Duckabush River Peter Ludwin

AUGUST 1997
T H E RAVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`On-Line Column`

about
Michael Hureaux-Perez
&
previous articles

apple jacked

michael hureaux-perez

As of this September, your boy will be working as a paraprofessional for the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School in central Harlem. It's going to be good to be working with kids again. It's always a lot of work, but even at its worst it's better than selling doodahs for the retail jail that the service industry has long been.

I'm coordinating a drum and dance class for the school one hour a day, two other hours of the day I assist in the development of writing skills and I assist in a humanities class. It's required by the State of New York that there be at least one paraprofessional who is versed in "computer networking technique" on staff, so I've been asked to dive into that puzzle. New York School District and a certain, ah, organized family willing, the equipment should be in the school by September, provided, of course, that we can get the rewiring for the classroom started by the end of July. This is an inner city program that serves the Black and Latino community, and there are priorities.

On the plus side, Bread and Roses has a very resourceful and confident staff with a leadership that crossed Al Shanker's picket lines during the Brownsville strike back in 1969, so there are no illusions as to the retrograde role that the UFT has sometimes played in New York schools. There is a pretty tough-minded lower east side consciousness as to the difference between union hacks and the labor movement, as well as a sharp and savvy set of eyes on the corporate yes-men who run the schools. The surrounding community has itself been mobilized by activists in the group ACORN (Aware Communities Organized for Reform Now), so the train has a pretty good chance of getting out of the station.

Complicating matters are the inner resentments that emerge in a community too long accustomed to dealing with resource shortages, and there are already some riffs between the Bread and Roses staff and the staff of the Thurgood Marshall Academy, which shares the same building on 135th and St. Nicholas Avenue. Petty nationalists on all sides have become bored with the tiny sects they run in the neighborhood and are looking around for accomplished programs to rip up, and Marshall stands high on the list as one of the most visible. ACORN has its own share of wild-eyed social democrats who are ever eager to prove that they aren't Leninists, so there's that to contend with. And in the middle, as usual, there are the kids, who, Bon Dieu willing, won't become chips in the squabbling between their elders. It's all part of the process, or just another day in New York community politics.

It never rains but it pours. The same week I was hired at Bread and Roses, I was given a contract to do some work for the Training and Upgrading Program at 1199, which is in the midst of a couple of fierce battles. On the one hand, there is a speed-up and additional chores for Licensed Nurse's Assistants, and part of my job is to take the edge off of that by introducing cooperative teaching methods to the trainers and teachers for the union. On the other, there is a two tier provision at the center of a contract being discussed this October. A two tier contract is one in which newer workers are brought into the workforce, usually at less pay and with additional job responsibilities. For example, in many hospitals in New York, the same Nurse's Assistant who scrubs out the bedpans and toilet in a sick room is serving food other hours of the day. Older workers sometimes face a provision in which they are bought out and given pensions, so the double tier has long been a fairly effective means to atomize the unions through layoffs and early retirement plans. It seems to be working.

I think bureaucracy and its attendant corruption is what a lot of people were warning me about when I began talking about my plans to move to the city at the beginning of last year. If New York is any indicator of where urban policy is going in the twenty first century, this country has become more pitiful and venal then I ever thought it was.

It is impossible to travel across this city without coming across some paean to the organizational genius of Rudolf Guiliani, who is up for re-election in the mayoral race this year. Guiliani is a graduate of the George Bush school of politics, that weird combo of "ah gee whiz gosharootie" mask and completely mean-spirited reality that we have come to love so much in this country. Guiliani, like Bush, is one of those he-man tough guy politicians we've gotten saddled with just because someone was the last pick for the football ball team fifty years ago. It's a political tradition that started with Theodore Roosevelt, the sickly kid with weak vision who worked himself up into a real man. The key problem confronting this personality is that foreign policy is a lot more transparent now than it was in T.R.'s day, so the sleight of hand has to be a lot faster. Domestic enemies must be found.

