Riverine

by Angela Palm

  Like a womb, the motel had held that crime inside it. The soft underbelly of our rural area, which was supposed to be a haven from “city” crime, was scaly, flecked with brown and green rot. It, too, had its dark and empty places where people lugged their worst secrets and tried to conceal them. But looking at that motel from outside, I couldn’t have guessed.

  The problem with the broken windows theory is that it fixes property, not people. Certainly not systemic poverty or oppression. Moreover, the theory assumes that a place can have psychological influence over people’s actions or state of mind. And it would seem that that’s true: for example, we long to visit beaches and climb mountains because we desire the physical and mental experience of those places. In 1981, Jane Byrne, the first and so far only female mayor of Chicago, lived in a Cabrini Green flat for three weeks to get firsthand experience of life in public housing. During that time, various upgrades were made to the buildings and surrounding land and no one was killed. The violence subsided to a simmer. But when she left, it started right back up again. The baseball diamonds that were built during her brief efforts were soon overrun with weeds. The windows were broken again.

  I once heard that New Yorkers are anxious because they can no longer hear silence or the chirping of birds, which seemed a logical correlation to me. Unbroken windows are an illusion, like small towns, meant to tell us that “nothing bad happens here.” But it’s not true. The problems of humans manifest wherever humans are, razing each landscape raw as freshly tattooed skin.

  Routine Activities Theory

  At the time of my first trip to New York, Corey had been in prison for two years. The trip was organized by the private Catholic college I attended in rural Indiana. I paid for the trip with money I had saved from working at the River—I’d continued working there even after I left for school, commuting for shifts once or twice a week. A group of twenty students and faculty members would fly into LaGuardia, take a train to a youth hostel in lower Manhattan, and meet once a day for group activities. The rest of the time would be ours, to do with whatever we wished. I didn’t know any of the people who had signed up, and that, too, was encouraging. Unsure of what lay waiting for me in New York, I packed my sketchbook, three pairs of leather pants, tank tops, a trench coat, and one comfortable walking-about outfit. We had only three nights in the city, and I planned to see as much as I could and sleep as little as possible. A classmate from New York had given me a list of things to see, taught me how to read my pocket-sized laminated subway map, wrote down which trains to take where, and wished me luck.

  I did all of the regular things—Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, MoMA, the Met. I had to buy new pants, having mistakenly imagined New York as some gigantic nightclub. Wearing new cotton pants purchased from a gated parking-lot bazaar in Greenwich Village, I looked out over the city from the top of the World Trade Center, which would fall nine months later. I went to an Internet café, a novelty for its time, where you could pay to use a computer while you drank coffee or beer. I ordered beer, and no one asked for an ID. I drank it and checked my e-mail. I had never before experienced the two activities in public, or at the same time.

  My nineteenth birthday fell in the middle of the trip, and I debated mentioning it to someone. It was my first birthday spent away from home, and I kept it a secret until I didn’t. It was too lonely, I decided. I didn’t call or e-mail home—no one carried cell phones, though a few people had one, and my parents didn’t yet use e-mail. I had written Corey a letter for the first time since he’d gone to prison, and perhaps as a gift to myself I had timed that letter so that his reply, if he wrote right away, would arrive around my birthday. It was in the back of my mind the whole trip, this letter to a man in prison, while I attempted to befriend regular young people who came from nice Catholic families. Some of the students had heard there were “triple X” bakeries in New York, and the boys on the trip were determined to find me a penis-shaped birthday cake. They settled for a flaky, chocolate-filled penis-shaped pastry, which I ate, laughing, as they sang “Happy Birthday” to me on a street corner. For dinner, my new friend David took me to a restaurant in Little Italy, where we pretended to be married and cosmopolitan, in hopes of being served wine, which we were. In one of my classes, I had learned about the major U.S. gangs and the criminal activities in which they engaged, so when I spotted the Hells Angels bar in the East Village, I wanted to get closer. I jaywalked and presented my ID at the door but was denied entry, as expected. Still, I’d gotten a glimpse inside: smoky, dark, loud. I didn’t want the day to end, and so, when everyone else turned in for the night, I selected a train line by its color and took it to anywhere, which turned out to be Queens.

  I walked from two to four in the morning, utterly lost. I had read about the routine activities theory in my criminal theory class, and I was growing paranoid, watching for crimes everywhere. The theory’s geometric representation was triangular: it converged a person’s daily routines and regular haunts, a motivation to commit a crime, and a clear opportunity to do so. The space enclosed by the three “sides” was the criminal activity. In broad daylight, glimpsing crime had sounded interesting. But nighttime was different. I passed dark alleys in which I could make out people’s shadows, and I passed vacant buildings with broken and barred windows. I wanted to stare at everything, despite my quickening pulse, but couldn’t: the urban fears I’d acquired in my rural upbringing had come to the fore. I had changed into the leather pants. Would I be mistaken for a prostitute? Was I asking for it? When I passed men on the sidewalk, I told myself, act like you live here and don’t make eye contact. How does one blend into a foreign place? By mirroring the behavior of the locals—size them up and quickly assimilate. And then, the darker thoughts: say you have AIDS; say you have children; pretend that you like it to undercut the desire. Every woman had a rape plan, didn’t she? Mine involved verbal manipulation. But no solicitations for sex arose, nothing bad happened, and no motivated individual saw in me an opportunity to commit a crime. I eventually found the train that took me back to the hostel.

