City Kid Read online

  But what really tripped me out was how she pronounced Pitkin Avenue. Everybody I knew in the projects said “Pick-in” as if the “T” was silent and the street was a metaphor for selecting items, which felt apt, since it was Brownsville’s main shopping strip. The lady said “Pit-kin,” with a heavy emphasis on the “T” and “kin,” which, technically speaking, was the correct way to say it, yet it felt foreign, and, coming from her middle-aged self, sounded old-fashioned.

  It was my first inkling that my Brownsville, a place of public housing, of bodegas and brown-skinned peoples, had housed others. Until then we—blacks and Ricans—seemed to exist in our own world, in areas that were a bus ride, a long subway trek, or a goodly car ride away from the Jews and Italians who shared Brooklyn with us. I’d already figured out that my home city was a place of enclaves marked by invisible lines of ethnic demarcation, and that wrong turns carried risks.

  But what the woman hipped me to was that this geography wasn’t stable. In fact, not only was it mutable, but it was changing all around me. In my Brooklyn circa the 1970s there were the predominantly black and Latin ’hoods of Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant; the Italian and Jewish areas of Flatlands, Canarsie, and Flatbush; and the rapidly growing Caribbean population of East Flatbush. Downtown Brooklyn was the land of movie theaters, the huge Abraham & Strauss department store, and Saturday afternoon Chinese food with Ma and my sister. Throughout my adolescence and teen years, blacks and Ricans and the white ethnic areas were in transition, as wealthier whites fled the borough in reaction to us angry brown hordes. Busing was definitely one of the engines of change, but not always the yellow kind.

  It took two city buses to get from Brownsville to Meyer Levin, and later Samuel J. Tilden High School. My magic carpet was my precious school bus pass, a wallet-sized card that granted free admittance to subways and buses. Public transportation meant I didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of exiting a school bus, but everyone knew where we were from anyway. After all, we came on the same city buses, knew each other, and, most noticeably, were usually all shoved into the same classes. It was possible at Meyer Levin to travel from darker Brownsville to predominantly white ethnic East Flatbush and yet have only fleeting classroom contact with your white schoolmates.

  When I entered junior high in 1969, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatlands were overwhelmingly peopled with white Italians and Jews. By the time I graduated from high school in 1975, all that was ancient history. In fact, I believe, my senior class at Tilden was the last predominantly white one in the school’s history.

  My personal journey was a little different from that of a lot of my Brownsville peers. Back in elementary school I’d been a star, partly because I was painfully well behaved, was as well spoken as my role model, Sir Sidney Poitier, and because I could read my ass off, which was greatly valued by teachers and administrators. Unfortunately, my reading ability overshadowed my many weaknesses—I had a speech impediment (despite therapy I still mumble), and couldn’t do math to save my life. I think reading was so easy and so much fun that I didn’t apply myself to math with any seriousness.

  When I got to Meyer Levin my reading scores from elementary school landed me in class 7-14, which was an elite group. And, within a few weeks, I knew I was in over my head. A crucial part of my failure was that in the fall of 1969 there was a long, bitter teachers’ strike over community control of local school boards.

  It’s little remembered now, yet it was a seminal moment in New York’s racial history. Ground zero for the strike was about ten blocks away from the Tilden projects in an area known as Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

  “Decentralization” was an educational buzzword of the period, with the idea that local school boards, reflecting the will of the community surrounding the school, would be able to fire teachers and principals without having to go through the traditional review process. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board had aggressively exercised its powers, and the United Federation of Teachers head, Albert Shanker, a combative man who never bit his tongue, saw this as an attack on the seniority system he’d fought hard to set up.

  Quickly the battle between the black school board and the white, largely Jewish teachers’ leadership became a flash point for the city’s black and white tensions. My mother experienced the conflict firsthand. As a young teacher she refused to make black and Latino students recite the Pledge of Allegiance. A white assistant principal tried to get her suspended, and a garbage can was tossed through the windshield of his car by a local activist. “Leave Arizona George alone” was the message. And he did. It’s just one example of the black versus white turf wars that infected the school system. The strike ended, but the antagonism between the black community and the UFT (and white New York) continued to fester.

