Tales from the 'hood.
The highlight of most of my days was loitering around various spots around Schenectady with my brother like raccoons people-watching from behind a dumpster gate. We always had some shit to talk about, and being out in the middle of the night in a place like Schenectady assured us we'd be witness to something entertaining at one point or another. One of our favorite spots was a new place that had just opened up downtown called Alltown Fresh. It was open 24/7, which at that point of the pandemic was virtually unheard of, they consistently had the cheapest gas in town, and they sold really good vegan mixed berry muffins and, according to my brother, coffee. It was a strange place whose brand identity didn't make a whole lotta sense to me. It sold all the typical poisonous bullshit you'd find at any other gas station mart or convenience store, but oddly also sold a plethora of vegan, organic, and all-natural products alongside it all, at unreasonable and exorbitant prices. It was like they were trying to market to both the poor and the not-as-poor with their eclectic inventory, but they still didn't take food stamps. Either way, they were the only place left open after 11PM and they had the nicest bathrooms in town, so it became our preferred place for late-night loitering and taking a shit. It also naturally became a hot spot for plenty of Schenectady's downtown weirdos, who would eventually flock there to aggressively approach people pumping gas and beg for change. We found ourselves interacting with a lot of them.
One night, a charming but frantic woman, perspiring from whatever drugs she was definitely on, came up to us and handed us flowers, announcing to us she was there to retrieve belongings she had left behind in a dumpster. She told us she had just gotten out of the hospital, and that the police had brought her there thinking she was high because her eyes were all bloodshot. Little did they know, according to her, there was another logical explanation for this: she insisted to us she actually just had pinkeye because she, "loved eating ass so much." Apparently, this woman was out there just tossing salads during a pandemic. Before being picked up by the cops, she said a man brought her to a hotel and fucked her for $100. Then she excitedly showed us her foot, where one of her toenails had been completely peeled off through constant friction inside her sneaker. After a little bit, we began to suspect she thought we'd offer her money for sexual favors or something, so we left after she went inside the store for water. We always showed the crazies and the downtrodden compassion and kindness, and spoke to them as we would anyone else. Neither of us were very far from being just like them, after all. Most were genuinely nice, and probably a little bored and lonely, as were we. However, they all eventually wore out their welcome. She left us with a dandelion she'd picked, which she had delicately planted into the straw of a soda I was drinking from Burger King.
Another night while outside a Stewart's, we heard a young girl walking while screaming at a car, their hazards blinking as they slowly followed her. At first, all I heard was her yelling, "No, bro! Stop following me! I am not going back to somewhere I don't feel safe!"
We watched as the car crept alongside her up the street. I got up and walked over to get a closer look, to see if I could help at all. It was then we realized the person in the car was a woman. We drove ahead of them and pulled over. When the young girl got up to us on the sidewalk, I poked my head out and addressed her, "Excuse me, Miss?"
Without hesitation and in a confidently sassy tone, she responded, "Don't talk to me, I don't know you."
Before she was gone, I was able to get out, "Are you in danger?"
She said no and thanked me. We sat there a little longer as she turned right down a side street and the car, driven by what we eventually discovered was her mother, continued to follow. This young girl was sobbing and screaming, telling her mother she did not want to go back home because she did not feel safe. In her yelling, we heard that her mother's husband was putting his hands on her.
She screamed to her mother, "Open your eyes and see what is going on!"
It was truly heartbreaking. The city was really bleak, and I was reminded how ugly reality is every time I left the house at night. I wished there was anything I could do to help her, but I did all I realistically could.
Another night at that same Stewart's, he and I were hanging out by the picnic table. In this city, and especially at that location, we almost always were eventually approached by some weirdo who wanted to talk. This time, it was some guy on a bike, smoking a cigarette, who without hesitation interrupted our conversation to tell us about toilet seats with lights on them. He went on and on about them. The lights were so you knew where to sit while in the dark, he explained. He then abruptly changed the subject and told us that someone had gotten murdered outside the Metro PCS. Shot 21 times, he said.
"I didn't even know guns carried that many bullets!"
Without any room for us to speak, he immediately went into a long thing about Metro PCS and some recent deals they had, sounding eerily like a commercial, like the murder he'd just mentioned was only for the purpose of segueing into this word-of-mouth advertisement. From there, he went on about Trump's taxes and Covid, and finally concluded with another commercial-like speech about different models of video game consoles and TVs and their comparative pros and cons. By the time he rode off on his bike, he was still in mid-sentence about this, like he'd been taken over by a radio signal or something.
