Scene from a neighborhood

Movie scene: A car pulls to the curb on a downtown street. Four men wait inside the vehicle. They're white. All of them have slicked-back hair, pinkie rings, shiny suits and shirts with long collars that almost cover the knots in their ties.

A man walks down the street, not seeing the guys in the car.

(Because the director of the movie is artistic and wears a scarf even when it's warm out, the soundtrack is “Se Vuol Ballare” from “The Marriage of Figaro.”)

Two of the men get out of the car. They take pistols from under their jackets and shoot the guy on the sidewalk, who dies in slow motion, arms flapping like a distressed pelican.

The men get back in the car, which roars off.

(Cars never “drive” off in these situations; they “roar.” You can't kill anyone if you're driving an electric car.)

When the “film” comes out, some movie critic who hasn't been in a fistfight his whole life will say the death scene was “eerily poetic.”

Words are important. The dead guy in the street has been “hit.” He's been “clipped.” He's been “whacked.” 'Clipped” is eerily poetic. “Dead” is not.

Fifteen blocks from my house, a week ago. Four kids in a car. None of them white. No one is wearing a suit. None of them is older than 21. Another kid, also not white, walks down the sidewalk. Two of the kids in the car get out with pistols in their hands. There's no soundtrack, and if anything is playing on the car's sound system, it's got way more bass than “Se Vuol Ballare.”

The kid doesn't fall in slow motion. He goes down so fast that, if you were on the other side of the street when he got shot, and you started to run, you couldn't get to him before the back of his head bounced off the concrete. The two guys get back in the car, which roars off.

(Decades, clothing styles and music styles all change, but cars “roar off.” Likewise, the calm of a neighborhood is always “shattered by gunfire.” You can believe me. I was a reporter for nearly 40 years.)

The kid on the sidewalk was on his way to an “alternative high school” called the “Resiliency Preparatory Academy,” a high school for kids who aren't doing well in a “traditional learning environment.”

The street calls it “the bad boy school,” and the street is far less likely to lie to you than the people who name schools.

The kid's not gonna get a movie, and if he does, it's not gonna win an Oscar.

The kid died in front of a church that was once attended by wealthy Protestants with thin faces and milky skin. When the thin-faced, rich, white Protestants went extinct, the old church became a restaurant that closed because its menu had more ambition than the neighborhood. It's just a big red-brick, empty building now.

The other kids from the school have made a shrine with the kind of tall votive candles you can buy in the Spanish corner stores and some mylar balloons, and they mill around there sometimes with their hoodies and backpacks.

It's not a movie, not at all. It won't become a “cinema classic.” It's a grimy death and some tall candles and balloons that are getting just a little slack.

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