[Artwork by ALEX FINE]
BY JEFF DEENEY This installment of Today I Saw Revisited presents two scenes from African Methodist Episcopal churches in North Philadelphia. My experience with the black church community in Philly is that it is totally vital to the function of social services at the grassroots level, and forms the backbone of community support for thousands of families around the city. However, there is a strong conservative streak that runs through many of Philadelphia’s black churches that some white liberal social workers find vexing. The Biblical literalist positions of some churches put them at odds with progressives on issues like gay marriage and it’s not uncommon for mental health professionals to discover that their clients have been encouraged by their fellowship friends to discontinue psychiatric medication and rely more on prayer, just to cite a few examples. By the same token, the faith community is sometimes the only reliable resource when working in the trenches of urban poverty, often stepping in to fill the gap in essential services like providing food, clothing and shelter when city agencies come up short. Falling back on the church network is sometimes a necessary fix when working within an imperfect system of threadbare public safety nets.

TODAY I SAW the Reverend. She she was working at the computer on her desk in the basement of the old AME church on North 7th Street. The Reverend is a little woman with a big presence; her eyes are fiercely bright and clear, and her voice is still strong enough to fill the sanctuary to the rafters with the The Word during services despite her advanced age. She has a wide smile that brims with sincerity and silver hair that shines like freshly polished metal and falls about her shoulders in soft waves. Its the unrepentantly natural colored hair of an older woman who is completely comfortable with who she is and this self-assurance radiates from the Reverend like summer heat shimmering over the sidewalk. She has unblemished brown skin without a wrinkle, even around the eyes. She’s gorgeous, really; its hard to not be mesmerized by her when you’re standing so close; she holds your hand firmly while welcoming you to the church and asking you how you are feeling today.

There are always women around the Reverend, attending to her needs and hanging on her every word. She’s typically surrounded by ex-convicts, former prostitutes, recovering addicts; they gravitate towards her, pulled by her aura of strong faith that conveys a sense of safe harbor and the hope for change and grace. There are also the working mothers dropping by on their lunch breaks and the neighborhood men, those hulking pillars of community stability, who come to get that little midday boost of strength that keeps their days full of lightness and their spirits high.

When you talk to the Reverend, God is always the third person in the room. To the Reverend God is tangible, his presence palpable and she speaks of him with the matter of fact tone most people reserve for material objects like tables and chairs. When speaking about her recently-ill husband, who also leads Sunday sermons at the church, God is at the center of his miraculous recovery. Her husband suffered kidney failure that was complicated by his overall frailty and he somehow pulled through despite doctors deeming recovery improbable.

“You know I didn’t worry even a little bit,” the Reverend says. “Because you know that I know God,” she continues, like God is right there next to her.

“That’s right,” chimes one of the women in the room, call-and-response style.

“God wasn’t about to let his good brother go,” the Reverend continues, “Not yet, not while there’s so much work to be done around here. God told me not to trouble myself; he said that there are many days left for my husband in this world.”

Whenever someone leaves the Reverend’s presence she gives them a blessing and they bless her back. As I turn to leave she looks me in the eye and says, Bless you, and I find myself saying it back to her despite the fact that Idon’t even go to church.

***

TODAY I SAW the sanctuary of an African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was set up for bingo, with picnic tables lined up side by side and ringed with chairs, with a colorful carnival-style concession stand off in a corner at the rear of the room. The sanctuary walls were fiberboard patterned to look like wood and the table tops were chipped at the corners. There was a stage at the front of the room and tall, rectangular mirrors attached to the wall that would reflect parishioners’ faces back at them during a sermon. There was a movable pulpit placed at center stage and an ornate, throne-like wooden chair set behind it.

On one side of the stage was an electric organ with a picture of Jesus over it. He was portrayed with skin the color of milk chocolate and a well-trimmed black beard. He wore a white robe with a hood that covered his head and smiled serenely from under its folds, holding his hands out palm up.

On the other side of the stage there was a piano and another electric organ side by side. Next to them, against the facing wall, was a small Marshall guitar amplifier. At the rear of the room there was a desk like they have in banks, where deposit and withdrawal slips are kept in little compartments under glass. In the little compartments were gospel tracts with titles like, “The Messiah …Who is He?” Next to that were two vending machines, one with sodas for .50; the other was out of order, covered over a tarp made from slit-open trash bags taped together.

On the wall directly above the glass desk was a collage of photos showing smiling black faces beneath church crowns and feathered fedoras; the faithful making their way to Sunday worship. There were narrow slips of paper reading MIGHTY GOD and AWESOME GOD and HALLELUJAH taped over the spaces between the pictures.

When I left the church there were two men in the parking lot wearing wool hats and heavy coats. There was a brown bagged bottle on the ground between them. They had torn a piece off the brown bag and one of them was holding it bent in a U-shape while the other sprinkled something into it. They were looking at this very intently. When they noticed me passing they stared at me angrily, challenging me to say something to them.

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a monger scoop up a prostitute under the El at the corner of Monmouth Street, a block north of Cambria. It was 8 am on the dot; the rising sun in the east softly illuminated the transaction as a pale, freckled and deathly skinny white girl with waist length bright orange hair looked both ways for patrol cars before running out from the doorway where she waited for a John. Her faded jeans rode real low, revealing the red g-string panties she wore underneath. She ducked her head in the open passenger side window of a tan Hyundai Sonata saying a couple fast words and nodding her head off in the distance. “Are you datin’? I know a spot.” She scrambled to hop in as fast as she could and the car sped north on Kensington Avenue.