One night in the parking lot there, while in my brother's car, a drunk woman approached his window as we were eating Thai food and began to try and sell us an allegedly authentic Louis Vuitton pocketbook. After we expressed disinterest, she continued to hang around, still talking about the bag for another ten minutes. We just sat there and let her tell us all about it, repeating where she got it from and how much such a bag is usually sold for. Her friend came out with coffee and she asked us to give him a ride somewhere, but we politely declined. Her friend was black, but when he walked away, she began explaining to us the different levels of the title "nigga". Neither of us had any idea what the fuck she was trying to get across, but she was white and probably trying to recite the classic "anyone can be a nigger" argument in some roundabout way. We didn't bother trying to engage in any philosophical discussion with her about it, even though we disagreed that such a historically hateful word was open to interpretation. After that, we were no longer having fun with her. Thankfully, she suddenly had a ride waiting for her. She said goodbye, and called us by the names Mark and Scott. We never gave her our names, and those certainly were not it. Did she think she knew us? Was that why she acted so comfortable talking to us? It wasn't worth asking such questions.
We were in Albany at our favorite pizza place one evening when this guy suddenly stopped and paused outside the entrance and began glaring at me through the windows we were sitting by. At first I just convinced myself I was being crazy, because I oftentimes was, but once he walked in he stood in place and blatantly continued to stare at me. He casually ordered his pizza once the guy came to the counter, and then just as casually and quickly turned right back, resuming his stance and concentration on me. My brother and I just sat there and stared right back. He remained silent and motionless, but I was intent on winning the staring contest. Eventually, my brother came out and said, "Is something wrong?"
The guy shrugged.
"Are you okay?" he followed up.
He shrugged again.
I asked him, "Is there a problem? You've been staring at me since you got here."
He did some strange gestures with his hands and we told him we had no idea what they meant.
I asked him again what the fuck his problem was.
That was when he angrily exclaimed, "I think you're sexy! Is that okay, fatty?! I like big men! I think you're cute!"
Considering his enraged tone, I had to assume that by claiming to be gay he thought he was insulting me. As hurt as I was by being reminded that I was fat, and despite now wanting to physically fight this man, I calmly responded, "Oh, okay. I mean, clearly. Well, thank you. That's okay."
I was never one for reinforcing the whole 'gay as an insult' thing.
Seeming defeated by the fact that neither of us were intimidated by him or considered being gay insulting, he went outside and proceeded to stand and stare at me some more through the window. We kept looking at him and laughing. The guy wouldn't let up. I was wondering if we were going to get into a fistfight, and part of me hoped we would so I could have an excuse to physically harm someone. His demeanor changed to something less threatening when I turned my phone toward him. He stood there for almost ten whole minutes, shaking his head with his arms crossed, rolling his eyes, and wearing a sucked-in grin. He got his pizza and then walked back to his car. The dude working told us he had first handed him two empty beer cans when he came in, so we assumed he was a little drunk, and so also apparently driving while drinking. As he very slowly drove out of the parking lot into the busy traffic of Central Avenue, he stared at me the entire time, until I was no longer in his line of vision. It was pretty funny, but also really creepy. I'd never know if he "knew" who I was or why he was so upset with me. I hated being in my city again and not knowing who thought they knew me for bad things I hadn't actually done. Maybe he was just another local with mental health issues who was attracted to me like so many inexplicably are, but maybe he was someone who had heard about my years of abuse in the city.
Doing deliveries usually gave me plenty of amusement, too. Like one day, I got to a house that was not responding to knocking, their doorbell, or their phone. Their next door neighbor saw me and told me they were in their backyard. He said he'd just seen them while mowing his lawn. I walked down the side of the house and then through their plastic white picket gate that I had to unlatch. I didn't immediately see them anywhere. There was what I thought was a wall to my left, but as I rounded it, I saw this woman, probably in her late 30s or early 40s, straddling a man with spiky but greying hair, in a huge hot tub, slowly and seductively making out with him, both their eyes closed.
I jumped a little and exclaimed, "Oh, I'm so sorry!"
But they didn't even flinch, their eyes remained closed, and she continued what she was doing to him as if I were invisible, despite being two or three feet away.
I stood there awkwardly and said, "Excuse me?"
No reaction whatsoever. I stood there for another five seconds, in disbelief, and then left and called my boss to tell him they weren't responding. I could only assume they were literally drunk on passion (and maybe also actual alcohol) in that moment, or they got off on people like me walking in on them?
One day I pulled into the plaza my job was in and the first thing I saw was a man's bare ass, the back of his balls dangling beneath it as he bent over to collect recyclables from deep within a trash can. His already sagging sweatpants had fallen beneath the cheeks and he wasn't wearing any underwear. He looked very angry. I later saw him outside of the Hannaford next door, looking like he was pointing and yelling at a bench. I didn't know what happened, but I then caught him walking away from the lot, throwing a very severe fit, eventually throwing his bag of bottles and cans against a Stop sign, sending all the recyclables scattered around the parking lot where they would remain until the wind moved it all away. He was yelling, but not at anyone; perhaps just the universe. I could very much relate to his energy. I'd continue to see him walking around town after that, one day oddly in bell bottoms. He always had this intense scowl, and his mouth was always moving like he was talking shit to someone who wasn't there.
