City Kid (17 page)

“Because I usually had a regular job somewhere, I was never forced into dealing with heavy drugs. Cocaine was my gravy money. I'd spend a few hours every day selling it. But mostly I worked, so they came to me, and not the other way. People called me because I had good stuff. I sold in bulk, and didn't want to see twenty-five dollars or thirty dollars anytime. I bought my stuff wholesale, then sold it at up to 100 or 200 percent profit. I always sold it in large amounts, never small. In Harlem, my deals ranged from $250 to about $300.”

We were speaking about the drug world before crack, a
Super Fly
world of cozy clubs where adults did their business in peace. That world was already disappearing in the early eighties, as angel dust, heroin, and aggressive young dealers were escalating the violence. In his mind Harlem had “got real mean.” Nelson Elmer viewed this “heavy drug scene” with worry. Just as the music uptown was shifting from disco soul to beat-oriented rap, the drug scene was undergoing generational change too.

In relating his gangster tales my father provided me with a great unintentional “just say no” lesson. It started with his observations about “bag followers.” These were “girls who like cocaine but have no money, so they hang with a dude until they sniff up his blow, and then move on to the next sucker.” Then, without remorse, Nelson Elmer told his son, “I had two women in bed with me and some coke on [the] night table, and decided I'd rather have a blow than get blown.”

Young and horny as hell, I figured any substance that could overwhelm a man's sex drive was to be avoided at all cost. On the heels of the tragedy of my mother's friend Eddie Sawyer, and my father's story, I have never allowed a line of coke near my nose. So I could never say that this man never did me any good.

Over time he'd show me more bits of his world. One evening he took me with him uptown. We hit the Big Track, a Harlem gaming joint where there was action twenty-four hours a day. We stopped at a bar near Esplanade Gardens where a thriving numbers operation was headquartered, and he went in the back to do a little business. We ended our little tour at a ragged tenement building just around the corner from the numbers bar.

Up two flights was an apartment with a red door. Nelson Elmer knocked. A dark face peered through the peephole. After being scrutinized, we were granted entry into a room awash in red. The lights, the carpet, and the bar were all red. Our host was named “J.C.” He was a balding brown man in a chocolate-colored suit and a black turtleneck. He and my father were old running buddies from many Harlem nights, and I enjoyed watching Nelson Elmer's casual camaraderie, though it struck me that these dudes were closing in on the end of their good times, and he seemed to know it.

He said that he was gonna retire from his fun part-time gig. Number one, his connection had gotten busted, and he “could no longer get what I wanted. See, that's why having a job was so valuable. I didn't need to go to somebody else 'cause it wasn't my entire livelihood. When you're in the street, you always need backup of some kind. Besides . . .” He paused. “I have been feeling some vibrations. Nothing certain. Just enough to make me feel nervous, and when you get nervous in the street you definitely have to go. That is no place to be nervous.”

On this foundation of lightweight gangster tales a détente grew between us. But the hustler in him couldn't be abated. At one point he wanted us to become a father and son process-serving team. His argument was that we could make quick cash and hang out together. Instinctively, I thought that that was a gig that could easily go bad. Serving the wrong man on the wrong day could be a very unpleasant business. Ma, as usual when it came to things related to Elmer, just laughed when I brought it up. She wasn't going to let that happen. This era of good feeling between my father and me would unfortunately be short-lived.

Perhaps it could have been the beginning of a strong father-son connection. After all, we shared DNA, looks, and an attraction for nightlife. For years I had thirsted for his company, feeling a primal need for a father and hoping, through him, to perhaps understand myself better. But I was in my twenties now. I had my goals to pursue and my own journey to take. Whether my father had been around when I was six or thirteen didn't matter now. What mattered were the decisions I made.

As a child, your parents define your world. As an adult, your decisions define your character. Between my mother, my peers, and the people I was encountering as a journalist, I was developing my own view of the world and, it hit me, I didn't need my father's. Over the next thirty years our contact would be brief and, mostly, superficial. It would no longer be his fault. It would be my choice.

