help rapidly get frustrated and quit.  S. was particularly upset when one of the few he trusted left.  “I used to sit in her office when I felt like relapsing,” he said.  “Four or five hours, I would just sit there while she worked.”

Not only has this housing failed to provide him with supportive staff, it has also returned him to the rough streets of his childhood in Far Rockaway.  Out there on the edge of the City, there has always been poverty and drugs, but now more and more programs for struggling people are winding up out there, adding to the chaos in the neighborhood and disrupting the community of long-term residents.

For many years, the Bronx was where these programs and people got exiled to, packing so much poverty and suffering into those streets that the entire borough is exempt from Trump’s workfare requirements because the average income is so low. But now that almost all of Brooklyn has fallen into gentrifier’s hands, the Bronx is the next frontier.  I saw it starting years ago in the South Bronx when the old youth prison and the sex work strolls began to be replaced by new “green” buildings with gardens on their roofs.  Now the plague of expensive new buildings has started spreading northwards, and the “undesirable” programs are getting pushed out to Far Rockaway instead.

Even the geography out there is working against the people who live there.  Close to the ocean, it’s prone to flooding and every storm of any size stops the above ground subway service, cutting the neighborhood off from the rest of the City.“I feel dumped,” said S.  “This is like the third time in life.  I feel dumped off to rot and its in the same place as the first time as a child.  Good old Rockaway.”  He has his own idea about why it is the way it is.  “An old cop told me that the Rockaways is like a virtual training  ground.  It’s kept the way it is because they train cops all summer long in the Rockaways. But now its like a virtual training ground on crack.  You got people mixed from the Bronx here.  You got people mixed from Brooklyn here. You have people mixed from everywhere here.  You have everything massively spinning out.  I knew it was bad when I started seeing people from the city get trapped out here.”

We chatted a little while longer.  He told me that one of my other clients, his best friend, had been hit by a car and injured while delivering food on his bike.  This is not the first client that has had this happen.  I asked him questions about his housing, trying to figure out exactly what type of subsidy he has to see if something like a transfer might be possible.  As the conversation wound down, he said “Thank you for letting me get some of this stuff out because I feel like if I didn’t I was going to lose it.  There’s something about talking to you and my father that y’all have a well of understanding  that I don’t encounter with others.  I can say the things that are actually on my mind and I know that even if you don’t fully agree, you will understand and I don’t have to fight because you’re not going to tell me what to do.”

“No problem,” I said.  “I would rather have these conversations than have to write to you in jail or something.” “To be honest with you,” he replied, “I really did have one of those days when I really was going to go check myself into the psych ward.  I think that the more glorious truth to all these hard times is learning that you don’t break fully but you bend and might stretch.”

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