  When school resumed in October my class moved at an accelerated speed to make up time. Maybe if I hadn’t missed those introductory weeks I might have been able to keep up. But as we moved through algebra and Spanish, I found myself spending increasing amounts of time staring out of the window with the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine” playing on my internal radio.

  It didn’t help my growing insecurity that my classmates were overwhelmingly white, Jewish, and seemingly hugely better prepared for the leap to junior high educationally and socially. Nor was I comforted by the presence of our homeroom teacher, a taciturn man who had a perpetual smirk on his face and Moe Howard hair, who didn’t seem to like me very much, or as much as I was used to. As the “black boy who could read,” I had gotten lots of attention back at P.S. 189. It wasn’t until Meyer Levin that I realized how much that support had meant to me.

  I had many memorable interactions that sad year in seventh grade. Of course, there was Bruce Gelman and our Marv Albert- Knicks broadcaster competition. There was Chucky, a tall, curly-headed classmate who called me “shvarts” to my face or shouted “Hey shvarts!” at me in the hallways. When I asked what it meant, Chucky would say “brother” or “black person.” None of my fellow Jewish classmates thought it worthwhile to inform me it could also be used to mean “nigger.” So wherever you are, Chucky, I send out a big “fuck you!”

  Then there was Brian, a laid-back, passive kid who, along with me, had failed at all the more popular instruments. After failing at trumpet, violin, and flute, Brian and I wound up as the band’s baritone section (the baritone horn looks like a tuba, sounds like trombone, and has the presence of neither) and furiously rehearsed our four-bar solo at the Meyer Levin semester-end concert.

  My schoolwork also wasn’t helped one bit by my full-on discovery of masturbation. I must have glazed all my underwear and pajama pants with semen during those first fanatic months of full-on self-pleasure. Every week Jet magazine had some big-hipped sista in a swimsuit in its photo section (“Brenda is a student, aspiring airline stewardess and enjoys go-go dancing. This Macon, Georgia, beauty is 34-28-38”). Then there was Players magazine (“for me who is”), the first true black men’s magazine. The photo reproductions could be poor, and the girls a very mixed bag, but hey, I wasn’t really that picky. My mother endured washing my stained clothes with nary a comment to me. It must be an unspoken rule of motherhood never to mention masturbation to their sons.

  Suddenly feeling inferior and helplessly horny, I was dropped down to class 8-8 for the eighth grade, a mediocre status that more truly reflected my place in Meyer Levin’s educational universe. Socially I was much more comfortable, of course—more black males, more brothers and sisters from the Ville, though I felt embarrassed when I encountered my former 7-14 classmates in the hallways or cafeteria. It turned out that that feeling of inferiority was good for me. Not being “special” anymore made me bear down on the books. I could still read at a higher level than my classmates, but now, with a real sense of purpose, I applied myself much more to math. No whiz, but at least now I competed.

  So for my last year at Meyer Levin I was promoted to 9-12, one of the top classes in my grade. My yo-yo junior high career est
ablished a lifelong pattern. I tend to stumble and sometimes outright fail my first time doing most things. I’m a natural at almost nothing. Eventually I get my bearings, find my legs, and can thrive where I’d once failed. Junior high was my first sign that I was not a sprinter but a long-distance man.

  To be poor is to never quite warm up in the winter and never be truly cool in the summer. It is to use the stove for heat, and to work your wrist to soreness trying to create a breeze with a paper fan. It’s wanting to stick your head inside the open oven like a freshly basted turkey, and to lay your head against the spinning wheel of your metal fan in search of relief from the humidity.

  When you’re poor you are always subject to the extremes of weather, ’cause your apartment is never really heated properly. You spend long winters with a slight chill in your bones that only hours in school can thaw out. When you’re poor in summer you sit outside, find some shade, and luxuriate in any stray breeze that comes briefly, sweetly, your way. It is socks and sweaters to bed. It is sweat as second skin. It is figuring out that weather is a tool of an amused god used to illustrate just how brittle the walls of your apartment are and how little comfort your place of shelter really affords.