This early in the morning there are still a lot of streetwalkers still working in broad daylight; the crack addicts are still at it since last night and trying hard to come up with the cash for that last blast and the dope addicts are just coming to, kicking off another day of hustling and in need of a wake-up dose to stave off sickness.

Further south on Front Street between Jefferson and Master, where the girls stroll along a desolate row of industrial warehouses and garages, there was a pretty young black girl sitting on a concrete slab attached to the facade of a building. She had her hair intricately arranged and also wore low riding jeans that revealed a white thong string that hugged the curve of her hip. She had on an orange halter top with a deep v-neck. When she saw me she started yelling and waving, then making loud, smacking kissing sounds when I was at the stop sign directly across the street. She reached inside her top and took her left breast out; she shook it in my direction as I drove past, then lowered her head and licked at her nipple.

AFTERWORD:  Early mornings along the Kensington Avenue stroll offer these kind of bleak images pretty much every day. Many of the girls are still up from the night before; some of them have been running and gunning for days on end. They look sick usually because they are sick, suffering from STDs, Hep C, chronic addiction, malnutrition, etc. The Johns — they call themselves “mongers,” short for “pussy mongers” — are trolling for a blowjob or a quick fuck in on their way to work. So there’s a flurry of activity on the Avenue in the early morning hours;  I was often headed into the field to do client visits in the Badlands around this time and would have to swerve around the Johns when they slammed on the brakes after seeing the girls by the Woodshed porno shop or the 7/11 near Tioga Park (“Needle Park”) waving at them to pull over.

How, any sane person might ask, could a guy be so compelled by sex-need that he would risk arrest to pick up a prostitute who looks like a concentration camp survivor in broad daylight on his way to work in the morning? There is definitely a John pathology. These are men who appropriate the name “monger” with pride and brag online about buying women in sex forums. They exchange stories about the women they’ve been with after each encounter in order to determine which are the best buys, worthy of seeking out for repeat business. They trade information about law enforcement activity, trying to stay one step ahead of the Vice Squad.  They keep almost obsessively detailed logs of which women are working which corners, sometimes even accompanying these reports with actual photos of the women they surreptitiously snapped on the street. They claim that this cataloging is for their own safety; prostitutes who assault or rob mongers are placed on ban lists the groups actively maintain. The Johns sometimes go to extraordinarily dangerous lengths to get sex, following prostitutes into crackhouses and shooting galleries to get off. Philadelphia Johns from online sex forums have meet-ups like other online forums do, except they connect in Kensington and Camden to scout the stroll. They report that they can’t get through a day at work, or get to sleep at night, unless they’ve bought a girl once the sex urge hits. It’s a bizarrely compulsive behavior that I have never quite understood.  I was a doubter of sex addiction as a legitimate disorder until I encountered this community.

I have worked with a number of former prostitutes as a social worker and almost exclusively their histories consist of a long trail of sexual trauma leading back to childhood sex abuse. Men rape for sport in Kensington; I have been told by women who worked the stroll about roving vans full of drunken goons who scoop up girls, gang rape them and then dump them back on the Avenue knowing they’ll face no repercussions. I don’t have a supporting citation at hand but wager that the vast majority of women working the Avenue have a serious mental health disorder co-occuring with their drug addiction, which is universal. Both these addiction and mental health disorders are continually exacerbated by the casual violence an Avenue prostitute encounters almost daily, which makes sustained recovery even harder to achieve than in most cases. It’s a very challenging population to serve, part of a very ugly facet of life in certain parts of Philadelphia.

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a pile of teddy bears arranged like a pyramid around the thin trunk of a young tree planted in the sidewalk near the corner of 13th and Parrish Streets. The tree was on a block of two-story Section 8 homes that looked still new, almost like suburban tract plots complete with small squares of green front lawn, driveways and little back yards big enough to fit a kiddie pool and a wash line. I was walking down this same block about a week earlier on a warm afternoon thinking that it didn’t look like a bad place to live. I walked past again after reading in the morning paper that a man was murdered there early Sunday morning.

I don’t know what I expected to see. There wasn’t any evidence of a crime scene, no body shapes in tape on the concrete to mark where the body fell. There were no blood stains, even though the victim died from a gunshot to the neck and there was surely a thick, standing pool of it left behind after the Ambulance sped off. A hard rain fell late that night and it must have washed away any remaining traces of the crime itself. I saw the colorful pile of bears from a half block away. When I got there I knelt down to look at them.

The victim’s name was Rahdean. It was written in magic marker on the bears. I love you, Rahdean…Peace, Rahdean… RIP, Rahdean…I miss you, Rahdean. The bears were soaked with rain water and some of the writing was smudged and hard to read. There was a crumpled and soggy sheet of poster board near the bears covered in scrawled shout outs from Rahdean’s friends on “D-Block.” After reading them I put the paper back the way I found it.

I went around the block to the Dunkin Donuts on Broad and there was an old dopefiend out front, trying to sell baby pacifiers encased in plastic from a cardboard box. Two dollars, he said, rustling the box in my direction. When I opened the door I smelt fried dough and burnt coffee and heard Elton John’s ridiculous falsetto singing the lalalalala ending to Crocodile Rock’s refrain.

AFTERWORD:  This was my first encounter with a street memorial, laid out at a homicide scene near the old Richard Allen Homes.  The Richard Allen Homes was a sprawling, drug infested lowrise complex east of Broad and south of Girard Avenue that was torn down in the 1990s; tenants complained for years about deplorable conditions including rotted plumbing that dumped raw sewage into their apartments and spiraling violence that made the Allen Homes one of the most notorious projects in the nation.  In 2003 these new, suburban tract style houses were completed and while conditions in the neighborhood are vastly improved there are still a couple incidents per year of horrific violence here, and a still thriving though less visible drug market remains (I know a dude who used to cop rocks around this way).  Most recently, a Temple student was shot in the stomach for his Ipod a couple blocks from where Rahdean’s memorial stood.

