could afford—the South Bronx. The yellow art deco building must have
been pretty fancy when it opened, but now graffiti covered the outside
walls, and the cracked mirrors in the lobby were held together with duct
tape. Still, it had what Mom called good bones.
Our apartment was bigger than the entire house on Little Hobart Street,
and way fancier. It had shiny oak parquet floors, a foyer with two steps
leading down into the living room—where I slept—and, off to the side, a
bedroom that became Lori's. We also had a kitchen with a working
refrigerator and a gas stove that had a pilot light, so you didn't need
matches to get it going, you just turned the dial, listened to the clicking,
then watched the circle of blue flame flare up through the tiny holes in
the burner. My favorite room was the bathroom. It had a black-and-white
tile floor, a toilet that flushed with a powerful whoosh, a tub so deep you
could submerge yourself completely in it, and hot water that never ran
out.
It didn't bother me that the apartment was in a rough neighborhood; we'd
always lived in rough neighborhoods. Puerto Rican kids hung out on the
block at all hours, playing music, dancing, sitting on abandoned cars,
clustering at the entrance to the elevated subway station and in front of
the bodega that sold single cigarettes called loosies. I got jumped a
number of times. People were always telling me that if I was robbed, I
should hand over my money rather than risk being killed. But I was
darned if I was going to give some stranger my hard-earned cash, and I
didn't want to become known in the neighborhood as an easy target, so I
always fought back. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. What worked
best was to keep my wits about me. Once, as I was getting on the train,
some guy tried to grab my purse, but I jerked it back and the strap broke.
He fell empty-handed to the platform floor, and as the train pulled out, I
looked through the window and gave him a big sarcastic wave. That fall,
Lori helped me find a public school where, instead of going to classes,
the students signed up for internships all over the city. One of my
internships was at The Phoenix, a weekly newspaper run out of a dingy