The cars on the block were mostly old wrecks, but one day when I was leaving for work I saw a big shiny silver Bentley parked right in front of my building. I said to myself, that's not a good idea. When I came home that night, it was a stripped burned-out hulk up on cinder blocks.

It was a very happy street, families with children, music everywhere, fire hydrants gushing in the summer, everybody in the street all the time, cooking over charcoal grills on the sidewalk at midnight when it was too hot to cook inside, everybody sharing everything. Nothing like the blocks north of 110th. People who lived down here never crossed 110th Street, it gave them the creeps. But sometimes sad things happened. There was a man who lived on the top floor of my five-floor walkup building who must have weighed 500 pounds. Somehow he managed to come down the stairs every day and sit on the stoop, passing the day smoking cigarettes and talking to everyone. At the end of the day he'd hoist himself back up somehow, and probably drink himself to sleep. Well, one day when I came home from work, the stoop was covered with a congealed white substance; Pedro was scraping it up with a big scraper. It came out from the entrance and covered the foyer and the inside steps. Pedro said the man was smoking in bed and fell asleep, the bed caught fire and I guess he was either too heavy or too drunk to get out, and he burned up and all his fat melted and ran down the steps and out the front door.