2 Grand Delusion Read Free Page A

with the family character of the neighborhood..." Then I headed outside to knock on doors and fill my page with signatures.
    But the neighborhood was virtually empty. All the kids were off at school, day care, or other child detention centers, and most of the adults were off at work. The two women I came across at the corner of Elm and Beekman were steering stolen shopping carts filled with babies and packages, and they turned their faces away as I approached them. I heard a teenage couple screaming at each other through an open window.
    The West Side, usually so neighborly, felt uncomfortably hostile today. Eager for my first ally, I headed across the street to see my old friend Dennis O'Keefe. Dennis is a large, big-hearted man with a serious beer belly, which doesn't seem quite fair since he gave up beer a decade ago. He also gave up his other major vices—heroin, tobacco, and real estate work—and devoted himself to working with troubled kids, trying to save them from the addictions and other foolishnesses that had almost wrecked his own life.
    Five years ago he helped some Saratoga post-post-Generation Xers form a group they named Arcturus, after a star that was shining brightly in the sky on the night when they had their first meeting. By hook and by crook (and by a government grant or two), they scraped together enough cash to buy a decrepit foreclosed house at the corner of Elm and Beekman. They fixed it up, sort of, and now they had an African drumming group on Mondays, a "young women's consciousness-raising group" on Tuesdays, a theatre improv/folk music coffeehouse on Thursdays, and "hanging out night" on Fridays.
    Shades of the 60s.
    They also ran a skateboarding shop there, and the streets outside the building were often taken over by teenagers whizzing around recklessly. But despite their creating a serious local driving hazard, I had a soft spot in my heart for Arcturus. When I walked in that afternoon, Dennis and three green-haired boys were performing a kazoo rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" in the background. It sounded great. I felt spiritually at home, like I always did at Arcturus.
    After they finished playing, and the teenagers went outside to risk death on their skateboards, I showed Dennis my petition. His blue Irish eyes lit up when he heard the word "petition"—he's always ready to take on a new political battle—but when he actually sat down and read what it was about, he frowned. "I can't sign this," he declared, shooting me an accusing look.
    "Why not?"
    He tossed the petition at me. "What is this nimby gentrification horseshit, Jacob? You turning Republican on me?"
    Ouch! Dennis was verbalizing my deepest fears. By getting rid of the relatively low-rent apartments next door, I'd be robbing poor people of places to live. Was I betraying the socialist politics of my youth?
    But on the other hand, Andrea and I needed our sleep. "Look, you try living next door to a bunch of drug dealers, see how you like it."
    "If they're dealing drugs, then call the police—"
    "I did!"
    "—but that's no reason the house shouldn't be three apartments. We need affordable small apartments in this town."
    I was so pissed off at Dennis's holier-than-thou attitude, and my suspicion that he really might be holier than I, that I started shouting. "Hey, I've been inside those places. What Pop did there is criminal, he ought to be shot! There's old paint flaking off the walls that has got to be lead, there's asbestos crumbling from the ceiling, there's scalding hot, exposed water pipes—"
    "Jacob—"
    "And the apartments aren't just small, they're pathetic—one minuscule, claustrophobic room with a kitchenette you couldn't fit a bathtub in—"
    "Hey, I've got kids coming in here all the time, eighteen, nineteen years old, no money, whacked out parents, desperate for a place to stay. You wouldn't believe some of the stories I hear—"
    But I was in no mood for his