Just Kids From the Bronx (25 page)

That town was something that we created. It was its own world. It had its own logic and its own story. It reflected the world that we knew but it was something different. And I think I’m trying to do the same thing in my paintings. The more I get into a painting and the more I work on it, the more it develops its own logic and becomes its own world. And then my job is to try to make it enticing for others to enter that world in some way.

I went to Music and Art High School, but I dropped out after one year. I always hated school. Maybe it’s my nature or maybe it was the influence and support of my older siblings. Maybe it was because it was the sixties and there was this kind of free vision of life. What I hated was people trying to control my behavior and my thinking and to what end? I didn’t know. I just didn’t take to discipline for its own sake or to being taught things that nobody had ever bothered to try to help me understand why we were learning all this stuff. Albert Shanker, head of the teachers’ union, was my hero because we had all these days off from school, due to all the teacher strikes going on at the time. The thing was, when I had off, I would go to class at Cooper Union with my brother Eddie or to bookstores with my brother Jay. I was very excited about learning, but I wasn’t excited about school. And I was excited about engaging with the world. So fast forward to tenth grade, where my parents were actually instrumental in helping me transition out of high school. They had me sign into a school down in South Jersey where my sister lived, just so the truant officer would have a harder time tracking me down.

All my friends were still sitting in classes when I got my GED. When I was eighteen, I was living in this apartment with my mother, father, grandmother, and then my sister moved in with her infant son. It was a no-brainer. I had to get a job and get out of there. By then I had already traveled to India and hitchhiked across America with my girlfriend. I moved in with Jimmy Boyle, my only friend who had his own place.

I had taken these civil service exams. I was very good at taking tests—or cheating at tests. For example, I had taken the post office test, but only got like an eighty or something. You’re competing with veterans and disabled people who get ten to fifteen extra points so you have to get a very high score to get the job. One third of the test was memorization. There’s a list of fifteen names and fifteen addresses connected with those names. You were supposed to stare at the lists for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then when the lists were taken away you were supposed to connect the dots. Well, if you spent a fraction of that twenty minutes copying the list … Needless to say, I aced that part of the test. I worked the graveyard shift at the Bronx General Post Office for one and a half years.

Luckily I was then invited to move into a commune in the Boston area with my brother Eddie and a bunch of people who were eight or nine years older than I. Living there I was able to focus on my art to a greater degree. What I found myself working on, in my first large painting, was the view from my parents’ apartment in the Bronx. When I was seventeen, I had done a Magic Marker drawing of the view, so that became the starting point for that painting. I started it in Boston, but I finished it back here in this apartment in the Bronx. I moved back in with my parents when I was twenty-four and then went to the School of Visual Arts.

To attempt to capture the view from this apartment with this sprawling urban landscape and amazing sunsets is a daunting task. When I was younger I couldn’t imagine drawing or painting such a thing because it’s simply overwhelming. But I think that aspect of it was the thing that stuck with me. My early impressions of that vastness were very strong. How do you do it? How does one manage? How do we urban dwellers process all of the information, the myriad of sounds and sights that surround us and are constantly bombarding us? How do you bring order to the randomness and chaos? How do you create art that reflects all these things but that has its own logic, enough to draw the viewer in? That’s the trick.

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Note: Danny Hauben and his wife, Judy, told me about their conversation when they met for the first time at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Danny:
“It’s so much easier to meet people here in Virginia. New York, you know, it’s like everybody is in their own world.”

Judy:
“Oh, you live in New York. Where do you live?”

Danny:
“I live in the Bronx.”

Judy:
“Is that nice?”

Danny:
I had no answer for that! I had never heard that response before. Who says such a thing?

LOUISE SEDOTTO

Educator, principal of P.S. 76 in the Bronx

(1957– )

I grew up in a semidetached home where there were always people coming and going—family, people from the block, people from the neighborhood. My mother cooked these Italian feasts so she was prepared for whoever stopped by. If it was dinnertime, they’d just sit down to eat. There would be a three-course meal, starting with the soup, and at the end my father’s job would be to cut the fruit. Then, of course, came the black coffee and lots of conversation around the table.

My brother is eight years older than I am, so if he had friends come by after school they would eat. Whoever came would always sit down and join us, whether it was during the week or on the weekend. My grandmother also lived in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away from us. My father is one of ten kids, and my mother is one of seven, and each of their siblings had four to five children. It was a very large family, with extended family too. My childhood was a good one. You know, comfortable.

My mother had an uncle, Morris, who loved to entertain. He would come occasionally with his buddies and he’d play the harmonica. Even though he worked for the IRT he had a show with his friends who played with a band. They would set up in the backyard and the whole neighborhood would come by. They came for the music, and of course my mother put out food. It was a gathering with music and dancing and eating. It was a simple life, not complicated by too many distractions.

I went to a parochial grammar school and later to parochial high school. In the Catholic schools we still had nuns as teachers. My father owned a dry-cleaning business and we would always take home the habits the nuns wore. He dry cleaned them for the whole school. I always loved school even though it was very strict. I seem to have been very disciplined because I knew that I was in school to do my work. If there were a mischievous boy or someone like that, Sister Mary Eymard would stand him in front of the room. I’ll never forget George Rogee. We were in third grade, and he was chewing gum. Sister made him stand in front of the room with the gum on his nose. That must’ve been about 1957. Sister would also walk around with a ruler and hit your hands. It was intimidating, oh yeah, and yet I had some wonderful nurturing lay teachers as well. And those were the ones I was very involved with.

