As the year wore on, most of the free time I did have I passed smoking weed in my stairwell or Fort Greene Park, all in order to avoid the increasingly melancholic vibe of our apartment. For the bulk of that summer, I walked from Bed-Stuy to Manhattan’s Chinatown, an hour away, in order to eat lunch. I couldn’t afford subway fare, refused to ask my mother for (more) money that she wouldn’t give me anyway, and Eldridge Street’s Dumpling House was the only place I knew where I could eat a fully satisfying lunch for $1.75. I’d pass Pratt Institute and the increasingly gentrifying precincts of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee’s old office, a converted firehouse, sits on the corner of the neighborhood’s grand park. Sauntering past the Carol’s Daughter outlet not far from it, I imagined I’d buy my mother, or a wife I’d have someday, body-care products when scurrying for a last-minute gift from the parkside residence I’d have one day. Turning toward the bridge once I reached Flatbush, sailing near Junior’s and in the process encountering the smell of cheesecake wafting from the doors, the first pangs of exhaustion would set in—I was terribly out of shape back then; the poverty was always forcing me to settle for Kennedy Fried Chicken for dinner. I’d enter the colossus of Manhattan from its southeastern flank, seeing the towering city in front of me for the twenty minutes I’d spend walking over the Manhattan Bridge, B and D trains fluttering by. Once I descended into Chinatown I’d go north on the Bowery, past the shop where I used to buy Chinese-region DVDs, soaking in Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 long before they were released stateside, and then I’d dart over to Eldridge Street on Grand, passing the pickup soccer games that take place on the pitches within the skinny park that separates Chrystie and Forsyth Streets between Houston and Canal. I ate at Dumpling House on many a summer weekday afternoon, at the lunch counter or on a nearby stoop, trying to figure out how to make a buck or two with a camera and always plotting another film, despite the obviously dire financial straits I was in.
Over time, signaled by the ways in which my roommate and I began to wear kid gloves around each other, neglecting to broach subjects that would summon his thinly veiled shame at being unequipped to find a job that he didn’t feel was beneath him, we stopped hanging out at all. I would go weeks without talking to him, preferring solitude when I could find it in a loft in which you heard everything the other was doing regardless of the drywall. The reality of our disconnection became an altogether undeniable force in our lives, as we grew too far apart to spend nearly any comfortable time together. I would often stay in Harlem at our childhood friend Ray’s roach-infested home or with a film school buddy, a tall, rail-thin, and devastatingly intelligent gay Jew named Jimmy who lived in the spare room of an elderly couple on the Upper West Side. He turned tricks on Craigslist for kicks and spare dollars when we weren’t kvetching about some film or album we found unworthy, two kids who had hardly made a thing. Whatever I could do to absent myself from my “Clinton Hill” apartment, I would.
Tony and I never once admitted to each other that we lived in an overpriced Bedford-Stuyvesant loft, one that was slowly choking away my solvency and our friendship. And I never once admitted, to him or to myself at the time, that despite all this, I loved my roommate, so much. I’d never had a brother, and over a decade he had become one to me. I didn’t want to move out. So I kept borrowing money on credit cards and deferring my student loans. “But now you enter the world a poor Negro for the first time in your life” wasn’t quite true, but lifelines from home were not, unlike Tony’s, seemingly unlimited.
Neither was my shame. In the ’90s, just as my interest in indie film was emerging right along with my mother’s career in real estate development, she would ask me how much I’d need to make a first film. Even in high school, I was savvy enough to say $200,000. She said she’d get it for me; my mother’s prescience didn’t extend to the lean times that would emerge in the housing market in which she planned on making a fortune, times that would permanently shelve that promise. I’m sure she thought, given how everything was growing in those halcyon days of centrist liberalism and cheap debt, that by the time I came of age and transformed my teenage dreams into the legitimate ambitions of a grown man, helping me raise such a sum wouldn’t be difficult.
