City Kid (16 page)

Sitting at a desk in the production area office was my great benefactor, Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr. I'd met Rocky in the fall of 1976, when I went with an old high school pal to see Graham Central Station headline a show at the Upper West Side's Beacon Theater. Sly's ex-bass player Larry Graham had organized a hot band of his own that had a funky instrumental out called “The Jam.”

When we got up to the theater at Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway, we found that Graham's gig was part of a concert series called California Soul, aimed at branding Burbank-based Warner Bros. Records in the black music biz. Aside from Graham Central Station, Al Jarreau, Ashford & Simpson, George Benson, and other recent signees were performing during this weeklong showcase. Warner Bros., like CBS and RCA, was intent on creating an identification with black music buyers that Motown, Stax, and Atlantic had organically.

However, the economic forces at work in black music weren't yet my concern. I was there to dance and look at girls. Which was what I was doing when Graham Central Station closed with “The Jam.” I was sitting in the back of the orchestra and, like the entire crowd, I rose to dance in my seat. Well, everyone but one guy. Through the sea of gyrating bodies I spotted a man with a big Afro sitting down and writing in a reporter's notepad with a lighted pen. Whoa! A real rock critic in the flesh.

Once the show ended I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd, trying to find the brother in the Afro. On the sidewalk outside the Beacon I saw him, and, to be honest, he was an odd sight. He was extremely light skinned, with a big head adorned in metal-framed glasses, a bushy mustache, a light-colored jacket, jeans, and black-and-white saddle shoes, like someone in a
Happy Days
episode.

Despite his eccentric appearance, I approached him and his sexy, dark chocolate girlfriend and introduced myself. Robert “Rocky” Ford wrote reviews for
Billboard
magazine, though his nine-to-five job was working in
Billboard
's production department. His date was a woman named Gail McLean, who was polite but clearly irritated at my intrusion. Rocky gave me his card and told me to send him some of my reviews.

Through a friend, Martin Baskin, I'd actually published a couple of record reviews in the Pace University newspaper (the editors never knew I wasn't a student). One was of the O'Jays'
Family Reunion
and the other of Paul Simon's
Still Crazy After All These Years
, both of which remain two of my all-time favorite records. I also sent him a few of my
Am News
clippings. Rocky liked my writings, and invited me up to
Billboard
's Times Square offices, which had a spectacular view of Broadway and out to New Jersey, where they were building the new Giants stadium.

Just as heady as the view through
Billboard
's big picture windows were the staggering amount of records casually lying around. At each writer's cubicle, and in glass-enclosed editors' offices, was enough vinyl to fill J&R Music World several times over. Almost every record released got a mention of some kind in
Billboard
, and the staff writers took their free goods for granted. As a vinyl-hungry college boy it was stunning to see all that music just lying underfoot. Those visits to
Billboard
were like trips to vinyl junkie heaven, and I never left without 45s, 12-inches, cassettes, or albums under my arm.

At first I was a mascot, just happy to be there. Eventually I got to know the editors and the staff, an eclectic group of music heads, serious journalists, part-time flacks, and full-time eccentrics who, along with Rocky, showed me the music-biz ropes. There was Adam White, the future editor-in-chief, a taciturn Brit with an encyclopedic knowledge of Motown soul; Roman Kozak, a balding punk rock connoisseur with a hard-on for the Plasmatics' Wendy O. Williams and a love for spicing his iced tea with alcohol under his desk; and Radcliffe Joe, a pipe-smoking, blazer-wearing West Indian cherub, who served as disco editor. Either by example or by giving me assignments, these gents granted me entry into the world of the record business and music criticism.

Through them I attended press parties and learned you could judge a good one if the buffet featured fantail shrimp and rare roast beef. I learned to refer to records as “product,” and that free promotional records could be sold in bulk for cash to retailers. I learned that most music-business lifers were cynics and dreamers who knew that payoffs could make hits yet still believed in the transcendent power of music. From them I got my first taste of the backstage stories and secret history of American music that never ended up in the pages of
Billboard
, and rarely anywhere else.

