Red House

I found a quiet street in the South Bronx, on a beautiful morning, where the bright summer sun cast the old houses in a peaceful, almost romantic light. I could just about envision what this area had once looked like: the sloping hill (now leading down to Park Avenue and the great trough through which the Amtrak trains run) lined with what once must have been beautiful houses surrounded by big oak and willow trees. Now the houses still stand, some inhabited, some semi-inhabited, some boarded up (like the red Victorian that caught my eye), and still others reduced to splintered ruins. The trees were also past their glory, with stumps for branches and all manner of detritus strewn about them.

I had set up my easel and was painting for a while when a group of four or five men came over to hang out, watch me, and carry on.

I began to notice that people would come down the street, disappear into the house and not emerge for hours. It finally dawned on me that the house I was painting was a shooting gallery.* One lanky guy in a green shirt went inside and appeared a few moments later in one of the windows on the ground floor. Having a person in the building added a whole new element to the picture, and I began to paint him in. But as soon as I started working, his head drooped down and he nodded off. Some of the guys around me called out to him, "Hey, Rico, hold still! He's painting you, man!" Rico straightened up and gave a lethargic wave. I managed to capture the shape of his head before he nodded off again. Eager to help, the guys around me began to chorus out at regular intervals, "Sit up, man! Face up!" I painted as fast as I could and the community effort towards immortalizing Rico in my painting was a success.

Later in the afternoon, a van drove by and pulled too close to a car that belonged to one of the men standing near me, and he yelled angrily at the driver. The driver apologized and drove on.

"Dumb white motherfucker," the car owner muttered.

A big guy elbowed him and said, "Quiet, man, this guy's white." They all turned and studied me. "You are white, aren't you?" No clever response leaped to my tongue. "Yeah," I mumbled.

The big guy slapped me on the back and grinned, showing two gold front teeth. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You're cool anyway."