City Kid (12 page)

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.

I didn't get Led Zeppelin at first. It was loud and abrasive, with some vague mystical mess going on lyrically. Then Roland, a big, strong, half-black, half-German neighbor with a passion for football and marijuana, invited me to go visit a friend of his. Kevin was a frizzy-haired stoner whose bedroom was lined with black-light posters of couples performing the Kama sutra. There were two white parakeets in birdcages by his bed, and he had quad speakers sitting in the room's four corners.

I was never much into drugs. What had happened to my mother's friend Eddie had dulled my curiosity. Even when my friends started getting high in the 315 staircase, I usually passed. But Kevin had a bong, which I'd heard of but never seen, and he had hashish, which I knew of but had never smoked.

So Kevin lit the bong. He released the parakeets. He turned on a black light. I took a hit of hash. He put on Led Zeppelin's
Kashmir
. It flowed through the quad speakers. John Paul Jones's keyboards sounded majestic. John Bonham's drum kit boomed. Jimmy Page played resounding power chords. The birds flew over my head. The sexy couples seemed to be moving. I took another hit. I laid my head back. And in the moment of sound, vision, and drugs, finally, I understood Led Zeppelin.

After we moved out to Spring Creek I became a long-distance runner. Across the street from Fairfield Towers, where Starrett City now stands, were large tracts of empty land that on their far side abutted the Belt Parkway. On afternoons after school and on weekends, I'd run down Flatlands Avenue, past Fairfield Towers and private homes, and onto the dirt and scattered streets of asphalt on the edge of Brooklyn. Listening to my feet bounce off the ground and my own steady breathing (there were no Walkmen or iPods back then), I sought that so intoxicating runner's high. I loved the splendid isolation of running, and it spurred on my writing, driving me deeper inside my head, feeding a desire for introspection that was becoming a defining part of my personality.

I had dreams of running marathons and joining the Kenyans in the elite of long-distance running, but that idea died as soon as I joined the Tilden High School track team. Running solo had always been fun and relaxing. However, being timed and having to practice, and to have strategy meetings before competitions, sucked the spontaneity out of it for me. Plus, I wasn't that fast. Nothing like running through Prospect Park with several hundred other kids passing you by to clarify your place in the world.

I wanted to run at my own pace, but alas, my own pace was too damn slow. During one race in Prospect Park I tripped going through a big meadow with the finish line some two hundred yards ahead of me. Instead of getting up, I lay on the grass, listening to the thump of teenaged feet all around me. I watched the passing parade of high school colors from ground level. It was a strangely beautiful moment of defeat that I remember as one of the highlights of my track and field career. I can still feel that moment—the crisp air, the smell of the grass, a bruise on my right knee from falling, and my labored breathing. I'm a lot more sanguine about that athletic misadventure now because I understand that this failure, and what I felt, smelled, and saw, was part of my journey toward becoming a writer.

When I read over my short stories and diary entries from those years, they are filled with attempts to capture moments like my track and field stumble. Maybe it was because of all the Hemingway I was reading, but I was lingering a lot over passing moments—catching a breeze on a hot summer day, overhearing Al Green on a mailman's transistor radio, watching cute classmate Diane Dixon's Afro shift slightly in the breeze when the window opened in Spanish class.

Running and, more profoundly, writing were so seductive to me because they served (and still serve) as a form of meditation. Just as running put me in an introspective state, the act of writing itself felt lovely, often sensual. I loved how time passed when I was writing, that an hour, or two or three, would just disappear as I wrote on a notepad or banged at my mother's electric typewriter.

I'd already disconnected from organized religion, finding a very mercenary professionalism in most temples of worship that turned me off to most religions, including the Baptist denomination my mother was raised in. However, it was through these meditative moments that I had become aware that there was a heightened level of existence I very much wanted access to.

Lucky for me, it was writing that seemed to connect me to a higher power. I could also feel this connection when running, listening to music, and sometimes walking down the street (later I would add making love, but that wasn't happening in my teen years). But I could only consistently conjure it up when I put pen to paper. If my prose wasn't divine, and it rarely was, or is even now, the process of writing itself always was and is. As a result, the act of writing filled a spiritual gap in my life and fueled a work ethic that I, in retrospect, realize was a joy ethic. The more I wrote, the more likely I was able to invoke the deity inside me. So I became a most grateful workaholic, dedicated to writing something every day, no matter how small or inconsequential, as if I was praying to a God with no name.

