Riverine (15 page)

I still went home on weekends to do my laundry. If I was hungry, I ordered the same kind of fast food I had eaten at home. I stored frozen quarts of my dad’s homemade chili, filled with vegetables from his garden, in my dorm room freezer. If someone had said, “Here is a blank piece of paper, draw a living room—anything you want,” I would have sketched my mother’s sofa and pine furniture. My dad visited me at school once a month when he was passing through for work. He would take me to lunch and we made small talk for thirty minutes, and he offered life wisdom: “Don’t sweat the small things,” he reminded me. Before we parted ways, he’d hand me a fifty or a hundred-dollar bill and I would want to not take it, but then I would pocket it reluctantly and kiss his cheek in thanks.

Soon, though, even that was too much. I needed more independence. I broke up with Greg and got a campus job tutoring basketball and football players to earn spending money. I imagined myself a satellite gathering information about the unknown world, extending sensors in hopes that an alarm would go off when I’d found a place that “fit.” As if it were easy to know what was what, where one belonged, what one should do. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” Joan Didion cites California as one such destination—where people seek destiny, or, at least, a refuge from “somewhere else.” She writes, “Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.” West as a Hail Mary. But I didn’t have the West. I had wherever my car and a few hundred dollars in the bank would take me. It wasn’t California.

My cousin Mandi’s golden dream consisted of getting a smattering of tattoos, changing majors half a dozen times, massaging hundreds of aching bodies before finally settling on acupuncture school, living in half a dozen states. Eventually, she bought a dog named Bodhi and moved into a small house in Evanston, Illinois. Greg moved to Las Vegas and lived with his friend James in an RV as a remedy to our breakup. He left a fifteen-page letter on my windshield, like a time capsule that recorded our brief history together, before making this journey. I didn’t think he’d really do it, but, to my shock, he never came back. Had he left an address, I would have written him and asked him to return home. Not because I wanted to be with him, but because I couldn’t fathom making a one-way trip to a distant state. People didn’t
move to Vegas
and stay there.

My own launch and exploration was more timid and piecemeal, oriented toward a fascination with selvage, run-down places and meaningful interactions with strangers. Sometimes I would visit a place and stand in its center, inviting it to transform me. In truth, I never had a plan for anything. Whatever came my way, I accepted, as if I had no choice in my own tomorrow. But after excavating the river and fields of my home, I turned that curiosity outward and slowly became an eclectic tourist of America’s towns and neighborhoods, an interlocutor in silent commune with other scarred lands and depressed buildings. I set out to my destination, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose, applying my new knowledge to each new landscape. I analyzed the metallic remains of postindustrial wastelands. I mouthed my secrets into the hallowed valleys that marked the paths of ancient glaciers. I sketched the scenery, recorded my conversations as journal entries or poems, then reported back home to Indiana.

Broken Windows Theory

After Corey disappeared from his bedroom window forever, I was fascinated by abandoned structures. Places that once held people, businesses, animals, cargo, but were empty now. Barns, silos, houses, warehouses, Cabrini Green. Places where the past was scooped out and the shell remained. I liked to imagine the stories that happened inside—the chain of events that culminated in each place’s specific emptiness, the people involved, and where they were now. How it had changed them. I still remembered watching the news when residents of Cabrini Green, a Chicago housing project, were evicted, then watching its demolition on television. They had to drag the last few people out by force.
Where on Earth would they go?
I wondered.
What would happen to them all?
There was no way to know whether emptying out and dispersing the violence-plagued community would scatter the people, the problems, or both.

The Sandman Motel was a different kind of empty, a rural empty. It had been vacant since I was a kid, having closed down for good in the late 1970s. I wanted to stay there for a night. I thought if I could sleep there, spend some time there alone, I’d learn its stories. I remembered my mother’s face when I asked her if we could rent a room there. She looked at my father as if to say, “See what I mean about this one?”