The impression made by this street memorial stuck with me.  I started to see more memorials around this time, and suddenly it seemed like they were everywhere in North and West Philly when I was doing my field work.  I can’t say whether the practice was new at the time, just new to me, or just a lot more visible because a shitload of people were getting murdered on the streets back in 2007, a very violent year even by Philly’s standards.  After seeing street memorials on an almost daily basis for nearly a year straight I decided to put Today I Saw to rest and start the Valley of the Shadow series that focused specifically on the memorial phenomenon.

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW new black magic marker tags scrawled on the sidewalk outside Mantua Hall. “Tre Six Gangstas,” read one, “36th Street Mafia” read another. There’s a ledge outside the front doors to the housing project tall enough to sit on, and there were seven or eight Tre Six boys kicking back on the ledge and mobbed on the steps leading to the front door. It was early Friday evening, so I assumed they were getting ready to serve the payday party crowd that would start rolling through at any minute. One of the boys had shoulder length dreads, an oversized black Dickies outfit and was playing with his Sidekick, flipping the top open and shut. On the third time that he flicked the swivel screen shut he spun the gadget 360 degrees in the palm of his hand. When I mounted the steps my foot landed right next to where he sat; he stopped playing with his Sidekick and looked up at me.

This is how you walk through a crowd of project boys: keep your back straight and your pace brisk. Don’t look tired, even if you are. Keep your eyes in front of you, unless someone is trying to make eye contact; if someone tries to make eye contact, return it and hold it. When you get taunted, ignore it or laugh it off. Never look wounded or threatened. If you are greeted, even in jest, return the greeting. Shout it back — don’t let your voice falter. Use uncertainty to your advantage, they think you’re probably not a cop. But you might be. As long as you come across as fearless, they won’t know for sure. A good gangster will err on the side of caution, eyeing you warily but letting you pass without harassment.

The man at the front desk in a white tee and busted-up teeth asks more questions than usual. It’s Friday evening; a white guy isn’t going to just stroll into a high-rise without getting grilled. Through the bulletproof Plexiglas I can barely hear him. Who you here to see? What apartment? How long you gonna be? Let me see your identification.

The lobby is filled with blunt smoke so thick it makes my eyes water. There’s another crew of Tre Six boys in an alcove by the laundry room. These are young teenagers; wild, feral children. Their narrowed, reddened eyes peer out from under sweatshirt hoods. Their loud banter and grab-ass games stop dead when they see me; they retreat silently into darkened corners where light bulbs have been smashed to provide cover. Two mothers and their screaming children flank me, waiting for the elevator. I can feel the Tre Six boys still watching me, though I can’t see them and don’t want to turn my head in their direction to verify that they are. It’s never wise to invite trouble.

Sometimes it takes 15 minutes for the elevator to arrive. I cross my fingers and hope that tonight it comes quick.

When the elevator opens, a tall and slender woman wearing Muslim garb emerges. She’s covered from head to toe, only her eyes showing from under the fabric wrapping her face. The front door opens behind us and a gust of wind fills the folds of her abaya, making her look like a bilious black ghost as she floats through the room’s haze.

Upstairs I’m greeted by the still-shrieking smoke alarm. The sound hits me like an open-handed blow when I step off the elevator. A minute later, it shrieks again, just like it shrieked when I was here two weeks ago. It’s going on six weeks now that the alarm has been sounding, around the clock. It gives the impression that Mantua Hall is a place frozen in time and totally forgotten, where nothing changes except to decay.

Its impending implosion can’t come soon enough.

AFTERWORD: The high rise public housing project is arguably the greatest failure of modern urban planning. It became an American icon, if a totally shameful one, as the misery of living in poverty in cities around the country was defined by the almost mythic horror stories emanating from housing projects in the ’80s and ’90s. In the early ’90s I was a young drug addict mostly failing out of the University of Chicago. On a couple occasions I went with a neighborhood oldhead to cop dope at the Robert Taylor Homes, possibly the most notorious housing project in the country at that time. The near total chaos that raged there was one of my first encounters with desperate urban poverty and the powerful impression it left on me would later become a driver for my involvement in the social justice movement. The Robert Taylor Homes are no longer there; they were thankfully torn down, as was Mantua Hall not long after this narrative was written. The families living in Mantua Hall were relocated to scatter-site housing in communities of their choice; from what I understand the relocation effort went smoothly and most families are very happy with their new homes.

I am often asked when I tell people about my job, how do you manage to work somewhere like Mantua Hall without getting hurt? Sometimes there is a more general follow up question about how to safely navigate bad (black?) neighborhoods (as a white yuppie). I feel like this is a loaded line of questioning that makes a lot of assumptions about poor neighborhoods. There have been some rare moments in my work like this time at Mantua Hall where I felt putting up a hard façade was necessary. The reason for this was that a social worker at the agency I worked for had just been assaulted there and another had been so threatened she fled without making contact with the client. We were told to be on guard when doing home visits at Mantua Hall, and the situation I walked into that evening was setting off danger alerts in my street senses. But the bottom line is that the hard façade was a bluff, and if one of the Tre Six kids had stepped to me and called it I would have been completely fucked.