I graduated in June 1979 from St. John's University. The seventies had been a rugged time for my hometown. The Bronx was burning—literally. The city had basically gone bankrupt under the burden of unchecked municipal spending, institutional corruption, and an eroding tax base. Every night Johnny Carson made jokes about muggings in Central Park, helping poison the city's image around the country. Every great crime film of the era (
The Godfather
,
Serpico
,
Dog Day Afternoon
,
Shaft
) painted the place John Lindsay had labeled “Fun City” as a cesspool of unrest and suffering.

Yet, on those same streets, new dreams were being hatched and old ones fulfilled. My peers and I, about to enter adulthood under throwback president Ronald Reagan and aggressive mayor Ed Koch, were going to help reinvent New York by dreaming big and working harder than we'd ever thought we could. The transition from the seventies to the eighties can be defined by one word: ambition. It burned in us and lit up everyone I knew. This wasn't civil rights movement “we shall overcome” optimism, but a desire to take advantage of all the doors that that struggle had opened. Oliver Stone, who wrote
Scarface
, and then wrote and directed
Wall Street
, captured the aggression of the era, and of my reawakening city. Though I have never done cocaine, there's an anxious mania for movement that the drug instills that I felt all over New York. For good and bad, the city's 1970s financial despair was turning into a 1980s of greedy productivity. I never snorted the drug, but I did partake of the frenzy around me.

Looking back through my notebook pages from the era, I see I ached to do something, to be someone, to make my name mean more than it had when my father and grandfather were the only Nelson Georges in the world. I'd roll around my bed at night frustrated if I felt I hadn't worked hard enough, or anxious if I thought I hadn't worked well. I'd think there was a white writer out there who was already out ahead of me, who could afford to relax, and I'd jump out of bed and start writing. I don't think I was at rest the entire decade. The dawn of the eighties would inaugurate a new era in my life, and, happily, in the city I loved.

It was also when my troubles began. Within months of my graduation, my sister announced that she was pregnant, which meant I needed to move out so she could have my room for the baby. Then, one afternoon that summer, there was a letter waiting for me when I came to the
Am News
's office. It said that due to budget cuts I was being laid off. Of course I was devastated. I tried to put a happy face on it. I'd started as an intern, so I suggested that I still write for the paper—after all, the perks were what really made it so valuable.

The management team that had allowed me into the
Amsterdam News
had been fired. The old-school reporters at the paper, who had Newspaper Guild protection, didn't stick up for me, nor were they particularly upset that I was out. So whether I was being paid or not being paid, I was no longer going to be allowed to write for the
Amsterdam News
.

At least I still had
Billboard
. After all, wasn't that the better gig? I went up to their offices one day later in that first postcollege summer, and was told that I was now banned from the publication. The LA-based editor-in-chief had sent a memo to New York stating that I used “black English” in concert reviews, and that I misspelled the name of Weather Report's Joe Zawinul in a review.

After my comfy college years, the real world hit me with three swift, hard, gut-busting blows. The only relief in this bad news was that Rocky Ford was getting an apartment in Jamaica, Queens, and was gracious enough to allow me to be his roommate. At least I wasn't starting my adult life living in my mother's basement, which I've always thought was for lazy losers, neither of which I had any intention of being.

I filed for, and got, unemployment via the
Am News
. It came to about forty or so bucks a week, beating a blank, though it did little for paying my half of the rent. So I lived the hustling life of a freelance writer, crafting press releases for publicists and writing four to five articles a week for as little as fifty dollars a shot. Rocky had hooked me up with a nice gig writing music news every month for
Musician
magazine, while I also ground out profiles for teen rags like
Black Beat
. Rocky was subsidizing my half of the rent with his
Billboard
money and a record-label advance for a 12-inch single by Harlem MC Kurtis Blow. Rocky, along with another
Billboard
friend, J. B. Moore, had decided to invest their money and time into making a novelty Christmas record with Blow, feeling that the rap scene in New York was a trend they could use to establish themselves as record producers.