Another day while making a delivery, a woman got out of her car to threaten me. The roads in Schenectady were really bad--like, mangled, wavy, dusted with rocks and shards of glass, and riddled with potholes and craters. Driving there sucked, and it was common for residents to have their cars ruined and damaged by just driving. A long stretch of road through the ghetto had recently been "worked on" for about a week. I couldn't ever tell why, but they dug a trench along a mile or so of this street, and afterwards just let it sit as it was for a few days, barely filled in. Driving on it with just the passenger side of your vehicle felt really fucking weird and like actual off-roading. At one point, they threw in another layer of cheap blacktop, but it was still sunken in and jagged significantly enough that driving on it felt scary. They'd made it clear they would not be doing anything else with it any time soon, and that the giant steel covers at the beginning and end of this trench would likely remain for months or years to come. Anyway, my car was already on its way out. The shocks were likely blown, and from what I'd been told it was only a matter of time before my axles snapped off. So I'd been swerving to avoid potholes and sometimes riding in the wrong lane just to go around and avoid how much of these roads were fucking destroyed. It was a local joke that you never knew if a swerving driver was drunk or just trying to miss a pothole--there were car decals of it, even. I never went into oncoming traffic or anything, and drivers going down that block were already driving differently because the lanes were no longer two complete lanes.
I had done this as I usually did and wound up at a red light. I noticed in my rear view that the woman behind me was yelling something at me, but I couldn't hear her because my music was up. When I paused it, I heard her call me an asshole. So I rolled down my window, stuck my head out, and yelled to her, "What's wrong?"
She immediately responded, "Oh, you got shit to say?! Let's do this, I'll beat yo' ass, let's go!" as she got out of her car and stomped over to me.
I calmly repeated, "I was asking you what was wrong; I couldn't hear you," several times before she finally heard me over her own enraged babbling.
She yelled about the way I was driving, saying something about being dangerous.
"Today is the wrong muthafuckin' day!"
She was an older woman with fucked-up teeth, bloodshot eyes, and thick globs of dried-up spit in the corners of her mouth as she snarled at me. I saw a teenage boy in her passenger seat, looking embarrassed but also as if this were completely normal.
I told her, "I just don't wanna fuck up my tires."
For some reason, I honestly believed, as a resident of our city, she'd understand, but she was inconsolably intransigent.
"I've got two muthafuckin’ babies with me, I will fuckin' kill yo' ass!"
She admonished me about safety, even though she was the one who was now outside of her car, challenging another driver to a death match at what was by then a green light while cars collected behind us.
I said to her, "Oh... well, I'm sorry."
She stormed back to her car, cockily saying, "That's right, you're fuckin' sorry!"
I didn't like her attitude, so I said, "Okay, I'm not sorry!"
She repeated that my ass was sorry, so I said louder, "I'm not sorry anymore!"
She turned around and yelled, "I will fucking kill you!" along with something incoherent about white people trying to kill black people, and then got back into her car.
In the end, I would continue to, within reason, do what I needed in order to make my car last.
One day while idling in my car outside the Chinese place, I had the luck of overhearing an altercation between a small group of hoodrat women and one of those old, white women who were always trigger-happy about calling the cops for any mild inconvenience or blow to their ego, especially by those who looked poorer than them and/or had too much melanin. From what I could gather from all the yelling, these women "stole" a parking spot from this typical Karen and an old man who was, ironically enough, wearing a shirt of the local co-op. She wasted no time calling the cops, of course, while the other women yelled things at her that she definitely needed to hear.
"Because the cops are your fucking savior, right?!"
They sat on a bench and waited for the police, but eventually impatiently got up and resumed their plans to shop for groceries, while the Karen stood outside in the cold and stubbornly continued waiting, jollily tapping her foot. In the end, the cops never came and I got to watch her and the man go back to their car and leave in defeat. They had apparently changed their minds about shopping, probably so they didn't have to see those girls again. I was glad no one got killed. Fuck any and all people who call the cops, especially when you're literally potentially having someone assassinated for something barely aggravating and far from harmful.
My brother and I briefly toyed with the idea of anonymously creating an Instagram page just for posting things like these, in part to combat the small usage of embarrassing Instagrams tags like "schenectadydoesntsuck" by people who don't actually have to live in the parts of Schenectady that make it suck so badly. We were both always on the lookout for wacky and awful things to take a picture of for this hypothetical account, and it wasn't all that hard to find between our nights out together and my days driving around while delivering Chinese food. It was just a strange, gross place, overall. Below are some of the pictures I took...
"A crackhead was here", written in what we had dubbed Piss Alley (for obvious reasons if you've ever walked through it) on Jay Street.
TRUSTPASSING. This sign was outside an inflatable slide play area in the local ghost mall.
