It's my hometown, and a place I've always felt embarrassed of. My father would call our town "clunky", and we lived there, but never participated in it.
My house was on the corner of 69th & Marshall Road - a main artery into Philadelphia and a really busy street. The back of our house was Woodcliff Road and that was our neighborhood. There were about 50 tiny row homes on my street, and the police would come at least once a week. When that would happen, my whole family would run up to the bedroom facing the neighborhood, shut off the lights and watch from the window. Here are some things I remember:
1. The house closest to ours was a crack house for a few years
2. The pink structure next to our house that became an old man bar (but not a "cool one") and my parents fought to close it after the customers started peeing on our steps.
3. The H______ house, 3 doors up on the right, had 7 children and routine domestic violence, drugs and other things. The police were called weekly and the children were a mess.
4. The T______ house, 5 doors up on the right, had a lesbian mother and I was not allowed to play with Bobby and Denise because of it. They were our age.
5. The P_____ house, 6 doors up, had a firefighter son and they were all about sitting on their porch every night and getting wasted.
6. H____'s house, on the corner (previously the crack house) with another lesbian mom and her two daughters -- also our age. We were allowed to play with them, but it was still only sometimes.
7. The "Elivs" house, about 15 doors up, with a girl about Audrey's age in a dishelved life with a huge bust of Elvis and an alcoholic mom.
8. The P_____ house, at the very top of our street, home to a bunch of sisters. One of them was murdered in a nearby cememtary.
9. The O_____ house, a block away, with twin metal head brothers that were into satan worship. They had drinking parties in their basement in 8th grade and eventually vandalized a church, decapptitating a statue of Mary.
The boy in the T_____ house, was sentenced to jail for molesting the 2 year old he lived next to. He did some weird things to Audrey and I too, but nothing like that. Denise got pregnant in 9th grade. One of the Haggerty brothers, who always had a runny nose, sold my parents a bag of jelly beans for a school fundrasier for $7 and never broght them over. Eventually, he admitted, that he bought a shirt with the money. There were beat up cars around, one of them with a sticker that said "I like blondes, brunettes and redheads" (and "redheads had a big indellible X on it). We'd find drug paraphalia in our yard. We'd find homeless people sleeping on our porch.
This was where I grew up. In a crappy block, riddled with problems. In an area a few blocks away from "murder" points including the PathMark parking lot, Cobbs Creek and Fernwood cemetary. Audrey and I grew up protected from all of it. We had no interaction with our block and were not allowed.
Having said that, these are the people I didn't write about:
Nannie - The sweet old lady that lived in house #3 that would always give us candy. The cool lesbian couple that lived across the street and took pictures of me when I went to my prom. Al, the quiet gay guy that lived 2 doors up. The really nice couple that had the 2 year old that was molested. The people on the corner with about 5 fierce dogs in the basement, that called the cops and were the unofficial neighborhood watch. My best friend Chrisolua that lived on the next block. Jerrry, Joe Joe, Georgie and Peter Cooper -- the kids that we played with constantly (but all moved away). The Wigner family, a really nice family that lived on the next street that were our friends. The "Me Without You" boys family, who's mother was totally cool and my mom really connected with. All the people on my block that would hang out at night, sitting on their porches talking across the street to one another. In my memory, this side was totally overshadowed by the other.
I went to the elementary school up the block and then my parents struggled to send us to The Christian Academy in Brookhaven. It was a disaster in a different way.Finally, they brought us back to Upper Darby High School District, seeing that I was miserably rejected by every girl in my class. I was in 8th grade.
So now you get a sense of it. We were raised feeling separated from where we lived. By the time we got to school, we felt different. And this is sort of where my story begins.
I went through high school thinking of my clunky, white trash town -- feeling separated from it. My scope of Upper Darby didn't go far beyond 69th Street, and aside from clubs and activities, I had friends that were "like me" but didn't interact with the community as a whole. In 10th Grade, I met Chris and Janine and other kids from Drexel Hill (the better part of Upper Darby) and my friend circle, although large, involved little community hanging out.
I left school feeling to some degree superior to my neighborhood. I was raised with culture, a strong sense of morality and with a family that was nothing like our neighborhood. So, although I was in dozens of clubs and activities, my view of our community was white trash because of my house. I never went to parties and really didn't hang out with anyone, besides Chris, Janine and sometimes Jenn and Heather -- socially.
Here's what you come away with: My view of Upper Darby was 69th Street and I felt superior to it.
