FRESH YARN presents: First They Came for the Dogs, But I Was Not a Dog... by Albert Stern

FRESH YARN presents:

First They Came for the Dogs, But I Was Not a Dog
By Albert Stern

I heard the dog howling downstairs on one of those sticky midsummer nights in New York City that feels like an air conditioner is in your window backwards. If you happen to be too stubborn or, like me and most of my neighbors on West 107th Street back in the mid-1980s, too poor to cool your apartment, home is where the hot is. On that type of summer night in that type of neighborhood, tempers flare, tepid grievances boil over, and the only response to a new affront that might seem to make sense was a decisive spasm of violence. It was the kind of night that a person might decide he'd had enough of that goddamn dog, trick it into thinking it was being taken for a walk, and then leave its sorry ass outside to fend for itself.

At least that was my theory of what happened to the obviously large animal out on the street six floors below my bedroom window. At about three in the morning, its cries -- as determined as they were distressed -- roused me from fitful summer slumber. The dog seemed fixed on the entrance to my building, perhaps because it was accustomed to that door always opening. Now the door would not open, and the dog did not know enough about the world to go anywhere else, say, to a friend's apartment. Really, where else would a dog think to go except home?

After less than a minute of nonstop barking, I heard the first canine rejoinders, the ululations of outraged yip dogs. Then the bigger dogs chimed in. Within minutes, seemingly every dog on the block -- and there were dozens -- was at a window and howling. Then, the first shouted obscenity, indicating that my neighbors had been roused to action. Now we had a situation.

Back then, West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue was gentrifying out of its incarnation as a largely Hispanic enclave. If you took the long view, it wasn't hard to see the promise -- the Upper West Side was moving uptown, Columbia University was moving downtown, and Riverside Drive to the west was solidly affluent. But there were problems from the east. Around the corner from me, Amsterdam Avenue was dotted with storefronts that openly sold nickel and dime bags of marijuana, marked outside by signs that read "School Supplies" and lined inside by black light posters depicting the signs of the zodiac and positions of gymnastic Afro-love. The illegal betting parlors operating on the avenue for some reason all had hair dryers and other grooming products in the windows. There were at least two red-and-yellow awning bodegas per block doing brisk business selling big bottles of cheap, strong beer and sub-Hostess quality snack cakes.

Things started to change after a turf war arson attack left the biggest (and, truth be told, the best) marijuana shop a burnt out shell, and two murders were committed on West 109th Street. In one night, the police raided all the pot shops, part of a larger effort to isolate the crack bazaar that had started to flourish two avenues east on West 107th near Manhattan Avenue (a corner given the moniker "Crack Street" in the CBS Reports documentary that alerted the nation to the burgeoning rock cocaine menace). With this type of action a part of daily life, a denizen of West 107th Street could not help but become accustomed to small and ugly "situations" like the one unfolding downstairs with the dog.

The economic, social, educational, ethnic, and psychopharmacological barriers that divided the residents of my block made intermingling problematic. The closest thing to a block party was the Fourth of July, always the biggest night of the year, when the locals would conduct their own explosives show that made children weep and sent dogs and cats scurrying under beds and into closets. Even the cops passing by knew to keep their windows rolled up tight to deflect the M-80s hurled at them from inside the buildings.

It was a sign of how downtrodden the area had become that my sallow white face could have been construed, as I was told it was by some, as a harbinger of better days. I moved to the block because Columbia University, New York's third largest landlord, refused to provide housing to transfer students, effectively exiling me from the student life that I needed to immerse myself into, as it was also one year after my mother died. I did not have the money, heart, or imagination to decorate a big one-bedroom apartment, and after a point, only the absence of a hanging tire swing distinguished it from a zoo monkey's habitat. I would abandon it as soon as I could imagine the existence of a life unbounded by claustrophobic bleakness. I would put down no roots. I would not become part of a community. I would gentrify nothing. I would even have disappointed a dog.

Case in point, the dog howling downstairs. Although its cries were becoming increasingly desperate as the din of barking and shouting intensified, the thought of trying to help never entered my mind. The next day, the excuses I formulated revolved around the late hour, the abruptness of the incident, and my feeling that I've always been more of a cat person. But the real reason was the New Yorker's reflexive cop out -- the dog was none of my business and someone else would take care of it, or someone wouldn't, but whatever happened, the unfortunate situation unfolding below my window would soon be over and, in that case, all's well that ends. For most of us living in this city, squandering opportunities to advance one's karmic standing is a matter of habit and self-preservation, to some a point of pride. So maybe it wasn't realistic to expect more compassion from the residents of West 107th Street on a hot summer night, though unto us a dog was barking.

