Man, this place is getting crazy. Three nights ago I heard a bunch of "pop, pop, pops" up the street. "Surely, this time it's just fireworks.." I said to myself, I said, "The kids bought them for Memorial Day Weekend, by mistake. They thot that you shoot them off like you do on the Fourth of July." I ignored it, and went back to channel surfing, clicking between Law and Order and some nonsense on Court TV. We had gotten back early from upstate, and Jess was off with his girlfriend..The next morning, at the school, while I was prepping for the 6th grade drama class I was teaching,( a cold reading of Act 1 Scene One of West Side Story, about a murder in Hell's Kitchen), I got a call from a friend who works at Child Protective Custody. "Did you hear about your friends?" She says laughing..(Nini is on some major mental pills, anti psychotics and stuff, so she has a tendency to blurt out stuff and laugh inappropriately..well, inappropriately to me, but she's funny, so I like her)
What friends, sez I.
Those guys in the commune. That guy Jeff got shot.
Now, I know a lot of people in the commune, since they are the only other white folks in the neighborhood except for Mrs. Adams, and she's an octogenarian shut in, and Jackie and Bill across the street, who are old hippies trying to keep the neighborhood a Sesame Street ethnic mosaic. oh yeah, and Mary and her son....Lately, it's become ghettoville, with drive bys and police helicopters with floodlights flying over my house at odd hours.., but I digress..
I know Jeff, vaguely. I've seen him with the GANAS crew, coming back from a party, or a group outing. They often go out to events together, and came to a gig I had, years ago at Le BarBat. They also came to All Angels Church once, to hear us sing. I've been buddies with Katie, crying on her shoulder when I was mishandled at the food stamp office, across from their store, and I proposed a concert on their county property. I know the other commune people too, cause I used to buy stuff in their thrift shop til my friend Maria started talking about how used clothes have the sweat smell and aura of the old people who wore them..even then I was a thrift store junkie.... I started a thrift shop of my own...and got sick of old clothes...I sold the rest of the stuff to the Ganas people...and they were very cool. Lately, I've been buying new cheep stuff more often..so I haven't seen much of them.... I don't have much money anymore, so I don't buy much of anything...anyway, it was strange to hear that one ot them was shot.
Nini says it was a stalker...a spurned lover of Jeff
Shakespeare said "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"...ain't that right?

Apparently the cops hadn't followed up on the stalker ladies' threats...I had a stalker too, and they wouldn't do anything about it, either..cause he wasn't my common law husband....thank god he slowed down with the threatening calls and surprise visits to my home and workplaces..but that was luck

I had heard that the Ganas people were into free love, so I also backed away from hanging with them...I'm a monogamist or at least a serial monogamist...and don't like open relationships..having beenaround when that stuff was big..it always gave me the creeps..whether it was alterative hippy stuff, or suburban swingers..yuch..I figured it was some sort of mental illness. seeing as how I had been the babysitter for the Queens head of the John Birch Society..as close to the Ku Klux Klan as you can get in NYC...and he and his wife were swingers..so I always saw wife swapping as the behavior of the depraved mind...but some of the folks at the commune were nice, kind people, if a little tightly wound...

I laughed with NiNi..I guess some people can't handle that free love stuff.... Maybe the 10 commandments were right...It's just a bitch that we've had shooting number 3 within a 4 block radius of my house (two on my block) within 3 weeks..it seems that the world is getting more violent...and this isn't even Iraq.