I had to keep making a living, especially without the production company money covering my rent at Taaffe Place every month. Although I wasn’t a technician, I took jobs on sets in my spare time, driving trucks for $100 a day on bad indie movies that would sell at Sundance for millions, or assistant directing disastrous short films for first-timers dipping into their trust funds for a taste of the indie film life. I still did work from time to time at a production company, driving around the art director of a Manoel de Oliveira movie as he scouted Staten Island locations, or serving as a production assistant on a CNN commercial, but money was getting increasingly short and my mother was, at the time, increasingly unwilling to help. Another executive at the production company was also a journalist who ran one of the more respected magazines covering the world of independent film. He offered to let me write for his publication and I accepted, but I wasn’t aware at the time that this wasn’t actually a job, it was simply a means of acquiring free travel and lodging in exotic places by writing for the house organ of a nonprofit. It was just a more glamorous means of scraping by.
It was a barrel-chested bouncer and social worker named Bo, a fellow resident of 227–241 Taaffe, who became the second person after my Independence Day assailant to tell me we didn’t live in Clinton Hill. “This is Bed-Stuy,” Bo said, a cynical smile crossing his lips as I pondered this. It was probably sometime in late 2006. He had told others, mostly whites who had recently moved into the building, this same thing many times, explaining that calling this block of Taaffe Place “Clinton Hill” was just a branding effort. In those dreary middle aughts, Bed-Stuy was propelled endlessly back into itself by Craigslist housing ads. Every year, before Bed-Stuy was hip among the developer set and the people they shepherded into gussied-up brownstones and recently converted lofts, another street on Bedford-Stuyvesant’s western or northern fronts would be digitally rechristened as part of a different neighborhood entirely. Bed-Stuy was a place that many Caucasians, aware of its reputation and history only from rap songs and television news crime reports, didn’t want to live.
Bo and I never really became close the entire time I lived there, never stepped into each other’s home; he nodded even when he was in a hurry and generally was happy to share an elongated anecdote in front of the building or outside the elevator, but wasn’t interested in playing host or coming over to watch the game. He was an excellent talker, loquacious and descriptive, but he carried a sadness with him, a sense that he was witnessing a transformation he wasn’t comfortable with. Bo was the first person I met who was actually from Bed-Stuy, who had grown up just a stone’s throw away, and who was one of only a couple of black men I got to know on the block of “newly renovated lofts,” the other being Mike Rolston, a filmmaker and electrician who lived down the hallway from Tony and me on the seventh floor and eventually moved into a houseboat on the Hudson River. He doesn’t have to worry about being a gentrifier there.
Back then, the idea that an amorphous, systematic conspiracy concerning the geography of central Brooklyn was afoot seemed implausible. I wasn’t deluded enough to think that lofts inhabited by kids with mysteriously inexhaustible checking accounts and spliff-smoking wannabe filmmakers had always existed on Taaffe Place, across the street from the Lafayette Houses and catercorner to the police station where Spike Lee shot exteriors for the underrated Brooklyn hood/cop/drug/redemption Harvey Keitel drama Clockers (that cop station rests on the Clinton Hill side of Classon Avenue, BTW), but what was wrong with them being here now? I didn’t much think about it, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it.
My roommate spent increasingly more time inside our home with his bass, trying to attain perfect pitch by playing incredibly slow chord progressions over and over and over, to the great, unending annoyance of his roommate, who was trying to figure out how the hell to make a living. He suggested, in low mumbles over his cereal, that he was looking for a job, but the vulnerability that we had shared with each other in shards throughout our late boyhood, despite the tough, taciturn personae we also sometimes wore, began to disappear, replaced by an unrelenting sense that our selves lacked worth without vocation. There was never any specificity to his desire in those years, and for someone as driven as myself, I judged him, seeing it as a waste of his advantages. I tried to help in whatever small ways my underemployed self could, attempting to have him meet one person or another who worked at cool culture industry company X or Y.