For the most part, the people living on my block simply coexisted, protected by the great walls New Yorkers erect to prevent sensory and emotional overload, and practiced in pretending that hosts of human beings existed only hypothetically. Just because we were indifferent, however, did not mean we were not alert and ready to act. Consider the time I had a Swedish houseguest, a woman who would later go on to become one of Key West's most popular ecdysiasts. A take-it-all-off sort even then, she walked naked into the living room, and I went into the bedroom she had just left. The shades were wide open, and I noticed four men in the building across the street at their windows - one was watering his plants, another shaking out a mat, one was having a smoke, and the last just enjoying a breath of fresh air. As I came into view, all four heads snapped toward me and then simultaneously turned away when it was clear I wasn't the naked blonde.

Those fellows were part of the faceless mass that comprises the majority of one's New York neighbors. Some neighbors, though, get one step closer. You may be aware of them, but you don't know who exactly they are -- for example, the couple whose bloodcurdling arguments resonate in the airshaft, the fellow who regularly messes up the garbage room, or the enraged individuals screaming at a yelping dog in the middle of the night. Though this type of neighbor mostly stays anonymous, sometimes, if the opportunity presents itself, they might intrude on your life more directly. For me it happened one year after my tax refund was late. When I inquired about it to the IRS, I was informed by mail that my refund had been paid; attached was a copy of the canceled check, which was endorsed by Sidney Stern. I went straight to the phone book and looked up Sidney Stern. He lived two entrances away in the same block of flats.

So I called him up and said: "Sidney -- it's Albert Stern. The guy down the block whose IRS check you cashed."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Sidney, who did.

"Sidney," I said -- I don't know why, but it was fun saying 'Sidney' -- "you've got my money and I want it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he repeated. "If you call me again, I'm going to call the police." Click.

So I tore out the page from the phone book, highlighted Sidney Stern's name, wrote a brief explanation to the tax auditor of what I thought happened, and sent the material off to the IRS. In a few months, I got a check. Sidney, I assume, got some grief. For years after, I would sometimes walk down West 107th Street wondering whether a man I passed might be sneaky Sidney Stern.

Then there are those neighbors about whom you glean one or two things that are not obvious and maybe products of your imagination. Like the bearded guy whom I had never seen with another person. One day, I entered the garbage room and found it stacked from floor to ceiling with pornographic magazines -- literally thousands of them. In a few days, I noticed that the bearded guy was in the company of a pretty middle-aged Asian woman who, it became apparent, was living in the apartment with him. In time, they became one of the jolliest couples I have ever encountered. My fantasy was that she was his mail order bride, and I still cling to it only so I can say that I have in my repertoire a happy story about a lonely wanker made joyful by a mail order bride from the Far East.

And finally, there are the neighbors who will not be ignored. Foremost among them was Mrs. Weissman, the jewel of block, who, along with her husband, represented the last of the Eastern European immigrants who once predominated. Her people's era on West 107th long since past, Mrs. Weissman had no fondness for the coarse new crowd, and in truth, was a kind of pitiable figure -- a yenta who had lost her nosiness. Seeing her walk without interest down the block (despite being surrounded by all sorts of goings on that were none of her business) was sad, sort of akin to seeing Gene Kelly in the film Xanadu or Willie Mays in a Mets uniform.

Mrs. Weissman, desperately wanting me to be a nice Jewish boy, took me under her wing. "Take orange to eat!" she'd enjoin me if we happened to pass as she came back from the market; "Come upstairs for tea and cookie!" if she encountered me walking alone. She spoke five languages (English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish), often in the same sentence. "And then and bedziemy twoja rodzina na zawsze in the ." I remember her saying, "Yeah and makheteyneste so I over there. Furshtaisht? You understand? Because they are vildeh chayehs." Wild animals. Those were the words she kept coming back to as she'd point at the lightly-parented urchins, the young men and women with all the time in the world to hang out, and the council of elders who sipped beer from 8-ounce cans outdoors from April through October. "All a bunch of vildeh chayehs -- vildeh, vildeh, vildeh chayehs."

A person like Mrs. Weissman would not have been surprised by the neighbors' furious reaction to a cast-off dog's barking in the middle of the night -- "Look with your own eyes at what goes on with them," I could imagine her saying, "then tell me what you'd expect." Mrs. Weissman survived Nazi persecution and fled Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s, and might have shared an attitude toward neighbors that I learned from Mr. Schwartz, who lived next door to me when I was growing up in Miami Beach. He made it out of Auschwitz, and his attitude about neighbors could be summed up as: "Neighbors are the people who are dividing up your possessions in their heads as the police are taking you away." Actually, he never said anything of the sort -- his wife, who hadn't been in a concentration camp but acted like she had, was the one who actually voiced those sentiments. But I'd always felt that she had them on good authority.