  Three Chinese men sat outside the hostel in the early dawn. They offered me a joint. I hesitated, thinking it a trick for a moment—Are they cops? Will it be these men who hurt me? Is the joint laced with PCP?—but then accepted. We sat on a bench together, our four sets of hips colliding, and blew long, straight trails of smoke into the air. I showed them my sketchbook—the spade-shaped bridge in Central Park, the gazillion windows of the city skyline—and they asked me to draw them. I drew each man, one by one, as they taught me words from their language. I didn’t know what we were saying, but I took it to mean, “We are all here together now and everything is all right.” Sometimes the differences in where we are from and where we are sitting are irrelevant.

  Biological Theory of Deviance

  As we were nearing the top of Grandfather Mountain on a hiking trip in North Carolina over my summer break from college, my aunt Eileen told me she sometimes felt a compulsion to throw herself from heights. Most any were problematic for her, she said— bridges, balconies, the top of the Sears Tower. “Do you ever want to jump?” she asked, and stepped nearer to the edge of the mile-high overlook bridge.

  “Too conspicuous.” I checked for signs that she was kidding. “Dramatic. If we’re talking about ways we could kill ourselves, I’d rather find a cave to crawl into. Starve. Rot away quietly. Eat poison berries. Avoid the free fall and the newspaper article afterward.”

  As we trekked upward toward the highest point, I watched her. Though it was rarely if ever spoken about openly, a clear pattern of depression ran through my mother’s side of the family. There were also incidences of schizophrenia, and I suspected that there were other undiagnosed mental health issues as well. Deviance was once believed to be phenotypically linked, but today’s biological theories of deviance associate certain brain functions with deviant behavior. Maybe we were on the biological fringe of deviance. But maybe we were just human.

  M
y aunt and I silently convinced one another not to play out those potential ends—knowing glances, pretend lurches toward the edge in an attempt to laugh away the seriousness of the implication—but I saw the way she eyed the spray-painted arrows pointing toward paths that led to the edges of cliffs.

  I understood her compulsion. But for me, the lure was the locked cellar, abandoned and untouched by light or humans for decades. Empty structures of any kind with the suggestion of a ceiling would do—the warehouses that lined Chicago’s South Side with rows of broken windows screaming skyward and graffiti mural walls. I didn’t want this cursed attraction; I wanted to be a person who embraced mountain overlooks—who found those sorts of places life affirming and rejuvenating. Mind quieting. I was hell-bent on trying, anyway. Is it possible to best a psychological ill though willpower? Whenever I’d had a cold, my father would look at me scornfully and tell me to stop coughing. When I had chicken pox: just stop itching. “Mind over matter,” he’d say.

  On the last upward thrust of the hike, perched on a ladder climb that had us scaling a mile-high cliff, I panicked. A familiar paralysis took over me, and I couldn’t breathe. Aunt Eileen, three rungs below me on the ladder, coached me upward. She was a paramedic, level-headed and at her best when she was faced with trauma. If there was anyone you wanted around in a medical crisis, it was her. It took several minutes for me to make it up the last few rungs with her verbal assistance, and when I reached the top, I collapsed and curled into a ball. I sobbed and she lay over me and held me. “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re having an anxiety attack.” She held my hands and face, soothing me until I could inch my body away from the edge, still pressed fully flat against the rocky ledge.

  I didn’t know if I could make it back down the other side of the mountain after that. “We’ll take our time,” she said. “Don’t stand up until you’re ready.”

  I realized then that what I experienced on the cliff was the same “heart attack” I’d had as a kid. Only now did I realize it was connected to fear. On the descent, I tried not to wonder about what in my childhood had been bad enough to give me anxiety attacks. I looked to the trees for solace. I constructed poems in my head. Anything to keep me from thinking backward—to keep me rooted in the present moment and in the flat land that awaited us at the bottom of the mountain.

  On the way down, we saw a dried gourd hanging from a barbed-wire fence line. How I wanted to steal it and take it with me. I wanted to weave a blanket of thatch in there, curl into it, and fold my wings. A tiny bird prison that left no room to expand into the air around me.

  Differential Association Theory

  My great-grandmother lived near Seven Mile Road in Detroit until she died when I was in college. She was Hungarian and tough, with a real mouth on her as I recall. She had been married to an Irish man who drank and gambled and left her. She had several children, each of whom was struck with one of the classic, stereotypical Irish ailments: drinker, gambler, physical abuser. I’m told that my grandfather had an inclination toward two of the three, and though I never met him, I know that my mother and her siblings suffered.

  In contrast to biological theories of deviance, the differential association theory said that behavior was learned, communicated primarily through the nuclear family. Even if people who witnessed deviant behaviors didn’t become deviant themselves, they may learn the rationales anyway. That made sense to me. My mother and her siblings were raised in an abusive home, a consequence of my grandfather’s alcoholism. It accounted for my mother’s willingness to let things happen that ought not to happen, to explain them away. I worried I was repeating the same behaviors—letting things happen in my life as though I had no choice. I wondered what marks, what effects of witnessing my grandfather’s deviance, had carried over, inadvertently passed down to me.

