NYC Block B
Micheline Ntiru
I arrived in New York that July with the kind of excitement only a 17-year-old with a summer to waste could carry. I was ready to experience the New York I had seen in movies, try my first hot dog, and walk the iconic Fifth Avenue. I was ready to step into a living postcard and experience streets lined with boutiques and towering marble buildings. Up until that point, I had lived a somewhat sheltered life – my suburban Nairobi holidays mostly involved hanging out at one of the two malls, Yaya or Sarit, or swimming on Sundays at the Devon or Fairway hotels with friends. The only place we were allowed to walk to was to visit my closest cousins on Riara Road, go to the shops at Adam’s Arcade, or visit other friends within the Kilimani-Hurlingham-Lavington neighbourhoods. On a few occasions we broke the rules and took a matatu or bus and walked a few city blocks, like Koinange or Kimathi Streets. Mostly we stayed at home in the suburbs, playing Monopoly or watching movies. In New York, everyone walked: teens, kids, adults, cucus, people who were differently abled. Immediately, I fell in love with the beat of New York. People looked so stylish and so nonchalant, walked like they were running and spoke like they had no time to waste.
In the first days, my sister Monica and I stayed safely nestled in our new home on Roosevelt Island. UN employees, global nomads, and the occasional exiled bureaucrat strolled its narrow lanes, all of us riding the ten-cent red bus to the tram. The late Kofi Annan lived in the next building from us, and once, while waiting for the red bus, he nodded at my sister and said, “good morning, young girls.”
We also took the tram over the East River into Manhattan’s organised chaos, and, at first, we limited ourselves to these safe blocks, near the UN, where my parents worked. On those streets, mostly the east 40s and 50s, we discovered Barnes and Noble and marvelled that you could leaf through countless books without anyone bugging you to buy them. Even more impressive was that you could have coffee while reading books that you did not have to buy! We walked from Second Avenue to Third Avenue and memorised that the order after Third was Lex-Park-Madison-Fifth, before we got to the west side.
We later discovered that “The Village” was an edgy, colourful corner of the city like an artist’s canvas splattered with graffiti and bold, rebellious storefronts – where people had blue hair, spiked collars, and shoes made out of bottle caps, walking art pieces in their own right. Harlem was off-limits, of course – ‘full of drugs and gangsters,’ we were warned, like a forbidden fruit hanging just beyond reach.
But as the summer dragged on, the air grew thicker with humidity, and we got bored spending days watching Ricki Lake, Oprah, and Generations.
“We need money,” Monica said one morning, flipping through a paper she’d grabbed from a subway entrance. She had figured that if we had money, we could go clothes shopping, attend summer concerts, go to Broadway and even go out to clubs. We could take cabs from time to time, instead of the subway. Monica was a year older, but at this age, she took on the role of a much older sister, guiding me through the do’s and don’ts of America. Having completed one year of college in Texas, she knew some of the workings of America and served as my guide on how to navigate this new life. But New York, ah, New York was a new and shiny maze that we both got to experience together.
We circled a vague listing from The Village Voice, which we found in the garbage dump on our apartment floor. ‘Photography Assistants Wanted.’ No details – just a number, a name, Mr Stinger, and a location somewhere uptown.
We mapped the route using a folded-up subway map we used every day during our aimless city trawls. We would take the Q train, then transfer to the one uptown. It sounded straightforward enough. There were no smartphones back in the day. Just maps and lots of getting lost.
The train ride was long, sweaty, and unfamiliar. We sat together, staring at the subway posters that we would soon get accustomed to over years of NYC subway commuting –‘DeVry Technical College’ and ‘WIN THE LOTTERY or ‘1 800 WHITE TEETH’ promising dreams that were seemingly within the reach of the illustrious passengers on the hustle.
We got out at what we later realised was the wrong stop on 125th Street. We had to walk about 10 blocks uptown. Worn buildings with chipped paint, faded awnings like tired old curtains, and graffiti shouting in bold colours, loud and unapologetic. Boomboxes competed with each other. Tribe Called Quest and Mary J. Blige played from passing cars. Street vendors called out, selling everything from fried fish to secondhand sneakers, DVDs to body oils and potions. West African women from Mali and Senegal, we would later realise, called out to us for ‘Peek and drop. Handred dolla.’ We marched on. Later, Monica and I would giggle and exchange notes. “Pick and drop. It is that hairstyle where you start braiding your hair with extensions and just pick a small gift, braid like one, two, three, and then leave the rest to just flow. It is good for short hair,” Monica would later explain to me.
We turned left from the street into two long avenues with no polished brownstones or trees, just blocks of tall buildings with a basketball court among them.
Finally, we arrived: Number 208 Block B, printed on a peeling directory sticker next to a cluster of identical concrete towers. The brown building had teeny windows, but they were all closed, I observed. Later, I would understand that in the 28-degree Celsius summer, most NYC buildings ran on air conditioning, which required that all windows remain shut.
We entered. The air in the building was stale, like rust, fried oil, and the subway. The carpet in the hallway was threadbare and faded and the flickering lights overhead cast shadows that danced unsteadily.
We reasoned – logically – that Room 402 must be on the 4th floor. So we trudged through the dim lobby, pressed the sticky lift button, and rode up past the stuttering floor numbers and the soft whine of wires. Room 402 had a handwritten sign taped to the door. It said ‘Office’ in fading ink, the i, c and e barely visible.
We entered.
The receptionist looked up. She had Dolly Parton-like hair and bright red lipstick. She was thin and looked at us, sans expression.
