“All sorts of strange stuff happened. We had a scene with fifteen zombies and wham, our generator blows out. I convinced this old lady to let us run an extension cord through the window. Robert says, ‘Action,’ and the electricity goes out again. I ran up to the lady’s apartment and her granddaughter is standing there with the cord in her hand looking really pissed off. She just got off the swing shift cleaning office buildings and pulled the plug. She’s screaming, ‘You’ll not be stealin’ my grandma’s ’lectricity!’
“Another night, we were doing this scene where a bunch of zombies get their head blown off with sawed-off shotguns. I guess maybe we should have done it indoors, not out on the street. It’s like two in the morning and these people are hanging out the windows. This guy was yelling, they’re blowing the fuck out of zombies down there. They thought it was real. Then, out of nowhere, these cop cars are coming up from every direction. Lights. Sirens. The whole deal. They got their guns drawn, spread-eagling us against parked cars. Then one of the cops is pointing at the street and says, ‘What’s that?’ I told him it was brains.
“‘Brains?’
“‘Zombie brains.’
“Now there’s six cops with their guns out at Troy and Decatur, looking at a pile of fake brains. We were using beef fat from the Spanish butcher’s. One of the cops is knocking at the fat with his foot. It kind of oozed. I thought he’d lose it right there. Finally they told us to get a permit and left.”
It is no small tribute to cross-cultural, semiprofessional horror-fan mania that Dead Roses came out more than watchable—way more watchable, say, than Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetbacks. McCorkle has a way with cheesy FX, and Tucker’s final confession of remorse (he plays the gang leader who has wronged the heroine) is kind of touching, at least until he’s ripped apart, limb from limb, by a gaggle of underfed zombies.
But creation is only the outset of art. It must be brought to the marketplace. “We weren’t exactly going the Sundance route,” says Johnathan Tucker, unloading a stack of DVDs from the back of his Chevy Tahoe in front of the Target department store on Flatbush Avenue. Business is brisk; in an hour, Tucker and McCorkle (sans makeup this time) move sixty “units,” for a total of near twelve hundred now. “Keep this up and we’ll be in profit soon enough,” says Tucker.
Just then a guy in a Nissan Pathfinder comes wheeling around the corner near the Williamsburg Savings Bank building. “Saw the movie, man!” he shouts. “Scared the shit out of me!” Watching the Nissan head down Atlantic Avenue, the filmmakers agreed, you couldn’t ask for a better review than that.
5
Chairman of the Money
Charlie Rangel has been Harlem’s representative to the United States Congress for the past thirty-six years and counting. This is the story of the dean of New York delegate’s most impeccably American journey. From New York magazine, 2007.
When Charlie Rangel, DeWitt Clinton High School dropout, first became a congressman from Harlem in 1971, beating the iconic Adam Clayton Powell Jr. by 150 votes, he would drive to Washington from his home on 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue in a beat-up Buick. “It was cheaper,” says Rangel in his quarry-pit voice. But mostly Rangel has flown the shuttle. Figuring how many times he’d made the trip, Rangel said multiply 36 (the years he’s been in office) times 52 times 2 (round-trips per week). From that, subtract the time Congress wasn’t in session. Still, it’s a lot of flights. But never had Dan Rather risen from his window seat to greet him.
“Mr. Chairman,” Rather said, with a slight nod of the head.
This is how it is for Charlie Rangel post-11/7, since the Democrats won Congress and the seventy-six-year-old Harlem rep became the chairman-to-be of the House Ways and Means Committee, a body usually prefixed by the adjective powerful. Delineated in the Constitution, the committee has the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts,” that is, Ways and Means is where the deals are cut on taxes, borrowing funds, Social Security, and control of trade and tariff legislation.
In other words, Rangel rasps, “the money.”