She called one day when I was away at school to tell me the motel was on the news. “They’re calling him ‘the chicken fucker.’”

I wanted to see it for myself. My preoccupation with dissecting crimes now extended beyond Corey’s. At night I watched
Unsolved Mysteries
with my roommate, and by day I read the local police blotter. In my criminal justice classes, I had learned a number of criminal theories. Policing theories, behavioral theories, psychological theories, economic theories, theories of socialization. There were endless theories to learn, and I wrote them all down on three-by-five note cards. I had also learned the names for the various crimes one could commit: larceny, burglary, murder one, murder two, manslaughter, trespassing, criminal trespassing, rape one, rape two, and so on. I memorized them and regurgitated them for exams, wrote papers about a growing, untenable American prison population that teemed with broken men and women, an untenable lower class, an untenable middle class, white-collar crime, the escalation of violence, the effects of the misguided war on drugs, earning perfect scores in all my classes. It was easy to understand the world from the top down. It was easy to comprehend a massive, layered problem when it was flattened out, two-dimensional as a flowchart, or as a series of smaller problems and solutions into whose connective tissues you could interject theories on little note cards like heroic antidotes and create a kind of sense. A way out of the mess. But in practice, it falls apart. Theories are not useful as cultural medicine.

The broken windows theory stood out as being particularly troublesome. The theory, developed by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the early 1980s, was based on the idea that the appearance of neglect in a given neighborhood lends itself to actual crime. In other words, in a neighborhood whose residents didn’t maintain its upkeep and safety, criminals were emboldened to commit crimes. A “no one else cares, so why should I?” mentality. Though likely only coincidence, the theory emerged as gang-related crimes at Cabrini Green escalated. In interviews, Chicago police officers years after the housing project was shut down for good termed the neglected area the “perfect place to commit a crime.” The buildings in the project had suffered from severe disrepair, and law enforcement and community boards either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything about the situation. And when they did try, they faced difficulties in gaining access to the buildings, as they had been overrun by criminal operations.

I never saw Cabrini Green up close, or the redevelopment that followed its demolition. But I could go to the rural motel and see for myself. I remembered the Sandman Motel as a categorically seedy place built as a long line of square rooms with thin walls, each with a separate entrance and a single cheap window framed in faded barn-red trim. Its rooms had held decaying beds, rotting nightstands. Old Bibles. The police had found feathers, and a blood-stained mattress. I saw on the news that the man had stolen chickens from a local farm, and he plucked out their feathers before committing bestiality.

Like a womb, the motel had held that crime inside it. The soft underbelly of our rural area, which was supposed to be a haven from “city” crime, was scaly, flecked with brown and green rot. It, too, had its dark and empty places where people lugged their worst secrets and tried to conceal them. But looking at that motel from outside, I couldn’t have guessed.

The problem with the broken windows theory is that it fixes property, not people. Certainly not systemic poverty or oppression. Moreover, the theory assumes that a place can have psychological influence over people’s actions or state of mind. And it would seem that that’s true: for example, we long to visit beaches and climb mountains because we desire the physical and mental experience of those places. In 1981, Jane Byrne, the first and so far only female mayor of Chicago, lived in a Cabrini Green flat for three weeks to get firsthand experience of life in public housing. During that time, various upgrades were made to the buildings and surrounding land and no one was killed. The violence subsided to a simmer. But when she left, it started right back up again. The baseball diamonds that were built during her brief efforts were soon overrun with weeds. The windows were broken again.

I once heard that New Yorkers are anxious because they can no longer hear silence or the chirping of birds, which seemed a logical correlation to me. Unbroken windows are an illusion, like small towns, meant to tell us that “nothing bad happens here.” But it’s not true. The problems of humans manifest wherever humans are, razing each landscape raw as freshly tattooed skin.