After reading all those great American novels I acquired through the Literary Guild, I'd imagined my future lay in writing a great American novel too. But in high school my focus slowly changed. I was writing tons of fiction and fictionalized stories. They filled up a green metal file cabinet—some typed, some handwritten, others just scrawls on bits of paper. At the same time, all of this introspection alienated me from people. As teenagers often do, I felt I wasn't connecting with my people, like I was standing outside of things, a state of mind that would intensify over time.

To combat that feeling I joined the
Tilden Topics
, the school newspaper, figuring that being part of it would allow me to ask questions, and asking questions would allow me to learn things about people, and hopefully about myself. Joining the
Topics
gave me an excuse to be nosy, and I exploited it, using my reporter title to fill my notebook with stories that were never written and quotes I never used. My output might have been limited, but these efforts pulled me out of my literary cocoon and into the world. For years afterward I used questions as conversation starters, and really tried to listen to people when they spoke to me, developing a patience for other people's musings that continues to serve me well.

It didn't hurt that Tilden High was at a turning point in its own history. The class of 1975 I entered the school with in '72 was predominantly white, but every class afterward was predominantly black and Hispanic, with a huge increase in West Indians. The white flight and black influx that I'd seen firsthand in Brownsville was occurring in East Flatbush. The civil rights-era tactic of school integration, alongside the failing city services of the seventies, was changing the color of my schoolmates with every semester. At local diners Jewish knishes were replaced by West Indian beef patties. In the surrounding streets the local accents were no longer Hebrew or Sicilian but patois. Soccer balls kicked by brothers in tams filled the air outside Tilden's gray stone front steps. Of course, the black/ white racial tensions of the time flared up from time to time, but there was this new element in the mix—African American versus Caribbean American, niggers versus coconuts, soccer versus basketball. We resented their presence, and didn't understand their words, their food, or their attitude. All of which gave me a lot to write about, even if not a word of it would ever be published.

For the first semester of my senior year I participated in a city-wide program that allowed students to work at a business four days a week, getting real-world experience in exchange for school credit. So from September to December 1974 I took the subway to Nevins Street, and then walked a few blocks over to Atlantic Avenue to the storefront offices of the
Brooklyn Phoenix
, a weekly that covered the brownstone areas of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Fort Greene (which I'd move into a couple of lives later).

The
Phoenix
was trying to carve out a niche as the chronicler of these “emerging” neighborhoods way before the banking establishment of the city decided to help with mortgages and loans. While the far end of Brooklyn, where I was living and going to school, was losing old-school white ethnics, the brownstone areas closer to Manhattan were just beginning to see signs of what we now call gentrification. The weekly's staff was filled with young, long-haired, white, liberal types, who had a rather condescending view of the blacks and Puerto Ricans these protoyuppies were replacing. I'm not sure if it was a little joke on their part or just insensitivity, but they gave me—the black kid—a regular assignment of calling the local precincts to write a police blotter column on local crime. I'd talk to the cops and write up muggings, breaking and enterings, and rapes. It was my first introduction to cop coinage like “perps” and their laconic attitude toward violence.

The schizophrenic nature of the journalistic lifestyle I observed almost put me off the profession. Every week the temperatures at the
Phoenix
rose as deadlines approached. People sniped at each other over editorial decisions, and erupted over edits. I watched with concern as these adults sparred. Once the paper was put to bed, the voices softened and wineglasses emerged, and everyone gathered together and went out to dinner. I'd never before seen the crazy mood swings endemic to this high-stress profession. If that was my future, I wasn't sure I wanted it.

Still, the idea that journalism could be more than just the facts, that it could even be an art form of its own, got into me. In the midseventies the phrase “new journalism” kept turning up in all the magazines I read, along with the names of its key practitioners: Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer. I reread James Baldwin's
The Fire Next Time
, now with a new appreciation for it as journalism, feeling a connection to it I'd never had to Baldwin's novels.

After my tenure at the
Phoenix
I began grabbing the
Village Voice
whenever I could. It was a weekly repository of new journalism, which is what first drew me to it. Quickly, however, I found that it was the
Voice
's critics, particularly the lead film reviewer, Andrew Sarris, and his rock counterpart, Robert Christgau (who did a monthly “Consumer Guide” column on new albums and singles), that had me a regular reader. Through their erudite commentaries I learned about film genres and musical movements, and got introduced to Sarris's auteur theory and Christgau's prickly pronouncements.