The red threat is dead, terrorism doesn't hold public interest for long because we know we all turn our eyes from our own more sophisticated hired guns. Along comes a politician like Rudy Guiliani, who started out as a crack prosecuting attorney who went after mob bosses. Seemed like a decent enough guy, unless you were in the wrong crime family. This crusading attorney decided he wanted to be mayor of New York, and so, with the help of about ten thousand off duty members of the Policeman's Benevolent Society, he led a march on Gracie Mansion during the administration of David Dinkins about six years ago. For a couple of hours, Mr. Guiliani and his off duty army stood outside the living quarters of this city's highest elected official and called that person everything but a child of God in protest of the strengthening of civilian police review boards in New York City. It was a scene roughly comparable to a beer hall putsch, but for some reason, boojwah politicians are allowed to behave like a bunch of animals. If this had been an action led by leftist students at Columbia, it would have been on the cover of Newsweek with a snide article reminding the public that "it's not the sixties anymore," which is very true. Nor is it Germany during the late days of the Weimar Republic, but that doesn't seem to make as much difference to the watchdogs of cultural punditry. Things being what they are, Mr. Guiliani was instead elected mayor of the largest city in the United States.

To this day, his police routinely beat and murder young people in the streets of this neighborhood, the most recent case being that of Kevin Cedeno. Just six weeks ago, Kevin was shot down about four blocks from here while allegedly charging a police officer with a machete. The problem is that the entry wounds from the bullets were all in Cedeno's back. (Was he charging them backwards? Seattle Police made a similar claim when they shot Robert Baldwin down at Yesler Terrace in 1984. Must be some new martial art.) Police authorities claim they tried to save the young man's life, but they left him handcuffed face down on the sidewalk for several minutes. And instead of taking him to the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian, just five blocks from the scene of the shooting, they took him to Harlem Hospital, which is about thirty blocks south of where the incident took place and on the other side of Manhattan Island. The reasoning behind this was that Columbia Presbyterian doesn't have a trauma ward, but when you hear the helicopters bringing in patients from parts remote several times a day as the residents of this neighborhood do, it doesn't wash. In any event, the hearing was held, the cop walked, and His Honor gave a quick statement to the press, extolling the courageous actions of the police officer.

I don't know why I expect more. This, after all, is the country that went ga ga over its ability to shoot the whole of a fleeing army--some one hundred thousand people--in the back on the Basra Highway during the Gulf War six years ago. As Pete Leinonen commented at the time, you can't expect much from people who are heedless of the fact that the very code of the Old West that we profess to uphold had its own harsh opinion of people who shot fleeing enemies in the back.

In any event, Rudy Guiliani goes on, protecting us from the harshness of cultural life and making Times Square family-safe and nice for the Walt Disney Corporation. My wife Kathleen is a student at Fazil's Studio, which is a studio that specializes in Flamenco and is housed in one of the aging studio buildings just off of 47th Street and Eighth Avenue. The place is seedy as all hell, but when you walk up in there you expect to run into the ghosts of Bert Williams and Fanny Brice around every corner. As it is, the building plays host to Noche Flamenca, which is a whirlwind of Andalucian dance talent that winters there quite often. But not forever. The rents are going up in that district, you see, part of making the area family safe. Just last March, contractors gave a new face to a ballroom where the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke used to play. It ain't there no more, but Mickey and Goofy are keeping it safe with their old pals Hercules and Guiliani. Thanks for the memories.

Fortunately, there's a whole lot more to New York City than the tourist bureau can do away with, and given the growing temper of life at the bottom, the time is not far off when a change is going to come. Were the powers that be giving something up as fast as they are taking everything worthwhile away, I would think different, but they aren't, and I think that's what's going to undo the present state of affairs. Not because of any democratic aspiration capitalism has, not because of any well of passion hidden in the breast of a desiccated proletariat--although that certainly is going to play an important role--but because everything is getting so god damn shitty. How's that for dialectic? Shitty, shittier, shittiest. But this too shall pass, no pun intended.

There's a story Eduardo Galeano tells about a man imprisoned in Uruguay, who is denied access to the artwork brought to him by his young daughter on a family visitation day. It seems that the artwork is forbidden because it contains images of birds, a symbol of freedom. A few weeks later, the child comes with her mother again, and brings him a picture of trees. Noticing the orange orblike objects that decorate the trees in the picture, the prisoner asks his daughter what kind of fruit the bright colored spots are. She reaches up, puts her hand over his mouth and says to him, "Ssshhhhhh. Those are the eyes of the birds. They've hidden in the trees, and I've smuggled them in to you."

