Cincinnati was the eighth most segregated city in America as Tony and I grew up. My mother managed to persevere in the midwestern demolition industry, an almost exclusively white domain, but nonetheless as an adult never acquired close friends who were white. She surely knew my path would be different, acquiescing to my conscious request to go to an almost uniformly Caucasian school full of entitled rich kids while fretting, to her friends over cocktails, about making sure I had enough exposure to “my own” culture. I saw less and less of my friends from my elementary school days and spent more time, slowly but steadily, in the parlor rooms and upstairs attics of those same east side families my mother had no real interest in getting to know. She was trying to build her own slice of modern middle-class housing for black families in generally black neighborhoods, residential projects that would increase property values for everyone in the surrounding community, she posited. This was in stark contrast to forging alliances with those who had the real money and heading for the hills, as the black professionals she would meet up with for top-of-the-weekend Happy Hour at T.G.I. Friday’s had done.
This kind of spirit informed the frustrated, defiant tone in my mother’s voice when driving through nearby Madisonville, a mostly depressed black enclave with pockets of both black and white prosperity tucked away from its fast-food-joint, hair-product-and-discount-sneaker-outlet-dominated main drag of Madison Road. “Our community doesn’t have to look like this,” she would intone, but then, even as a child, I would ask, “Well then, if that’s the case, why does it?”
They never covered this in American History at the Seven Hills School. Why are so many Negroes so broke? Why can’t they have nice things too? Of course, many of those I knew did—in Silverton, we were thought of as rich Negroes. While my grandfather and his wife fully entered a strata of east side, Hyde Park society, hosting parties where many of the city’s power brokers hunkered down for bourbon, my mother generally shunned such social climbing. But in the prosperous ’90s even she, who drives a pickup truck and is in perfect harmony with the world when she encounters a sack of chicken wings and an episode of Martin, indulged in the clubs of the city’s black elite and played bid whist with hairdressers and McDonald’s staffers.
I went to daytime house parties and Kings Island Amusement Park field trips with a chapter of the black children’s club Jack and Jill as a preteen. We didn’t seem quite as well off as most of the black professional families that made up this awkward, self-selected assortment of the talented tenth and their offspring, those who had fled to the white suburbs or the old, moneyed east side neighborhoods, but that’s not why I never completely fit in—I just liked hanging out with the working-class black kids from my extended family and the rich white kids from my school more. I was especially alienated from the girls—I was fat and didn’t take on a particularly hard, ghetto mode of speech or demeanor, something those rich black girls loved at the time, reminding them as it did of the macho cousin or uncle they knew who hadn’t made it to the other side of Clinton-era prosperity, the risk-taking hothead kids who went to Withrow or Hughes High School, the hip-hop stars they could watch every afternoon on MTV’s Total Request Live with Carson Daly. While consorting with the children of other classy Negroes was something I was never much good at doing back then, my growing intimacy with Cincinnati’s diverse and self-enclosed tribes, its posturing ascendant Negroes and its relatively poor blacks, its working-class Catholics and its wealthy east side WASPs and Jews, left me with an ability to code-switch, to find ways to speak a common language, grasp a set of common values, among people in almost every part of the city’s class hierarchy. Yet it also left me with a cognitive dissonance about the value of modern black American symbols.
Despite the kente cloth I wore to eighth-grade graduation and my penchant for accosting white girls over their inability to “confront their guilt” following my first reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I too had been conditioned by an America where black institutions and neighborhoods and vernacular were things the culture told you were inferior, regardless of the two-bit nationalism a young Negro child like myself encountered when seeing the Nation of Islam guys on the corner near Swifton Commons Mall or outside the diner they ran on the strip of Reading Road, near where my mother lives now, that has given way to open-air drug markets. Was hardly a bulwark against these sentiments.