Underneath our civility, however, I began to feel a slow, creeping desire to avoid him, to keep away the great silences that suddenly began to mar our time together. His subtle dominance of our living space, engendered by the two-thirds of our rent his parents were paying, floated just under the surface of our domestic unease, casting a terrible pall over our conversations. Everything that had once been easy between us became stilted, loaded, a dizzying vertigo that caused me to choose my words carefully and feel easily embarrassed—was I ashamed of the entry-level labor I was doing, work that Tony had the luxury to avoid? Not necessarily, but I began to feel that the world was not designed for us to have anything resembling equality of opportunity in our pursuits. I don’t doubt that Tony knew this. He was, then and now, too wise not to, even if he doesn’t see anything particularly wrong with that. One night, he came home drunk and, after a conversation about a Thomas Mann novel of outsized fortunes and destinies born into instead of made, he said, savagely, “Do you think it’s any other way now?”
It shook me, that assertion, but of course he was right—regardless of the possibilities the wealthiest country in the history of the world provided for transcendence, his fortunes would be tied to, in no small part, his family wealth, just as mine would be tied to my own family’s fortunes, ones that would not prove immune to the tumult the housing market was just beginning to undergo at that time. America was, we were discovering—regardless of the increasingly porous cultural divisions between high-, middle-, and lowbrow—no longer so good at class mobility. According to a study by Pablo Mitnik and David Grusky at Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, “the amount of money one makes can be roughly predicted by how much money one’s parents made, and that only gets truer as one moves along the earnings spectrum,” claimed The Atlantic in 2015. This seemed obvious to me a decade earlier. Tony’s assertion that “It’s their money” wasn’t quite true in the America we lived in—when the rubber hit the road, the real advantages of familial wealth were ones that he was just beginning to experience, his debt-free $50,000-a-year college education being just the tip of the iceberg.
At first it really didn’t seem possible that he would never get a job in the two years I lived there, or even so much as appear to be looking for one, eventually allowing the sheer fact of his effortless affluence to overwhelm our shared space and, in the end, our friendship. For one thing, I didn’t think his parents would allow it. I saw the same looks of exasperation on their faces that Christmas holiday when they asked me about his job prospects as they had shown during the previous fall, when his mother came to New York for Tony’s birthday and treated us to steak at Peter Luger. I would suggest, disingenuously but with unfailing faux sincerity whenever she would pull me aside, that he was working really hard to find a job. Making some reference to what a terrible job market it was for millennials would usually cinch it; Tony could leave in good stead yet again, free to play his bass or listen to soul records or sip Sapporos while reading Thomas Mann novels with a friend to vouch for his tough luck.
When I would see posts about internships at The Village Voice I would print them and give them to him or leave them on our kitchen table. They would sit there for days, unfussed at. Where was the good ol’ boys’ club when you needed it? Surely this intelligent young man, who read real literature and thought about things with seriousness, would find his way in the world. Regardless, such proximity to the advantages of time undisturbed by the pressure to earn, a luxury he had and I didn’t, began to weigh heavily on me.
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p; I continued to try to help him find work but I spent more time wishing I simply had the support to attempt to make meaningful art of my own. I had produced a short—poorly—late that winter, by the friend whom I was speaking to when I was mugged the summer before, but it hadn’t gone well and I was increasingly relying on cheap anesthetization to put up with all the newfound stresses of adulthood in the unforgiving city. I found affordable weed (my drug of choice since a dangerous bout with acute liver failure in high school made alcohol anathema) wherever I could—in fact, I couldn’t sleep without it. I’m not quite sure when I became so dependent; it more or less coincided with the onset of adulthood.
While collecting the mail from the lobby of my building, I noticed some very young brown children across the street. The boys wore white T-shirts and carried themselves in a way that suggested they were harder than they had any business being at their age. When I saw them conduct a transaction from the opposite sidewalk one afternoon later that summer, I had an inkling they carried. One day I worked up the gumption to approach one of them. “You got herb?” I asked gently as he sat on a nearby stoop. He eyed me hard, his irises green like mine, his skin a delicate caramel. He nodded and told me to call him Little G.
