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today the glitterbomber is... |
2002-01-30 i've been thinking lately about the different places i have lived. this has the potential to be a small series. today i will tell you all about the bustling metropolis of peekskill, new york. (warning: this is a long entry.) after i graduated college in '98, i moved to peeskill to be a VISTA volunteer for a year. there were times when i wondered if i wasn't, perhaps, delusional when i made this decision. (move to a place i've never seen before? live on $700 a month? sure! sign me up!) but i didn't want to go back to school right away, and the prospect of cleaning petri dishes and counting cells in a lab all day made me want to retch. besides, i was being kicked out of the house. so i packed up all my stuff and left. during my phone interview, my soon-to-be supervisor praised peekskill highly, saying it was "very urban." i figured, "it's only an hour north of manhattan, it has to be cool." let's just say that i was wrong. peekskill is a very very unique town. the police reports in the newspaper would be things like "children were throwing rocks at cars on the bear mountain parkway" or "a woman was smoking crack in a house on division street." i got used to being sexually harassed in spanish, to the street lights never working, and to my bizarre neighbors. one such neighbor was stalking us. one evening, my housemate, christine, and i were putting out the recycling, and a man, reeking of alcohol, came up to talk to us. we chatted politely but couldn't get away. he said he was a chef. he offered to cook for us. ("all y'all hungry? i got some cornish hens!") finally, we got away, but he kept coming back, hanging out outside of our house, peering into the windows. finally, we called the cops, but they never showed up. (to protect and serve, my ass.) we had to get someone we knew from NA (narcotics anonymous) to scare him off. the other volunteers and i never met anyone our age in peekskill, and we could never figure out why. just about everyone we knew, we knew from the health center (co-workers or patients), the homeless shelter, or NA. i met some cool and interesting people, though. it was a good group...we had lots of parties, took swing-dance lessons, and got into minor mischief. i lived in a scary house with three other women with whom i worked. the house was up for rent because the owners couldn't sell it. it was that bad. it was 100 years old, smelled funny, and was HOT AS HELL in the summer. there were bright red curtains in the kitchen, a fake fireplace that consisted of a red light bulb in some fake logs(you had to plug it in), and a creepy unfinished basement with a clothes dryer that shocked us hardcore whenever we turned it on. our landlord was the meanest man alive. whenever we caled him to complain about the dryer, he yelled at us and told us to empty the lint filter. um, last i checked, lint wasn't exactly a superconductor. it was like a house that hadn't been lived in in years, yet the family had just moved out. one redeeming quality was that i could see the hudson river from the front porch. my housemates were pretty cool. emily was a hardcore athletic girl from a weathly family. christine and i always made each other laugh a lot. kristin got progressively weirder and weirder. she would eat little but canned peas and ketchup, (have you ever smelled that combination??) and had an incredibly nasty, sweet-rotten foot stench. peekskill had its scary moments, but i actually liked living there. there's something fun about exploring a new place, and i liked the people i met. i liked the cultural diversity there, too. (i'm from pittsburgh...we don't get too diverse here.) i left after my year of service was up, and i haven't been back since, but who knows? *** quote of the day: "do goats use litter boxes?" -amy b |
