Brother From Another Planet
Here's a window you don't get to look out of every day - a blog by a black MBA plopped down in the heart of shot-and-a-beer Port Richmond.
For the past month, Travis has been bunking with an old frat brother. The recent B-school grad from the University of Virginia is waiting for his job to start downtown. So he's been jogging, carrying his laptop, catching "Seinfeld" marathons and occasional stares as he navigates through this bizarro world he calls Phila. (Philly, he proclaims, is a handle that's a little worn.)
He uses his MySpace page to share a few observations about his new home in a post he calls "Illadelph, PA... live, without a DJ."
Seems like he is still adjusting to the local rhythms, like the car alarms that rip him from sleep about 6:30 each morning - three or four hours too early. One month in, and he has never felt so "socially baffled" in his life.
"This is URBAN white poverty. It's like the hood, but with all white people... it's so surreal. People are always outside on their porches or in the streets ...talking loud, tellin vulgar stories, etc... there are at least four generations of people living in the row house next to us. I only see one of them go to work everyday. When it gets hot rather than go to the public pool, which is a sight unto itself, they pull out the old skool inflatable pools for the chillun. They don't set it up in the backyard like my parents used to do tho...rather, they put it out right in the middle of the sidewalk so you have to dodge the splashes of the 9 or 10 kids that are jammed in a pool with a diameter of about 4 -5 feet."
Then he turns to personal grooming and haberdashery.
"And everyone has a tattoo! No #$%&$, literally everyone! From age 8 to 80, male, female it don't matter. The younger obviously have the cliche Chinese letters or elaborate barbed wire around the bicep, but the octogenarians out there are doing it big with the old skoo tats that are all one color, like blue or something. These guys were obviously in the military ... maybe they fought for the Union during the war of Northern aggression."
I haven't heard that phrase since I lived in Charleston, S.C. They also called it "that recent unpleasantness."
Well, you can read him yourself here - and he goes on about the $20 Modell's Eagles and Phillies jerseys, tight jeans, mullets -- the full Port Richmond.
If you're expecting the sort of high drama that makes for ugly headlines - you won't find it here. In the comments section he pronounces the locals cool with his color. "I must say that I have not experienced any heightened level of racism yet. I mean outside of the empty stares I get from everyone. I think that the tension that I feel is more or less related to the lifestyle issues -- ie. getting crazy looks when I jog, or if someone sees me in public with a book or a laptop."
Meaning, I guess that anybody toting a computer or a paperback on that street would get the same 50-yarder. It's more a class thing than race.
It's too bad he's starting his job in a week or so because we could have used this sort of close observation and flowing style in the paper. Give the man a notebook and a pen. Now that would be slumming.
(photo courtesty of Ted Adams)
is Port Richmond in the circulation of the NE Times? if so, once those editorial letter writers get wind of this, oh man, the hilarity. has he read the NE Times letters to the editor section yet? it could alter his sense of a "heightened level of racism" in the area.