Our collectivism manifested itself in ways I found strange sometimes. Watching the O. J. Simpson verdict with my classmates at Seven Hills, I was the only black student in the room as “Not Guilty” passed through the speakers of the TV in the central atrium. I couldn’t help but feel alienated as pale faces reddened and tears, along the edges of the room among the adults, were shed. You could sense the righteous indignation spread among some of the teachers, most of whom quickly stifled it. Not in front of the children; American innocence had to be protected for them, for now. I thought O. J. was guilty, and so did my mother, but in our home I had heard the voices of black people who would be happy to see him walk anyway, if just to get back at the white man. “What did we win?” Chris Rock joked a year later in Bring the Pain, the HBO comedy special that truly made him a star. Not a damn thing, but schadenfreude is a powerful animating force in many black minds toward many a white person for reasons that are older than all of us.
Tony didn’t know the first thing about those anxieties then, and not what they actually meant to me, but for some reason, like so many white people I’ve befriended in my life, I sort of assumed he did. He certainly seemed to have insight into blacks that extended beyond stereotype; he was immersed in black forms. As the years went by, I admired not just his thinly concealed melancholy (I had my own), but his knowledge of black literature and boxing and soul music. These cultural signals kept me thinking he probably empathized more than he did. I was still too young, too gullible myself to have gleaned that whites who loved black culture didn’t necessarily understand black people.
Eventually, toward the end of middle school and beginning of high school, Tony and I ran in a coherent circle of friends. Even though I no longer went to Seven Hills, having gone to a less expensive, less diverse, more conservative Catholic high school that had attracted me with dreams of football glory, most of my closest friends remained at the prep school for the city’s elite. Seven Hills was barely a mile down a steep hill along Daniel Drake Park from Brandonburg, where we lived both before and during my mother’s fourth marriage, this time to an arrogant and foolish preacher whom she had known most of her life.
In my early high school years, the second floor of our handsome home played host to the rampant misbehavior of our posse; dropping mushrooms and ecstasy after seeing Magnolia in the cinema or during a long night of The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn followed by a VHS of Aronofsky’s Pi, I became someone my mother wouldn’t have recognized had she the guile to climb the stairs and discover what we were up to. She caught my friends and me stealing her booze after one raid had proven too brazen for her not to notice; ever the entrepreneur, she extorted money out of each of my friends in order to replenish her stock, threatening to expose them to their parents if they didn’t come through. We stopped partying at my house.
My friends and I prided ourselves on being edgy intellectuals, dabbling in drinking and drugs, punk shows and Ralph Nader, García Márquez novels and David Fincher movies. Long evenings on the Ludlow strip, a series of hip businesses near the University of Cincinnati in the city’s Clifton district, we would drift from coffee and chess at the old underground location of Sitwell’s Café to an inevitable house party or a night logging around, smoking weed, and watching specialty movies that weren’t quite art, like, say, Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, over and over and over. Eventually, as seniors, we rounded up enough people to invest in our own apartment, which we dubbed Party House. Despite earning the highest grade point average I ever did in high school, I spent most of my senior year in front of a television at Party House, playing Grand Theft Auto and watching Tom Ty
kwer movies. We grew weed in the closet of the sole bedroom, often smoking it out of a six-foot bong to better take years off our lives, and hung an American flag upside down with an anarchy sign written on it. It was a slice of gutter paradise.
Across many years class meant little to us—we were just boys having an adolescence together—even as its portent grew more obvious. Tony attended private and pricey Sarah Lawrence for his Westchester County college education, while I opted for the nearby film conservatory at SUNY Purchase, to which I still tithe my wages while teaching a new generation of future Purchase debtors how to dream in cinematic terms. Tony grew into the type of rich midwestern white man on the coast who, despite his station in life, would vote for liberals with some ounce of self-pride, “loyalties to his class,” as he would have it, be damned; he lionized his father—a ranching and hunting enthusiast from the South—for bucking the trend of the wealthy and southern to support Democrats as well.
