All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (8 page)

It felt good to speak frankly, as if by stating the irrefutable I was doing my part to advance the cause of racial understanding.

This neighborhood is ninety-nine percent black, she said. When you see white folk here they catch your attention, like that couple I told you about. They had dreadlocks and all these tattoos. Real eccentric-looking, but nice.

When I’d tried to imagine the other thirteen white people, that’s what I typically pictured—white Rastafarians, that most peculiar of oxymorons.

I know what it’s like to stick out in a neighborhood, she said. The other day I went out for a typewriter ribbon. It was Hanukkah, so all the Jewish stores were closed. I didn’t realize it was a Jewish holiday until I found a couple of stores locked. So I went back home and looked in the yellow pages and called some other places. I found one that had the ribbon I needed. Except it was in Greenpoint. I had to take the bus, and after I got off the bus I was lost. I went into a bar to ask for directions. The place was filled with old white men, Polish or Irish or something. What nationality are your people?

French and Irish, I said.

May the road rise up to meet you. That’s Irish. I’m African and Hispanic. Anyway, I’m in this bar with a dozen old white men, somewhere in Greenpoint.

Looking pretty scary half drunk in the afternoon, I said.

Oh, yes.

I know. I’ve been in those bars.

You got that right, darlin’. I told the bartender I was lost. He looked at me a little funny but he took me outside and pointed down the street and showed me where to go. He was pretty sweet about it. In the end we’re all human no matter our color. We live in our neighborhoods but we’re all in this together. The border of the world ain’t the edge of our neighborhood.

I’m finding it instructive to live somewhere where I’m conscious of my skin color, I said. I’ve never had that experience. What you find first are the kindness and curiosity of strangers. At least here.

Most places, she said, most places.

It seemed as if we’d sussed out an essential truth about the human condition, and there was nothing left to say.

I should run, she said. I’ve kept you long enough.

Happy New Year, I said. Maybe I’ll see you around.

Indeed you will, she said. Keep faith with the Lord and all will be well.

I never saw her again.

I worked ten to six on weekdays, so I was usually around the neighborhood only at night. Young people flirted outside the Fried Chicken Palace. Deals went down on Marcus Garvey. The heat in my apartment was oppressive that winter, the steam radiators working full bore without modulation, so I left my bedroom windows open. Lying in bed reading by lamplight, I could hear the night sounds below: a shout in the street, the thump of a bass line from a passing car. Most of the time these sounds were a comfort to me, evidence of a complicated social life I could access vicariously. I knew I’d never be a real part of the community, but that didn’t matter. I wanted a situation where nothing was asked of me, nothing expected, and while you could find that pretty much anywhere in New York if you were a refugee from the hinterlands, it seemed purer for me in Bed-Stuy. At night I would often see groups of men my age gathered in the barbershops, cutting each other’s hair and laughing, dapping, telling jokes. There was no way in hell I could have joined them, I knew that, but I didn’t mind. Scenes of joy in camaraderie only reinforced the bitter bite of my bittersweet solitude.

I devoted my free hours to reading, as I mostly had since my brother’s death, reading being one of the surest escapes from the cocoon of solipsism in which I was otherwise so comfortably nestled. One book in particular seized me that winter: James Baldwin’s collected nonfiction,
The Price of the Ticket
. I’d read parts of it years earlier, and now I picked it up again, looking, I suppose, to his fierce intelligence for an anchor in the swirl of impressions I’d encountered in Bed-Stuy. Instead the thing that gripped me to the point of obsession was a passage from the essay “Nothing Personal,” which a footnote said was “written with Richard Avedon” but sounded like vintage Baldwin:

. . . sometimes, at 4 a.m. . . . with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor—the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self—death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way.—And many of us perish then.

But if one can reach back, reach down—into oneself, into one’s life—and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day. . . . What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him.

I’d done some systematic reading in the literature of suicide, most of it amounting to a thumbs-up or -down on whether it was permissible. That question held little interest for me. No matter what judgment Kant or Schopenhauer offered on the subject, thirty thousand Americans a year did themselves in, hundreds of thousands more worldwide. I intuited the raw impulsiveness of the act. You either got there or you didn’t; the route was mysterious, and no religious prohibition or philosophical text seemed likely to sway a person in the throes of suicidal despair. Who has time for
The Myth of Sisyphus
when the gun is right there within reach? (“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus had written. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”) Anyway, in the case of my brother, the deed had been done. It hardly mattered whether I condemned him or offered my posthumous blessing. He was dead and he was going to stay dead, no need to bury him at the crossroads with a stake in his heart.

Baldwin had a point of view on the morality of the deed, but even as he made his judgment he expressed a nuanced sympathy for the lost and the damned. He saw that dark night through their eyes. To find my brother’s state of mind—my own state of mind many nights—expressed so clearly offered me a different sort of anchor than the one I’d been looking for. I repeated that one ringing line to myself—
all lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him—
so often that it became a mantra, a reason for living another day. It gripped me so fixedly I ignored a pertinent warning that came not long after:

Then one selects the uniform which one will wear. This uniform is designed to telegraph to others what to see so they will not be made uncomfortable and probably hostile by being forced to look on another human being. . . . It is necessary to make anyone on the streets think twice before attempting to vent his despair on you.

Before I moved to Bed-Stuy, I’d been under the impression that the crack epidemic—always so called, as if it were some virus beyond human agency, akin to Ebola or monkey pox—had run its course in the city. There were no longer any stories about it in the papers, but every other day or so, on my walks to and from the subway, I’d find an empty vial in the seams of the sidewalks. Their stoppers came in various colors, and soon I had a little collection—yellow, red, white, purple, green, blue. In the mornings before work, when I’d try to write and fail, I’d pull them out of my desk drawer and hold them in the palm of my hand, wondering what it felt like to have that kind of high, that kind of need for a high. Out in the streets you could see the crackheads coming from a block away: stumbling, weaving, a beatific smile on their faces if they’d just smoked up, their eyes meat-red and their noses smeared with snot. If you got close enough they smelled something horrible, like they were already dead and beginning to rot.

