The Day of the Drones

My mother hates to have guests or strangers come into our house when it is not completely spotless.  I understood how she felt on Thursday when I was having dinner with Chloe at Chez Lucianne on 125^th Street.  It was a warm spring evening, so Chloe and I decided to take advantage of the outdoor seating.  We sat down facing Lenox Avenue, but as soon as we ordered our drinks I began to regret that decision. 

The Mess is Hot!

The amount of trash on the street was surreal.  It was as if someone had turned the metal can on the corner upside down and let its contents fly free up and down the sidewalk.  Napkins, empty chip bags, water bottles, and the insides of blunts covered the street.  The black plastic bags ubiquitous in corner stores and bodegas were being blown to and fro like some kind of ghetto tumbleweed.   

On the corner, manchildren in the promised land used the ledge of Starbucks as a picnic table.  They watched women walk by in sundresses yelling after them, “don’t be mad because nobody said anything to you,” without realizing the irony of their words.  There was a man in all black, roughly the height and weight of Eric Garner, selling loosies and spitting onto the street as patrons enjoyed wine and cheese feet away.  I was alternately angry at him (didn’t he watch the news?) and empathic.  He was clearly suffering from seasonal allergies which made his breathing labored and his nose runny as he paced up and down the block opening his pack of Newports for dollars.

 

Black Power

There was definitely an entire cast of characters out on Lenox Avenue, and added to the drama were the European tourists and the bankers and lawyers who travelled uptown by train in order to go to Happy Hour at Red Rooster. They walked awkwardly from the train station toward the restaurant trying to appear at ease, as if they were confident that they were walking in the right direction.  They shyly acknowledged each other with nods and half smiles as strangers in a strange land often do. 

Because Chez Lucianne is right next door, it often gets the run-off from its trendy neighbor.  A middle-aged white couple, who seemed to have arrived early for their dinner reservation at Red Rooster, sits next to me and Chloe. As sirens blare and mothers usher children in charter school uniforms down the block, I try to listen to their conversation. The man is French and he asks the waiter about the squid.  An older man wearing a zoot suit and holding a camera hovers near our tables.  It is unclear whether he is photographer or a prop.  They declare him “great” but don’t pay him much attention.   A woman who is notorious for her aggressive style of begging approaches them at the table with her trademark, “EXCUSE ME, EXCUSE ME.”  Zoot Suit Man and I watch her, annoyed, hoping that we won’t have to step in if she goes to far.  She doesn’t ask us for money.

I am mortified.  I want to tell les blancs  to sit at one of the tables on the other side of the restaurant- the side that faces Red Rooster so that don’t have to see what I’m seeing.  And then I’m mortified with myself for being mortified. I tell myself that I don’t know these white people and I shouldn’t care what they think.  I can’t be mad at people for being poor.  What am I expecting?  That out of a sense of black pride, they would take their petty crime around the corner where people with money don’t have to look at them?  They were here first.

 In the midst my reverie, the man sitting next to us, turns to Chloe excitedly and says “look, there’s a drone!”  I turn in the direction that his finger is pointing and see it. Hovering in the area around Planet Fitness is a blue, black and white drone.   I ask Chloe if she knows what a drone is and she says “yeah, its like a flying robot camera.” She turns her profile toward it and smiles as she has been trained to do when there is a camera around.

Everyone on the block is mesmerized by it as it hovers, retreats, and then, almost flirtatiously zooms back into view.  The black market cigarette salesman sees it and asks, “what the fuck is that?” A FedEx worker who has just bought a Newport from him explains it.   Collectively, we are watching it watch us.  It is interesting that no one is frightened; no one assumes that it is a tool of terrorists.  We all suppose that it is the long arm of the law.  Officially, the NYPD does not use drones to police neighborhoods, but considering that it appeared right after a hail of sirens and police cars came down Lenox, I'm doubtful that it was anything but the police.   At first I was embarrassed that these white folks had come into a neighborhood that looked like a war zone, but then I realized that we should all be embarrassed by a country that treats its own citizens as inhabitants in an occupied territory.

**Sidenote: The Day of the Drones is the name of a really good Science Fiction novel about a futuristic society in which blacks may be the only survivors of a nuclear disaster.