  Seven Mile Road and the surrounding blocks are notoriously known as Detroit’s deadliest neighborhood. The city’s Mile Road system, made famous by Eminem’s biopic, 8 Mile, is fraught with disproportionate crime and blight within a city that is known for its crime, abandonment, and blight. When you google Seven Mile, page after page populates with links to violent crime reports, news articles about the atrocities that have occurred on Seven Mile, and statistics about murders. The numbers are staggering. It was recently dubbed Carjack City by local police, who cite carjacking as a serious issue in the area, with incidents annually numbering in the hundreds in recent years. We were told as children that her neighborhood was too dangerous for us to visit. My mother had told us stories of visiting there herself as a child, when they’d more than once had to drop to the floor during a drive-by shooting, and it had gotten worse since then. That my father wouldn’t allow us to visit I found most disappointing. I felt they were hiding the real America from me, and I loved peering into those unfamiliar cultures, which to my young eyes were like dystopian snow globes. There was the shake and wonder as we sped by in our car, my mother white-knuckled at the wheel, having taken a wrong turn; the litter like a futuristic urban snow; and the wide black streets a plastic bottom that held up an insular world that might shatter if it was dropped. My great-grandma’s funeral was held in a Catholic church near her home—it was the only visit I ever made to the city. My mother made us duck and run from our car into the church, but again, nothing happened. I had seen worse things in our own neighborhood.

  In the film 8 Mile, the place where Eminem grew up is both a physical and a symbolic barrier to his achieving success as a hip-hop artist and, more generally, as a productive member of society who is not simply rendered irrelevant and unsavable by his own past—his lack of privilege and his familial instability. Eminem has a dichotomous relationship with the neighborhood where he was born and raised: it’s both the source of his art and the limiting factor in his personal wellness. The film itself depicts pure transition, a big reach for a golden dream, retelling in a way that is contemporary and culturally relevant the classic American story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. It reflects an ongoing struggle to shed the past, shed place, shed experience derived from place. Pack the memories and move somewhere better. Differentiate his association. Never mind the bootstraps, which haven’t been worn for decades. But I bet even Eminem goes back home. I bet even Eminem lets slip a few learned behaviors in the presence of his daughter. I felt a kinship with him—both limited and empowered by my river home, like a strange new species trying to jump out of a koi pond of overgrown goldfish even though it was the only place I’d ever known or would know as home. Cursing it even though it was part of me.

  Defensible Space Theory

  Near Indianapolis’s downtown, a now-defunct Eli Lilly laboratory facility stands three stories tall beyond the enclosure of a chain-link fence. I first visited this building with a young man named Dustyn. I’d met him at my second job, where I was working evenings at a café after putting in nine-hour days as an intern at a nearby government association. Dustyn wore a mustache before mustaches were cool again. He looked like a disheveled Salvador Dalí, with his slick black hair and the detached air of an artist. He rode a stunt bike to and from work at the café, even in the winter. On a cold night in October, I’d insisted on giving him a ride home, which was more for my peace of mind than for his convenience—he had no problem with the temperature that I had noticed.

  We set the café’s leftover food on the bistro table in front of the restaurant, where each night a handful of the city’s homeless would pick it up to distribute among one another. Dustyn and I wedged his small bike into the backseat of my car and set off for the city’s near south side. We turned onto Orange Street, a name that had inexplicably been assigned to the cheerless gravel alleyway that ran parallel to a string of businesses whose operations weren’t apparent upon first glance.

  The defensible space theory, similar to the broken windows theory, was also about discouraging criminal behavior through property management and a place’s projection of a certain type of image. The theory asserted that buildi
ng design and layout that created naturally defensible spaces, a layout that allowed people within to watch what was going on outside, for example, would deter criminals. The building on Orange Street featured none of the theory’s cornerstones. Its first floor had virtually no windows. The parking lot had no streetlights to speak of.

  I was suddenly unsure of my decision to drive Dustyn home. Once at home in an environment that bespoke neglect, I had somehow grown afraid of it. Experience and age and the American media had ingrained in me a kind of fear of the nonsuburban, of being alone with a strange man in the middle of the night. Dustyn was, actually, more or less a stranger to me. He asked me if I’d like to come up and take a look. Though I was skeptical, recalling those moments in which the first fatal violence occurs in your average horror flick, I could not resist the opportunity to enter the building. I wanted to see what was inside.

  The building’s foundation slid at a diagonal into the ground, crumbling on one side. Several of the windows—small rectangular inlays that composed a larger plan of windows on the second and third floors—were broken. Dustyn opened the heavy metal door and led me inside. One lightbulb swayed slowly in the center of the entryway, a dull yellow orb. He told me that the building had once been part of the pharmaceutical company’s sprawling campus. Now it was pieced out and sublet to so many folks—four artists to a room in some cases—that none seemed compelled to bear responsibility for its common areas. The place smelled of mildew and finger paint.