This difference in relative economic and social advantage didn’t weigh on us sitting through Hype Williams’s Belly and Keenen Ivory Wayans’s Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood three times each, listening to John Coltrane or Motown albums all day while mutually slacking. These were activities Tony would participate in happily, without irony, by himself. Beneath his cool patrician vibe was a genuinely searching and tortured and open person with whom I shared a lot of laughs and from whom I learned multitudes. I miss him.
But the gaps between us, cracks of misunderstanding in which the entire relationship would become mired, began to overwhelm the thing before I ever had the life experience or self-awareness to bring language to how unnerved I was often made to feel. His parents, generous and hospitable upon every visit I’ve ever made to their home, were the type of white liberals who might bemoan the presence of young, unrefined-looking black boys walking through their tony part of Cincinnati’s east side. Tony’s brother, who took to dealing dope in high school and college like the rap stars he idolized, lived largely without fear of life-altering repercussions while doing so, despite several run-ins with the law. Tony confided his parents’ behavior to me with a look that asked, “Can you really blame them?” That these same people could visit me, a Negro child, while I was sick and potentially dying with liver illness, never failing to drive me home or feed me or make me welcome in their home as a high schooler, speaks to just how deep is this mess that we’re all in together.
I spent the better part of my time in high school perfecting how to use drugs on the third floor of their hilltop white frame house, taking shelter from the state-sponsored danger that awaits the black drug user in the streets of the city’s west and central districts. I felt perfectly at home with privilege. I realized mine was more precarious than most, but not here. There was safety in those walls, on that champagne-colored carpet of the study and game room where I watched so many championship fights over the years, blunt smoke wafting in the air.
In college, Tony and I grew closer still, seeing each other as somehow more reliable than the other people in our circle from back home, many of whom were fleeing Cincinnati for the coasts, but with what we saw as less aplomb. Our Westchester County campuses were only twenty minutes from each other by car or forty-five by public transport, so early in our sophomore year we began to hang out on weekends, swapping party invites and shoot-the-shit sessions. He was not a prankster and neither was I, but a good laugh was our backbone and we shared them frequently, while he crashed on my dorm room couch during Purchase’s music festival, Culture Shock, or during a sojourn to Madison Square Garden to watch our first title fight together. Planning trips to see a film in the city or mutually crash at Ray’s Lower Manhattan New School dorm was easy, but talking about sex, as opposed to mere attraction and desire, was not; I was far too inexperienced, having just lost my virginity the year before, not to feel threatened by him.
During Christmas break that year, he slept with a girl I had a crush on. Although the feelings of betrayal that I had toward him persisted for years, by the time we moved in together I thought I was past it. I had met Rolanda, a guest in those tony environs who would become my first serious girlfriend, during one of those Sarah Lawrence visits, and the summer before Tony and I began living together, I had a monthlong fling with his most serious ex-girlfriend, a working-class Irish girl from Cincinnati’s west side who was the child of Jehovah’s Witnesses and whom Tony’s parents had briefly considered putting through Sarah Lawrence so they could remain together. It was a comeuppance that he accepted with what I took for maturity when I told him, later that year, what had happened. We were even.
Yet for all his wonderful qualities, ones that made me love him, such as his modesty—he liked to remark how he hadn’t bought a new shirt in years—this was a person for whom entitlement was the air he breathed so naturally that he seemed to hardly notice it. He proceeded through life with the awareness that no financial calamity was likely to threaten his ability to eat and lie down somewhere comfortable, and seemed, because of this, in no great hurry to make his own way. He knew where entitlement ended, though. This lover of jazz and boxing and ’60s soul could passively assume in conversation over dinner with a mutual friend that of course black celebrity X or Y “would squander all his money, they always do.” No one seems to call this “double consciousness,” but someone should.
