Victim by Andrew Boryga

Author:Andrew Boryga [Boryga, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

I had entered Donlon as a kid who was only just beginning to grasp that he had an identity that was “in,” so to speak. But I left as a young man who was clear on how he could pimp that identity to his liking. By the time I walked down the runway at our football stadium the day I graduated, I was a noted columnist on campus who had leveraged his platform and respectable number of followers into a few freelance writing gigs at bigger publications. To top it all off, I had Anais by my side.

The plan, on leaving college, was that Anais and I would move to New York City. She’d only been to the city a handful of times. Making trips down with her girlfriends for concerts while in high school and taking the train back, going with her family to visit the Museum of Natural History or the Statue of Liberty. Basic tourist shit. But she yearned for more. She wanted to experience the grind, the hustle, and see what kind of person an environment like that might turn her into.

Knowing that, I figured we would be on the same page about where to live. Her ideal location, she told me, was somewhere “clean and cute” but also somewhere that would allow her to feel like she was “part of a community.” In other words, she said, she wanted to make sure we would not be gentrifiers. “I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.”

The concept of gentrification was being written about everywhere. Beware! White people are flooding out of Manhattan and invading the outer boroughs. They bring with them nice coffee shops, salons, restaurants, and noise ordinances. Watch your backs! I read this from afar while I was at school but never experienced it when I went back to the Bronx. My neighborhood was too far uptown, well past 125th Street, which seemed, as far as I could tell from what I read, to be the unofficial dividing line between “a hip, authentic locale” and “a savage wasteland where you will still 1,000 percent get robbed.” Since my neighborhood had yet to be touched by white hipsters, it was, I thought, the “community” Anais might be in search of.

Graduation came and went, and we began packing up our lives in Donlon to prepare to move to the Bronx and stay with Mom for a bit until we found our own place. It was during this period that I first saw some real red flags. Whenever Anais showed me listings of places in the city, they were always well over my price range and in boroughs I had no interest in being in, like Brooklyn or Queens. Unlike her father, I didn’t want to run away from the Bronx. I loved it—warts and all. As far as I was concerned, the two of us would buy a house there one day, and when I was old, I’d fall over and die on a gum-stained sidewalk.

I broached the issue with Anais a couple of nights before our drive down to the city.

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