So that's where I put my faith. There is far too much glory of the Good God in the face of the person who hands you the homemade empenada at the corner booth, which by the way is a shopping cart converted into a place of business by someone long accustomed to making a way out of no way. This vender may face harassment and arrest by any number of hot head cops out to make quota by nailing her or him for not having a street vender's license which they have the remotest chance of attaining in the next two to three years due to a waiting list. And understand this. No matter what they do, they are wrong. There's no work but seasonal grunt work, they may get thrown from their apartments on the whims of a landlord, they may have several children who rise up with them early in the morning to make the product that will deliver the day's groceries. And yet they keep moving, in spite of conditions that would break the back of any journalist or speculations shark who refers to their existence in terms as dismissive as "permanent underclass" and "bottomfeeders." The experts talk about bridges to the twenty-first century, but let it be said plainly that any country that will not learn to respect and uphold such a people and such creativity is going nowhere fast, the Internet and all its Burma Shave information highway wonders be damned.

Today is another baked apple day, meaning that the heat will soar to upwards of one hundred and the humidity will be high and any shirt I put on, regardless of its "cool" color, will be sopping up that rivulet of sweat that's going to be running down my spine to my buttcrack all day. But I'm going to head out today anyway, find my way down to Frederick Douglass Boulevard and burn the skin off my face with this cayenne New York daylight, trying to find the Texas hot link guy who stands in front of the abandoned building midblock between 137th and 138th. He'll whump me up a sandwich smothered with onions and peppers that's about as long as my arm, hand me a bunch of napkins and a plate to catch the drip. Then I'll get a bucket of ice cold pink lemonade from him that puts what a certain corporate entity calls a "big gulp" to shame, and the whole mess will cost me about four bucks. Then I'll stand and eat it and talk and listen to people talk about the twenty-one year old kid down the block who already has fifty-five violations on his license and why doesn't somebody do something about these here young folks, or about what Malcolm said to someone's dad just down the block from here one day when the old man was out on his numbers run back in 1964.

I tell you, there's a lot of work in the days ahead, but right now, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