Acknowledging several realities, not just about geography and history but relative privilege and shared values, was impossible for me to avoid in the long run, but in my unwillingness to confront the obvious at the time, my inability to work up enough gumption to say to my friend, “Look, I’m drowning. Either we find a cheaper place to live, or help me with my rent. I know you can,” I inadvertently doomed any chance of mutual recognition on our part, of the love I had for him growing into the type of friendship I had always imagined for us, gruff old cats like Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, one of our favorite movies, telling ghost-laden stories about the past for a laugh and a sigh.
At the nadir of my postproduction-company-job scouring during the final months with Tony, I had been an overnight production assistant on the first season of I Want to Work for Diddy. My whole job was to stay up all night, in the control room of an unfinished set that was being constructed on the fourth story of a large, ex-industrial building on Duane Street, of which the production had reserved three floors just to stage lights and crafty, wardrobe, and production. The sheer amount of money that went in service of this flimsy and tasteless premise could have funded dozens of indie films, I was sure. It paid me $100 a day to stay up all night and eat snacks. Situated in Tribeca, only a few blocks from where the production company office still was, I’d sneak off to the offices of my former employer and nap on the couch not far from what used to be my desk until dawn came and the possibility of being discovered posed a threat. The one time Sean Combs did visit the set during my stint there, a gleeful panic rose through the entire six-story Tribeca edifice in such a profoundly silly way as to suggest the Christian rapture had dawned on a sect of Satanists.
In the fall of 2007, I temporarily moved out of 227–241 Taaffe Place. Tony and I had a lease, so we moved someone in to sublet while I traveled, but at the time I had no real intention of coming back. I spent a couple of months in Ohio, writing cold pitches to indie film production companies about a movie I wanted to make in Cincinnati, before heading to Martha’s Vineyard, where my aunt had a home and I thought I’d write a Manchurian Candidate–esque thriller set in a future America where war with Iran is imminent and climate change is out of control. When I arrived back in New York just after Thanksgiving, it was to live in Ocean Hill, east of Bed-Stuy, with a film school classmate, his boyfriend, and their leggy, somewhat unhinged performance artist roommate from Florida. Eventually I moved back to 227–241 Taaffe in early 2008, shortly after Obama won the Iowa caucuses.
Tony and I tried again, but the same baggage was there and I couldn’t keep paying $800 a month; it had been over a year since I had stopped getting paid by the production company, and although I was taking on more writing jobs, writing online dispatches from film festivals for Filmmaker magazine and Variety and applying for grants feverishly, I had yet to consistently replace the income. Still, as soon as I moved back in, I spent about $1,200, mostly on credit, making a new short film, an adaptation of a couple of Jonathan Lethem short stories that he was encouraging people to option for free. It was about a couple who speak in metaphors to each other about biospheres being interjected with new elements instead of having the more frank conversation about infidelity that they are avoiding. It wasn’t very good, that film, but it was a strange monument to where I had lived and what had happened to me there. I fled shortly after making it, telling him of my plans only days before, as our communication had grown nonexistent. He didn’t help me move out—sitting in his room petulantly and listening to the sounds of furniture being pushed or hauled—as our place in each other’s life came to an end.
Would it have mattered if we’d known we were in Bed-Stuy? I don’t know. It might not have meant much to me then. But “Clinton Hill” was bulls
hit, so I thought, and Bed-Stuy was a place of black history. Somewhere in that painful time I was beginning to understand that where I lived had an importance beyond what I had previously grasped, one that my relationship with Tony, and our very presence in the space, potentially threatened. When I see Tony on the street now, coming out of a soul food joint on Nostrand or on the opposite side of an F train car, I avoid him. It’s too much to bear, the burden of what Bedford-Stuyvesant revealed about us that we dare not speak of.