The Chairman of the Money tends to be a popular guy. Then again, Charlie Rangel has always been popular in Harlem, where many residents have never known another congressman. What is now called the Fifteenth District has been represented by exactly two men since 1945—Rangel and Powell. Asked if this was democracy, two guys in sixty-two years, Rangel honks, “The people know what they want.” Rangel has been reelected seventeen times, usually with more than 90 percent of the vote. Since “the chairmanship,” however, on One-Two-Five Street and up in Dominican Washington Heights (Hispanics make up 46 percent of the district now), wherever Charlie shows up, silvery hair swept back, iris shock tie and pocket handkerchief matched up just right, he is shown an extra helping of love.
“People come up to me saying, ‘We did it, we finally made it,’” reports Rangel, who’s been on Ways and Means since 1975, the last ten excruciating years as ranking member of the minority Democrats. “It’s like the whole neighborhood’s moving up.”
Ride with Rangel for a few days and congratulations come from every angle. They’re lining up to kiss the outsize green opal ring on his finger. One minute State Assembly strongman Shelly Silver is calling him “my great friend, one of our own … whom we can trust to do the right thing.” Then Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, is on the phone. Congrats on the chairmanship, says Kantor, and, by the way, maybe Rangel might want to talk a bit about U.S.-China trade relations? Mary Landrieu, senator from Louisiana, adds her good wishes, but what about that offshore-drilling bill?
And here comes Hillary, charging down the buffed hallways of the Capitol Building, with a hearty “Mr. Chairman!” Just the other day, Rangel ate breakfast with the senator in Harlem. Rangel figures he’ll overlook Hillary’s early prowar stance. “If I swallowed John Kerry, I can swallow that,” he says. Rangel (who told Barack Obama to “go for it if you want; if you don’t, you’ll wind up hating yourself”) doesn’t think Rudy Giuliani’s running (“He’s just building up his billings”) but hopes he does because “it’ll be fun, kicking the crap out of him.”
The whiplash over the power shift from lily-white Houston boardrooms to Sugar Hill has only begun. The other day, men from Pfizer dropped by Rangel’s 125th Street office. “He just wanted to say hello,” Rangel recounts. As for those nasty details about drug pricing (“gouging,” Rangel calls it) and exactly how the new chairman—a harsh critic of the status quo “health-care disaster”—was likely to view the role of big-time pharmaceutical companies, well, that was another conversation.
“I’ve got so many new friends these days,” Rangel says with mock amazement.
Rangel’s new status was clear enough during the recent dustup over the draft. Appearing on Face the Nation, Rangel kept to less sexy Ways and Means issues, like the alternative minimum tax currently draining middle-class 1040s. As Charlie Rangel performances go, it was fairly uneventful. At no time did Rangel call Dick Cheney “a son of a bitch” or suggest the vice president check into “rehab [to deal with] whatever personality deficit he may have suffered.” Nor did Rangel, as he did following Hurricane Katrina, refer to George W. Bush as “our Bull Connor,” a man who “shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all.” Then host Bob Schieffer asked Rangel if he still believed in reinstating the draft.
Military conscription has little to do with Ways and Means, but Charlie Rangel, the most canny of loose cannons, has never been one to underplay his hand in a big spot. “You bet your life,” said Rangel, who has long opposed the volunteer army, saying politicians would think twice about starting wars if their own children had to fight them.
Rangel told Schieffer: “If we’re going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can’t do that without a draft…. How can anyone support the war and not support the draft?”
The reaction in the blogosphere and every o
ther “-osphere” was loud and unanimous: Rangel was bonkers. The limp liberals of the New York Times editorial page, haven to who knows how many recipients of 2-S college deferments, said a draft would not achieve the aim of making “the armed forces more equitably representative of American society.” The chicken hawks of the right wing lambasted Rangel’s assertion that the military was inordinately composed of “people who can’t get a job doing anything better.” There were plenty of potential Rhodes scholars and Hardee’s CFOs slogging through the Iraqi sands, angry radio voices declared. To suppose otherwise was downright unpatriotic. As a testament to Rangel’s runaway moonbatism, commentators pointed out that when he introduced his draft bill in 2004, it was defeated 402 to 2.
“Rangel didn’t even vote for his own bill!” complained an eye-rolling Dick Cheney to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. (Rangel says he voted nay to protest Republican procedural finagling.)
Rangel, who has that raised-bushy-eyebrow who me? thing down pat, purports to be “flabbergasted by the fuss” caused by his draft statements. “I’ve been talking about this for years and no one paid attention. I guess that’s the power of the majority.”
Gee, you think?
A world-class press hound, Rangel was soon wall-to-wall on the tube. “I want to push the debate, make them think about what exactly war means,” says Rangel, with the assurance of a man whose position on the issue has been impeccable for the past fifty-six years, ever since November 30, 1950, which was when he found himself, along with forty or so other members of the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion of the Second Infantry Division, hunkered down in a foxhole near the Yalu River.
“We had these ten thousand crazy-ass Chinese coming down on us,” recalls Rangel. “All I could hear was bugles, screams, and gunfire. Dead, bloated bodies were everywhere. Guys’ toes were falling off from frostbite. I thought we were deader than Kelsey’s nuts. The Chinese dropped leaflets saying they were colored people like us, and when we got back to the States we weren’t going to be allowed to swim in pools in Miami Beach and how could that be worth fighting for?
“In a situation like that, you don’t think about saving the world from communism, you think about surviving,” says Rangel, who despite shrapnel wounds managed to lead several soldiers to safety, for which he got the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, both of which now sit on a shelf in his 125th Street office. “People who haven’t been in war don’t understand what a difference a wrong step here, a bad decision there makes…. That’s the question in Iraq. How long can you wait? By tomorrow it’s gonna be too late for someone. It is a matter of time … time running out.”
It makes sense that time would be on the mind of someone past his seventy-sixth birthday, even a workaholic (sixteen tightly scheduled hours per day is routine) who looks fifteen years younger and plans to keep going forever. Rangel gives you his happy-warrior line about how he’s “never had a bad day” since getting out of that foxhole, but he admits to feeling “the claustrophobia” of time. He says the chairmanship “couldn’t have come any later for me.”
Fact is, if the Democrats hadn’t won this time, Rangel would have retired. It would have solved a lot of problems; his wife, Alma, had been after him to stop for years. Mostly, though, “I couldn’t take it anymore, how the Republicans were running things. Someone like Tom DeLay has no interest in legislating. He just wants to push through policy. This wasn’t the Congress I’d grown up in. The House of Representatives was being destroyed right in front of me. Sending people to prison camp without trial, wiretapping without warrant. This was another kind of America. I didn’t want to be part of it.”
Word that Rangel might quit sent a chill through Harlem. It isn’t that he doesn’t have his rivals. The Reverend Calvin Butts, who has Adam Powell’s old job at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, has sniped at Rangel for years, once calling him “a timid politician” willing to “settle for crumbs.” But no one wanted to see all that seniority (some might say pork) go down the tubes. Local papers ran pleading headlines: BROTHER CONGRESSMAN! DON’T GO!
A thoroughgoing secularist, rare among old-school black politicians in not bearing the honorific “Reverend” (his Catholicism once had Harlem Baptist ministers debating whether he should even be allowed to speak from the pulpit), Rangel has greeted the Democratic victory as tantamount to being born again. “For me, it’s a reprieve. My grandfather told me about seeing people getting lynched, how it haunted him, thinking what he could have done about it. I didn’t want to have my grandchildren ask, ‘What did you do when the Constitution got ripped up?’ and have to answer, ‘I quit.’”
So there he is, getting called Mr. Chairman, living what he calls “my honeymoon,” which figures to go on through the first week of the 110th Congress. That’s when, Rangel says, “The clock will start ticking again. We got two years to turn things around.” It is, as Rangel says, “a short fuse.”