Routine Activities Theory

At the time of my first trip to New York, Corey had been in prison for two years. The trip was organized by the private Catholic college I attended in rural Indiana. I paid for the trip with money I had saved from working at the River—I’d continued working there even after I left for school, commuting for shifts once or twice a week. A group of twenty students and faculty members would fly into LaGuardia, take a train to a youth hostel in lower Manhattan, and meet once a day for group activities. The rest of the time would be ours, to do with whatever we wished. I didn’t know any of the people who had signed up, and that, too, was encouraging. Unsure of what lay waiting for me in New York, I packed my sketchbook, three pairs of leather pants, tank tops, a trench coat, and one comfortable walking-about outfit. We had only three nights in the city, and I planned to see as much as I could and sleep as little as possible. A classmate from New York had given me a list of things to see, taught me how to read my pocket-sized laminated subway map, wrote down which trains to take where, and wished me luck.

I did all of the regular things—Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, MoMA, the Met. I had to buy new pants, having mistakenly imagined New York as some gigantic nightclub. Wearing new cotton pants purchased from a gated parking-lot bazaar in Greenwich Village, I looked out over the city from the top of the World Trade Center, which would fall nine months later. I went to an Internet café, a novelty for its time, where you could pay to use a computer while you drank coffee or beer. I ordered beer, and no one asked for an ID. I drank it and checked my e-mail. I had never before experienced the two activities in public, or at the same time.

My nineteenth birthday fell in the middle of the trip, and I debated mentioning it to someone. It was my first birthday spent away from home, and I kept it a secret until I didn’t. It was too lonely, I decided. I didn’t call or e-mail home—no one carried cell phones, though a few people had one, and my parents didn’t yet use e-mail. I had written Corey a letter for the first time since he’d gone to prison, and perhaps as a gift to myself I had timed that letter so that his reply, if he wrote right away, would arrive around my birthday. It was in the back of my mind the whole trip, this letter to a man in prison, while I attempted to befriend regular young people who came from nice Catholic families. Some of the students had heard there were “triple X” bakeries in New York, and the boys on the trip were determined to find me a penis-shaped birthday cake. They settled for a flaky, chocolate-filled penis-shaped pastry, which I ate, laughing, as they sang “Happy Birthday” to me on a street corner. For dinner, my new friend David took me to a restaurant in Little Italy, where we pretended to be married and cosmopolitan, in hopes of being served wine, which we were. In one of my classes, I had learned about the major U.S. gangs and the criminal activities in which they engaged, so when I spotted the Hells Angels bar in the East Village, I wanted to get closer. I jaywalked and presented my ID at the door but was denied entry, as expected. Still, I’d gotten a glimpse inside: smoky, dark, loud. I didn’t want the day to end, and so, when everyone else turned in for the night, I selected a train line by its color and took it to anywhere, which turned out to be Queens.

I walked from two to four in the morning, utterly lost. I had read about the routine activities theory in my criminal theory class, and I was growing paranoid, watching for crimes everywhere. The theory’s geometric representation was triangular: it converged a person’s daily routines and regular haunts, a motivation to commit a crime, and a clear opportunity to do so. The space enclosed by the three “sides” was the criminal activity. In broad daylight, glimpsing crime had sounded interesting. But nighttime was different. I passed dark alleys in which I could make out people’s shadows, and I passed vacant buildings with broken and barred windows. I wanted to stare at everything, despite my quickening pulse, but couldn’t: the urban fears I’d acquired in my rural upbringing had come to the fore. I had changed into the leather pants. Would I be mistaken for a prostitute? Was I
asking for it?
When I passed men on the sidewalk, I told myself,
act like you live here and don’t make eye contact
. How does one blend into a foreign place? By mirroring the behavior of the locals—size them up and quickly assimilate. And then, the darker thoughts:
say you have AIDS; say you have children; pretend that you like it to undercut the desire
. Every woman had a rape plan, didn’t she? Mine involved verbal manipulation. But no solicitations for sex arose, nothing bad happened, and no motivated individual saw in me an opportunity to commit a crime. I eventually found the train that took me back to the hostel.