The boy couldn’t have been more than thirteen. He was probably no younger than ten. I could never really tell and I was certainly too afraid to ask. He didn’t say much, this young yellow child. I couldn’t stop looking at him, probably in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable; he looked so much like me. It was as if I were scooping buds from a skinny younger brother of mine, one that as an only child I had never had. He was too young and inexperienced to know the danger he was constantly putting himself in, dealing nickels to loft-dwelling gentrifiers and bangers and desperate folks like me less than a hundred yards from a police precinct. Yet he took on the air of an experienced hustler, projecting an edgy confidence you knew was not hard-won but a mere pose, out of a desperate need to reject the fears that a childhood in the projects brings, let alone those known to affect the willful, abject criminal, servicing the desires of the emergent leisure class just to get over.
I was so relieved to meet someone who would sell me nickels; Little G remained my primary pot dealer for much of that year. I occasionally saw another guy named Clay, a Jewish teenager in a Yankees hat who spoke a thick, almost throwback New Yorkese. In a year in which I swooned in and out of poverty despite my lush, subsidized-for-one-tenant-only pad, I was rarely able to justify the twenty dollars for his product. I’d known him for years, always walking his fluffy dog while he dealt; he lived with his mom in the Fifties, amid a row of elaborate old town houses and gleaming apartment buildings with red-coated doormen, just north of the United Nations headquarters on the far east side of Manhattan. I’d have to go there to score his product, which reserved it for outings that demanded Manhattan-quality headies.
Clay would meet me on the street, walking his dog the whole time as he spoke a mile a minute, slipping the pot into my jacket pocket while I retrieved a twenty-dollar bill. One time, while waiting for Clay on the sidewalk in the middle of a winter snowstorm, I ran into Gordon Parks, the revered African-American photographer and the first black man to direct a studio film, walking toward his home. I stopped him—we shared a birthday, after all—and quickly told him of my great admiration. “Thank you, young man,” he said, but before he could ask me about myself or I could tell him about how we shared a birthday, Clay came barreling across the street and I had to end the conversation to settle my fix.
I worried about Little G, sure, and knew not how to process the marked immorality of buying drugs from a child this young, regardless of my poverty. The Ryan Gosling character from Half Nelson, a dope-addicted youth basketball coach and junior high school teacher, was a sorry one to identify with, but identify I did. He’s genial, handsome, and reckless in all the same ways I aspired to be at the time. When he gets caught freebasing in a school bathroom by one of his players after a game, a twinge of guilt always touches my features. The movie, which won Gosling an Oscar nomination, climaxes with him in a seedy motel room buying drugs off that same youngster, played by the remarkable Shareeka Epps, who has been needled into the underworld by Anthony Mackie’s pusher-with-a-conscience. I always thought a less charming but more honest actor would have made that character more ambiguous and potentially unlikable; regardless, I had the pervading sense we were in the same class of douche bag.
Little G, like most children his age, wasn’t reliable, and caution didn’t come easy to him. At first he refused to come up into the building to sell, afraid as he was of leaving a well-traversed street in broad daylight to be caught on camera in the confines of an empty hallway. I eventually convinced him the latter was a safer bet than his normal spots. He was frequently late and his weeks-long disappearances caused me to occasionally call one of the Mexican delivery services that ran through much of the city, the ones I swore off because of their less-than-stellar quality. Getting high on marijuana in Brooklyn in this era meant, without the capital to consistently afford the high end, indoor-grown delivery weed produced and sold by middle-class, mostly white New Yorkers in Manhattan and the nicer precincts of Brooklyn, that I was forced to choose between black juvenile delinquency or murderous Mexican cartels. Bad faith everywhere you looked.