about Michael Hureaux-Perez & previous articles

© The Raven Chronicles 1997

�

	AUGUST 1997		T H E RAVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`On-Line Column` about Michael Hureaux-Perez & previous articles		apple jacked michael hureaux-perez As of this September, your boy will be working as a paraprofessional for the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School in central Harlem. It's going to be good to be working with kids again. It's always a lot of work, but even at its worst it's better than selling doodahs for the retail jail that the service industry has long been. I'm coordinating a drum and dance class for the school one hour a day, two other hours of the day I assist in the development of writing skills and I assist in a humanities class. It's required by the State of New York that there be at least one paraprofessional who is versed in "computer networking technique" on staff, so I've been asked to dive into that puzzle. New York School District and a certain, ah, organized family willing, the equipment should be in the school by September, provided, of course, that we can get the rewiring for the classroom started by the end of July. This is an inner city program that serves the Black and Latino community, and there are priorities. On the plus side, Bread and Roses has a very resourceful and confident staff with a leadership that crossed Al Shanker's picket lines during the Brownsville strike back in 1969, so there are no illusions as to the retrograde role that the UFT has sometimes played in New York schools. There is a pretty tough-minded lower east side consciousness as to the difference between union hacks and the labor movement, as well as a sharp and savvy set of eyes on the corporate yes-men who run the schools. The surrounding community has itself been mobilized by activists in the group ACORN (Aware Communities Organized for Reform Now), so the train has a pretty good chance of getting out of the station. Complicating matters are the inner resentments that emerge in a community too long accustomed to dealing with resource shortages, and there are already some riffs between the Bread and Roses staff and the staff of the Thurgood Marshall Academy, which shares the same building on 135th and St. Nicholas Avenue. Petty nationalists on all sides have become bored with the tiny sects they run in the neighborhood and are looking around for accomplished programs to rip up, and Marshall stands high on the list as one of the most visible. ACORN has its own share of wild-eyed social democrats who are ever eager to prove that they aren't Leninists, so there's that to contend with. And in the middle, as usual, there are the kids, who, Bon Dieu willing, won't become chips in the squabbling between their elders. It's all part of the process, or just another day in New York community politics. It never rains but it pours. The same week I was hired at Bread and Roses, I was given a contract to do some work for the Training and Upgrading Program at 1199, which is in the midst of a couple of fierce battles. On the one hand, there is a speed-up and additional chores for Licensed Nurse's Assistants, and part of my job is to take the edge off of that by introducing cooperative teaching methods to the trainers and teachers for the union. On the other, there is a two tier provision at the center of a contract being discussed this October. A two tier contract is one in which newer workers are brought into the workforce, usually at less pay and with additional job responsibilities. For example, in many hospitals in New York, the same Nurse's Assistant who scrubs out the bedpans and toilet in a sick room is serving food other hours of the day. Older workers sometimes face a provision in which they are bought out and given pensions, so the double tier has long been a fairly effective means to atomize the unions through layoffs and early retirement plans. It seems to be working. I think bureaucracy and its attendant corruption is what a lot of people were warning me about when I began talking about my plans to move to the city at the beginning of last year. If New York is any indicator of where urban policy is going in the twenty first century, this country has become more pitiful and venal then I ever thought it was. It is impossible to travel across this city without coming across some paean to the organizational genius of Rudolf Guiliani, who is up for re-election in the mayoral race this year. Guiliani is a graduate of the George Bush school of politics, that weird combo of "ah gee whiz gosharootie" mask and completely mean-spirited reality that we have come to love so much in this country. Guiliani, like Bush, is one of those he-man tough guy politicians we've gotten saddled with just because someone was the last pick for the football ball team fifty years ago. It's a political tradition that started with Theodore Roosevelt, the sickly kid with weak vision who worked himself up into a real man. The key problem confronting this personality is that foreign policy is a lot more transparent now than it was in T.R.'s day, so the sleight of hand has to be a lot faster. Domestic enemies must be found. The red threat is dead, terrorism doesn't hold public interest for long because we know we all turn our eyes from our own more sophisticated hired guns. Along comes a politician like Rudy Guiliani, who started out as a crack prosecuting attorney who went after mob bosses. Seemed like a decent enough guy, unless you were in the wrong crime family. This crusading attorney decided he wanted to be mayor of New York, and so, with the help of about ten thousand off duty members of the Policeman's Benevolent Society, he led a march on Gracie Mansion during the administration of David Dinkins about six years ago. For a couple of hours, Mr. Guiliani and his off duty army stood outside the living quarters of this city's highest elected official and called that person everything but a child of God in protest of the strengthening of civilian police review boards in New York City. It was a scene roughly comparable to a beer hall putsch, but for some reason, boojwah politicians are allowed to behave like a bunch of animals. If this had been an action led by leftist students at Columbia, it would have been on the cover of Newsweek with a snide article reminding the public that "it's not the sixties anymore," which is very true. Nor is it Germany during the late days of the Weimar Republic, but that doesn't seem to make as much difference to the watchdogs of cultural punditry. Things being what they are, Mr. Guiliani was instead elected mayor of the largest city in the United States. To this day, his police routinely beat and murder young people in the streets of this neighborhood, the most recent case being that of Kevin Cedeno. Just six weeks ago, Kevin was shot down