What is the best way to navigate a bad neighborhood? Make friends there. It’s amazing how less threatening even the most notorious blocks becomes when you are able to put names to faces and know peoples’ stories. My experience is that even on the city’s most dangerous blocks there are honest, hard working families who don’t want anything to do with the nonsense, and most of them are totally cool with somebody like me working on their block. The best way for a social worker to do their job is to build alliances with the people living in the neighborhood who are willing to work in partnership with them towards a common goal of improving their community.

BY JEFF DEENEY  Today I saw a wino walking across a trash strewn lot on Ridge Avenue, down the street from the shelter. It was a classic image, a living stereotype stumbling with bagged bottle in one hand while the other waved in the air unsteadily, like he was struggling to get across the deck of ship in rough waters. He slowed and then stalled, as if he might change direction but had to think hard about the decision before continuing. Then he pitched forward, undulating towards the brick wall at the other end of the lot. When he reached the wall he leaned forward at an angle and laid the flat of one palm against it. He hung his head and took a deep breath. Once steadied his movements changed, becoming more sure; he began to bounce a little, shaking his legs out before putting the bottle down and spraying the wall with piss.

Up the block a ways the usual Ridge crowds were gathered, and on a warm day like today the flock was thick. One man walked briskly past wearing three heavy winter jackets layered on top of each other, all unzipped. He said, “Man, this weather’s crazy, this is the El Nino season.” There was a well dressed older white man walking with him, looking furtive and determined, not speaking. They sped off down the block to take care of whatever business they had to conduct together.

Outside the shelter a man was holding court (there’s always someone holding court outside Ridge) before a row of tired and run down looking men and women, all piled with thick clothes layers that were unzipped or partially removed, unecessary in the winter day’s unexpected warmth.  They all sat on the small concrete ledge that runs along the building’s front wall just east of Broad Street. The man was gesturing like a street preacher, fervent and animated as he said, “I don’t play. Naw, man, naw, I don’t play, man. I will not hesistate to put a nigga in the ground. I done did it before, man, plenty of times. But I don’t do no shit like that no more because I love my freedom, man, ain’t nobody gonna take that shit from me, man, because my freedom is everything.”

AFTERWORD: I caught heat from critics about descriptions in Today I Saw installments that some considered offensive, too harsh, unfair, inappropriately unsensitive coming from a social worker, etc.  My argument was always that I simply wrote what I saw, using the kind of raw language I heard in the neighborhoods I worked in at the time.  I also understood that such context free short passages can be coopted by people with certain political agendas to support assertions that run contrary to my own beliefs.  For example, a political conservative could use this passage to support their assertion that the homeless are a bunch lazy drunks.  That doesn’t bother me.  I don’t really care how political conservatives read what I write.

In fact, part of my agenda as a writer is to call into question white liberal middle class perspectives on issues like urban poverty.  These perspectives are too often poorly informed, too distanced from the problems to have much value.  My opinion is that urban poverty, racial inequality and social injustice in America persist not because of efforts by conservatives to maintain the status quo, but a lack of commitment from an increasingly wealth-driven left to demand real change.  Very few liberals have any direct involvement with any part of the social justice movement and rely on newspapers whose editors are often equally as distanced from the reality of the streets to shape their ideas of what poverty in America is like.  No wonder such stark descriptions are so jarring, you don’t see them often because very few people are capable of providing or willing to print them.

I wanted to force liberal readers into an uncomfortable space where their perspectives on urban poverty as viewed from the comfort of their dorm rooms or corporate offices collided with mine as I experienced it on the streets through my work.  In this particular installment we see Ridge Avenue shelter, the city’s main homeless shelter for men, the way I see it.  I don’t like homeless shelters.  I think homeless shelters are a collossal and costly failure of urban planning and policy.  I think they are inhumane places do nothing to treat central causes of homelessness like addiction and mental illness.  I think this installment conveys that much to perceptive readers without the need for editorial contextualizing.

Many liberals still cling to the understanding that homeless shelters are great things, and that to solve our homelessness problem we should build more of them.  My clients have told me that you can’t even take a shit in Ridge when you need to because all the toilets are clogged with crack caps, dope bags and dirty needles.  I don’t think the the shelter system’s failure as an institution could be highlighted any more clearly or forcefully than that, but it’s not a description you’re going to get from your daily newspaper, though I think it’s an important piece of information for readers to have.

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW two fresh faced white kids in almost military looking black overcoats, starched slacks and gleaming patent leather shoes canvassing a bleak stretch of 19th Street near Wingohocking, an area of North Philly pocked with crack markets and tiny row houses covered in flaking paint. They were standing under an awning on one of the small front porches that lined the block. One of the kids banged repeatedly on the door while the other peered through the blinds, trying to see if  someone was home.

After waiting a minute they moved on to the next set of steps and again one kid  banged on the door while the other watched. A heavy man in his undershirt opened it looking confused, not expecting visitors. I rolled my window down to listen. The kids said something I couldn’t quite hear and the man shook his head and closed the door in their faces.

As the kids were coming down the steps towards where I was parked, they stopped to talk to a passerby. He had on a green Boston Celtics jumper, baggy jeans, a knit cap and brand new Timberland boots. He had a Muslim’s thick beard. One of the kids called out to him, “Do you want to come to church this Sunday?” His voice was enthusiastic, full good cheer; it was as sincere an invitation as I ever heard. The Muslim boy took a quick glance at them and chuckled, threw them the deuce (a sign of goodwill, two fingers held up like a peace sign and given a little shake) and said to the boy who called out to him, “Nah, I’m cool, big man.”

