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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 13, 2006 Tales From The Crib Why we don’t live in the city anymore Jennifer Margulis The red digits of the clock radio on the floor beside my futon read 4:55 a.m. I could hear somebody fumbling in the next room. “Who’s there?” I cried. “’Jus goin’ ta school,” a man’s voice sang out from behind the door, which was slightly ajar, as if he had been peering in at us. “’Jus goin’ ta school.” “What do you want?” I threw on my robe. “Get out of my house!” “What is it?” My boyfriend Max, who was staying with me while my brother was out of town, mumbled sleepily. “There’s somebody in here,” I cried. “Get up!” “You think so?” Max was awake now, listening. “I didn’t hear anything.” I flung open the bedroom door. The intruder was gone. The apartment was empty. A moment before a stranger had been standing in the middle of the living room. Now there was just the jostled air he left behind. I was living in a rough section of Berkeley, Calif., in a graduate program in Comparative Literature at Cal. My brother was in journalism school, and we rented an apartment together. A few weeks later, I biked home to find five police cars with their lights flashing and dozens of people milling around a block away from our place. “What happened?” I asked a neighbor, a sturdy woman with gray hair and wise eyes. “Girl,” she sucked in her breath. “A drive-by, right here. Four boys shot. Ambulance jus’ came to take ’em to the hospital. Don’t nobody know if they dead or alive. Look on over there — you can still see the blood messing up the sidewalk.” Then one day I turned the corner from Alcatraz to King Street and saw a huge young man riding a child’s sized bicycle. He looked so funny with his bent knees jutting so far out at his sides that I smiled out the window in his direction. Our eyes met for a moment. He slowed down and watched my car pull into the driveway. When I got out of the car he was right there, sitting casually propped up against the bicycle as if he’d been waiting for me all day. “This is a stick-up,” he grunted. He gestured to his coat pocket to indicate he had a gun. “Give me your money.” I had nothing in my Mexican bolsita but a dance punch card, a sweaty headband, and a pair of cheap earrings. As I emptied all of it on the sidewalk in front of him I calculated which way I would run if he attacked me. When James and I got married three years later, we were living in Cabbagetown, a run-down but hip section of Atlanta where people like Panorama Ray (a photographer) and the man next door — a white pimp prostituting young white teenage crack addicts out to gray-haired men who picked them up in BMWs — bought coffee and Wonder Bread at Leon’s up the street. The week before we left Atlanta, there was a drive-by shooting on our street. James picked the brass bullet casings off our driveway with chopsticks and put them in a plastic bag. The police never came for them. I miss the diversity, culture, and excitement of places like Berkeley and Atlanta. The sumptuous Ethiopian food you can buy cheaply at hole-in-the-wall restaurants where Eritreans sip Italian coffee and argue politics, the Alvin Ailey dance performances, the snobby art museums and high-heeled receptions where strawberries dipped in chocolate and crustless gnome-sized sandwiches are served. But I don’t miss the way I hunker down when I walk in a city, making myself more centered, more alert and ready for any threat. I don’t miss the bloodshot eyes, round lasers of hate, of the man who held me up in broad daylight or the sea of gray concrete with pebbly surfaces and rough edges of that South Berkeley neighborhood. On hot summer days in Ashland, I sometimes roll down the car windows and leave the doors unlocked. But I never take doing so for granted. Jennifer Margulis has been held up a gunpoint in Berkeley, California and had a double running stroller stolen off her porch in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She is the author of “Why Babies Do That,” and editor of “Toddler.” DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Generic Viagra Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Sportsbook Absinthe Supply Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations African Safari Hammocks Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino King of Spirits ink cartridges Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams