Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,14

city has a hockey mask? Are there Babadooks and Mothmen in the city? Honey, the rent is too high for all that. True, there is the threat of mugging and an air-conditioning unit falling out of a window and crushing you and buses driving by and splashing your tutu. But that’s about it, at least as far as physical threats go. The danger in a city is systemic and endemic; it’s built into the walls and the street corners and written in invisible ink on the mortgages and in the local newspaper headlines; it powers the public transportation and funds the political campaigns. The danger in the city is all around you, but has clearly delineated borders. The suburbs, on the other hand, are places of literally endless physical peril for everyone everywhere. The worst of the worst are those super suburbs for people so rich they can’t stand the sight of other people, where you have so much land that you basically live in a house hidden in a national park. You might as well be Sigourney Weaver in Alien going into some of the places with a mile-long private drive. Like, you are forsaken out there. If you call the police, they let you know their anticipated arrival time in days. And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.

I actively distrust the suburbs. I especially distrust the sprawling ones, the ones built on top of old rock quarries, the ones where everything is alike in sameness and remoteness and perfection. I have trouble understanding the melting pot when by order of the neighborhood association every ingredient looks identical or you have to squint to see your neighbors. That said, the suburban house, the patch of land in a ticky-tacky Hooverville, is the pinnacle of the American dream, so who am I to judge it? If it’s good enough for Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, shouldn’t it be good enough for me?

The fact is, when it comes to living space and Little Shop, I’ve always preferred “Downtown” to “Somewhere That’s Green,” both musically and symbolically. I decided early on that you would never catch me out in some cul-de-sac with minimum light pollution. I’d rather take my chances on Skid Row with a person-eating plant than try to navigate the foreboding open space of a suburb. This is especially true if there are woods involved. It’s too quiet. It’s too dark. There are too many crevices and corners and crags and scritches and crackles and shrieks. If there’s a copse, there’s a corpse, I always say. (I am a delight at parties.) The woods, as I’m sure you’re aware, are where roughly 65 percent of all terrible things happen in horror movies. The other 35 percent happen in beautiful suburban houses where no one (except me, apparently) would ever imagine such a thing taking place. This rule isn’t even restricted to horror movies, actually. I love a good Dateline investigation or British mystery novel or Gone Girl, and all of them are basically infomercials about the inherent danger of living anywhere with a lawn. Dateline investigations are never in crack houses. They are always in split-level homes owned by a dentist who snapped. You never see Jane Pauley or whomever walking through a neighborhood like mine, pockmarked with abandoned buildings and soundtracked by sirens, asking neighbors if they ever expected a thing like this to happen here. It’s assumed that it will happen here. And something has taught us that when it does happen, we shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t happen to agree with that understanding of the differences between city life and suburban life. But I will definitely take it to heart. I’m not trying to spend years saving up all my coins and pouring all of my worth into a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom rancher in some neighborhood where there are stringent rules for what color your mailbox is just to be surprised by my own murder.

If you’re going to kill me, I want to expect it. That’s the real American dream.

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The fact is, white people did this to themselves. Red-lining and white flight are basically like when someone in a horror movie hears a noise in the basement and everybody (black) in the movie theater is yelling “Don’t go in there!” and they go in there anyway. The city, as a concept, is not objectively dangerous. (Unless you’re Batman’s