Christian Rapture lunatics on the busy street corner of Brandywine and Albany, yelling about repenting to Jesus through megaphones on a late Friday night.
One of those massive $300 skeletons from Home Depot. It was not immediately clear if the nearby Trump flag was sincere or just another Halloween decoration.
A used shooting target sheet on the front of someone's door. Very welcoming.
A mad sick inflatable Beetlejuice yard decoration. This was neither gross nor dark, and it was in the far more middle-class area of Rotterdam; I just liked it.
A sexually suggestive ad for lemon pepper chicken wings that will either apparently turn someone on so intensely that they will want to fuck you, or maybe want to fuck themselves with the wings?
One day, there was a five-minute rainstorm and it somehow destroyed the whole city.
I hate all politicians, but this made me laugh because of the whole hair thing. The couple who answered the door were very friendly, and when I told them I liked their yard sign, the woman started excitedly talking about voting. I didn't have the heart to crush her little liberal spirits and tell her I would never vote.
What can only be described as a shank, sitting on the ground in the gas station parking lot across the street from me at the corner of Altamont and California. It remained there, untouched, for almost two weeks, probably because no one wanted to add their fingerprints to it.
A local member of the National Guild of Hypnotists.
Yard signs in Rotterdam: "This is a disgrace. St. Clare's retirees deserving of justice. St. Clare's retirees going through hell. We need justice. Worst case of abuse." An old and now defunct hospital here, St. Clare's, which was replaced by Ellis, shut down while fucking a thousand of their past employees out of their earned pensions and retirement benefits, and are now facing a civil suit. The St. Clare's Corporation and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany are fighting it because they are total scumbags.
The aftermath of a death on Cutler Street. A 30-year-old dude going really fast on his dirt bike the wrong way down a one-way struck another oncoming vehicle and later died at the hospital. A day or so later, people honored him by riding their dirt bikes up and down the block where he died, doing the very thing that got him killed. This was the second local dirt-bike-related fatality I'd driven up on.
The notorious Volkswagen Beetles that aimlessly drive around the area code solely to promote Jesus and The Bridge church at the corner of Crane and Bridge, comic sans and all. Churches have way too much money to burn, I swear.
A lot going on at this corner's electrical box.
I had no idea what "upstate vag" meant. Was it an acronym? Was the driver representing their NY-bred vagina? I'd later be told it was a local Volkswagen and Audi enthusiasts group, which was actually cornier than any of my initial theories.
A very large neighborhood of bird houses on someone's lawn in Rotterdam.
The tiniest snowman ever, made out of the only surviving snow left under the sun after one of the lightest snowfalls of the season. I was impressed, until I saw the Trump sign.
Some heroes altered racist graffiti on Crane Street in some spot where people usually pee and shoot up drugs (so, while outdoors, technically still the typical racist bathroom graffiti).
Oof, we got a Blue Lives Matter flag, a Jeep logo partly made of handguns, and... a Mumford & Sons sticker.
On the corner of Duane and Craig there was an abandoned home that looked like it used to be a daycare of some sort. On both doors, there were the long, incoherent ramblings of a conspiracy theorist scrawled up and down them in Sharpie chicken scratch. I'd seen similar messages written around the neighborhood, but none as lengthy as on these doors. It isn't even worth trying to type any of the nonsensical shit written here.
Corny. They weren't even listening to music I could hear.
A very old graffiti portrait of a naked person with breasts on the side of an even older Italian place at the corner of Congress and 10th. Somehow, this has never been buffed, though it appears someone tried.
How do you know someone's a fucking horse girl? Oh, they'll tell you.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a really strange way to go about this?
An impractical frankenbike that someone likely very quickly realized could not be ridden, abandoned outside the Stewart's.
An amended sign outside Sandy's Elbow Room bar on Olean. I guess they must've been having trouble with those pesky anti-maskers.
All in one day.
A laminated sign was tied to the fence of an empty lot by the 890 on-ramp on Brandywine, underneath two heavy bags of raw, rotting meat. It was maybe the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen in Schenectady. It was there for at least a week, even after the meat had fully melted away into sludge. I joked that the meat was human, because a few months earlier at the Speedway across the street from it, I witnessed a tall, lanky homeless man get jumped by a man hiding behind a bush for allegedly being a pedophile. I was sitting on a curb by myself at 4AM when it happened and showed him kindness when he stumbled over and talked to me as we both waited for the convenience store to reopen from its one-hour shutdown for cleaning. He was very hyped up, probably due to the adrenaline of having just been attacked, and told me he was a 12-year felon, but not for any sexual transgressions. He told me that a woman he knew had started the rumor. I could relate. He told me he was going to kill her and her family and eat some of them, and I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. He pantomimed eating pieces of them out of a bowl, and said he'd only eat a little bit. Then again, he also hinted that he had actually invented the iPod while in prison. Anyway, I imagined this theory where, maybe, this meat belonged to that woman he killed and ate.