  When we lived in the projects I remember how vulnerable my family was to the fluctuations of nature, and how flimsy was our grasp on security. My mother held my sister and me just above the poverty line for years—working poor but not homeless—before we actually started creeping up toward the middle class. But we never did live anywhere with serious central heating. So winter mornings—when the wind whips and my clothes seem to disappear in the face of arctic blasts—I always get pulled back to the days when I stood in front of the kitchen oven with outstretched hands, briefly warm when I was dying to be toasty.

  Hot summer days remind me of roaches. Being poor in Brooklyn also meant having unwelcome little brown visitors. We never had rats. I saw a mouse now and then. But in a New York City housing project in the sixties and seventies roaches were to our life as blue sky was to someone in Montana. Live in a sixteen-story building packed with poor people, and maintained by a crumbling city’s bureaucracy, and you’ll have roaches, despite your mother’s best efforts. To paraphrase a football cliché: You couldn’t stop the roaches; you could only hope to contain them.

  For years I used to worry that I’d be at school and a little brown roach would crawl out of a book, a bag, or even my shirt. No matter how you dressed or how poised you sounded, a roach’s appearance just howled poverty like a wolf does at the moon. In the days before we finally moved out of the Tilden projects my mother was carefully looking through our clothes and belongings for roach eggs, determined to leave the projects behind and not bring any souvenirs with us.

  Ma was, not surprisingly, considered uppity by a lot of our neighbors in the projects. She didn’t sit outside on the benches and gossip. She didn’t drink beer, play cards, and watch the “stories” (soap operas) with them. She wanted to move out of the projects. Who did she think she was? That’s not to say my mother didn’t have friends in 315 Livonia, but once she began attending night school in pursuit of her teaching degree, she poured all her heart into it. And that dream wasn’t just to teach, it was to escape the vertical ghetto of the Tilden projects.

  During our years there all the more ambitious and able residents of Tilden began moving out, relocating either to Queens, Long Island, or even back down South. When word got around that we were trying to move there was definitely lots of “playa hating.” It was as if Ma’s ambition somehow made others look bad. Even close friends and relatives doubted her. I’d overhear them on the phone questioning her, and Ma answering, “No, it’ll be all right,” “Yes, I can handle it,” and “No, I can afford it.” My sister, who as an adolescent grew more connected to the streets of Brownsville while I was withdrawing, was actually reluctant to leave the ’hood.

  Ma was too stubborn to listen to the doubters. So one morning when I was fifteen, I left the Tilden projects for school in East Flatbush and never came back. I took my usual route, one bus up Rockaway Boulevard and another out to East Flatbush, and then onto another bus or take the short walk to school.

  But after classes I didn’t head back to Brownsville, but went in the opposite direction, getting on a bus filled with more white kids than black. We headed in the opposite direction, going toward Mill Basin, a white enclave that housed South Shore, the biggest and newest high school in Brooklyn. In fact, I changed buses at Flatlands Avenue right across from South Shore, which gave me some trepidation, since they’d quickly emerged as Tilden High’s fiercest athletic rival. Hoping the “T” stitched onto the back of my jean jacket wouldn’t cause me any trouble, I got on the bus heading east in Flatlands. It took me through Canarsie and toward an unimpressive piece of real estate called Spring Creek.

  My new bus ride on Flatlands actually ran parallel to my old journey toward Brownsville, but several important miles farther south. There were other black faces on this bus, but mostly my ride mates were Jewish and Italian. I felt very self-conscious, and there were definitely some hostile eyes on me. I’d traveled on the Flatlands bus before, yet always as a tourist, an outsider. Now this was my ride home, and I felt uncertain about claiming it.

  Fights between white and black teens were regular occurrences in the contested streets of Flatlands, Mill Basin, and Canarsie. Kids from the rival schools, Tilden, South Shore, Canarsie, and Jefferson, battled at basketball and football games. I recall going to a football game during which the mostly black and Puerto Rican cheerleaders of Jeff bum-rushed the field while the mostly white Canarsie girls were still doing their routine, pushing them off the grass and onto the sidelines. Just as those tough Jefferson girls made it clear they were gonna take over the field to do their thing, blacks from the South and the Caribbean were steadily encroaching on white areas. My presence on this bus was just one more example.

