Shots With Neighbors

I had never before run from gunshots. To be clear, I had never even been in the vicinity of gunshots, unless you count the shooting range in the basement of Tiro A Siegno, an old Italian club in Greenwich Village, where a group of us not long ago ate a huge meal, drank more wine than was necessary, and then stumbled down the stairs to an area where these crazy proprietors gave us guns so we could fire at paper targets and hopefully hit them.

But on a pleasant night in New York’s Harlem, just a few blocks from where nattily-dressed beautiful people were sipping Prosecco at Red Rooster, my wife and I left our apartment, turned left, and began walking up our block toward Lenox Avenue. We got maybe 50 yards when we heard two sharp cracks just ahead of us.

In the first seconds after the cracks, I really thought they were firecrackers. My wife reacted differently. She lived in L.A. in the post-Rodney King era, which seems to have left her with an innate knowledge of gun sounds. “Holy shit!” she immediately barked as she folded into a crouch. By the time she got those words out, we saw people running toward us from the direction of the sounds.

In those moments when something is going down but you don’t know what, your brain tends to think the worst and go into survival mode. We heard two shots. We had no idea if that was the end of it. For all we knew, a full-on firefight was erupting and coming our way, like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. We turned and started back toward our apartment, though that instantly seemed like a flawed strategy since our front stoop is terribly exposed, and we’d have to stand there for several seconds getting keys into locks.

We moved to this neighborhood only a few months ago. We’d lived in Harlem for three years, but eight blocks from our current street. In New York, eight blocks can be like crossing a continent, taking you into a completely different culture and sense of place. Our old apartment was in what has become a genteel version of Harlem, where tourists from France wander innocently with maps, looking for someplace Dizzy Gillespie once practiced his trumpet. Our new apartment is in Harlem Harlem. This isn’t a bad thing or even a scary thing, just kind of a gritty thing. We think our street is great. But the neighbors who have lived on this street for 30 years are quick to point out that the residents on the next street over are really pretty awful.

As my wife and I scurried away from the gunshots, we passed some neighbors who had gathered together a couple of buildings up from ours. They have a tiny fenced-in courtyard in front of their building. They pulled us in as we passed. “Come here!” an older women said, and guided us into their sanctuary.

These neighbors, all black, had experienced New York’s shitty era, before Bloomberg and Giuliani, when much of New York, not just Harlem, was what you’d see in Superfly as the Curtis Mayfield score played. The neighbors sized up the situation the way a good general can read a battlefield. There, they said — that guy, walking quickly down our street with his shirt off, he must have been involved in the shooting. They could see it in his actions. They agreed the shooters must have been teenagers from that terrible next street over — hot-heads who got guns, probably from runners who picked them up in Virginia and carried them back on the Bolt Bus. They explained how that works.

They said the cops would swarm in a minute. Sure enough, the cops swarmed in a minute. Impressively.

We lingered in the courtyard as other people from the street walked past and stopped to talk. One man said he’d been up there on the corner when things went down. Two teenagers, he confirmed. Everyone was appalled that something like this happened again here. Harlem has changed. Superfly is an anachronism. We live on a nice street — gearing up for a block party. The woman in the courtyard is counting on making a big batch of barbecue chicken for it.

Over the next few days, the shooting turned into one of those things neighbors talk about, like a baseball-size hail storm or a nearby coffee shop opening.

We learned a lot, hanging out with our neighbors after a shooting. We bonded a little, I like to think. Later, they probably had some good laughs at our expense. But that’s OK. We were grateful. We would like to fit into our new neighborhood. Sharing a shooting might have helped.