While out doing deliveries, I stopped to say hey to this turkey couple loitering outside of an abandoned convenience store. They were pretty welcoming, and one of them was particularly interested in my car, maybe lured in by its purring and warmth. Turkeys were such beautiful beings and I loved their gentle vocalizations.
The plaid barn on the interstate!
I also started taking pictures of the many roadside memorials around my part of town...
Despite how bleak the city was, I could usually count on the sky. I really admired and made time to take in the sunsets and night skies, and delivering during the golden hour was one of my favorite things about working...
One night, a charming but frantic woman, perspiring from whatever drugs she was definitely on, came up to us and handed us flowers, announcing to us she was there to retrieve belongings she had left behind in a dumpster. She told us she had just gotten out of the hospital, and that the police had brought her there thinking she was high because her eyes were all bloodshot. Little did they know, according to her, there was another logical explanation for this: she insisted to us she actually just had pinkeye because she, "loved eating ass so much." Apparently, this woman was out there just tossing salads during a pandemic. Before being picked up by the cops, she said a man brought her to a hotel and fucked her for $100. Then she excitedly showed us her foot, where one of her toenails had been completely peeled off through constant friction inside her sneaker. After a little bit, we began to suspect she thought we'd offer her money for sexual favors or something, so we left after she went inside the store for water. We always showed the crazies and the downtrodden compassion and kindness, and spoke to them as we would anyone else. Neither of us were very far from being just like them, after all. Most were genuinely nice, and probably a little bored and lonely, as were we. However, they all eventually wore out their welcome. She left us with a dandelion she'd picked, which she had delicately planted into the straw of a soda I was drinking from Burger King.
Another night while outside a Stewart's, we heard a young girl walking while screaming at a car, their hazards blinking as they slowly followed her. At first, all I heard was her yelling, "No, bro! Stop following me! I am not going back to somewhere I don't feel safe!"
We watched as the car crept alongside her up the street. I got up and walked over to get a closer look, to see if I could help at all. It was then we realized the person in the car was a woman. We drove ahead of them and pulled over. When the young girl got up to us on the sidewalk, I poked my head out and addressed her, "Excuse me, Miss?"
Without hesitation and in a confidently sassy tone, she responded, "Don't talk to me, I don't know you."
Before she was gone, I was able to get out, "Are you in danger?"
She said no and thanked me. We sat there a little longer as she turned right down a side street and the car, driven by what we eventually discovered was her mother, continued to follow. This young girl was sobbing and screaming, telling her mother she did not want to go back home because she did not feel safe. In her yelling, we heard that her mother's husband was putting his hands on her.
She screamed to her mother, "Open your eyes and see what is going on!"
It was truly heartbreaking. The city was really bleak, and I was reminded how ugly reality is every time I left the house at night. I wished there was anything I could do to help her, but I did all I realistically could.
Another night at that same Stewart's, he and I were hanging out by the picnic table. In this city, and especially at that location, we almost always were eventually approached by some weirdo who wanted to talk. This time, it was some guy on a bike, smoking a cigarette, who without hesitation interrupted our conversation to tell us about toilet seats with lights on them. He went on and on about them. The lights were so you knew where to sit while in the dark, he explained. He then abruptly changed the subject and told us that someone had gotten murdered outside the Metro PCS. Shot 21 times, he said.
"I didn't even know guns carried that many bullets!"
Without any room for us to speak, he immediately went into a long thing about Metro PCS and some recent deals they had, sounding eerily like a commercial, like the murder he'd just mentioned was only for the purpose of segueing into this word-of-mouth advertisement. From there, he went on about Trump's taxes and Covid, and finally concluded with another commercial-like speech about different models of video game consoles and TVs and their comparative pros and cons. By the time he rode off on his bike, he was still in mid-sentence about this, like he'd been taken over by a radio signal or something.
One night in the parking lot there, while in my brother's car, a drunk woman approached his window as we were eating Thai food and began to try and sell us an allegedly authentic Louis Vuitton pocketbook. After we expressed disinterest, she continued to hang around, still talking about the bag for another ten minutes. We just sat there and let her tell us all about it, repeating where she got it from and how much such a bag is usually sold for. Her friend came out with coffee and she asked us to give him a ride somewhere, but we politely declined. Her friend was black, but when he walked away, she began explaining to us the different levels of the title "nigga". Neither of us had any idea what the fuck she was trying to get across, but she was white and probably trying to recite the classic "anyone can be a nigger" argument in some roundabout way. We didn't bother trying to engage in any philosophical discussion with her about it, even though we disagreed that such a historically hateful word was open to interpretation. After that, we were no longer having fun with her. Thankfully, she suddenly had a ride waiting for her. She said goodbye, and called us by the names Mark and Scott. We never gave her our names, and those certainly were not it. Did she think she knew us? Was that why she acted so comfortable talking to us? It wasn't worth asking such questions.