The kids saw me watching them. As they came over to the car I saw they had black plastic tags attached to their coats, signifying them as elders with the Church of Latter Day Saints. The kid who did the door knocking came right up to my window, smiling a rosy cheeked, sparklingly white toothed smile less than a foot from my face. His voice was brimming with the enthusiasm of a small child inviting another child to play his favorite sandbox game. He said, “Would you like to come to church this Sunday?”

AFTERWORD: Mormon missionaries are ubiquitous in North Philadelphia; they are dispatched from the church’s main Philly temple at Broad and Wyoming and canvass the surrounding neighborhoods relentlessly. If you’ve done work in the communities near the temple you’ve surely seen them a million times, standing out like sore thumbs in their distinctive uniforms moving among the addicts and corner hustlers. For the most part they are what could be called excruciatingly white, and are thus pretty hard to miss. I used to strike up conversations with these kids from time to time and the ones I talked to were usually straight off the bus from Utah. At first I thought they all must have brass balls to do the work they do but most of them seemed blissfully ignorant of the risk, well known to social workers, associated with foot canvassing the Badlands on a Friday afternoon.

I tried to build some contacts among the missionaries in order to do a story on them. I wondered what the experience is like for a kid from a sheltered community out west to be dropped in the middle of North Philly. When approached on the streets the missionary kids were super friendly and always willing to talk, free with their cell phone numbers and open to the idea of a writer walking with them on their route. But then I would follow up to arrange a time to meet and would be told that the temple wasn’t okay with it. The kids also move around a lot from temple to temple, and their temple-supplied cell phones are often taken and given to another missionary, so maintaining contact with any one missionary proved difficult. I eventually moved on to other neighborhoods for my work, and dropped the story idea.

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a long and boxy old black Cadillac parked on Master Street just west of 17th. Master Street is on the south edge of Pill Hill; up the block towards Jefferson Street young pushers were perched on every stoop with pockets full of Oxys, Percs, and Xanies. They watched the passing traffic for white guys from downtown who might be out cruising on their lunch breaks with fat wallets and runny noses, hoping to cop their medication. Every eye in that crowded corridor between Jefferson and Master Street vied for contact with mine, assuming I was there to buy. After being closely watched by the young neighborhood boys who were all waiting for me to pull over, or maybe swing around the block for another slow cruise past the loitering crews, I pulled to a stop at a red light.

There’s a pay phone near the end of the block and a man in a lightweight, acid-washed denim jacket with beige leather sleeves was holding the receiver away from his face, his conversation interrupted by a passerby. He held his hand out, letting the other man who stopped to talk to him take something from it that I couldn’t clearly see. In turn, the other man put a folded up bill in his still outstretched palm. The man on the phone went back to talking and the other man walked off.

That was when I saw the Cadillac — it was in the background as I watched the man walking off with what were probably a couple of pills in a little plastic baggie. I saw a man on a bicycle leaning into the Caddy’s window; the ass end of his bike was sticking out into the middle of the street, blocking my path. When the light turned green I made a right onto Master Street and pulled up to his rear tire. He looked like a rough, white addict and I didn’t want to start drama by laying on the horn, so I gave him a minute to finish his business. There was an elderly black couple inside the car. The old man in the driver’s seat, who was 80 if he was a day, handed the man on the bike a bag like you get at the bodega, made from thin black plastic with a smiley face printed on it. The man on the bike opened the bag and took a quick peek inside; he liked what he saw and reached into his pocket for a knot of cash.

Who would have thought? The neighborhood oldsters were out for an afternoon drive, probably straight from the pharmacist with a sack full of meds for sale. The driver gave a quick tip of the fedora and started to crank his window closed. He wife was sat stern and stony-faced, sitting stock still as her husband steered their big boat of a vehicle out into traffic right in front of me. They turned on to 18th Street, with me behind them. They were driving so slow that the guy on the bike was way out ahead of us. They had a white bumper sticker that said, “Marriage =” in bright red letters next to a pair of stick figures like you find on public bathroom doors, one lady and one gentleman, holding hands.

***

AFTERWORD:  It occurred to me while sitting in detox coming off a 320 mg/day OxyContin habit in January of 2004 that it’s kind of fascinating that North Philadelphia has a specific section dedicated strictly to the distribution of black market pharmaceutical drugs.  I honestly hadn’t thought much about it when I was there buying pills because I was usually feeling pretty miserable and also a little nervous about getting stuck up for my money or stopped by the cops.  Once I had a chance to reflect it struck me that Pill Hill was a sociologically significant location whose emergence as a major destination for drug abusers citywide mirrored the increasing incidence of prescription drug abuse nationwide.  I’ve written about Pill Hill and prescription drug abuse in Philadelphia periodically over the past 3 years.  This particular Today I Saw was written while I was working with homeless families; I had returned to Pill Hill to work with a couple local churches who were helping out my clients.  As a social worker I’ve had the opportunity to help families in other neighborhoods likeFairhill and West Kensington where I used to score drugs.  I feel like I have paid down some sort of cosmic debt in being part of the solution and not the problem. I returned to Pill Hill recently, this time for the Daily Beast, and that story is set to run soon. Keep an eye out for a link to it here on Phawker.

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW  a white kid, maybe 12, with dirty blond hair cropped short, pedaling an adult size tricycle with a wooden box between the rear wheels up D Street towards Indiana Avenue. Attached to the back of the graffiti tagged wooden box was a fifteen inch stereo speaker that blared rap music loud enough to shake my windshield. The face of a car stereo was mounted to the front of the box so he could reach down to adjust the volume or skip tracks while coasting along. There was a subwoofer inside the box nestled in a tangle of wires that linked the whole thing together. The speaker itself was vibrating, rattling the wooden box as the rapper Scarface said to everyone in a two block radius, “I murder by numbers nigga, one, two, three, darin’ any motherfucker to come test me, ya standin in the jungle nigga.”