The message drilled into me as a child was that even if you don't know your neighbors, you can be pretty well certain that they're up to something. Watch yourself. Mrs. Schwartz also sometimes mentioned that her husband would never own a dog because of the way he had seen them tear apart prisoners in the camps. At the command of their human handlers, those dogs performed good or evil acts indiscriminately -- and as long as they were fed, they were just as happy. So don't trust dogs, either.

The canine demographic on West 107th Street was as starkly differentiated as that of the human residents -- the gentrifiers' dogs seemed largely to be spoiled, lovable nimrods of all sizes, while the locals kept Pit Bulls, Rottweillers, Dobermans, and mongrels that were some conglomeration of the three breeds. Bedecked in chains and leather studded collars, their ears hacked down to nubs, these dogs served as accoutrements in the young locals' tireless cultivation of their personal menace. The hounds were working animals, occupying the same function as a six-shooter on the hip of a Wild West gunslinger.

As the men got older, a woman's influence sometimes softened at least the canine profile, usually via a cute lapdog to complement hubby's Cujo. Case in point was my building super. He owned a behemoth named Wolf, a massive Doberman with the miles-away stare of a soldier who has seen too much, while his wife doted on Floffy, a white toy poodle with a skin condition. In one of life's ready-made ironies, Floffy was a vicious heel nipper, while Wolf was a soulful creature who would commiserate with me every time I came down to do my laundry, nuzzling his head into my lap while I succumbed to the irresistible charms of the gentle giant and fretted over the safety of the future generations.

In and of itself, the idea that one of these monsters might be crying like a helpless puppy six floors below me beggared the imagination. All dogs go to heaven, sure, but hearing one of these inbred thick-necked behemoths genetically engineered to maim having its doggie heart broken left me uncertain about how to feel. It was as if I'd just found out something like, I don't know -- that Stalin was extremely ticklish. But if my heart didn't quite go out to the poor creature, neither did I think there was a point in cursing it at the top of my lungs. Like my neighbors did on that hot summer night.

The din of howling dogs was joined by the chorus of outraged apartment dwellers, their obscenities hurled scattershot at the dog downstairs, the dog owners who couldn't keep their animals quiet, and the people yelling for everyone to shut up. The malice of their invective was unsurprising -- after years of passing by my neighbors on the street and catching repetitious snippets of their conversations, I was convinced that many of them had as little choice in expressing themselves by saying "fuck" as their dogs had in saying "woof." And so the cacophony built, dogs and neighbors screaming at the street and at each other; throughout, I could hear the plaintive "rooooooooooooooooooooooo!" of the dog downstairs.

Then the first bottle broke. It registered as sharply as a slap, and shocked the human voices silent. But only for a second. The shouting started again, but this time intermingled with sounds of laughter. Then the second bottle broke. Then the third and the fourth. And then bottles started to rain down from the open windows toward the front entrance of my building. For over minute, I could hear nothing but shattering glass and rageful human screams, the noise drowning out the canine howling. At least two or three of these screams were deep, guttural, and sustained -- opportunistic eruptions of explosive rage.

When there were no more bottles to be thrown, laughter echoed on West 107th Street, along with the sounds of dog owners admonishing their pets to be quiet and get back to sleep. The dog downstairs was silent.

Groggy from lack of sleep, I emerged from my building the next morning and looked for bloodstains on the sidewalk. I found none, just shattered bottles surrounding the huge turd just outside the vestibule. I barely missed stepping in it. The shit was piled up high in a shapeless heap rather than a tidy sausage shape, and stood like a stele marking the dog's betrayal and terror.

As I returned with a cup of coffee about five minutes later, the morning sun shone on the shards covering the sidewalk after the night's barrage. The light at that angle made the glass sparkle, transforming West 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam into the embodiment of an immigrant like Mrs. Weissman's dream of America the goldeneh medinah, a land where the streets are paved with treasures. Another image was of a German streetscape on the morning after Kristallnacht, only this time the rabble had turned against a dog -- but I was not a dog and I said nothing. The glittering path ended at the shit pile that, in the time I was gone, had been parted in two by a footprint. It was a dead center hit -- the foot must have gone heavy into the pile, and right up to the ankle.

And I thought, good for you, doggie -- you made what you could out of your Kitty Genovese moment. Good luck with the challenges ahead. I certainly let you down, leaving you to the wild animals like that.

I looked up at the buildings lining my block. In the quiet morning hours, the street was de Chirico empty. But inside were my neighbors, without question all up to something.