  While that racial turmoil concerned me, I was still overjoyed to be out of the Tilden projects. No more were we mice in the maze of a sixteen-story building. Now we were residents of a three-bedroom apartment in a two-story building we shared with three other families. These “garden apartments” filled one block of the Fairfield Towers. The other buildings were well-maintained apartment buildings with balconies. There were other apartment complexes in the area, as well as some blocks of two-family houses. A block away from our new home was a strip mall, and next to it an enclosed mall anchored by an supermarket.

  In reality we were only two neighborhoods away from Brownsville, but the vibe in Spring Creek, at least when we first moved in, was more suburban than Brooklyn. In fact, right across Flatlands from our place at 1081 New Jersey Avenue was a huge tract of undeveloped land, which, one day, became the vast Starrett City development. But in the midseventies its only distinction was that Pennsylvania Avenue, the road that connected the area to the Belt Parkway, ran right through it.

  I got off the bus at the intersection of Pennsylvania and Flatlands, walking through the supermarket parking lot to 1081 New Jersey, where, finally, I had my own bedroom. There I had my first desk, my own stereo system, and a closet where my comic book collection was replaced by copies of Players magazine, the black Playboy, which was brand-new then. I was fifteen, just starting high school, and it was the first time I’d ever had privacy in my life.

  At last I could play BLS or eight-track tapes late at night, beginning my own personal education in pop music. I became obsessed with Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, playing “Family Affair” over and over at night, seeing in that lyric about estranged brothers a correlation with my increasingly contentious relationship with my sister.

  Moving out of Brownsville didn’t change things for Andrea, though, because, mentally, she never really left. While Ma and I were happy to have made the move, my sister missed the projects and would go back as often as she could. Ma and I were trying to escape the physical and mental limitations of life in the projects, whereas Andrea fou
nd a sense of community and personal freedom in that chaos.

  Her deepest friendships remained the kids from the Tilden projects and schoolmates who resided in the Ville, while I bonded quickly with the more middle-class white and black boys and girls of Fairfield Towers. Years later I’d coin the phrase “ghettocentricity” in reviewing a rap album in the Village Voice. People thought my idea of a point of view so consumed with street values that everything else felt foreign came from listening to the music. In truth, ghettocentrity, like a lot of my ideas about the attraction of street life and urban culture, came from life in Brownsville and, in particular, my sister.

  Even in this more middle-class development Andrea fell in with a local crew of tough girls who, not too long after we moved out there, turned against her. Sometimes they’d hang out under our window and call out threats to her. Andrea brushed it off. To Ma and me it was a strange twist. Here we were trying to avoid ghetto-style drama, and not a month or so into our new life, Andrea got into a beef with the only female roughnecks for blocks.

  Andrea still carried the ’hood with her wherever she went, but for me, Spring Creek was a vastly different experience from Brownsville. When I played touch football and half-court basketball out with the Fairfield Towers crew, I balled with Italian, Jewish, and Irish kids, along with the blacks and Puerto Ricans. Even the brothers there were different from my Brownsville friends.

  Whereas my old friend Dan Parks’s Hendrix adoration was an anomaly in the Ville, out in Spring Creek I met black kids who blasted Gentle Giant, Genesis, and Jethro Tull. A couple of dudes I befriended were products of mixed marriages. They were teenage boys figuring out how to define themselves as men. Quite a few of them chose a “white” lifestyle, which meant rock music, dingy bell-bottom jeans, and no dancing at parties.

  Hanging with them, I started listening to rock radio like WNEW-FM and WPLJ, New York’s album-oriented rock powerhouses. I bought a Rolling Stones greatest-hits package, Hot Rocks, as well as the Beatles’ catalog and lots of Elton John. I watched the movie version of the Who’s Tommy a couple of times, and finally understood the difference between Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. I was proud to be the first person in my Spring Creek development to own Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. I opened myself up to a side of pop music that I’d have been reluctant to publicly embrace in the projects.