Chapter Text
The neighborhood on Skid Harlor Street was noisy. An older man with dirty jeans and a bald head yelled to a lady on the fifth floor of one of the many blocks.
"Shut the fuck up, Cheryl! I know Jerry's with you." His dry mouth, caked with pizza sauce, opened to throw curse words around fierily. His wizened index finger rose and swirled fanatically in the cold air.
Cheryl, the lady in a red bathrobe, spat out her window, hoping to hit the old man's ghastly face.
"Get out of here, you ass!" she screamed back even more hysterically. Her golden, gigantic hoops, clawed at her earlobes. "I don't owe you shit, fucker."
With each incensed movement of the woman's head, they glinted under the faint sunlight beneath the many dreary clouds. The bald man remained standing stubbornly but swaying, it seemed as if the five bottles of beer were catching up with him. No one screamed or was at all surprised that Cheryl, whose eyes blazed as red as her bathrobe, now pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the man five sticks below her. Immediately the man staggered away, alert pit bulls and hungry bulldogs behind fences barking after the running man.
The turmoil was part of the usual daily routine of the residents here in the dirty, poor parts of Manhattan. Mold spread in the small apartments of the 'skyscrapers of the poor', five to eight-member families fought for space, which is why you could often see teenagers and men of the families sleeping under bridges or benches.
However, they were hardly safe, sleeping out in the open among death-defying gang members.
Every day was a fight for life and death, whether it was for the last piece of bread or because of the neighbor boy who aggressively demanded money in the afternoon with whimsical companions. And if the wrong person turned into the wrong alley of the wrong streets, the skeptical and dogged residents would grant them no mercy.
In Skid Harlor Street, it was kill or be killed.