There was Mrs. McGann, who wore perfume. I loved walking past her. She was also very well dressed, which made her so very different from my mom, who never even wore makeup. I was fascinated with those teachers who came well dressed to school, wore makeup, and smelled of perfume. I was just so amazed at the glamour of it all and it impressed me. And then again, I actually loved the work. I always wanted to be at my desk, I guess, to please them, but when I went home I played school for hours, especially since my father had bought me a school desk for my bedroom. I was always the teacher, and my imaginary playmates were the students. I knew even then that’s what I wanted to be—a teacher.

I always felt that the people in the Bronx were so friendly and down to earth. I bought my first house there but when I moved up to Westchester it was very different. Playdates for the kids? Something we never had when we were growing up.

There’s an old saying, “You can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can’t take the Bronx out of the girl.” So here I am, back at a school in that borough. I’m home.

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Note: P.S. 76 was the neighborhood school that I attended as a kid. I don’t think we had any particular academic distinctions at that time. It is definitely a better school now than when I was there in the late 1930s and ’40s.

STEVE JORDAN

Drummer, musical director, composer, producer

(1957– )

Music was always in my house—always in the family. Music and baseball. Those were my two favorite things. My parents were big music fans. My mother used to sing classical music, actually. My father is an engineer/architect, but you could swear that he was a musician. I was sitting with him a couple of days ago, and he sang that great old Lionel Hampton tune “Flying Home.” He sang the solo, the saxophone solo, verbatim. That’s where I get that from, because I can sing a solo break too.

I was the class clown in school, so for a couple of years there my parents had to stay on me. But I wasn’t like an evil kid. Nothing like that. Any time I got grounded, the one thing they didn’t take away from me was studying music. So when I was sent to my room, I could listen to music and I could practice. So I was like,
Hey, this isn’t too bad
. In fact, it kind of helped me focus.

From the age of two years, I played on pots and pans and, in fact, I was always also playing records for people. My parents were fascinated about how I knew, before I could read, how I knew which record was which. I had figured it out. I must’ve been able, because I have this photographic memory kind of thing, to just identify the labels and the print on the labels. I could remember which song was sung by which group by the look of the label.

When I was about eleven or so, if my aunt was having a party or somebody in the neighborhood was having a party, I was the deejay. If my class was having a party, I would deejay the party. I was on this AV—audiovisual—team in school. There was this record player that was made for schools, a big mono speaker, just one speaker, but it was heavy duty to withstand children. It always had a really big sound ’cause it was a bigger unit. It had a little bass happening. It was very sturdy. I always remembered that record player. So years later, I was producing a record—and they were still records in those days—in Milwaukee. I was going down the street and saw this AV repair shop, so I walked in and I saw all the stuff that I used to have in school. I bought all of it. So I have one of these record players in my home now. It sounds fantastic.

And of course I was a baseball fan. I played second base from the age of about seven years old through the clinic and then Little League. In the back of my head, my dream was to be the second baseman for the New York Yankees. To begin with, I wasn’t very tall. In fact, I was always trying to figure out how to grow.
I gotta get taller here
. I’d try standing up straight. I loved milk, so I drank a lot of it. They had to lock up the fridge. One of my best friends, Steven Grant, was a guy who was almost like six feet when I was five-four or something like that. Actually, he went on to play professional basketball. It kinda drove me nuts that he was so tall. My dad had to take me to a shrink because of it, to talk it out. To have this doctor explain to me that it was okay and that it doesn’t mean that you’re any less of a person or anything like that. You know, it got serious. The strange thing is that my father is six-one, so there was always hope. Hope springs eternal. I was gonna get there.

My mom started a neighborhood association. That was a big thing in the sixties and seventies—to try to get your communities back. The organization started a day camp, so the whole camp was able to get tickets to go to a Yankees game. It was the old Stadium, and of course we were sitting in the bleachers, where the seats were black. Those seats were about twenty degrees hotter because of that black paint. It was really a bizarre design, but the reason for it was because if you’re hitting, if the bleachers were white, you wouldn’t be able to see the ball, so there had to be a black background.

The Yankees did their best to try to help out the community. They teamed up with Con Ed and came up with a program called Con Ed Kids. They’d get a bunch of kids from different communities around the city and you’d get into a game for free. You’d also get a special gift, besides the seats from Con Ed. Some extra perk. There was this guy called the Answer Man. His name was Earl Battey. Now Earl Battey was a professional major league catcher who played for the Minnesota Twins. So he’s sitting out there in the 900-degree heat and there’s a field full of kids—just millions of them. Around the seventh-inning stretch, it’s time for him to ask a question to one of the kids, and if you got the answer right you’d win two free tickets to sit in the mezzanine section at the Stadium and then get your picture taken with a Yankee. So we’re out there—a sea of kids. And now it’s time. He asks the question. And I, with all the other kids, I’m like—
Hey teacher—
and I raised my hand and I pinned on the Answer Man, and he looks right back at me, looks right into my eyes, and poses the question to me. So this is like incredible. The question is, “Who plays second base for the New York Yankees?” I’m like,
What?
I’m like,
This is crazy!
Or maybe the question was, “Who’s number 20 for the Yankees?” Something ridiculously easy for me.