birdpoopandharlem

Sometime yesterday. Probably around 9 am.

Who is this extremely happy tour guide? Is she actually… passionate about this? Oh my goodness, she actually loves what she’s doing. This is weird. I was expecting a malnourished Dominican man with a patchy beard in an over-worn, stained sweatshirt to lead me around for two hours telling me about the significance of the buildings I would never have noticed and the road signs that I would never have read and the change in the landscape I would never have thought of. But instead we have been thrown into a page of a Wes Anderson movie script. What are those shoes and coat doing on the same body anyway? I was digressing. I tried to pay attention to her but the bustling Friday morning crowd on 135th and Lenox held too many distractions.

Suddenly I felt something on my shoulder. Did something just? HOLY. The audacity of pigeons these days.

An unimaginably brainless, probably blank faced, insolent, unmannered, uncivilized, uneducated pigeon had hit its target dead OFF. My shoulder was decorated with a line of green and white poop, lying there in all its glory, boasting its feats of accuracy. I saw wings flapping away and I wished for a bow and arrow and accuracy that beat the one the bird’s butt had just practiced. But I didn’t have a bow, or a quiver of arrows. I had my drawstring bag and a lonely dollar that was now going to be spent on a self-consolatory doughnut and the extra wet napkins that the street vendor was kind enough to give me. But the stain disgraced my shoulder until I saw a desolate Popeye’s (an unusual sight for the place) and as I rushed in and encountered an Indian accent behind the counter, I ushered myself into the bathroom to change while the class stared at my supposed insolence in abandoning the tour in order to get fried chicken. As if I would have betrayed the doughnut I had eaten earlier and introduce it to the company of fried chicken, what a preposterous notion.

The tour was fascinating in some ways, especially when I realized there were million dollar properties right behind the hellhole I thought I resided in. That this place used to be the Czech republic of the early and mid twentieth century, just my luck to develop the ability to even think by the time it had ended. The thought of visiting the Harlem YMCA as I came to New York for the first time in my wool trousers and blazer with a crisp cotton shirt, lugging baggage out of the subway on 135th and Lenox was a page out of a novel written in the back of my mind. The two-story penthouse at the top of the Theresa hotel left a myriad of stories to be concocted and the dinners to be had with world dignitaries left me in a delirium as we crossed the street to the Apollo theatre where the crowd was giving standing ovations to the Jackson five as I bustled my way through the crowd.

But all of this was only a figment of my imagination. Harlem had passed its heyday and it was now a cog in the capitalist machine of advertisements and cheap stores that yelled and screeched their sales pitches through the avenues and streets of Harlem. The ongoing and obvious gentrification of the place was a sign of ‘better’ things to come but better for who, we would only know in the aftermath. It was a chapter in the life of this ever breathing, living city that millions commuted to and resided in. But only a handful had any idea of what was happening as their walked in their bubbles to their office buildings and walked right back to their homes and television shows to keep their minds entertained in short bursts and spurts like a car in disrepair.

Suddenly I turned around to see the tour guide had vanished. Who was she, did anyone catch her name? And on that note of suspicion, my tour of Harlem had come to an abrupt end.