My first
Billboard
piece was a profile of Evelyn “Champagne” King, a strong-voiced teenager from Philadelphia who had a disco smash with “Shame.” That was followed by an interview with Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the bass and guitar duo behind Chic, who'd go on to have impressive careers as producer and writers. Radcliffe Joe gave me those first two gigs, which gave Roman the confidence to begin assigning me concert reviews. While Radcliffe had me covering the emerging disco scene, an area none of the vets at
Billboard
cared about, Roman sent me out to review music from the industry's other bastard genres—heavy metal and blues-based guitar rock.

So my black Brownsville self was soon found reviewing British blues-based rock bands like Foghat, Bad Company, Foreigner, and Hot Tuna (and silently thanking my Spring Creek friends for the ear-splitting education a few years back). There was one double bill I'll never forget—AC/DC opening for Ted Nugent at the Garden. Those two combined for a night of sonic sludge my eardrums have never forgotten. I took to buying packets of tissue paper to stuff in my ears whenever Roman sent me out.
Billboard
afforded me a real schizophrenic existence. One night I'd find myself at a gay disco in the West Twenties reviewing Sylvester. The next I'd be at MSG, surrounded by white kids in football jerseys shooting off firecrackers as Bad Company did an encore.

As I turned in my copy, I'd start harassing Roman or Radcliffe for my next assignment. Between the
Am News
movie screenings, the
Billboard
music reviews, and actually studying for St. John's tests, my nights were full during those hectic years. Once I had my assignments, I'd call around to line up some dates.

As my adventure in Vegas suggested, through my access to events I met older, more sexually active women. I didn't get any handsomer or dress any better (style never being one of my strong suits), but I became a more exciting date.

I'll never forget going to LeMoche, a big disco on Eleventh Avenue, to review the female disco trio First Choice, and spotting this big-bodied sister standing in front of me. She was tall, with wide hips and nice shoulders and sexy strong legs. Her hair was slicked back and tied into a small bun. When she turned to talk to her girlfriend, I saw her face—she was light brown with a wide mouth and sweetly protruding lips. I smiled. She smiled. Her name was Evelyn. She was Jamaican, lived in Flatbush, and had her own apartment. Most important: She thought I was cute.

At this point in my life I'd never actually spent the night at a woman's house, since none of my girlfriends had had their own places. Evelyn, god bless her, changed all that. I remember she had a tidy little Flatbush apartment in the era when West Indians were pushing out the Jews and Italians.

She had a small sofa, but what I really fondly remember is her silver beanbag, which was cool to watch TV in as well as being a sex enhancer. Evelyn and I discovered a variety of ways to get busy using that beanbag on our first night together. I remember how both confusing and liberating it felt to wake up in a strange bed, to smell her perfume in the sheets, to see the beauty products in her bathroom, and to shower using her soap. The fact that this was my first overnight visit with a woman wasn't lost on my family. When I stumbled home that next afternoon, as bleary-eyed and tired as I'd ever been, Andrea took one look at me, said, “It's about time,” and then started laughing.

My maturation as a sexual being came at the tail end of the sexual revolution. Though the sixties is still associated with the “free love” period, the looser morals that were unleashed carried over well into the eighties. In the now distant pre-HIV era, condoms were optional. I carried condoms, but only used them if the woman insisted, and a great many women didn't. They'd use the curved plastic diaphragm, which I sometimes helpfully inserted for them. Or they used the IUD, a stringy, weird contraption that, if not put on properly, could pop your penis in the head. A few women, Evelyn included, utilized pills inserted in the vagina that would dissolve and generate a green sperm-killer foam. This stuff was a real joy killer, since the foam would sometimes slide into my tip and burn like hell. Moreover, once this stuff dissolved there was no oral sex for her, since it tasted like disinfectant.

Evelyn, as my first true mature lover, taught me much, and after a while she was suggesting that I move in with her. Evelyn was thirty, and I was about twenty-one, so I was in neither the financial nor psychological space to do as she wished. Our parting was bittersweet, since she wanted more than I knew I could give. I have to admit, this would not be the last time I'd part with a woman over my inability to give my heart.

