Out our front windows and across our lawns, Hip-Hop and I stared at the tableau of each other’s lives. What he saw was a lawn prone to overgrowth and dandelions; an old blue pickup truck with Texas plates parked in the driveway, its back window covered in Navy fighter squadron stickers; and a garage, when it yawned open late at night, with dusty surfboards and mountain bikes that never came down off their pegs and a crumbling wall of still-packed moving boxes. What he saw was a couple on opposite schedules, a house permanently awake and half empty, the way station we lived in while we waited for the next reassignment.
We didn’t like each other, Hip-Hop and I. We were just close enough in age that I hated his music; not for its genre, rap and hip-hop, but his choices within that genre—T.I., for instance, and not Tupac. He watched me stretch for my daily run, and if I were a few years younger I might have mistaken this for him checking out my body, a twisted sort of compliment, instead of the blatant aggression it was. What bugged me about it was that he didn’t drop his gaze when I caught him staring and scowled back; his stare was a territorial challenge, and it made me feel like I had less of a right to my place. Also, he invited his buddies to set up lawn chairs to watch and laugh while I attempted to mow and edge the lawn one sunny morning shortly after Ross deployed. They formed a line, the three of them, their white torsos and chicken ribs exposed to the sun, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses. I kept getting tangled up in the rosebush trying to groom the grass beneath it, and I put the wrong gas, the gas mixed with oil for the edger, into the mower, and it began to smoke. I wanted to cry. They cracked open beers.
Mostly, though, we were able to avoid each other. I worked and went to evening classes in Fresno, and he didn’t open his garage most mornings until around eleven, so the only times we saw each other were late nights when I came home from school and idled in the street for a few seconds while my garage door lifted, framing a well-lit, wide-angle exposure of my stored life. His half-open door spilled fluorescent light and exposed a card table covered in a forest of red plastic cups, folding chairs, scattered ashtrays, and a child’s plastic swimming tub, dusty and propped up on one end. The light lengthened the shadow of him in his chair and caught the puffs of smoke as they drifted above his head. He still wore the shades.
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I love the HBO series The Wire, and at the time I lived across the street from Hip-Hop, I would go through long stretches where I sacrificed sleep at the end of a sixteen-hour day just to see whether McNulty and Lieutenant Daniels had finally caught up with Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, or that creepy bastard Marlo. I loved the cops, but I loved the dealers too, and I especially loved the ones caught in the middle, like the renegade Omar, who followed his own complicated moral calculus in meting out vengeance among the various dealers. I thought about them when I wasn’t watching the show. I wondered about their lives, which direction I would take if circumstances were different and I was in their situation, either protecting a corner or trying to crack a drug ring.
This was what I was doing home alone one Friday night, a month after fracturing my foot and fainting in Starbucks, thinking about plot machinations on The Wire after watching three episodes back-to-back on DVD. I had just turned off the TV and was heading to bed when four explosions, the biggest firecrackers I’d ever heard, went off in front of my house. I felt the percussions in my chest and heard the windows rattle in their frames, and before I even knew what I was doing, I was on my knees in the living room, crawling fast toward the kitchen wall to reach up and turn off the light switch. Gunshots. They were gunshots.
I dragged my purse down from the kitchen table, dug out my phone, and dialed 911. I got a recording that said something ridiculous like, “Nine-one-one Emergency, please hold for an available operator. Thank you.” On hold, I watched the red glow of taillights move slowly across the ceiling through the wide-open curtains in my living room. The lights passed, and then a brighter version, the added whites of a car in reverse, came back again. I held my breath and crawled out into the living room, both wishing I was staying put and knowing I could get a glimpse of the car that might help the cops. I peeked quickly, once, and saw a beat-up white Neon, and as I ducked back down I heard its engine whine as it raced off down the street.