Up Jump the Boogie Down

In ’90s New York, an eager young volunteer from Montana is thrust into a world of flying bullets, crack addicts and giant rats—and loves every minute.

Illustrations by Box Brown

In 1931, Ogden Nash published this famous couplet in The New Yorker:

The Bronx? 

No Thonx

On August 24, 1993, I pulled off the Major Deegan Expressway, headed up Fordham Road and took a right onto Andrews Avenue. It was a lively block. A mélange of faces: Puerto Rican, Dominican, African-American, even a few older white folks wandering out of their never-give-it-up rent-controlled apartments to the half-stocked corner shop that pathetically passed for a grocery store. I dodged the legions of kids cooling off in an open fire hydrant as I made my way to 2277 Andrews Avenue. For the first time, this Billings, Montana, native touched down at what would be my home for the following year, a four-bedroom sixth-floor apartment in the Bronx.