551 Kosciuszko Street
When the great recession hit, in the fall of 2008, I was living at 551 Kosciuszko Street, between Malcolm X and Stuyvesant, just a block and a half south of the Bushwick border. My new digs were located in one of the poorest zip codes in the borough. Much of the neighborhood was dominated by a series of decaying row houses and brick walk-ups filled with immigrants from the western hemisphere’s most impoverished countries. I had moved into the four-bedroom town house at the behest of my hard-drinking, New Hampshire–born lighting technician friend—M&M—who had lived with me four summers earlier at 166 Throop. We were talking about “hope” back then, but by the summer before Obama was elected, M&M, who showed promise as an experimental filmmaker in his youth, had given up on making art of his own, having taken on the blue-collar persona of a set electrician. A man who smiled at the mention of twelve-hour turnarounds and dreamed of joining the IATSE Local 52 film and theater technicians union, aesthetics didn’t mean much to him in and of themselves anymore. The sausage making that went into finding someone to believe in and pay for your work wasn’t for him either. The movies will do that to you, break a working-class kid’s heart.
We lived together among an assortment of other clowns from various stages of our lives, throwing raging BBQs and endless poker nights, hosting young actresses for brunch and young actors for opioids and beer. It cost half of what I’d paid in “Clinton Hill,” and, when it was good, I was having double the fun. My apartment no longer took on the air of a mausoleum. The constant, unspoken, low-simmering antagonism that had taken hold of me and my old friend from Cincinnati no longer existed. Now I paid $450 for a basement room with a view into a crummy, rock-strewn backyard and tiny carport. I was content with what my poverty could provide at the time.
A significant contingent of the folks M&M knew in the neighborhood were refugees from post-Katrina New Orleans, crust punk street kids in their early twenties who played brass in renegade Second Line bands, had smelly dogs, and came from broken, impoverished homes. M&M was hosting several of them when I arrived with my truck full of furniture on an early June day. It was a musty space, one a lover of mine would later describe as a place “with dirt on every surface.” A hole had been smashed at about eye level through the drywall on the stairwell landing, the wall darkened and fraying along the half wall that separated the stairwell from the galley kitchen. Sweeping clearly wasn’t much of a priority. The living room ashtray, a large marble affair stationed on a rotting wooden table that was surrounded by well-worn couches, was beyond full and leaking butts.
When I first descended the stairs into the basement where I was renting a room, I immediately came upon a couple lying in a bed under the stairwell, fucking. One of them was the sister of a friend of mine from college. I watched her for a moment, mouth agape, before they noticed me. We both said hi sheepishly, flush with our mutual embarrassment and mild awe. She and her lover—one of the gutter punks, who had a large dog, and a sweet nature, and would be a frequent guest—got decent hastily.
There was another couple sleeping in my room when I arrived, but they, too, dressed and removed themselves, although they didn’t take the filth on the floor with them. I stripped a putrid rug, a thin black affair that was encrusted in grime, swept and mopped the floor. The place had the sensibility of a flophouse but I was, in my youthful naïveté, determined to change that. I remember embracing M&M shortly after I arrived, smiling, and saying, “We’ll class the joint up,” in my most arrogant of tones. My assumption was that it would be effortless.
My room was right next to that belonging to M&M, who bathed sparingly and smoked indoors often. His was an irritable odor of body funk and unwashed clothing, one that often emanated from his room even when he wasn’t around. After a Latin punk rocker who lived in one of the two bedrooms on the first floor moved out under duress, another friend from film school, a chain-smoking, cardigan-wearing Italian-American animator named Kevin, moved in upstairs. Liam, tall, morose, and seemingly both too mature and self-contained for this kind of living arrangement, was next to Kevin in the largest bedroom, the one that had a back entrance leading into the small, weed-strewn yard that my bedroom window looked out on.
Liam was the oldest of us and the longest-standing roommate. He seemed wary of me at first, but soon I learned that this was his way with almost everyone. Over time his presence grew more gregarious and less frequent; he’d stay at his girlfriend’s place for weeks at a time. I had a girlfriend too, a dancer I had met while at SUNY Purchase whom I’d kept running into near our mutual subway stop at Classon Avenue, but by the end of my first summer there we had both cheated on each other and were mutually moving in opposite directions. It was the last relatively sanguine breakup I’ve had, no hurled words or trembling days—besides, I’d moved into a bachelor pad and planned to embrace it.
