One of the first warm weekends of this nascent summer in New York, and the streets on Saturday night were quiet where they should've been cracking and chaotic where they should've been silent. Los Trinitarios seemed to be staying in playing Mob Wars, leaving Los Sures to the older crowd: In the five minutes after I left my house, I exchanged pleasantries with a trio of homeless folks on the shelter steps, passed a heaving circle of Dominicanos going verse-for-verse in front of the mechanic's garage, came upon an impromptu taco stand--complete with two-man mariachi band--in front of an apartment building, and ducked and weaved through fifteen twentysomething men streaming out of a row house to watch a brawl in the making.
Later, walking to the train through an eerily silent LES, a beater Camry packed with Latino teenagers screeched up alongside me, veering onto the sidewalk across the street and almost hitting a hydrant. On the phone, I glanced over long enough to gather that the driver was fighting with a girl in the passenger side, with another girl riding bitch most certainly not real thrilled about the whole scenario. Before I turned the corner, I looked back in time to see homegirl square up and punch the dude in the jaw, hard, before he drove away. An hour later, after an empty train ride back over the river, I stumbled down from the platform to see a white guy in a Warriors-inspired getup talking to three cops--one uniformed, two plainclothes--with blood caking the left half of his face and big welts rising on his forehead and right cheek. Jumped by kids on the train: "And the worst part was--listen to this--the worst part was, they were videotaping the whole thing! Check Youtube, I think they were doing it to put up there..."
And so on.
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