Once it seemed as if Charlie Rangel had all the time in the world. “Growing up in Harlem, I didn’t think much about the future. My father left when I was six. I was just drifting around.” Indeed, it isn’t hard to find Harlem codgers willing to boast, “Charlie Rangel? Shit. I used to take his lunch money.” The army changed that. “When I came out of the service in 1952,” Rangel says, “I had so much self-esteem.”
Back home, however, was not all that different. “I had a hundred jobs. I worked in a drugstore. The Adler Shoe Store. Sold vacuum cleaners.” He also worked down in the garment center, where he had the epiphany that set him on his life path. “I was unloading a truck, and these boxes fell out, spread all over the street. This cop came over and said, ‘You better clean that up, boy.’ I started picking up the boxes, and I’m thinking, I’m pretty sick of this crap. I thought I’d reenlist, go back into the army. Then I thought to myself, ‘No. I’m Sergeant Charles Fucking Rangel. Who are these people to treat me like this?’”
Rangel went back to high school, at age twenty-three. He took a job-aptitude test that indicated he’d make a swell mortician, a classic race-based track for black men. Rangel’s response was “Screw that.” He used the GI Bill to pay for school, getting his degree at NYU in three years, then enrolled at St. John’s law school. Becoming a lawyer seemed logical.
“The most important person in my life was my grandfather,” Rangel relates. “He was an elevator operator at the court buildings downtown. He wore a neat uniform and was always talking to men in slick suits. I got the idea that being a lawyer or a judge was the most magnificent thing a human could do. It was funny, though, when I told my grandfather I was going to be a lawyer; I thought he’d never stop laughing.”
He put himself through school as a desk clerk on the night shift at the Hotel Theresa, sometime home to Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, and Moms Mabley. Moms defended Rangel when he was caught reading his law books on the job. “Let the boy study,” the old chitlin-circuit comic snorted. Rangel was at the Theresa when Fidel Castro came to the U.N. after the Cuban revolution. “They said he got thrown out for plucking chickens in his room, but I never heard about that,” says Rangel, a longtime opponent of the U.S. embargo of the island. Once, meeting with Castro, Rangel said the United States might see things differently if he held “free and fair elections.” Castro said he did have “free and fair elections.”
“But you get all the votes,” Rangel said. Castro replied, “Don’t you?”
Rangel started his career as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Later came a term in the State Assembly, which set him up to run against Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in what remains the most pivotal election ever held in Harlem.
“I knew Charlie could beat Adam; all he had to do was listen to me,” says former Manhattan borough president and Ur-Harlem businessman Percy Sutton, who along with Basil Paterson and David Dinkins and Rangel (who calls Sutton “my mentor”) formed the so-called Gang of Four, young-Turk Harlem politicians chafing under Powell’s increasingly erratic suzerainty.
“Adam was a great man, but he didn’t understand the new Harlem,” Sutton continues. “He went down to Wyatt Tee Walker’s church on 116th Street and condemned Martin Luther King Jr. That’s when I knew he was slipping, ego getting the best of him. We told Charlie to go down to Selma to march. When he came back, we said here’s the man who wears the orange vest of courage, which is what the marchers wore…. Adam thought it was all in the bag. How could anyone beat him?”
Dead since 1972, Powell still casts a shadow. Rangel’s office is in the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. In a 1994 primary, Adam Clayton Powell IV, running almost exclusively on his father’s name, held Rangel to a spindly 58 percent. Not that you’ll ever hear Charlie Rangel utter a bad word about Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He says, “I keep the faith, always, baby.”
Ask Rangel how come it seems like every black politician in New York is another politician’s son or daughter, and he cackles. “I call that the ‘no child left behind’ school of politics…. My mother was a seamstress, there was no family business to go into.” So he rolls on, secure in his mottled skin, the self-made wise old head, dean of the delegation. “Talking to Charlie is like getting the lottery numbers early, because if history repeats itself, who’s seen more history than him?” says state assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., one of those politicians’ sons.
American Gangster Page 8