The boy pulled to the curb near Indiana Avenue and I pulled in behind him, pulling my van up to his rear wheel as the Latin kids who sling dope on that corner swarmed him, looking his bike over like it was a shiny Escalade right off the showroom floor. The white kid was brimming with pride but kept his face hard and blank as he cranked the volume to a deafening blast, clearly showing off for his friends. He cut the volume as I walked past and they all turned to stare uncertainly, like most corner kids do when they see me approaching. I noticed the white boy had a string ofKanji characters tattooed along the inside of his left forearm, despite the fact that he barely stood higher than my waist.

“Did you make that?” I asked him, pointing at the box.

He looked at me like he was going to tell me to go fuck myself but gave me a straight answer.

“Yeah, my cousin helped me, he built the box but I did everything else.”

“That’s cool. I like that,” I said, but this time got ignored so I walked on. Behind me the music started to blare again, its throbbing bass beating on my back.

When I left D Street to head back to the office I saw the same kid cruising down Kensington Avenue just north of Somerset. I pulled up next to him, took my foot off the gas and coasted at his speed. When he finally looked over and saw me smiling at him he smiled back. It was a wide, confident smile, like he knew he was coolest thing happening inKensington today. I laughed and so did he. He stood up and pedaled hard, veering off onto Boudinot Street, every head on the Avenue turning in his deafening wake.

AFTERWORD:  The afterwords for previous Best of Today I Saw selections have been focused on whatever serious social issue underlied the original narrative, that I felt could benefit from the extra years of experience and insights I’ve gained working in the field since.  But there’s no larger message here, aside from this:  Ride on, Awesome Tattooed Twelve-Year-Old Kenzo Kid, ride on.

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a hot sun shining down on North Philly for the first time this year. The forecasted high was 82 degrees with nothing but bright blue overhead; compared to the cold spring the city was emerging from, it felt like mid-July. The flavor on the streets was beer, even at 11 a.m. on a Monday. On 25th Street near Dauphin, a young girl in skintight capris, a halter top and a waist-length weave drained a Miller High Life bottle on her front step, her head tilted back 45 degrees and her throat open in full chug. When she lowered the bottle, she hollered across the street to the dealer boys in their Muslim beards congregated around the front of an abandoned corner store on Dakota Street, grasping dark, amber bottles of their own by the neck.

At 23rd and Allegheny a man dodged through traffic, cradling a brown-bagged 40 oz. beer like a football, giving oncoming traffic the Heisman straight arm. The bars were open, too; corner dives with names like Boo’s Double Down Lounge, Lou & Choo’s, the Tender Touch and Club Menage A Trois. These darkened gin joints had their doors propped wide to let the fresh air wash over their stale innards. A peek inside showed anemic business; only three or four Jeff-capped neighborhood old heads per place, perched on old style round-topped bar stools.

On Allegheny closer to Kensington there was a Latin family sitting in umbrella-shaded beach chairs, circled around a smoldering grill piled high with spicy chicken skewers. Those go for a couple bucks each and they were doing brisk business, selling cold Buds from a cooler “to go.” The beer cans were hauled from under an ice pile by a stocky older man with a crooked nose who popped them open with hard, fighter’s hands. He then passed them to his customers, mostly neighborhood young boys who held pacing, panting pit bulls on the end of long ropes. The young boys are fast learners who know a good potential front when they see it; around the corner on Clearfield Street there’s another grill set up just like this one and while it never smokes there is a plastic Igloo cooler underneath it that they reach into when an addict approaches.

On an old steel loading dock attached to the back of an abandoned warehouse south of Clearfield Street, four men sat with legs dangling over its edge, toasting with tall boys and looking like Depression Era train-hopping hobos in dirty denim and tank tops, their toes pushing through the fronts of torn-up construction boots. A middle-aged neighborhood woman in a business suit passed by, surveying the scene in frustration, the distaste apparent on her face. She said, “My, my, we got a whole lot of nothins out here today not workin’.”

AFTERWORD:  The representative working class black woman’s voice that occasionally appears in the Today I Saw series belongs to a former coworker of mine who I rode with into the neighborhoods just about every day. White liberals tend to be shocked by the toughness working and middle class blacks often display towards members of their own community. White liberals often view poor minorities who engage in criminality or succumb to addiction as victims of an oppressive system that drove them to that behavior. In my experience, the black community — especially the working and middle class — tends to see these same behaviors more as a failure of personal responsibility, much the way white conservatives do. My coworker would reference her own biography in order to qualify these seemingly harsh judgements; she also grew up in a housing project in North Philly, was dirt poor, went to public schools, had children at an early age, and despite all this still worked her whole life and as a result was stable and comfortable in her middle age. If she could do it, why couldn’t everyone? It’s a sentiment I’ve heard repeated by frustrated church ladies and neighborhood oldheads a hundred times.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Today I Saw was a series of short imagistic non-fiction narratives I did back in 2007.  I didn’t even conceive it as a series for publication, it was really just a bunch of scenes and images I jotted down while doing field work as a social worker. It ran twice a week for a year straight.  Each installment begins with the same phrase, “Today I Saw” because I was literally writing down things I was seeing in the neighborhoods, as I was seeing them each day.

