San Gennaro (and why my people have nothing left)
Howdy motherfuckers!
Fall. This is the season that the theoretical leaves change color, NFL football begins and the kids (and young adults who have been left back repeatedly) go back to school. Some people call it "autumn", but they probably also eat brunch, drink pomegranate juice and suck copious amounts of proverbial dick.
I’m sorry, there is so much to be irate about I wandered down Tangent Road before I even got to the corner of Point Street.
Fall is also the season when the city of New York allows a bunch of Italian people to take over Mulberry street for the feast of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. Personally, having been in Naples for less than 2 hours before a group of youthful Italian thugs tried, unsuccessfully, to separate me from my Euros, I would say that San Gennaro could try a little harder to save the urchins who reside in his/her streets.
Naples did have an entirely different group of youth urchins who played soccer with me and did not attempt to separate me from my North Face backpack, even though at times it was out of my sight. They also had one of the more crazed open air markets I’ve ever seen. But that’s Italy, and this is Naz… I mean New York City.
Before Jewliani (i write his name like this to express disdain) killed all the homeless people, declared war on the mob and anyone who had any trace of ethnicity was forced to question their place in the city, San Gennaro and a host of other street fairs were important cultural events in a city that celebrated diversity. Y’all remember diversity, right?
New York used to be home to the type of diversity that one could not buy at Starbucks, Rite-Aid, Subway or a host of other chain stores, whose development was held in check by rules which Jewliani waved, perhaps in an attempt to drive "mom and pop" stores into oblivion so that corporate cats could cake up crazy (alliterations for all you illiterate children out there), or maybe just because he really likes the sterile nature of these places, its anyones guess.
Basically, in between ruining the city and assassinating minorities, Jewlie also decided that people should no longer be able to drink alcoholic beverages at these street fairs. (yet, somehow the drinking at the 2000 P.R. Day parade went on unchecked, even though there were no vendors even licensed to sell the alcoholic fruit of Our Lord. This was probably some strategic plan to crack down on "wild youth gangs" not unlike the whole big lie that was the Central Park Jogger case, which happened so long ago it may as well have been a dream. Who’s old? We’re old!
I would imagine that it is only a matter of time (there has been a notable change of attitude at San Gennaro in the last 8 years, and anyone who has been to the P.R. Day Parade post-2000 knows it is not the orgy of hot Puerto Rican mamis, Heineken and haze it once was. I haven’t seen a phat ass shaking in a thong hanging out the window of a whip bumping Big Pun in way too long) until the vendors selling their wares and the sausage and peppers guy are replaced by booths where you can donate to the GOP, sign up for the army, or waive your right to privacy.
Yeah, so catch me at San Gennaro, holding on to what is, remembering what was, and dreading what will be.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
I am pumped for SG. So many hot trashy Italian babes from Staten Island. I’ll see you there (even though I am a mut of 8 European countries, not one of them being Italy).