“Just sit,” she said, nodding toward a bench near a crooked potted plant. The cactus in that pot was brown and spikey, long forgotten.
“We are here to see Mr Stinger”, my sister insisted.
“Say that again?” She stared at Monica, a small smile forming on her face. “You have an accent!”
I’d grown up hearing a panoply of accents: Ugandan, Rwandan, Kenyan, Indian, British, and French. Nairobi was a cosmopolitan city. My sister and I had mostly a British accent then, gained from years at an international school, where we were taught English by British teachers and picked up their accents and those of the mainly white students.
In the US, I was beginning to learn, anyone with a non-American accent had ‘an accent’.
“We just said that we are here to see Mr Stinger”, my sister repeated as we sat on the cream coloured leather sofa.
I saw a sign just in front of the door that read ‘Minorities welcome.’ Minorities. That is another word we had learned earlier that summer. We were minorities. Blacks were minorities in America. It did not compute. In Kenya, black was the default setting. The majority. Here, suddenly, we were a sociological checkbox. An exception.
A door creaked open to our left. A woman in fishnet stockings strutted passed the receptionist down the hallway, with the highest red heels I had ever seen. Then another. And another. Women with long blond hair, short skirts, and fishnet stockings. The perfume that each came with was thick and loud.
We tried not to stare, Monica and I. We were two suburban Nairobian girls – one who had worked at the university library in Texas and one who had never worked. But we knew that this was not the typical office setting that we had envisioned.
“I think… this is not photography work,” my sister whispered, voice trembling slightly. Then she started sneezing uncontrollably.
At this point, after the ladies had left, leaving their perfume with us, the door to the back office flung open.
We knew immediately that this was Mr Stinger.
He was short, with a belly bulging over a checkered shirt, buttoned halfway, revealing tufts of chest hair and a dazzling gold necklace. His necklaces are like those rappers on TV, I thought. His hair was greased backwards and was as shiny as a wet rock. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth.
“Beaudiful. Very beaudiful,” he said, with a lewd glare that made my skin crawl.
A beeper buzzed loudly on his belt. He checked it, muttered “be-right-back grrrrls,” and vanished into a back room, leaving us suspended in a tense silence. Monica sneezed again.
“He’ll be ready for you in 5 minutes,” the receptionist shouted, her voice flat but piercing,
We nodded and fake-smiled.
Monica whispered in urgent Swahili: “Twende.”
We stood.
“We are just going to the bathroom,” my sister told the receptionist, trying to sound casual, but her voice trembling slightly. She sneezed again.
The receptionist was filing her nails, her gaze vacant, her voice curt.
“Hurry, or you will lose your slot. Ladies is on the left.”
Instead of turning left, we found an exit sign leading to stairs on the right and flew down four flights, skipping two at a time, our hearts pounding.
Outside, we burst into the street. We ran past a homeless guy nodding off with a needle in his arm and past ‘Aminata’s braid shop’.
When we got to 125th Street, and leapt into the subway. We did not even see what train it was. “As long as it is going downtown, we will be fine”, Monica announced. In less than 10 stops, we were back in midtown. The ride back seemed so much shorter. We found a Dunkin Donuts on 68th Street, bought two donuts each with the weekly pocket money my parents had given us and started laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“Was that, umm, a pornography studio I asked.
Monica sneezed and giggled as she licked the glaze off her donut.
Had we really nearly accidentally walked into the porn industry?
That night, we ate matooke and binyebwa, which my mom bought from an “ethnic food shop” she had discovered in Queens. We had matooke every Friday. Throughout our lives, no matter where we lived, my mom has always maintained some routines, like matooke on Fridays.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Good, we just explored Manhattan.” I was quick to answer, without providing any detail. If we told her, she would just scold us and try to prevent us from going anywhere. My two little sisters filled in the gaps with stories about their teachers in middle school and their art projects. My dad told us we should go to the Midtown library at Bryant Park on 42nd Street. “Get yourself a library card. It is only 10 dollars.” We promised we would.
By the end of that summer, we got smarter. We found real jobs in the New York Times this time – clean temp jobs, also known as ‘Gal Fridays’, doing receptionist duty or typing simple documents at JP Morgan. Simon & Schuster. We donned suits every morning, took the Q train to our midtown desks with ID badges and coffee runs and bought cute outfits from Strawberry’s or the Macy’s sale. We were always in demand because of our typing speed – thanks to my mom’s early career as a secretary, we had learned to type more than 70 words a minute by the age of 14, and because of our ‘accents’, because, it turns out, the British accents are valued in the US.
Later that summer, we would learn, through a combination of TV, magazines and getting lost in the subway, that Block B was in the projects, where drug busts and random shootouts were rampant in the mid-90s. In those years, we generally navigated Manhattan below 99th Street with the exception of the then seedy, prostitute-ridden Times Square.
Still, every time I walk past a building that looks like Block B, a shiver crawls up my spine and I hear Mr Stinger’s voice: “Beaudiful. Vewy beaudiful.”
Micheline Ntiru is a writer and the host of a podcast dedicated to African narratives, We Three Queens of Africa, where colourful stories from the continent come to life. With a passion for storytelling, Micheline has just completed her memoirs that explore her life and work across four continents. She speaks nine languages and is at home in Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Abidjan, São Paulo and New York. When not immersed in writing or reading African literature, she actively supports founders of ambitious startups across Africa, fostering innovation and creativity on the continent.
*Image by Joël Edouard on Unsplash
