Sounds of the Hood
Right now, it's pretty peaceful for a Saturday afternoon. Baby, it's cold outside and the guys who usually hang out on the street in bunches, basking in the deep thump of their car stereo's bass are -- well, I really don't know where they are.
Where do they go to be cool when it's cold or raining out? Most of the baggies (so called for their low-slung denim and untucked, XXL white t-shirts) still live with their parents, and I suspect that spending time outdoors playing with their astoundingly loud music systems isn't really for love of fresh air and sunshine.
Someone down the street has their tunes on, and though it's muffled by my double-glazed windows, I still hear a thud-thud, thud thud thud pounding low from someone's car. Or it might be Janelle, the girl across the street who's almost always sitting on her front porch with her outdoor porch stereo on.
She's either staring into space, or she's braiding someone's hair. Her clients are usually Latino or black guys who drive up in pimped cars and leave them double-parked while she works on the tresses. It's quite a little social scene, and the tough guys look kind of vulnerable as they sit under the spell of her braiding hands, like little boys with their mother.
Other sounds include squealing tires, the passing rise and fall of music as a loud car drives towards my house and then away, birdsongs, the damn ice cream truck, followed by children, the next-door dogs barking, cars revving, helicopters, and, like right now, sunshine and silence.
Christmas in the Hood
It's sweet on my street -- there are three houses clustered together who have outdone each other in piling on the lights, candy cane gutter ornaments, and illuminated reindeer, heads nodding, up and down, up and down.
One little house has overstuffed its tiny front lawn with three giant inflatable characters, too. And though it's January 4th, the twinkling lights still shine at these humble palaces of glitter.
I was Scroogelike and tore down every scrap of Christmas on December 30th. It was all out the door on New Year's Eve, and my house was swept clean and made ready for 2007.
But my next-door neighbors keep theirs up, with the candy-cane lights ringing the porch, a wreath on the door, and a big, puffy, inflatable Santa and snowman on their lawn. One night I came home and saw my neighbor Ana bending over the inflatables in the dusk, tenderly examining their deflated forms to see why they'd fallen.
Of course, even amidst the holiday cheer there are disturbances. Three nights before Christmas, I woke from a delicious deep sleep at 2:40 a.m. to the awful racket of the loudest music I'd ever heard, slowly rolling towards my house like thunder from the middle of the block. Deafening, shaking the house, it was some sort of lethargic rap with a heavy beat.
I sprang to the window and what to my wondering eyes should appear but an obese gold SUV with some of the charming youth from the house in the middle of the block dancing and prancing on the roof, out the open doors, steaming down the street at about 3 miles an hour. They seemed to be having a pretty good time. I called the police, and they didn't come.
After a while, this festival of inconsideration stopped.
A few days later, I read an article in the Oakland Tribune about ghost riding, which is what was up for the wee-hours parade down my street. Ghost riding is a celebrated fad in which the driver of a car puts it in neutral and while the car is veering through the lane, the "driver" gets out and dances on top of the car, often running into other immobile objects in the process. Great.