But, while hip-hop's journey from street style to recordings was being hatched in our living room, I was struggling to make ends meet. It was a battle I'd wage from the summer of '79 right through all of 1980. During the many months when I questioned both my ability and my dreams, New York sustained me. By plugging into its places and spaces, I felt like the city was keeping me afloat. One asset was my relationship with Birdel's record store, a classic mom-and-pop store located in Brooklyn, at the corner of Nostrand and Fulton, near the A train.

Birdel's speakers were a daily announcement of the newest grooves in R&B and gospel. Inside was a narrow room with a low ceiling, covered top to bottom with racks of records, posters, top ten lists, flyers for concerts, autographed photos of singers, and a fine dusty mist created by the steady decomposition of the old albums in the racks and the foot traffic from the street. Birdel's high priest was Joe Long, a raspy-voiced man with black-framed glasses, a thick mustache, a modest Afro, and thick hands that either held 45s hooked around his index finger or rapidly racked up sales on the cash register. Ask him if Gladys Knight & the Pips had a new record, and his answer was always, “Right here!” and he'd turn around to where the latest 45s lay stacked like pancakes. If you said, “I don't know who made it, but it's about fishing in the sea,” Joe would say “Marvelettes,” and place the record on the miniturntable near the counter and “Too Many Fish in the Sea” played for you on a Saturday afternoon.

Joe dated a friend of my mother's, so I'd always looked forward to stopping, knowing there could be a free 45 in it for me. When I became a reporter, Joe became a source of info about the contentious, often poisonous, relationship between black mom-and-pop stores and the major companies that took over black music in the seventies and eighties. Those labels gave big retailers all the discounts, and, because they bought in bulk, better billing terms. Slowly, the combination of competition from bigger retailers, the conflicts with the major labels, and the decay of the business strips in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community ate away at Birdel's business, forcing Joe, and his peers nationally, to abandon competing in pop and R&B music and to begin emphasizing gospel, Caribbean, Latin, and other niche markets.

Early in their existence, rap records created one of those niche markets. I have a vivid memory of traveling out to Bed-Stuy in the fall of '79 to gauge the impact of “Rapper's Delight.” When I arrived, the Sugarhill Gang was on the speakers outside, and the store was filled with a steady stream of people asking for the single. The 12-inches didn't even have the blue Sugar Hill Records label—just orange labels with Sugarhill Gang in black type. Joe was behind the counter, making change and selling this hot record like it was the glory days of Motown. My understanding of hip-hop's early appeal came from watching customers buy “Rapper's Delight” at Birdel's.

Just as influential in helping me keep my musical instincts sharp was J&R Music World on Park Row across from City Hall. Back before superstores and downloading, tasteful, full-service record stores kept the culture going, and J&R, located in a few cramped basements, was one of those places. I bought lots of jazz and blues at J&R. I'd read Charles Keil's
Urban Blues
or an article by Robert Palmer in the
New York Times
or Gary Giddins in the
Village Voice
, and I'd go to J&R to buy Bobby “Blue” Bland's
Two Steps from the Blues
or John Coltrane's
Giant Steps
.

My trips to J&R provided more than musical adventures. These Saturday trips to that record store introduced me to a discovery of lower Manhattan. After buying albums I'd walk past City Hall and across on Chambers Street to West Broadway where I took to eating souvlaki at Adelphia, a Greek diner. Thus fortified, I'd head uptown through the aging warehouse area that wasn't yet called Tribeca. It was just adjacent to City Hall, and neither fashionable nor cool.

More memorable was Soho, which was not yet an arty destination, more just a gateway to the West Village. It's impossible for anyone who wasn't in New York back then to understand now how dark and unpopulated the old industrial area between Canal and Houston was at the dawn of the eighties. I remember shafts of light cutting through the thick air on Mercer and Wooster, and the pad-locked doors on innumerable gray, cast-iron factory buildings. I'd walk into art galleries on occasion, where I'd see carefully mounted rocks or odd shapes on wood floors. It was mystifying to me how these galleries survived.