He always came down the same hill on the same street from that blue color enclave overlooking the toughest parts Paterson, down through the Christopher Columbus projects where my mother dragged me for a time and the street gangs couldn’t get over the fact that a white boy could be poor and live in the projects, too, my friend – the son of a postal worker who had hoped his son would become a postal worker, too – making his way through the broken back of Paterson where the projects met the ruins of the old silk mill workers, naïve to a fault, believing because his father started out poor that he might be immune to those evil things that happen when white faces like his wander in places like this, the same street gang waiting half way down the hill for him to appear, his pale face, his funny looking World War I campaign hat, his bellbottom jeans, and the wads of singles he had stuffed in his front pocket so he could make a payment on the guitar he had put on layaway at the music store near Broadway and Main, desperate to own something he could hold in his hand and create art with his voice, and each time he came to pay, they waited, acting as the intermediary collection agency, taking even the loose change he kept in his other pocket for the bus ride home with his receipt, making the same trek until he came to realize he would need to take the bus both ways if he ever expected to avoid the post office and pursue a career in art, four tall towers of the projects looming over even that route, he protected by the thin glass of the bus, shattered in places from kids throwing rocks as the bus passed, these projects all named after questionable men with pale faces, once havens of hope, new shinny kitchens and snug bedrooms offered to the poorest of poor, turning into vertical slums even old Paterson’s Italian thugs could not have survived – with Christopher Columbus projects the worst in the city, where poor preyed on poor as the police kept guard on the boundaries, keeping everything contained like a virus, with only a few fools like my friend failing to recognize the warning signs until too late, a reckless Columbus searching for new horizons that won’t trap in him a life time job in the post office the way his father was trapped, he willing to risk having his money stolen in a dream he was buying on the installment plan.
