Work Up part III: The Night Shift

Projects vs. Trailer parks

Which would you choose if you had to? Would you go for the cement social experiment, or the mobile destitution of the lower class? I bet you're having trouble deciding, it's quite a conundrum, a damed if you do, damned if you don't situation. On one hand you roll in, delivering delicious, hot, tasty, pizza treats, and you get yelled at "Gotcha rock, white boy?" and stared at, cased really, by large gangs of young men, sitting idly on the corners of their block... and you most certainly don't get tipped. On the other hand you go down into the warped pavement and cracked asphalt despair of trailer trash, but usually they would hit you with some cashback. Then again, if you got the right call you might end up in the smoked filled dampness of section eight housing, getting an obscene monetary gesture from a seventeen year old dope dealer excited by the sauces, veggies, and meats presented from your silver lined heat bag. Maybe you almost get your face ripped of by the pitbull/ rottweiler mashup from hell, as you stumble across the broken toy strewn cement slab that a double wide nightmare sleeps on. Where are you more likely to get flashed on? When you drift across the stark yet invisible color line, out of your place and obvious? Or when you sink to the bottom, to the level of perpetual mistake, where the bins are always full of bottles and the children's cries go unanswered? Do you really want to offer conjecture on such an obviously loaded question, to throw your hat in one ring or the other, defining yourself in the glaring light of your prejudices?
Well, let me offer my experience, anecdotal as it may be. I never got robbed, not in my thirty consecutive days and nights of duty, although I was constantly invited inside out of the cold, the wet, or just the night. I saw the private space of many different people and many times I was surprised by its honesty and the care people took with what they had. I got stiffed and I got paid, the biggest tip I ever got was from a beautiful, black, single mother who asked me to pick her up a bottle and some mixer at the liquor store so she could stay with her daughter until her mother arrived and she could go off to her Halloween party dressed as an angel. I never once wanted to go to those places, those wild, secretly malicious blocks where the fight for survival scrapes a little to close to the uncivilized realms within us, to the poverty stricken struggle to get by, to make it work, to get on top. But I did, and although I got nervous, I was never afraid, because I knew those people in a small way, because who was I and where was I at, the bespectacled white boy coming into the wrong neighborhood to bring them small comfort, what was I doing, if not whatever it took to get by, and what did I have worth taking? We were all working hard then, in our own way, whether we knew it or not. We were all poor in this country, eyes consistently bigger than our stomaches. The ramshackle lean-to of failure is a matter of relative disposition, could you ever squeeze a million dollar baby into a ten dollar pair of shoes?. Of course not, but if you were barefoot in the cold, you wouldn't care how much they had cost. What could anyone choose? Prison or Poverty? We all choose neither, but in the end it is places like these that we lay our head, in the end the poverty is in our hearts and the prison we call home.