We were in Albany at our favorite pizza place one evening when this guy suddenly stopped and paused outside the entrance and began glaring at me through the windows we were sitting by. At first I just convinced myself I was being crazy, because I oftentimes was, but once he walked in he stood in place and blatantly continued to stare at me. He casually ordered his pizza once the guy came to the counter, and then just as casually and quickly turned right back, resuming his stance and concentration on me. My brother and I just sat there and stared right back. He remained silent and motionless, but I was intent on winning the staring contest. Eventually, my brother came out and said, "Is something wrong?"
The guy shrugged.
"Are you okay?" he followed up.
He shrugged again.
I asked him, "Is there a problem? You've been staring at me since you got here."
He did some strange gestures with his hands and we told him we had no idea what they meant.
I asked him again what the fuck his problem was.
That was when he angrily exclaimed, "I think you're sexy! Is that okay, fatty?! I like big men! I think you're cute!"
Considering his enraged tone, I had to assume that by claiming to be gay he thought he was insulting me. As hurt as I was by being reminded that I was fat, and despite now wanting to physically fight this man, I calmly responded, "Oh, okay. I mean, clearly. Well, thank you. That's okay."
I was never one for reinforcing the whole 'gay as an insult' thing.
Seeming defeated by the fact that neither of us were intimidated by him or considered being gay insulting, he went outside and proceeded to stand and stare at me some more through the window. We kept looking at him and laughing. The guy wouldn't let up. I was wondering if we were going to get into a fistfight, and part of me hoped we would so I could have an excuse to physically harm someone. His demeanor changed to something less threatening when I turned my phone toward him. He stood there for almost ten whole minutes, shaking his head with his arms crossed, rolling his eyes, and wearing a sucked-in grin. He got his pizza and then walked back to his car. The dude working told us he had first handed him two empty beer cans when he came in, so we assumed he was a little drunk, and so also apparently driving while drinking. As he very slowly drove out of the parking lot into the busy traffic of Central Avenue, he stared at me the entire time, until I was no longer in his line of vision. It was pretty funny, but also really creepy. I'd never know if he "knew" who I was or why he was so upset with me. I hated being in my city again and not knowing who thought they knew me for bad things I hadn't actually done. Maybe he was just another local with mental health issues who was attracted to me like so many inexplicably are, but maybe he was someone who had heard about my years of abuse in the city.
Doing deliveries usually gave me plenty of amusement, too. Like one day, I got to a house that was not responding to knocking, their doorbell, or their phone. Their next door neighbor saw me and told me they were in their backyard. He said he'd just seen them while mowing his lawn. I walked down the side of the house and then through their plastic white picket gate that I had to unlatch. I didn't immediately see them anywhere. There was what I thought was a wall to my left, but as I rounded it, I saw this woman, probably in her late 30s or early 40s, straddling a man with spiky but greying hair, in a huge hot tub, slowly and seductively making out with him, both their eyes closed.
I jumped a little and exclaimed, "Oh, I'm so sorry!"
But they didn't even flinch, their eyes remained closed, and she continued what she was doing to him as if I were invisible, despite being two or three feet away.
I stood there awkwardly and said, "Excuse me?"
No reaction whatsoever. I stood there for another five seconds, in disbelief, and then left and called my boss to tell him they weren't responding. I could only assume they were literally drunk on passion (and maybe also actual alcohol) in that moment, or they got off on people like me walking in on them?
One day I pulled into the plaza my job was in and the first thing I saw was a man's bare ass, the back of his balls dangling beneath it as he bent over to collect recyclables from deep within a trash can. His already sagging sweatpants had fallen beneath the cheeks and he wasn't wearing any underwear. He looked very angry. I later saw him outside of the Hannaford next door, looking like he was pointing and yelling at a bench. I didn't know what happened, but I then caught him walking away from the lot, throwing a very severe fit, eventually throwing his bag of bottles and cans against a Stop sign, sending all the recyclables scattered around the parking lot where they would remain until the wind moved it all away. He was yelling, but not at anyone; perhaps just the universe. I could very much relate to his energy. I'd continue to see him walking around town after that, one day oddly in bell bottoms. He always had this intense scowl, and his mouth was always moving like he was talking shit to someone who wasn't there.