166 Throop Avenue
When I discovered that 166 Throop, despite what the realtors and the Caucasian people had told us, was in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 2004 was long over and I didn’t live there anymore. I remember thinking it could be worse for the three months that I did, grateful to have my first nonparental or university dwelling regardless of its location or condition. Two bedrooms for three of us—the Serbian and I would take the rooms while my classmate M&M would camp out on an airbed in the unventilated, windowless “living” room, drinking himself to sleep with PBRs in between best boy electric jobs, often while I watched blaxploitation movies on the TV next to his bed or fucked Rolanda, my girlfriend at the time, in the adjacent room. Our rent was $1,200 a month, and for the largest room in the joint, I paid $450 of it.
It was often an oppressive place, 166 Throop, but it proved liberating in ways I couldn’t have imagined at the time; the summer I lived there was the last I ever spent without Internet service. I had resolved to pass the summer reading serious black literature, watching blaxploitation movies, and being as off the grid as possible. Despite this desire to live simply and contain myself to my thoughts, it was the first summer I had a cell phone; Don DeLillo novels and inconclusive brain cancer studies had taught me they were bad news, but my mother insisted. I split time between our crib and Rolanda’s, a third-floor walk-up on South Second Street in Williamsburg. When we met the previous winter, she had been living on the waterfront in Manhattan, just off the sleepy eastern edge of the Financial District, in a gargantuan rent-controlled loft. It belonged to a university professor who was traveling on a sabbatical that, much to her chagrin, didn’t last forever. Her new crib was in a somewhat dingy Williamsburg two-bedroom for which she and her gay actor roommate, pale and fresh from Interlochen, paid $1,400; at the time, I thought that was a fortune for two people.
Multiple generations of a Puerto Rican family inhabited the various floors of Rolanda’s building. The woman to whom she paid her rent was always welcoming when we’d glimpse her in the stairwell, her husband the same, although I could see in the occasional sideways glance that she was unsure of our presence there. This woman and her family, remnants of Los Sures, the community that had begun moving into these brick walk-ups in the 1940s, had no reason to doubt that we came as friends. At least as long as she owned the building there was comfort in the fact that Southside wouldn’t be completely ceded to hipsters, although if she rented exclusively to them, a potential windfall awaited. The solemnity on her face, how it would return after sharing a wooden smile on the landing or near the gate out front, spoke of a community that wasn’t as lucky,
one that would simply disperse, regardless of which home owners won and which renters were cast aside.
Rolanda was tall and pretty, blue-eyed and openfaced, her hair dyed a pale pumpkin shade that summer. We’d go see Michael Haneke movies and hold hands, and there was none of the awkwardness I had come to expect with some white girls who were always looking at me and thinking of how to couch it to their daddy. The most honest of them would foreground their ignorance and/or fear of Negroes plainly, such as a blonde coworker from my hometown who’d touched my hair during our shifts selling tickets at an art-house movie theater in the Cincinnati suburbs the summer previous, marveling at the coarse texture of my hair. She only stopped when I scolded her, angrily. In front of a child who was about to see an Eddie Murphy kids’ movie with his spectacles-wearing, ruddy-faced grandmother, I asked her, “What am I, your Negro petting zoo?”
A decade later, after intermittent bad sex and a few tears, the same coworker said flatly, “My parents will never accept you,” as if reading the news, a difficult truth undergirded with nonchalance.
Back then I didn’t give two shits about Bed-Stuy, the community where I was actually living; I did not care to know that Bed-Stuy contained one of the nation’s first free Negro communities in the first half of the nineteenth century, that parts of it had been Harlem before Harlem. What I did care to know, due to concern for my physical safety heightened by exposure to a million television news segments, newspaper stories, rap songs, commonly used epithets, and, most significantly, the painful indoctrination into Negro American fear, handed down to me by my loving and forever concerned mother, was that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) projects to the west and east and south of my apartment were foreboding, overwhelmingly filled with the dangerous and needy. This is what America tells you.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 2
