We Were Feral Children
Four stories about growing up in 1980s Brooklyn.
Today, I was reminded, in a roundabout way, of the 1980s. The pea green pleather chairs, the tawny brown sofas, tumblers etched with sunflowers — leftovers from the 70s where free love and psychedelics reigned supreme. Glittery beaded curtains that would tangle themselves into a kaleidoscope of color; I still remember one hand cleaving through the air, parting the glass. A man with suckers and sweets in his wet lap.
I see a woman on the stoop sipping her Bacardi real slow. She points to the blood in the street still fresh from the boys swinging baseball bats. Flashing their switchblades. She says, the dead don’t want nothing from us, but the living, shit, motherfucker will take and take until there’s nothing left. My mother lights a cigarette and it plumes over her eyes. One summer, a news anchor describes a a massacre in a place called Wonderland so depraved, so grizzly, it reminds them of the Sharon Tate murders. The camera pans to an apartment in California with blood on the walls. I am six.
We are children hopscotching over junk-sick bodies in the park. We are children who joke that the garbage gets picked up faster than the bodies. I am a child when I step into an apartment and a woman lays sprawled out on the floor, lights blaring overhead. Her mouth gaped wide. I…
