KENSINGTON BLUES

Tag: Audio Recording

August 8, 2012

Tanya

Tanya, 2010.

Tanya sits on the steps of the El Train at Kensington and Somerset.

Audio Transcription

Tanya: Uh, I escorted since I was 18 years old with a, uh, like an agency. Um, I only been out here for about a month… on the streets. Um, but, all together, I’m 25 now. So, 18 to 25, you know, I been doing this for, like, um… a couple, a lot of years.

$181.00 for food stamps, you know? It’s like… you know. So, once all that’s gone, you know, I gotta come out here and make as much money as I can, and I don’t like doing this, like, you know, this, like, I don’t like being on the street if I’m not on Xanies, you know, because, if, like, I’m… I’m more, like, not that, that, that, that afraid, if you know what I mean… to do it. You know. But… I am afraid. You know, you never know what can happen.

I do a bag of dope before I leave my house. If I have money at that point, um, I’ll do like, one or two bags of dope. I get ready, I get a shower, I come out, you know, catch a date, and you know, after I catch a date, well, I go get my drugs and then I catch another date, and then another date, you know. So… It’s kind of, it’s kinda rough out here. You gotta watch the cops 24 hours a day, you know what I mean? You gotta watch what car you get into. You know, I just, you know, I don’t like being out here. I hate being out here, you know. When I got out of Detox, I went into Detox in February, I was clean for 5 months. Those 5 months that I was clean, I couldn’t get a job at all. Like, I went so many places, like so many places, like Kmart, Pathmark, you know what I mean. Like, anything you can think of, I went to it. I even went to the mall to see if they had jobs, none of them were hiring.

11 Comments
August 3, 2012

Kevin and Tom

Kevin and Tom, 2010.

Audio Transcription:

Kevin (pictured left): I’m uh, an inner-city kid, my name’s Kevin. I, uh, I actually grew up in this neighborhood that I’m back down in now which is Kensington. I moved up to the North East and now I’m back running the streets down in Kensington. Addicted to uh heroin now but it started out as uh, uh a Percocet addiction. Percocet turned into Oxycontin, Oxycontin eventually turned into heroin, which turned into snorting uh powder cocaine. And then you find out when you shoot the powder cocaine that it’s a much bigger and better high. So now we’re shooting coke instead of snorting it and my life is a disaster. A living hell. Wake up in the morning, you don’t want to live no more, you just wish that when you go to sleep at night, its kinda crazy but you ask God not to wake you up in the morning. So… Imagine living like that. It’s kinda crazy. I’m uh, I’m 25 years old. 25 years old. Went to a private high school, top athlete in the city, first team all Catholic, soccer, baseball, uh, scholarships to Temple, Rhode Island, Arizona State, University Connecticut for baseball. I was in baseball showcases. That chopper is flying across from us, overtop of us, we call that the ghetto bird.  The ghetto bird is looking, uh surveillancing maybe for drugs, drug corners, drug blocks, watching people buying drugs, they’ll walkie-talkie to the police letting them know where the activity is going on and then they’ll run and sting the block. Umm… That’s uh, that’s how they do it. Umm… I was caught down here in a sting the other night. I wind up walking. Let me tell you a story about how crooked these cops are. I get caught in a sting. The sting is they uh, they go and they get buyers and they get the sellers. So here they had four buyers, I was one of the buyers but when I bought my drugs, I stuck my drugs in my ass, right so they didn’t find it. So I wasn’t positive for heroin. They take you to C and Allegheny, which is a Rite Aide, they put you in the paring lot, right, and they identify everyone that was positive for heroin which are the buyers and then they get the drug dealers who had the drugs and then they match the bags of heroin, there is a stamp on the bag, there are different names on the bags like Viagra, High Power you know different bags, so that’s how they match up and know that you bought the drugs off of them drug dealers. Anyhow, they didn’t find the drugs off me so when the cop let me outta the back of the cop car, took me outta handcuffs, there’s Suboxone, Suboxone are these orange pills, its like Methodone, they uh, they help you get off of drugs. So the cops had seized some Suboxone off another kid, but he had also had Heroin on him so the Suboxone’s on the back of the cop car. This cop took me outta the back of his cop car, told me to take the Suboxone, off the back of his car and told me to beat it dude, the cop gave me the Suboxone, it was crazy.

3 Comments
July 26, 2012

Wilfredo

Wilfredo, Front Street, 2010.

Audio Transcription:

Wilfredo: I’ve been using since I was twelve, I’m 32. It’s rough. Black guys controls almost all the corners. They don’t like Puerto Rican guys. We fight almost, almost all the time.  I like to always like to take the trash out. I don’t like to ask for money. I don’t steal from nobody I just like, even that I’m sick I like to try to do something so I can win my money, that’s it. And I think that way you don’t have to be looking behind your shoulder every time that you get out from the house.