After I'd used
Billboard
's phones to make my personal calls, and listened to the gossip about Springsteen, or debated Steely Dan's latest effort, I'd go through the staff writers' pile of reject records, stuff as many as I could carry into a bag, and head out into Times Square toward the IRT subway home. I'd usually wait until after rush hour was over, and the commuters had thinned out, so I'd have room to pull out my notepad and start scribbling again. I had a long subway ride ahead of me from Midtown Manhattan, way out to Pennsylvania Avenue, the third-to-last stop on the New Lots Avenue line.

On my ride home, I was writing when a newspaper blew against my leg. I looked down, and, whoa, it was the
Am News
. Even more ironic was that this particular crumbled bit of newsprint contained three bylined stories by me; all my work on the subway floor, looking as disposable as a candy wrapper.

Unfortunately, this accident would come to foreshadow my immediate future. When I graduated from college in June 1979, my future looked good. I had income from two steady writing jobs (plus freelance assignments coming in) and access to all the cool free stuff I could handle. Plus, I was still living at home, so I could save money. I felt like my postcollege years were gonna be sweet. Then reality hit me hard, real hard.

The Pink Tea Cup is an anomaly, a soul food restaurant in the heart of the West Village that has survived for decades. When I first started eating there in the late seventies it was on Bleecker Street near Grove. I'd get an order of fish with greens and macaroni and cheese to go, and then carry the meal in a brown paper bag west toward the piers. These were the glory days of the gay liberation movement, so I kept my eyes to myself, not wanting to suggest to any of the friendly gentlemen who strolled its curvy streets that I wanted to hook up.

About a half block from the piers, where transvestites ruled and truck drivers snoozed, and blow jobs were the coin of the realm, I walked into a garage with my soul food feast. Sitting in the booth where drivers checked in before parking their cars was Nelson Elmer George. Throughout my college years and into my early twenties, I tried to bond with my father. My mother, who'd heard me whine and even cry about not having a father, reluctantly encouraged me, knowing it might help me become a man but worried I'd eventually be disappointed.

As I said earlier, my first really vivid recollection of my father is our weird trip to Harlem, where I got my first inkling of how, if not why, he got his hustle on. The irony was that I'd become something of a hustler myself, roaming the same nocturnal boulevards in search of money and fulfillment. The huge difference was that nothing I would do, or even seriously contemplate, would come close to crossing the line between the legal and illegal. To paraphrase Rakim, “I knew the ledge.”

One of the things that came out of my visits was an article in the
Amsterdam News
called an interview with Mr. C., and it was billed as the reflections of a small-time drug dealer, which it was. The article was a way I could justify hanging with Nelson Elmer to myself—I was finally getting something tangible out of him. It was a way for him to explain his life to me, which he very much wanted to do.

Apparently my father's life changed in 1957, the year I was born. Unfortunately, the turning point in his life wasn't my birth, it was his first visit to a Harlem after-hours club on 122nd Street called Cary's. “It was in the basement of a building,” he told me. “I came with a friend who was known there. They were very careful to see if you had any weapons before they let you in. There was a bar section, and people were sitting and drinking and smoking reefer, which seemed to be the main feature of going to this type of place. I was always a fella out in the street as well as being a working man. So I became acquainted with all the ways people made their livelihood. I met all the hustlers and all the hustles.”

It sounded like dialogue from a Chester Himes novel, except for this man in a garage mechanic's uniform enjoying his macaroni and cheese, this wasn't a hard-boiled narrative but his life or, at least, his version of it. When I asked him about Pete Smith and he told me he was also known as Joe Robinson of the Bronx's Grand Concourse, or Clarence Robinson of Far Rockaway, Queens, I realized that his identity had been as fluid as his job status.

In the years since he and my mother separated, Nelson Elmer had been a merchant seaman, a doorman, a short-order cook, a onetime bar owner (apparently his partner, a woman, shot at him), and a low-level coke dealer. “I sold cocaine because it meant quick, easy money,” he said. “I sold only cocaine. Exclusively. Never marijuana. Never anything else. Cocaine meant fast money. Nice clientele, clean clientele. Selling any other drug, you run into the scum of the earth, and I didn't want to be bothered. With cocaine, you only deal with kings and queens and heads of state. Just worked with blacks, too. Never sold a grain to a white man. Nothing. They were bad news to me, baby, especially when it comes to drugs.