Or so I thought. That summer, despite the newfound social possibilities, was filled with lonely afternoons. M&M’s friends in these parts, save some of the neighborhood kids he spoke to on the stoop, were uniformly Caucasian, but they were also among the working poor and blended into the neighborhood somewhat seamlessly. Most of the people I was beginning to know in the filmmaking community, the hotshot young producers and directors who went to NYU or Columbia for $150,000 but had no student debt to keep them tethered to creativity-sapping jobs, still found Bedford-Stuyvesant foreign and dangerous. “Discovered a surefire way to make sure people don’t come hang out with you (even when they say they will)—move to Bed-Stuy,” I wrote on my Facebook page late that June.
The local hangout of choice among our crew was Goodbye Blue Monday, on Broadway, underneath the J train. A dark, high-ceilinged affair busy with trinkets, scavenged streetlights, and paintings of gospel choirs in mid-performance, the bar had a gonzo vibe. I was still teetotaling nearly a decade after my bout with liver disease, but the GBM backyard, which had the feel of an active auto garage and a shantytown at the same time, was 420-friendly when the crowd was sparse. The cheap beer and sangria, the only beverages available since it never got a full liquor license, made enough for Goodbye Blue Monday to keep the lights on and keep the rent paid. The owner, Steve, a diminutive, middle-aged hipster with long, graying hair he kept in a ponytail, usually pottered around with both a dour expression and a pit bull in tow. He had opened it as a DIY music venue that would be easy to book and entice all sorts of characters with, from random crusts to Steve Buscemi, who once broke up a fight there while catching a set by his son’s band.
M&M was a regular, drinking his off days away in those dark environs when he wasn’t taking shifts at the bar itself. Our whole social orbit gravitated around the place, with friends from college often drifting through, especially during the summers, when the venue would host daylong parties with dozens of bands, several active DIY grills, and, pre-Tinder, copious possibilities for the random hookup. Deals were easy to come by: Vernon, the boyfriend of my cinematographer from college, bartended there, as did a tall transgender Negro named Reginald. Gifted musicians in their own right, they performed in a band called the Marionettes of Satan. Its reputation steadily grew—by the time I began to go there regularly in those early Obama years, their legend had already been hatched well enough that the New Year’s 2008–2009 party they threw was picked by The Village Voice as the can’t-miss, deep-Brooklyn post-ball-drop freakout of the evening. It was the fourth or fifth party my friends and I went to, long after 2009 had been officially brought in, and the Marionettes were still putting on a remark
able noise show well past 2:00 a.m., with Vernon dancing about rhythmically, intermittently covered by a cape delicately tended to by several women, body pulsating like a punk James Brown. Reginald, who had a greasy seductiveness about him, his heavily processed hair swooshing this way and that, proved to be the ultimate utility infielder for the space, on nights like this tending bar one minute and on stage pounding a keyboard the next.
Having lived in Brooklyn for several years now, I couldn’t have made more than 150 percent of my rent the whole time. Learning to live cheaply and simply was essential. At a greasy-spoon Dominican restaurant on Malcolm X, just a block and a half away, one could get an entire serving of rice, beans, and chicken for $2.50. At Seven Flags, a Jamaican restaurant on DeKalb near its intersection with Malcolm X, a whole meal of oxtail, plantains, rice, and stew peas cost just $5. The proprietor, a skinny man in his forties named Wilson, was a gregarious dreamer. He always talked about how he planned to renovate the place and open up the backyard space for eating and dancing. When he needed the help, in the restaurant’s halcyon days prerecession, he hired not just West Indians but many of the early adopting hipsters, gutter punks and true bohemians and pot dealers, such as Emilia, a green-eyed, gravel-voiced young woman who was one of my many bud dealers for a time.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 8
