Livin in My Hood

For those unfamiliar with the geography of the Mitten (Raise your right hand, fingers together. Now you have the Lower Penisula of Michigan.) Ypsilanti is the wrong side of Ann Arbor-the place people who want to live in Ann Arbor, but can't afford to, live. My particular slice of Ypsi is apartment complex city. It's not the real hood, I accidentally found that one day when I was lost, but there's hints of it. My own building could be one of those old multiethnic Benetton ads except well, we're not that pretty and we're definately not united. There's blacks, asians, a Sikh (his personalized plate reads SIKH QT) and me. Some of the guys in the building are, well they're not really hoods (for example instead of having a Pit Bull, cause you can't rent with a Pit Bull, they have a Pointer) but they could play them on TV if, by TV you mean a lesser cable channel like, say, Lifetime. One of their favorite things to do when I first moved in last fall was hang out by the front door and not move to let me pass. Apparently, it's a good time. Now I firmly believe the best way not to get bullied is to not acknowledge the effort and it seems to have worked. Now I mostly get the head tick up, what my friend Les calls 'man chin' (as in 'Hey, I'm a man, here's my chin'). Once they even opened the door for me while they were sitting on steps inside the building smoking pot. (You don't want to linger in the hall if you care how you smell.) Me, I'm like the Greta Garbo of neighbors-I just want to be let alone* but I did overhear the following conversation on the way in one day:

"Who dat?"
"White girl? She stay in the basement."

Priceless.

As I believe Ben Franklin once said, "rent in haste, repeat at leisure."



*One of Hollywood's most oft misquoted, the line is almost always spoken incorrectly as "I want to be alone". There is a small but subtle difference between the two.