The first of what be a long location series.

Location, location, location.

A week of locations and set changes, long cast-lists and improbable set pieces. I’ve felt blurry, not sure about my role. I’ve had moments when I’ve realised that all I have to do is stand there, or follow this group, or get on this subway, and the story will continue. I’m just in a suitcase, bundled along from stop to stop, given a view here or there, a couple of lines to say, and then back on the luggage rack and the rollingrolling carries on.

Location 1:

Kingston Avenue and Fulton Street, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Wednesday. Noon.

I’m doing a crime story. They want us to do it real time. So the ticker comes through from the NYPD, we grab it and then run off to the scene. I come in on Wednesday morning and look at the reports to see what has been broken and smashed the night before.

PERSON SHOT CONFINES 79PCT
ON 09/23/03 AT APPROX 2158 HRS AT C/O KINGSTON AVE AND FULTON ST CONFINES OF THE 79 PCT A M/B/22 WAS SHOT 1X IN THE STOMACH BY A M/B FOR UNK REASONS. THE VICTIM WAS TAKEN TO ST JOHNS HOSPITAL IN STABLE CONDITION. NO ARRESTS. INVESTIGATION ONGOING.

This is what they call a “skel on skel” shooting. Young black man in shoots young man black man in central Brooklyn. Probably drugs. The papers don’t report these crimes. The information is hard to get and when it comes, it’s usually dismal and hopeless, there’s normally no twist, nothing unusual, no “gee whiz” factor that makes it news. New York has 600 murders a year, that’s down a lot since ten years ago, but it’s still almost two a day, and this isn’t even a murder, the kid lived, what’s news? It’s not news because it happens all the time. It’s a funny sort of logic, ignore it because it’s so frequent. It means these crimes are background noise, tuned out, sounds indistinguishable from each other, one fuzzy mess. Leave it a week, the individual clinks and clanks, shots and names will be different but the mess will remain, incomprehensible and depressing. Let’s stick with basketball players and movie stars flashing each other.

I call the 79th and they tell me a detective Lozado is running the investigation. 50 minutes later, the subway brings me up right under the corner of Kingston and Fulton in the middle of central Brooklyn. It is one of those typical cheap high street corners you get in Brooklyn. It reminded me a bit of Shepherd’s Bush. Two corner shops, one of them 24 hrs, a couple of beauty salons, fish shop, Chinese takeaway, West Indian bakery and a group of about seven or ten men lounging outside the Family Deli Grocery, just watching the day go by. As for signs of the crime, there’s an empty squad car parked up. The temperature is good. My shoes are comfortable. I’m not too hungry and I don’t seem to be tripping over too much. Best start talking to people. In the fish shop they don’t know anything, the night shift isn’t in yet. I cross over to the group of men outside the Family Deli. Up to a man with the cloudy red eyes that move slowly and just a narrow strip of doo-rag visible under his cap. Does he know anything about a shooting last night, just there, right in front of him? Nope. Do you mind if I ask your tall bald friend, who is also standing there, if anything looking even more vacant, even more stoic, just peering out? Slow motion shrug.

Did you hear about a shooting?

The-re w-a-s a sh-oo—ti-ng?

Inside the shop I queue as if for a phone card and then talk awkwardly through the bulky bashed plastic partition they have in these delis, partly to store batteries and cigarettes and old signs asking for id, and partly, you think, to make a little distance between keeper and customer.

I start my customary blathering away, hello, I’m Sam I’m a student journalist from Columbia yes yes I’m not from around here that’s right, yup, English, yes, London, oh really? Yup, English, long way, yes, I’m writing about Brooklyn actually I’m here doing a story on a shooting that happened last night just right here about ten o’clock at night yup there was did you? young man got shot in the stomach did you, by any chance, did you, were you, I mean, how, what time, what time do you close here were you working then, about ten, hear anything? the shots I mean. Hear any shots?

Ushered back. Ali was here. He’ll talk to you. Ali is in his forties and tall. He leans down from the end of the counter. We’re in among the cereal. An older gentleman comes back and starts poking at the stack of Cheerios. He wants the top one. Ali squeezes past me to help the old man. With a practised jab of his fingers he pokes the lower pack and the top Cheerios falls down, Ali catches it smoothly and gives it to the old man. No, says the old man, he doesn’t want that one after all. There are the three of us bunched around the Cheerios, the old man making up his mind, me with my notepad out, Ali looking around the shop. It’s one of those crowded situations where one of you has to turn around to let someone else through, who has to turn and shift their balance on to their other foot, like cogs or one of those games where you slide the tablets around and into the one empty space to make a map of the world. Ali’s scared but he wants to tell me about the thirteen or fourteen shots he heard, the different types of guns, boom, he heard, boom boom from a little gun and then bababdababdbaba from a bigger gun, big gun, too much bullets, too much. Ali heard the guns and got himself down on the floor by the coffee machine, behind the racks of nuts and chocolate bars and then he heard people running by the door of his Family Grocery. It is very dangerous here, says Ali, pronouncing the g in dangerous like the g in gun, danguerous. We shake hands quickly by the cereal and Ali climbs behind the counter again.