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a fire fight break out on Old York Road and Venango Street. Right before I heard the first shots fired I was staring idly out the window of my car while two young dudes were engaged in friendly conversation on the sidewalk next to where I was parked. One of them leaned back against the minivan in front of me. He had his keys out and it looked like they were getting ready to part company. The shots rang out from about fifty feet away, four in quick succession, pop…poppop…pop. It could have been school kids throwing fire crackers but I knew otherwise when the guy leaning on the minivan hopped up off it and crouched down, looking up the block in the direction of the sound and pressing himself tight up against the side door. The other guy ran around the back of the van and squatted behind it for cover, waiting for some signal of what to do next. He ran to the driver’s side door, yelling as he pulled it open for his friend to get in, fast. He fired up the engine and they tore off, making a fast three point turn and heading in the opposite direction. As he did there were more pops coming from up the block.

One of the shooters was coming my way. I felt this before I actually saw him. There wasn’t anything I could do but get down and wait for him to pass. When I saw the shooter half-running, half-skipping towards me, turning his head as he did to see if he was being pursued, I reached down and pulled on the seat release and eased the seat back as far as I could. If a bullet were to come through the windshield I didn’t want to catch it in the head. Even with my body laid out horizontally I could still sit up a little to see what was going on.

The shooter was a young black kid, maybe in his late teens, clean shaven and boyish looking in an oversized black t-shirt and baggy brown jeans. I saw the gun that was still in his hand, a boxy and mean looking piece of black metal that he had partially stuffed into his front pocket. He wanted to keep his finger on the trigger in case he had to start shooting again but at the same time he didn’t want to openly brandish the weapon for witnesses to see.

He slowed to a walk when he got within arm’s reach of me; if my window was down I could have reached out to touch him. Maybe he felt comfortable, thinking he had escaped unharmed. Maybe he was lingering for a second, thinking about going back to pop off a couple more shots. He was smiling broadly, like street corner crossfires were fun and games. His face said, ain’t no thang. Just throwin’ some lead, baby. Just bustin’ slugs. We were two blocks from Temple Hospital in the mid-afternoon. The streets were filled with pedestrians and working folks.

When the shooter saw me leaned back in the passenger’s seat, my wide eyes darting back and forth from the gun to his face and back again — he started to laugh. Look at him. Motherfucker about to shit his pants. The shooter jogged off, turning the corner on Tioga Street and heading east.

When I pulled to the corner of Venango Street the other shooter was there, standing in the middle of the intersection with his gun held close against his thigh. He was scanning the line of parked cars I just drove away from, looking for the kid who just ran past me. The other shooter was an older guy, maybe in his 30s, with a Muslim’s big beard and close cropped hair. His caramel colored baggy shirt and pants matched exactly. When I slowed at the stop sign he waved me through the intersection with his free hand.

I turned right onto Erie Avenue and within a minute there was a blue and white with lights flashing and siren screaming parting the traffic in the westbound lanes. Out of nowhere I started to laugh hysterically. I couldn’t say why then and I’m still not sure. Maybe it was the relief; maybe I realized how foolish I must have looked laid out flat on my back in the seat of my car, bug eyed and scared half to death. At the first red light I came to I rolled my window down for some air with a severely shaking hand and from the car parked next to mine I heard hype hip hop blasting, the rapper practically hyperventilating as he rhymed about being a maniac when he’s out on these motherfuckin’ streets.

AFTERWORD:  If you are a social worker doing intensive community based work it’s just a matter of time until you get caught up in street violence. You understand intellectually as you go about your day that you work in violent neighborhoods, but it’s not until there are actually guns going off around you that you truly understand how dangerous your work is. There are safety protocols you can practice, but you really have no idea how you will handle a situation like this until it happens. Dropping my seat so I could be horizontal while the shooting was going on was completely instinctual; I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing at that moment.  It wasn’t until later that day when I was writing this narrative that I realized it also just happened to be exactly the right thing to do in that situation, that could have prevented catching a bullet in the face. Taking this right course of action was unintentional; it was a moment of blind panic. I remember being terrified that the shooter saw me looking him in the face, knowing that I could potentially witness against him.  It would have been nothing for him to stop for a moment and shoot from point blank range as he walked right past me.

PREVIOUSLY: Today I Saw… Revisited#1

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Today I Saw was a series of short imagistic non-fiction narratives I did back in 2007. I didn’t even conceive it as a series for publication, it was really just a bunch of scenes and images I jotted down while doing field work as a social worker. I was doing intensive community based work with homeless families, and writing about all the crazy things I saw in the field helped me decompress at the end of the day from the stress and pressure I was under at my often emotionally-grueling job. Phawker approached me about writing for them after a couple well-received cover stories I did for the Philadelphia City Paper, and trying to work the notes I had taken into a regular column made sense. It ran twice a week for a year straight. Each installment begins with the same phrase, “Today I Saw” because I was literally writing down things I was seeing in the neighborhoods, as I was seeing them each day.

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a Latina in pajama bottoms and bedroom slippers standing on the sidewalk near D Street and Clearfield holding onto the handlebars of a little boy’s BMX bike. Pajama bottoms and bedroom slippers became acceptable street wear in the ghetto at some point; I see young girls out pushing baby strollers or shopping on Kensington and Frankford Avenue in them almost every day. The neighborhood old heads don’t appreciate the trend; I’ve spoken to many older black and Latin men and women in North Philly who see the development in End Time terms. They say we’ve fallen real far when chronic unemployment is so acceptable and expected that young girls don’t even bother putting on pants or shoes before leaving the house any more. When Ruthie sees these girls she says, “How can a girl wear her bed clothes to go shopping? It makes me think she ain’t washed her a-s-s today.”

