More Life in the Borough – Listening to Drake in Tesoma

The bad kids wear now Adidas sweats and have their ears cleaned regularly and they don’t smell like sweat and earth at all, they just smell like boys, the musky smell of the herd, of a group with name-brand hoodies peer pressure and similar smart phones and scrolling through Facebook updates and Instagram photos of their classmates, swearing with great gusto, the swears of young people who have only just learned how to say those words in a bus and look at old people the other passengers defiantly and proudly,

and the little kids are riding the bus, too, it’s their English conversation class and they are talking in broken English because they are little enough to abide by the rules even on a bus, the boys sit in the back next to me, their handsome teacher sits in the middle, surrounded by the girls who all desperately want to talk to him and just to be close to him and have him smile at them, because he is nothing like the disgusting boys, he has long unruly hair and a low voice, but the boys take no notice,

they discuss their parents, and what has been the most fun they’ve ever had, and the answers are what to be expected from a bunch of ten-year-olds,

trips to the waterpark, or when someone I miss it laughed that one time so hard he had the soda come out of his nose,

But one of the kids says that he would rather have his own difficult parents than the dream parents who let you do whatever you want and stay up all hours, because if you grow up totally without manners, this is what the kid says to his friends, you won’t be able to get a job because you’ll be all rude and awful to others, it’s too crazy to be made up, and I feel the urge to turn and hug him for being a smart kid but I contain myself because it would embarrass him and maybe make him second-guess his nobility and because I am a stranger and it would be highly inappropriate.

The big kids talk about drinking and they hog all the seats, they are not the baddest kids

even if they sometimes smash the random hood of a car, but only sometimes, almost never,

and that was years ago so these boys were little boys then, so it couldn’t have been any of these here bad boys of Tesoma,

and now they talk about getting drunk, exaggerating like boys do, and hiding their beer bottles at the gates of what I miss it, and giving each other drunken rides in their mopeds, and who was sucking face with whom, they can talk freely, I am a grown-up in other words invisible, and the talk is the talk of rampant fifteen-year-old boys with the grown man’s size forty-seven sneakers and from those grown man’s feet grow the bodies of still awkward teens, hiding their insecurities because that’s what you do, but even the baddest kids on the bus I know it instinctively because you develop a sense a radar for aggressive behavior for real danger, and there’s no real danger here, these boys they’re not bad boys at all, but they need to tell themselves that they are or else they lose face, even these big kids here have a deep compassion inside of them, in their hearts the soul of someone who will stop to help others, of a man living in a neighborhood where there’s blood on the pavement at the underpass on Sunday mornings.

The neighborhood is changing now, scenery changing fast it is the first big change since the Seventies

cleaning up the borough with the bad rap

and as I walk past the construction sites in my Caterpillar boots and crew cut and large ear phones that cover my ears entirely

I, too, feel the need to make myself look like a motherfucker in case of danger, but there is no danger in the daylight, and when I come home and it’s dark, I make it known that yes, I’m a woman, but don’t mess with me

but there is no one to just the same kids hanging out on the parking lot of the little shopping center and I make myself laugh at my own precaution maybe it’s the empowering attitude from the music that is contagious and why not if I’m like yeah

once inside my own building I still sometimes smell grandfather’s aftershave, but only sometimes, almost never now, but he is watching over me, yeah

it don’t mean be stupid it just means be prepared but it isn’t more dangerous here, it never was I was a little girl here, staying the weekend at my grandparents here, it never was it is as dangerous.