Eventually I started going to an illegal speakeasy I was introduced to by some tatted-up girl I met outside of Sputnik, where a surer bet was to be found on a nightcap spliff. That night she took me to 729 Myrtle, where, behind a black security screen door and below a bank of discreet video cameras, was the door to Percy’s, an unlicensed bar where one could watch the NBA playoffs and buy cocaine, bud, and spirits. It was the underground Cheers of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most nights the crowd was relatively sparse, though on certain weekend late nights one could find a hundred cokeheads and sundry onlookers in that illegal bar, the smell of crack wafting out of the bathrooms, trannies and johns and gangbangers all operating in harmony. Although I became something of a regular, I was always a bit terrified when I entered on the busier nights, assuming in my infinite bad luck that I would be there when the place finally got raided.
Although upon entering one encountered a three-hundred-pound, thirty-something, hard-eyed black man standing by a bank of security monitors, Percy’s was run by elderly Negroes who qualified for social security and seemed like odd, gentle survivors from the blaxploitation movies I had endlessly pontificated about to unsuspecting classmates in college. I bought weed from them regularly, especially a woman who would sit in the corner and squint until I leaned over and asked her for a twenty. Frank White, who had taken my job at the production company, went even more often than I did, the rare white regular in that mostly brown milieu.
I thought often of Little G when I would see him hustling out on the street. I gradually stopped buying from him once I found Percy’s, but would still see him wandering around the neighborhood from time to time, and witness his transactions with others in gloom, ruminating upon what few opportunities the child had. Was school a place where, as it was for me, the opportunity to learn and grow was made to seem commonplace for him? Did he have parents who went to PTA meetings and who read to him at night while he drifted off into Gulf War nightmares fueled by the CNN-fed triumphalism of the first Bush era? Did he see white people as his peers or his oppressors? Were there other plausible options for him, from his point of view, besides dealing dope before he could legally drive? Who took care of him in that ramshackle building across the street from my loft, near where he spent his days ducking in and out of the gentrifiers’ lobbies, slinging bags in stairwells?
Little G faded away before I had the chance to figure it out. I stopped seeing him effortlessly roam the project courtyards, the ones my roommate always declined to cross, regardless of whether it was the quickest way to our apartment from the G train and despite the fact that the police station was always in view. A rumor of juvie caught wind among Little G’s friends from the block. A bri
ef sighting as I walked along the projects, north on Classon, cops across the street at the Eighty-eighth Precinct joking on the sidewalk behind me, made me think not. His eyes, green as mine, flashed toward me for a second, a wetness in them I’d never seen. I forced a smile, but G didn’t return it. And then he was gone.
I had by far a nicer apartment than any of my friends and I was miserable whenever I was there. It felt like it was hardly mine at all even if half the furniture had come with me from home in a giant haul from one of my hoarder mother’s troves of model-home-ready furnishings. The nicest items had been ordered from catalogs by Tony’s mother; the sinewy South Asian rug, the coffee table Tony insisted we use coasters on, the elegant black bookshelves and dinner table, the green Danish couch that was ultimately broken at a party I held, while Tony was out of town, by a drunk woman, also from Cincinnati, whose body had come between us several New Year’s Eves before.
Still, while underemployed and paying my own rent and eating the cheapest food I could muster, I too had something of a safety net. In an emergency, my mother could, and would, and did, in those less strident years, send me money, her staunch desire to see me grow independent of her out in the world giving way to a form of financial sympathy engendered by unconditional love. She sent me several thousand dollars that year, enough for me to make my rent many times when the till ran nearly dry. A shame in my heart, engendered by the help from home, lingered still. Depression would reign during these seasons, even as I thought, with a measure of unchecked optimism, that surely one day soon I would be able to make a living in the movies. It must have been even worse for Tony, who completely relied on such assistance from our earliest time together as postgraduates. But when I would glimpse an errant ATM receipt he’d leave on the countertop that separated our kitchen from the living room and see that he had $10,000 in his account following a $200 withdrawal, the difference in what constituted “assistance from home” for both of us became overwhelmingly apparent and my sympathy for him dried up.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 7
