In East Harlem

The Upper East Side and all its securities come to a screeching halt on 96th St., the line of demarcation between all that is bleached and boutiqued to all things of color, between what is merely uptown and truly Uptown; the Rio Grande of Manhattan, separating Tex from Mex and Yorkville from El Barrio. People start looking over their shoulders more when crossing the hilly intersection of Lexington and 96th.

A perfect symbol of the porous frontier is Paco, a weasel-faced, longhaired Argentine who begs from car to car and person to person in a wheelchair. After a soft day's work, he heads north toward 97th and immediately folds up and pushes his chair in front of him; he need not worry about any uptown customers catching him at his ruse, because none of his rubes lives where he does. All the money?legit and illegit, for everyone else and Paco?is south of the border, down Anglo way. You can tell some stores get desperate for business when they call themselves "Upper Upper Carnegie Hill Dry Cleaners," as one storefront proclaims despite its location upriver.

I suppose I have changed since we met. I no longer sport a dashing eye patch; I now pass for normal with a Bio-Eye, a plastic-and-titanium artificial eye ("Multidirectional!" boasts the owner's manual) that has been fully operational since earlier this year. My beard is gone and my chin-length hair has been trimmed to a conservative length. I have lost weight (I take opium and yohimbe every day?nature's own organic speedball and diet aid?God bless the flower district). I have applied for and successfully received a New York City pistol permit, allowing me to own but not officially set hands on a .40-caliber Glock 23 outside of a federally approved pistol range (I know of only two that exist in city limits). A firearms license in this city is a little easier to obtain than authentic bone fragments from Saint John the Baptist, and only slightly cheaper. I take it as no small coincidence that I finally qualified the week after we arrived in El Barrio.

It does not hurt to pack a Pound of Wallop whenever walking in my neighborhood after dark. This is the land of the Boricuas, the terminus of the Puerto Rican diaspora, which displaced the Italians and Jews and permanently installed descendants of the fierce Taino warriors of the Caribbean. Others have called them human cockroaches for their invincibility and ubiquity; some have said, "Well, at least they're not Dominicans" (both statements overheard at whiter playgrounds near us); but I simply attempt to live peacefully with them. (This upon the suggestion of my friend Juan Johansen, who can afford to dispense with such advice, being half-Boricua, half-Swedish himself, and safely ensconced at Selis Manor, aka the Home for the Criminally Blind in Chelsea.)

Recently a wave of Mexican immigrants has moved in, and, honestly, the food has gotten better, to my taste. How many half-day-old windows of cuchifrito under UV lights can a neighborhood have? Mexicans, despite all the stigmata of being gangsters, are more polite, and, to my advantage, shorter than Boricuas. Being new, they have less of a sense of entitlement to the streets and, not having commonwealth status, have less to fall back on. I also risk many future bricks through my dirty windows when I say they work harder than anyone else as well, myself included.

But back to my change, inner and outer: my wife did not expect a gun-toting, furtive opiate-extracting cyclops when we first met, and neither did I. This is possibly what six eye surgeries and a vasectomy do to you. But I feel 100 times smarter at 32 than I did at 27, when alone at least. On the outside I still resemble Shaun Cassidy with the thousand-yard stare. I have seen too much for one eye, or perhaps have just read too much. Note the irony: I seduced my wife in South America, brought her back to the Big Lechón, and now I want to go back to Ecuador and she doesn't. A simple equation, and one I should've seen coming, but one less solvable than it is sad.

The week I canceled my health insurance (which paid for my eye surgeries and an almost free year's supply of oxycodone), my sources in Ecuador reported a land bargain: almost two acres for $250 a month over five years' time. I looked around our one-bedroom tenement apartment, populated by wife, daughter and self, and quickly started wiring the payments.

I am more than ready to jump ship and swim against the current of immigration. Ecuador's appeal to me is in its inferiority complex, a perversely pleasing contrast to the Divine Righteousness here in the U.S. Besides, population-wise, New York is Ecuador's fourth largest city; if I wait a little longer, I will have even more room on the equator to raise poppies, shoot garden rats and live off the reduced fat of the Third World, where one is born poor and dies poorer. It is extremely dull to have no cash in Manhattan: the libraries all close too early.

I will remain a responsible parent and take my three-year-old with me, but my wife?who originally suggested buying Andean real estate?won't budge, and I can't blame her. To her, Ecuador is the same as New York City is for me: a hometown with all the nasty implications and static horrors, dead ends and streets so repetitive they are dull even in dreams.

So therein lies the rub. Until I save enough to build a house, I have to sit here and hate my neighbors, myself and the city of my birth. They are an easy bunch to hate, too: they litter and smoke and piss outside my door (and will no doubt continue with passion if they ever read this), fire shots at each other at 2 a.m. on weekends (weeknights are reserved for catcalls and revving dirtbike engines) and tap into the phone box in the airshaft to steal my line. (We had just moved in, paid an extra $80 for jack installation and discovered voices, like a party line, whenever we picked up the phone. Bell Atlantic came twice but failed to rid us of the aural cockroaches. We now have to dial 22 "secret" digits for 911.)

How long, Starbucks, how long? A Yankee couple just moved into the first floor, signaling the possible gentrification of East Harlem in the year to come. He plays acoustic guitar and she yodels after supper, and they proudly crank their loud stereo with the musical equivalent of patchouli. Last week they played a very bad U2 song from 1985. Delighted to be distracted from my bile for Puerto Ricans, I shouted down into the dark: "Ireland for the English!" The volume level remained. I prefer to hear my upstairs neighbor, who is like a howler monkey, have sex every evening, to Bono.

Recently, walking past a homeless sidewalk sale, meditating on the impossibility of January's rent, I saw the best emblem of where I live: a plastic model kit of a guillotine, for one dollar. Ages 8 & up, the box stated; historically accurate; victim not included.