Who are the (Sketchy) People in Your Neighborhood?

The Early Years - New York

Comedian Patton Oswalt describes a condition called "Sketchy-Head" wherein a person is drawn towards that which is shabby, shady, and perhaps tinged with risk and danger. Usually this is a condition of economics, but sometimes it's a character flaw. I cop to the character flaw, enhanced by economics.

The first place after my parent's house was an apartment over a nail salon, deep in the urban heart of Albany, NY. The entrance had that fake nail chemical odor, but you would stop smelling it after a few minutes in the apartment. We had a beautiful view of an overpass and an abandoned church. The abandoned church attracted crack-heads and teens looking for a place to fornicate. But you know you are living in a shady neighborhood when the Chinese place with bullet-proof glass at the counter won't deliver to you. No Chinese restaurant would deliver to us unless we took great pains explaining that we lived on the north end of Green St. and not the south end. And even then, it was only 50-50 that they would agree to deliver.

Then there was the place "just outside the Stockade district" in Schenectady. To the outsider, Schenectady has a reputation as all sketch all the time, but it's not. There are many beautiful, historic places to live. I just couldn't afford any of them. So I moved into a shoebox on the second floor of a pre-civil war building that was literally next to the bridge that divided the Stockade from the its shabbier neighbor. Rents dropped by $150/month just by virtue of a bridge. Talk about being on the wrong side of the tracks.

The first flaw of this zoning disaster was that there were no closets. Blinded by the appeal of cheap rent, I never noticed the lack of closets until moving day. I kept my clothes in laundry baskets (the Louis Vuitton of sketch-head luggage) during the entire time I lived there. The bathroom was so small that you had to climb into the shower to close the door. The landlord hadn't bothered to clean the place between tenants and there was birdseed stuck between the edge of the carpet and the wall. My downstairs neighbor (in an unwitting attempt to be ahead of the drug trend) was an un-employed meth tweeker who called me the N-word when I banged on the floor to let him know his wife-beating was too noisy. Since using the front entrance meant that I would have to encounter "Tweeking White Guy", I routinely used the back steps…also known as the fire escape. There were no bugs. That's the only nice thing I can say about it.

Stay tuned for the New Jersey installment.