about four blocks from here while allegedly charging a police officer with a machete. The problem is that the entry wounds from the bullets were all in Cedeno's back. (Was he charging them backwards? Seattle Police made a similar claim when they shot Robert Baldwin down at Yesler Terrace in 1984. Must be some new martial art.) Police authorities claim they tried to save the young man's life, but they left him handcuffed face down on the sidewalk for several minutes. And instead of taking him to the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian, just five blocks from the scene of the shooting, they took him to Harlem Hospital, which is about thirty blocks south of where the incident took place and on the other side of Manhattan Island. The reasoning behind this was that Columbia Presbyterian doesn't have a trauma ward, but when you hear the helicopters bringing in patients from parts remote several times a day as the residents of this neighborhood do, it doesn't wash. In any event, the hearing was held, the cop walked, and His Honor gave a quick statement to the press, extolling the courageous actions of the police officer. I don't know why I expect more. This, after all, is the country that went ga ga over its ability to shoot the whole of a fleeing army--some one hundred thousand people--in the back on the Basra Highway during the Gulf War six years ago. As Pete Leinonen commented at the time, you can't expect much from people who are heedless of the fact that the very code of the Old West that we profess to uphold had its own harsh opinion of people who shot fleeing enemies in the back. In any event, Rudy Guiliani goes on, protecting us from the harshness of cultural life and making Times Square family-safe and nice for the Walt Disney Corporation. My wife Kathleen is a student at Fazil's Studio, which is a studio that specializes in Flamenco and is housed in one of the aging studio buildings just off of 47th Street and Eighth Avenue. The place is seedy as all hell, but when you walk up in there you expect to run into the ghosts of Bert Williams and Fanny Brice around every corner. As it is, the building plays host to Noche Flamenca, which is a whirlwind of Andalucian dance talent that winters there quite often. But not forever. The rents are going up in that district, you see, part of making the area family safe. Just last March, contractors gave a new face to a ballroom where the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke used to play. It ain't there no more, but Mickey and Goofy are keeping it safe with their old pals Hercules and Guiliani. Thanks for the memories. Fortunately, there's a whole lot more to New York City than the tourist bureau can do away with, and given the growing temper of life at the bottom, the time is not far off when a change is going to come. Were the powers that be giving something up as fast as they are taking everything worthwhile away, I would think different, but they aren't, and I think that's what's going to undo the present state of affairs. Not because of any democratic aspiration capitalism has, not because of any well of passion hidden in the breast of a desiccated proletariat--although that certainly is going to play an important role--but because everything is getting so god damn shitty. How's that for dialectic? Shitty, shittier, shittiest. But this too shall pass, no pun intended. There's a story Eduardo Galeano tells about a man imprisoned in Uruguay, who is denied access to the artwork brought to him by his young daughter on a family visitation day. It seems that the artwork is forbidden because it contains images of birds, a symbol of freedom. A few weeks later, the child comes with her mother again, and brings him a picture of trees. Noticing the orange orblike objects that decorate the trees in the picture, the prisoner asks his daughter what kind of fruit the bright colored spots are. She reaches up, puts her hand over his mouth and says to him, "Ssshhhhhh. Those are the eyes of the birds. They've hidden in the trees, and I've smuggled them in to you." So that's where I put my faith. There is far too much glory of the Good God in the face of the person who hands you the homemade empenada at the corner booth, which by the way is a shopping cart converted into a place of business by someone long accustomed to making a way out of no way. This vender may face harassment and arrest by any number of hot head cops out to make quota by nailing her or him for not having a street vender's license which they have the remotest chance of attaining in the next two to three years due to a waiting list. And understand this. No matter what they do, they are wrong. There's no work but seasonal grunt work, they may get thrown from their apartments on the whims of a landlord, they may have several children who rise up with them early in the morning to make the product that will deliver the day's groceries. And yet they keep moving, in spite of conditions that would break the back of any journalist or speculations shark who refers to their existence in terms as dismissive as "permanent underclass" and "bottomfeeders." The experts talk about bridges to the twenty-first century, but let it be said plainly that any country that will not learn to respect and uphold such a people and such creativity is going nowhere fast, the Internet and all its Burma Shave information highway wonders be damned. Today is another baked apple day, meaning that the heat will soar to upwards of one hundred and the humidity will be high and any shirt I put on, regardless of its "cool" color, will be sopping up that rivulet of sweat that's going to be running down my spine to my buttcrack all day. But I'm going to head out today anyway, find my way down to Frederick Douglass Boulevard and burn the skin off my face with this cayenne New York daylight, trying to find the Texas hot link guy who stands in front of the abandoned building midblock between 137th and 138th. He'll whump me up a sandwich smothered with onions and peppers that's about as long as my arm, hand me a bunch of napkins and a plate to catch the drip. Then I'll get a bucket of ice cold pink lemonade from him that puts what a certain corporate entity calls a "big gulp" to shame, and the whole mess will cost me about four bucks. Then I'll stand and eat it and talk and listen to people talk about the twenty-one year old kid down the block who already has fifty-five violations on his license and why doesn't somebody do something about these here young folks, or about what Malcolm said to someone's dad just down the block from here one day when the old man was out on his numbers run back in 1964. I tell you, there's a lot of work in the days ahead, but right now, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. about Michael Hureaux-Perez & previous articles
			© The Raven Chronicles 1997