Its night time, the street lights, some flickering, illuminate the 200 block of Main St, the heart of the City of Poughkeepsie. The block, made up of apartment buildings of various sizes could be any block of the any inner city USA. The constant sounds of cars, people and police sirens pollute the ears; young men stand on corners serving fiens their medicine an all too familiar aspect of inner city life. Standing on the block, you see the product of urban decay, garbage littered, empty crack bags, stray cats unhealthy and skinny. Rap music fills your ears from an apartment window a couple floors up, a man is hanging his head out the window moving to the music scanning the block. Bums search the garbage cans on the side of the building, taking out bottles to return, police walking looking for their next victim, constantly watching the activity of the street. The air is warm; smell of fried food from Kennedy Fried Chicken stimulates an appetite. A group of people congregate in front of the take out restaurant, various individuals, most of them hustlers, trying to make their next meal, a constant struggle of ghetto life. In front, glorified street entrepreneurs, already successful in the drug game, show off there accomplishments in their luxury cars with over sized rims, DVD systems and constant marijuana smoke leaking out of the cracked window. A few local kids are walking out of the restaurant with food, looking at the display of affluence, and falsely realize how much crime really pays. Inside Kennedy's, Arab music plays in a small radio, representing the racial ethnicity of the owners, and post 9/11 stereotypical attitudes victimize the owners by locals, who those selves are victims of discrimination. You order your chicken and absorb the atmosphere; you see young women walk by, obvious slaves of addiction, and show off their natural assets in hopes to cop their next fix, their faces hardened by their lifestyle.