I walk into Unity Beauty Products. It’s empty except for Percy who’s been running it for the last 14 years. It’s one those shops that is all cards and balloons, one dollar earrings and wrapping paper, lots of pink and white, glitter pens and stickers and Percy. Percy shuts at seven pm so he wasn’t here when, but his alarm went off and the company called him and he got here about ten fifteen. His alarm went off? Look up there, and Percy showed me a hole the size of a child’s fist smashed the top of his storefront, six inches below the ceiling. The hole was so finely jagged around the edges and it had a pale blue NYPD sticker just below it with an arrow in pen pointing up, look, said the NYPD sticker, bang. And I looked, turning around, from the hole in the window into the shop and followed the line of the spinning bullet which wracked through the Percy’s metal shutters, ripped his window and set off his alarm. I followed the bullet and saw that it had punched a rude hole through one of Percy’s balloons in his display and then bounced along the ceiling, smashing two long neon bulbs and spreading the glass all over the floor.

“That’s a big gun, that ain’t no school kid thing.”

In the Young Apache bakery next door, Richard was pulling down the shutters to the store when the bullets started flying and clacking against the walls and the store fronts, ran into the bakery thinking he’d been shot. He was ok. “I had my back to them and was pulling down the shutters when it started,” said Richard, who was short and jokey and quick with his clichés, “the residential area will always be the residential area” he said a couple of times with a meaningful grin and a singsong ragga accent, residenshall aieria. Richard was missing two teeth in the middle of his lower jaw, ‘you’re the fbi aincha?’ he asked me, ‘you like da fbi to me, ha ha.’

After Richard, Percy and Ali I went and sat in the police station waiting to talk to the detective who was out talking to the victim with the hole in his stomach at the hospital. In the waiting room by the detective squad there was a mound of old filing cabinets, faded dark blue and green next to the tough yellow walls and big, practical rubbish bins. Above and behind my head the wall was pasted with wanted and reward posters, in some places three deep, each one held up with one or two pins and when each time a door opened or closed along the corridor they fluttered silently, revealing for a moment the face and alias and date of birth of some wanted villain from the nineties, the eighties, the seventies. Homicides and assault ones, rapes and informations leading the arrest. Deep amongst them there were the small faces of two cops shot multiple times in 1971, their faces darkened and smudged from the thousands of xeroxes taken from their police graduation photos. Two cops with darkened faces shot mutiple times in the east village in an assassination by the black liberation army thirty years ago. The shooters must be 50 by now, grandfathers?

The detective didn’t come back. Later I spoke to a perky woman detective on the phone. I told her who I was. “Why are you so interested in this shooting?” she asked happily, curiously, as if she’d missed something, as if there was some joke she wasn’t getting, as if I had some plan. I went to McDonalds and ate some old fries and thought I would do one last run around the shops on the corner, see if anyone had seen anything rather than just dramatically heard things and found the routes of old bullets. I heard a rumour that an old woman had seen everything and was talking but I couldn’t find her. And then I heard Richard from the bakery in my head again, “I had my back to them…’ Them. Them. He had an image in his head of something that was “them,” he’d seen something, and was that why he was pulling down the shutters at two or three minutes to ten rather than ten when the bakery shuts?

By this time it was five and the sun was beginning to go down at the western end of the hugely long Fulton street, it was making things hard to see, bouncing off the windows of cars. Richard was outside the bakery, talking to a pretty woman with two tattoos below her neck. “Hello mista journalist, how’s your story coming?’ he asked with a big smile. Not never, he said, they’ll never get the one that did this, not never, and he pulled the pretty woman who half, jokily, protested, into a doorway next to the bakery. The brown door shut and I stood on the pavement, with the light going down and the group of men still gathered around the Family Grocery and Ali inside still scared. I stood there and the sun came down and there was a young boy about nine years old in dark blue trousers and a white shirt just singing and rapping quietly to himself, willowing around on the pavement, snapping out a foot or hand whenever his voice tensed up on the beat, covering and re-covering eight or nine paces around the pavement, singing while the sun came down. Richard came out and the pretty woman left, holding onto her small brown paper bag. I asked Richard about “them”, who’s them Richard? “This is the black area, Mista Journalist, the black area will always be the black area and the white area will always be the white area.” That was his way of not saying anything more. So I wanted to check one last thing and so I pointed across the street, I said, so that’s where the shots came from and I swung my arm around to face the bakery.

“Don’t point your hand,” said Richard, for the first time very serious. “Don’t point your hand because people are watching.” And I brought my hand down. It suddenly felt very big on the end of my arm and I knew Richard was talking about the group of men outside the Family Grocery. They were gathering for this evening and they were there last evening and they saw the young man got shot and Mista Journalist wasn’t going to learn anything more than that.

On the subway home I was rushed and shaky and tired and didn’t feel like I had much to say at all.