Another day while making a delivery, a woman got out of her car to threaten me. The roads in Schenectady were really bad--like, mangled, wavy, dusted with rocks and shards of glass, and riddled with potholes and craters. Driving there sucked, and it was common for residents to have their cars ruined and damaged by just driving. A long stretch of road through the ghetto had recently been "worked on" for about a week. I couldn't ever tell why, but they dug a trench along a mile or so of this street, and afterwards just let it sit as it was for a few days, barely filled in. Driving on it with just the passenger side of your vehicle felt really fucking weird and like actual off-roading. At one point, they threw in another layer of cheap blacktop, but it was still sunken in and jagged significantly enough that driving on it felt scary. They'd made it clear they would not be doing anything else with it any time soon, and that the giant steel covers at the beginning and end of this trench would likely remain for months or years to come. Anyway, my car was already on its way out. The shocks were likely blown, and from what I'd been told it was only a matter of time before my axles snapped off. So I'd been swerving to avoid potholes and sometimes riding in the wrong lane just to go around and avoid how much of these roads were fucking destroyed. It was a local joke that you never knew if a swerving driver was drunk or just trying to miss a pothole--there were car decals of it, even. I never went into oncoming traffic or anything, and drivers going down that block were already driving differently because the lanes were no longer two complete lanes.
I had done this as I usually did and wound up at a red light. I noticed in my rear view that the woman behind me was yelling something at me, but I couldn't hear her because my music was up. When I paused it, I heard her call me an asshole. So I rolled down my window, stuck my head out, and yelled to her, "What's wrong?"
She immediately responded, "Oh, you got shit to say?! Let's do this, I'll beat yo' ass, let's go!" as she got out of her car and stomped over to me.
I calmly repeated, "I was asking you what was wrong; I couldn't hear you," several times before she finally heard me over her own enraged babbling.
She yelled about the way I was driving, saying something about being dangerous.
"Today is the wrong muthafuckin' day!"
She was an older woman with fucked-up teeth, bloodshot eyes, and thick globs of dried-up spit in the corners of her mouth as she snarled at me. I saw a teenage boy in her passenger seat, looking embarrassed but also as if this were completely normal.
I told her, "I just don't wanna fuck up my tires."
For some reason, I honestly believed, as a resident of our city, she'd understand, but she was inconsolably intransigent.
"I've got two muthafuckin’ babies with me, I will fuckin' kill yo' ass!"
She admonished me about safety, even though she was the one who was now outside of her car, challenging another driver to a death match at what was by then a green light while cars collected behind us.
I said to her, "Oh... well, I'm sorry."
She stormed back to her car, cockily saying, "That's right, you're fuckin' sorry!"
I didn't like her attitude, so I said, "Okay, I'm not sorry!"
She repeated that my ass was sorry, so I said louder, "I'm not sorry anymore!"
She turned around and yelled, "I will fucking kill you!" along with something incoherent about white people trying to kill black people, and then got back into her car.
In the end, I would continue to, within reason, do what I needed in order to make my car last.
One day while idling in my car outside the Chinese place, I had the luck of overhearing an altercation between a small group of hoodrat women and one of those old, white women who were always trigger-happy about calling the cops for any mild inconvenience or blow to their ego, especially by those who looked poorer than them and/or had too much melanin. From what I could gather from all the yelling, these women "stole" a parking spot from this typical Karen and an old man who was, ironically enough, wearing a shirt of the local co-op. She wasted no time calling the cops, of course, while the other women yelled things at her that she definitely needed to hear.
"Because the cops are your fucking savior, right?!"
They sat on a bench and waited for the police, but eventually impatiently got up and resumed their plans to shop for groceries, while the Karen stood outside in the cold and stubbornly continued waiting, jollily tapping her foot. In the end, the cops never came and I got to watch her and the man go back to their car and leave in defeat. They had apparently changed their minds about shopping, probably so they didn't have to see those girls again. I was glad no one got killed. Fuck any and all people who call the cops, especially when you're literally potentially having someone assassinated for something barely aggravating and far from harmful.
My brother and I briefly toyed with the idea of anonymously creating an Instagram page just for posting things like these, in part to combat the small usage of embarrassing Instagrams tags like "schenectadydoesntsuck" by people who don't actually have to live in the parts of Schenectady that make it suck so badly. We were both always on the lookout for wacky and awful things to take a picture of for this hypothetical account, and it wasn't all that hard to find between our nights out together and my days driving around while delivering Chinese food. It was just a strange, gross place, overall. Below are some of the pictures I took...
"A crackhead was here", written in what we had dubbed Piss Alley (for obvious reasons if you've ever walked through it) on Jay Street.
TRUSTPASSING. This sign was outside an inflatable slide play area in the local ghost mall.
Christian Rapture lunatics on the busy street corner of Brandywine and Albany, yelling about repenting to Jesus through megaphones on a late Friday night.
One of those massive $300 skeletons from Home Depot. It was not immediately clear if the nearby Trump flag was sincere or just another Halloween decoration.
A used shooting target sheet on the front of someone's door. Very welcoming.
A mad sick inflatable Beetlejuice yard decoration. This was neither gross nor dark, and it was in the far more middle-class area of Rotterdam; I just liked it.
A sexually suggestive ad for lemon pepper chicken wings that will either apparently turn someone on so intensely that they will want to fuck you, or maybe want to fuck themselves with the wings?