There was a woman who hung around the bodega on the corner asking everyone who passed for cash or beer. She may have been no older than twenty-five but she had only half her teeth left. The skin on her face was swollen so tight I feared it might rupture if she so much as coughed. Her shoes were sometimes mismatched. Other times she went barefoot. I could tell she’d once been a great beauty. She still had the legs, although they were awfully skinny now, and her eyes were huge and lit from within as if she’d seen the Rapture coming.

Mister, wooyoo bry me and ache bull? she slurred, the first time I saw her.

I’m sorry?

Mister, wooyoo priss doobie faber an bry me an ache bull?

It took me another moment to understand she was asking for a forty-ouncer of malt liquor.

My first impulse was to say, Honey, that wouldn’t be doing you a favor. But what sort of favor could I do her? She terrified me, she’d ruined herself so completely—as if committing suicide in slow motion.

Do you smoke? I said, making the universal symbol for a cigarette, index finger and middle finger splayed in front of my lips. I didn’t want her to think I meant crack.

She nodded.

In the bodega I bought a carton of orange juice, asked the clerk to throw in two loosies.

I handed the woman a cigarette, lit it for her, lit my own. Her hand shook as she held it. She thanked me, told me I was a nice man.

I thought: No, I’m not. I am not a nice man.

Instead I said: You’re welcome.

As much as there was a part of me that secretly feared—and even more secretly craved—being harmed in Bed-Stuy, there was another cloistered and delusional part of me that thought I might be redeemed by intimacy with squalor and degradation. Those words appeared more than once in my journals around that time, and what was a better synonym for the squalid and degraded than a crackhead on the streets of Bed-Stuy? Despite the veneer of higher education, I was still an ignorant white boy. I’d never seen a Spike Lee movie, never listened to a word of Biggie Smalls, but I knew the motto
Bed-Stuy Do or Die
, and with no appreciation for the obvious irony I’d taken it as my own. I may have read Baldwin but I hadn’t understood.

Mired as I was in my own dark trip, I wasn’t terribly interested in the social texture of the neighborhood—in its history, in the stories of the people who lived there, their struggles and hopes, fears and dreams—and truth be told, I didn’t want to get all that intimate with squalor and degradation, whatever they might mean. It’s not like I was prepared to take a crackhead home and give her a hot bath and a home-cooked meal. I got a little tingle from being in proximity to self-inflicted suffering, but I didn’t want to have to
do
anything about it. I constantly reminded myself that I hadn’t gone to school to be a social worker. I’d chosen a course of study that taught me various tricks for how to observe the workings of the world, to take notes and write them up in stories, so I took notes, as much out of habit as anything. I knew I had zero chance of convincing an editor at the
Wall Street Journal
to let me write a feature on the myriad ways the American government and moneyed interests had turned their backs on Bed-Stuy, a neglect—a spiteful, willful neglect—that was nothing short of criminal.

For a time, squalor and degradation were all I could see in the streets, or all I chose to see—and not just in the world around me but in my own mind. At my day job I could impersonate a competent, self-possessed young man, but my inner life festered with diseased visions:

At the laundromat today I saw a poster tacked to the wall. It said the 79th precinct’s homicide squad is looking for information about the death of a livery cab driver who was found murdered in his car on the corner of Marcus Garvey Blvd. and Monroe St. on Feb. 1. The thought of it chilled me: a dead body forty steps from my front door, shot for the cash in his pocket.

On the stoop across the street a man lifted his shriveled penis from his pants and relieved himself on the topmost step. His urine steamed in the cold. It steamed in its arc and steamed where it splashed on the concrete.

Think of the cool reassurance of gunmetal in palm. The dull and languid hereafter, the painless hereafter. Think of the bliss of death.

I’d been in the neighborhood a couple of months when I was given a raise at work, and one of the ways I celebrated was by going on a little shopping spree at Century 21, just up the street from the paper. I bought a suit jacket off a sales rack, a DKNY number that fit well enough, though it was a touch long in the arms. On another sales rack I found a pair of pants that more or less matched the jacket. I bought three new dress shirts and four ties to go with them. To complete the ensemble, I rode the train up to Eighth Avenue and Forty-first Street, to a hat shop I’d passed many times on my walks through the city, and I bought myself a sharp-looking fedora, black, with a red and yellow feather in the band.

Most of the men at the paper wore white shirts and patterned ties that looked like they’d been bought a generation or two before. If you looked closely you could see little stains on them where they’d caught a splash of soup or a dribble of mustard, possibly during the Reagan administration. I opted for colored shirts—salmon-pink, lime-green, cornflower-blue—and ties with a bit of pizzazz in their patterns. The fedora, though, was the real flourish, a gesture of pure irony. It offered not a clue about who I really was, where I’d come from, what I believed.

A natty socialist at the
Wall Street Journal
. A white guy in a black neighborhood. Strange how comfortable my discomfort became.

In other words, I was asking for it.

The woman who was supposed to move from Detroit and share the apartment never did. After a while, another friend of Mary’s became my roommate. Beth had just ended a long-term relationship with a woman and decided to explore the complications of hetero life by seeing a married man. Among the palest people I’d ever encountered, she was impossible not to notice on the streets of Bed-Stuy—she made me look swarthy by comparison—but she carried herself with an air of oblivious good cheer that made me believe she’d remain immune to trouble. She wasn’t around much anyway. She stayed most nights with her boyfriend Dave in Manhattan, in the apartment he’d taken after leaving his wife.