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Discount Furniture
Tales from my bed
I remember when my wife and I were new to living in New York City and were looking to buy a couch. Everything was so expensive.
Searching the Internet one day, I found a discount furniture store in Brooklyn with some amazing prices. Bingo. This would be where we would set out to make our purchase. We planned a trip there for the coming Saturday.
When we stepped off the train that Saturday afternoon and walked through the neighborhood of Brownsville, consistently named the murder capital of New York City (and where Mike Tyson grew up), we had the feeling that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Gangbangers hung out on stoops, police sirens blared in the distance, two cops stood on a nearby street corner outside of their cruiser, pedestrians jaywalked hurriedly, ubiquitous poverty, and the smell of “something really bad is going to go down” hung in the air.
I had never been so scared in my life. And, just our luck, the furniture store was a half-mile walk from the train station.
As we strolled through the hood, I mumbled to my wife, who was whiter than a bar of Dove soap, to play it cool. “Let’s just start talking to each other like we don’t have a care in the world. Try not to stick out,” I said.