One day, there was a five-minute rainstorm and it somehow destroyed the whole city.
I hate all politicians, but this made me laugh because of the whole hair thing. The couple who answered the door were very friendly, and when I told them I liked their yard sign, the woman started excitedly talking about voting. I didn't have the heart to crush her little liberal spirits and tell her I would never vote.
What can only be described as a shank, sitting on the ground in the gas station parking lot across the street from me at the corner of Altamont and California. It remained there, untouched, for almost two weeks, probably because no one wanted to add their fingerprints to it.
A local member of the National Guild of Hypnotists.
Yard signs in Rotterdam: "This is a disgrace. St. Clare's retirees deserving of justice. St. Clare's retirees going through hell. We need justice. Worst case of abuse." An old and now defunct hospital here, St. Clare's, which was replaced by Ellis, shut down while fucking a thousand of their past employees out of their earned pensions and retirement benefits, and are now facing a civil suit. The St. Clare's Corporation and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany are fighting it because they are total scumbags.
The aftermath of a death on Cutler Street. A 30-year-old dude going really fast on his dirt bike the wrong way down a one-way struck another oncoming vehicle and later died at the hospital. A day or so later, people honored him by riding their dirt bikes up and down the block where he died, doing the very thing that got him killed. This was the second local dirt-bike-related fatality I'd driven up on.
The notorious Volkswagen Beetles that aimlessly drive around the area code solely to promote Jesus and The Bridge church at the corner of Crane and Bridge, comic sans and all. Churches have way too much money to burn, I swear.
A lot going on at this corner's electrical box.
I had no idea what "upstate vag" meant. Was it an acronym? Was the driver representing their NY-bred vagina? I'd later be told it was a local Volkswagen and Audi enthusiasts group, which was actually cornier than any of my initial theories.
A very large neighborhood of bird houses on someone's lawn in Rotterdam.
The tiniest snowman ever, made out of the only surviving snow left under the sun after one of the lightest snowfalls of the season. I was impressed, until I saw the Trump sign.
Some heroes altered racist graffiti on Crane Street in some spot where people usually pee and shoot up drugs (so, while outdoors, technically still the typical racist bathroom graffiti).
Oof, we got a Blue Lives Matter flag, a Jeep logo partly made of handguns, and... a Mumford & Sons sticker.
On the corner of Duane and Craig there was an abandoned home that looked like it used to be a daycare of some sort. On both doors, there were the long, incoherent ramblings of a conspiracy theorist scrawled up and down them in Sharpie chicken scratch. I'd seen similar messages written around the neighborhood, but none as lengthy as on these doors. It isn't even worth trying to type any of the nonsensical shit written here.
Corny. They weren't even listening to music I could hear.
A very old graffiti portrait of a naked person with breasts on the side of an even older Italian place at the corner of Congress and 10th. Somehow, this has never been buffed, though it appears someone tried.
How do you know someone's a fucking horse girl? Oh, they'll tell you.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a really strange way to go about this?
An impractical frankenbike that someone likely very quickly realized could not be ridden, abandoned outside the Stewart's.
An amended sign outside Sandy's Elbow Room bar on Olean. I guess they must've been having trouble with those pesky anti-maskers.
All in one day.
A laminated sign was tied to the fence of an empty lot by the 890 on-ramp on Brandywine, underneath two heavy bags of raw, rotting meat. It was maybe the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen in Schenectady. It was there for at least a week, even after the meat had fully melted away into sludge. I joked that the meat was human, because a few months earlier at the Speedway across the street from it, I witnessed a tall, lanky homeless man get jumped by a man hiding behind a bush for allegedly being a pedophile. I was sitting on a curb by myself at 4AM when it happened and showed him kindness when he stumbled over and talked to me as we both waited for the convenience store to reopen from its one-hour shutdown for cleaning. He was very hyped up, probably due to the adrenaline of having just been attacked, and told me he was a 12-year felon, but not for any sexual transgressions. He told me that a woman he knew had started the rumor. I could relate. He told me he was going to kill her and her family and eat some of them, and I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. He pantomimed eating pieces of them out of a bowl, and said he'd only eat a little bit. Then again, he also hinted that he had actually invented the iPod while in prison. Anyway, I imagined this theory where, maybe, this meat belonged to that woman he killed and ate.
While out doing deliveries, I stopped to say hey to this turkey couple loitering outside of an abandoned convenience store. They were pretty welcoming, and one of them was particularly interested in my car, maybe lured in by its purring and warmth. Turkeys were such beautiful beings and I loved their gentle vocalizations.
The plaid barn on the interstate!
I also started taking pictures of the many roadside memorials around my part of town...
Despite how bleak the city was, I could usually count on the sky. I really admired and made time to take in the sunsets and night skies, and delivering during the golden hour was one of my favorite things about working...