The woman holding the bike had on a pink camisole top, and a green and red dragon soared up from under its fabric, a big tattoo reaching nearly to the nape of her neck. Her face was hard, pulled tight with anger as she leaned in to say loudly right into the little boy’s ear, “You say, ‘Excuse me.’” The little boy was maybe seven, wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt in need of washing. He sneered and rolled his eyes as he turned his head away: He wouldn’t pay attention to the woman let alone give her the respect she was looking for. He stared across the street and said, “I told you to watch out.”

The woman cupped his cheek and pulled his face back towards hers, demanding that he look at her. She raised her voice up another notch. “You say, ‘Excuse me.’” The kid yanked his face out of her hand; as he pulled away he said loudly, “I told you to watch out.” The woman put her mouth back up to the boy’s ear and screamed, “YOU SAY EXCUSE ME!” and as she did the kid yelled back, raising up to start pedaling, “I told you to watch the fuck out you fucking nasty bitch!” The boy pedaled off, cruising slowly to show he wasn’t scared. The woman screamed at him, telling him to watch his back when he comes around, she might have one of her boys from the block teach him some manners in a way he’ll understand. The kid grabbed on his crotch and told her to suck his dick without looking back at her.

AFTERWORD: I practically lived on D Street in West Kensington during 2007, the most violent year in recent memory for Philadelphia.  I had a client family there whose needs were so deep and varied that they lived in a constant state of crisis and required a tremendous amount of time and attention from me as their social worker. It was the kind of family that had been put out of every homeless shelter in the city, had contact with just about every social service agency under the sun. When my agency came in contact with them they were living in an abandoned house in West Philly that had no heat, electricity, stairs or even floorboards. They used a loose piece of sheet rock for a front door. It was mid-December and there were two little children in the home huddled by kerosene heaters. So we moved them to D Street, where we had available housing. Even though we suspected their needs would be beyond our small agency’s ability to serve, we tried because we felt that given the circumstances not trying was not an option.

A number of Today I Saw installments focused on West Kensington, an extremely poor neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs. Like much of the series, these installments were intended to capture elements of urban poverty’s ugliness that most people in Philly never experience. The ugliness of many Today I Saw installments jarred and even offended many readers.  I understand that. However, the reporting is faithful and the details accurate. Around the time this installment was written police raided a home a few doors down discovering a substantial stash of heroin and also a malnourished 12 year old boy in the basement where his parents kept him in a filthy cage like a dog. How do you put a positive spin on these ugly aspects of life in Philly’s poorest neighborhoods? You don’t, and you do readers a disservice if you try to. The only other option is to not write about them, because you feel some things are so awful they shouldn’t be written about.

With Today I Saw I encouraged readers to not look away from the ugliest side of life in Philadelphia. Looking away doesn’t make it disappear. I recently rode past the house on D Street where my clients lived. It was boarded up, left empty. I don’t know what happened to the family. I imagine that after failing to thrive in yet another social service program they returned to squat in another abandoned home. This is a fact of life as a social worker; sometimes your long hours of hard work for low pay in dangerous neighborhoods amount to nothing.

BY JEFF DEENEY Chester is the archetypal once-thriving small American city left to die in the post-industrial flux of globalization. The steel industry, ship building and other manufacturing that used to fuel the local economy have long since evaporated, the city’s population halved since its 1950s heyday. Chester today is largely black and extremely poor. Its economic decline is readily apparent to even the casual surveyor of its housing stock; boarded up, abandoned buildings and vacant store fronts with faded marquees dot the downtown streets. Some homes were neglected for so long that their roofs eventually caved in, causing the floors below to collapse under their weight, leaving what look like demolition sites in the middle of a residential block.

Chester is 20 miles south of Philadelphia, but looks every bit as bad as the worst big city ghetto. Its woes have been compounded over the years by the presence of numerous toxic industrial waste sites and a failing school system. The Central Business District is little more than a collection of dollar stores, discount clothing shops, hair salons and corner take out joints; by 5pm the entire stretch is shuttered, its sidewalks barren and eerily quiet. The new waterfront casino that was one of the Chester’s few recent major economic developments is a nickel and dime slot parlor whose front doors overlook the razor wire surrounding the state prison facility across the street.

Considering Chester’s make up of primarily poor blacks, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Barack Obama has overwhelming support, here. There’s no shortage of Obama lawn signs, at least on blocks where the homes have lawns. What’s worth noting, though, is the local Obama supporters’ practice of affixing campaign signs to the facades of the city’s multitude of abandoned properties. Throughout Chester you’ll find them tacked to plywood boards that cover shattered windows and seal doorways to prevent squatters from converting the properties to drug houses. Block after block, the blue signs baring Obama’s name can be found framed by flaking paint, yards with high, weedy grass, and crumbling concrete stoops covered in broken bottle glass.

Flat rectangles of plywood like those used to board up an abandoned house are a logical place to slap any kind of sign. It might not be worth noting if there weren’t so many of them. But if you drive through Chester, circling from 9th Street to Seventh, from Seventh to Fifth, on up to Front Street where children gather, pitching pebbles at the rusting railcars that rumble along the CSX tracks just ten feet from their front steps, you start to realize that there is an intention behind the placement of these Obama signs. They hang from abandoned buildings at literally every turn. They are like figurative “X’s” marking the blighted spots of institutional failure, where the destitution of American dreams are most apparent. The signs seem to say, “Change this.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in PW, City Paper and the Inquirer. He focuses on issues of urban poverty and drug culture. He is currently working on a book about life in the crossfire of poverty, drugs, guns, and the bureaucracies designed to remedy them, all of which informed his experiences as social workers in some of the city’s most dire and depleted neighborhoods.

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