Once you touch your vain, you love it. You love it so much that in the morning if you are married, your woman want to have, make love and you are sick, you’ll say, ‘No. I gotta get my shit first, then I make you love.’ And that’s crazy because we, we are the man. The most, the most that we love is the woman. It’s sex. It’s love. But once you are in this, the love and the woman became second and third because this became first. This is like you are married to this beautiful woman that she got her legs tied to around you, it’s like a snake and she don’t let you go. And you can be clean for one, two, three years and just one day just fall and take you like seven or eight months to get you up again. And I got this hypothesis, that when you are wake up you are an addict, but when you are sleep you not an addict because once you open your eyes, your mind tell you, ‘I need a bag of dope’. And he starts sending you and your whole mind starts and starts sending you these symptoms that they recall a monkey on your back that, that means you are feeling this, all this pain in your back and you got your chills, you got your diarrhea, you got everything, all this vomiting, all this horrible pains and horrible symptoms and once you put that tiny um units with that shit, everything is gone. Every, every, every symptom of the sickness is gone. You are putting something in your body that is not fun anymore and is only, you gotta need it, you need it to eat, to sleep, to do everything because if you don’t have it, you cannot do it. You don’t function. To everything, to make love, to eat, to go out, to, to everything you gotta have it on your system. If you don’t have it, you are sick. That’s being a slave.

Wilfredo, shooting up in an abandoned lot on North American St, 2010.

I came here to take care of my father and I was doing okay in the methadone program. But I, I like fall in love with this Italian girl and I used to um, smoke crack behind her back and one time she told me ‘If you wanna get high don’t do it behind my back, you just tell me and we do it together.’ I crossed that line and, and then we became not a, not um a couple. We became club friends with privileges that we had sex when we was high. That was it. We used to spend three thousand dollars in two nights smoking all day and all night in the kitchen, shooting dope, shooting powder, smoking crack. Three days, three thousand dollars. It’s incredible. It’s incredible.

I started using cocaine, when I was twelve, snorting. And used to spend a lot of money, uh the cocaine is something that once you start, if you got one thousand dollars, they all gone. But, if you got something that stop that craving, that um, that, that get, that, that your body is asking for more and more and more like the dope, the heroin cut that and just make you calm down and make you don’t want no more coke. So I did it and I start snorting. Then I was snorting twelve, thirteen bags in a day and one guy told me, ‘You know what? You are spending a lot of money because you are snorting. If you shoot it, you only need twenty dollars and less than one hundred and ten. You wanna try it?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’m gonna save more money.’ Once I give him my arm and he did it the first time, I see how it was the process and then I started doing it myself and that was it. I was married to the devil, the devil himself.

3 Comments
July 19, 2012

Ashley

Ashley, 2009.

1 Comment
June 15, 2012

Maria’s Block

Maria with her family and neighbors at Kensington and Somerset, 2009.


Audio Transcription:

Maria (Looking at a book of my photos): Oh my God.

Daughter: Pregnant lady.

Robert: That’s the pregnant girl?

Maria: That’s not her, that’s not her.

Robert: All these ho’s be out here.

Maria: That’s another one. Oh my God look at her arm, Jesus Christ. Oh my God, Jesus. You know that I don’t need no cable in my house. I see everything live, live.

Robert: I pray and pray and pray for the people like this. But I can’t do nothing but put them in God’s name.

Maria: I have a daughter, I’m the only one with a daughter in the building, I’m 2811 and nobody cares. People sell me, up and down, up and down, takin drugs, all over the freakin building, and I’m the only one that don’t take drugs thanks to the Lord, knock on wood, okay.  I’ve been I’m been honest, very honest.  I believe in the I believe in the Lord.  Nobody does but I do.  Okay.  So far I’ve been here almost 8 years and I see a lot of bad stuff going around and I don’t, they say when you go between it, you gonna do it too.  That’s a lie, but I’m, my daughter’s right now, she’s 11 years old and I’m tired of her seeing this.  She got two bikes she cannot enjoy.  She got, she don’t got nobody but me and her father.  She don’t got no friends at all.  So right now I’m about to move.  Hopefully God-willing by next week we out of here.

Robert: Damn, the only people we know out here is, is junkies.  Those are the only people we know out here is junk they all come up to us, you got this, you got a cup of water, can I get this, can I get that, can I get.  And uh we help them.  And we help them.  We feed them, we give them clothing if they need clothing.  If they want a cigarette if we have it we’ll give it to them you know but it, it’s it’s crazy out here.

Jeffrey: And your sittin here.

Robert: Yea, we sit here all day everyday.

Maria: Everyday we sit out here. I’ll be out here at 7 o’clock in the morning.

Robert: Yeah this is better than HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, everything combined.  You don’t need no cable, you don’t have to watch TV.  You just gotta sit out here.  You see drama, you see soap opera, you see violence, crime.

Maria: You even see sex. Somethings that I’ve never seen before and I don’t bring my daughter out everyday outside.  When I come outside, I say ‘Mommy come outside, stay a little while with me.’ But that’s about it.  When I when I go in, right in, she go in. She don’t go in with nobody, she don’t like to be with strangers at all and a lot of people know, around here, they know that.

Robert: Right here, right there we seen this one guy stand right there and defecate.  Right on the steps. He just stand right there and just defecate right there and we’re like, ohhh man.  You know right in broad daylight I mean it’s like, and everybody’s walkin around nobody says nothin.  That’s crazy.  It, it’s, it’s crazy out here. I mean they sell drugs around, they sell drugs everywhere in Philly but this is like the worst spot in Philadelphia so far. They sell everything from pills to your mother.  I mean, for real, they, they’ll sell your mother.

2 Comments