This shouldn’t have surprised me. Ninety-five percent of independent movies lose money, even critically successful ones that play at Sundance and sell for millions of dollars. The world of movies I worked in nebulously was equally in flux; I had learned to roll with punches coming from all directions. In the years since I had entered the industry, the old-guard New York indie producers had watched as venture capital and hedge fund investing pulled out of the sector, their sense of a stable livelihood disappearing. By the time Redlegs was released, episodic television was the only growth sector in the industry, and the publications that had devoted themselves to independent film were routinely running episode recaps and clickbait listicles that had little to do with the enduring difficulty of making movies in an unusual way. Anyone who aspired simply to be an uncompromising film artist was being told to drop dead (or get rich) by the official organs of indie film.
Even for those filmmakers whose works premiered at reputable festivals and were acquired by companies whose logo one’s Ohio mother may have seen before a movie she liked at the just-barely-getting-by local art house, the advances were dwindling, the sense that one could really break out seeming ever smaller. Lena had done it, acquiring powerful mentors such as Judd Apatow and leveraging her $25,000 indie movie for more clout within the industry than anyone had ever done before. But she had a sensibility, self-effacing but narcissistic, privileged but portly, postmodern but disarmingly approachable (for whites), that could sell. No one knew it would become a new Brooklyn zeitgeist unto itself, this sensibility of Lena’s, especially Lena herself.
“What I wanted this to be no longer exists,” said a mutual friend and prominent female director, lauded in The New Yorker and most of the publications that matter in indie film, just before her picture won an acting prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. She wanted to be the new Lena, or something akin to that, and had in her short career already made better films than Dunham ever had, but that type of stardom would remain out of reach. There were people that crossed over every year, but the expectation was now that, like Ryan Coogler, they would go make work for the man, somehow rejiggering an ancient franchise like Rocky into a work of personal expression as brand rehabilitation, such as Creed. Selling out had simply become a way of life.
My debut feature film was released on DVD and VOD the following year, after I had moved back to Bed-Stuy, broke again. It fell like a tree falling in an empty forest where no one was around to hear. My writing was appearing in more well-known or respected places, from The Daily Beast to The Brooklyn Rail, but often for amounts that made it impossible to take the subway let alone rent an apartment. The $750 a month I paid to live with Liam, the most stolid and reliable of the roommates at 551 Kosciuszko, and his buddy Simon, also a former Kosciuszko tenant and gifted illustrator, was more than I could really afford. I had squandered my momentum, one agent told me, joining without quite knowing it that list of black directors with promising first features who struggled to leverage them into something bigger. I wasn’t twice as good, but even if I was, would it be good enough?
I knew thousands of filmmakers who would kill to get the reviews I had gotten. One of my actors got an agent and some other film roles. I was suddenly a credible candidate for teaching jobs. But my circumstances had not changed. “Success” wasn’t what I had thought it could be. My life was still not the stuff of those film school brochures. The dream they sold, even for the most successful independent filmmakers, largely didn’t exist anymore.
And I still didn’t have a stable home. When this newest Bed-Stuy dwelling ran its course, it didn’t sting as hard as some of the others; there were no hurled words or quivering days, and not too much avoidance. It was the second Bedford-Stuyvesant and fourth Brooklyn apartment I was thrown out of by a white man, in this case after eight months of intermittent subletting and never being late with the rent. Liam was a good man and a decent roommate, quick-witted and mostly fair, even if he confided to friends and ex-girlfriends of mine that he had fucked me over. When I journeyed back to Ohio for a long stretch of the summer to look after my ailing father—a lifelong smoker and poor eater who didn’t quit cigarettes before or after the double bypass surgery he had in July of that year—the newest subletter, a friend of theirs, took hold of the place and I was asked to leave permanently, cast back into the anxiety and destabilization of the undomiciled. But I was old enough to know that there were no idylls to be had in Bed-Stuy, and happily ripped off some of the subletter’s magic mushrooms with the keys I still had, from the room I still considered mine, while removing my belongings. The dudes doing the evicting were looking out for their own convenience, pursuing the American Way; who was I to blame them, really?
On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, in November 2013, I was an adjunct college professor who relied on food stamps for duck bacon and homegrown kale sandwiches while paying $750 a month for the honor of living with a skinny pot dealer who once dabbled in shady real estate and had deep ties to Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community, a peak oil survivalist from Newton, Massachusetts, with a horror-movie-ready skin problem, and yet another mild-mannered, fair-eyed Cincinnatian.
Everywhere on the streets of Bed-Stuy now, I saw a breed of young upwardly mobile professionals that had strollers and expensive jackets, designer bags, running lycra. A great social experiment was suddenly unfolding in our midst. Restaurants were popping up on Nostrand Avenue that served ten-dollar tater tots and were lauded in The New York Times for their adventurous cocktail lists. Organic markets sprang up where mere bodegas had once stood, seven-dollar breakfast sandwiches the norm. Realty firms such as the Corcoran Group displayed their signs ever more prominently, on an increasing number of the neighborhood’s handsome brownstones.
We seemed to be immune to it at 551 Kosciuszko. I lived with Jews, one of whom had grown up Orthodox and knew the landlord from the Hasidic community. Only within the auspices of their solidarity could I receive a submarket rent in this black part of town anymore. For this I was grateful; while it was a bit ragamuffin, the place had a rough-hewn charm. There was a nice garden in the back of the split-level property. I had the room right near the front door, the only one without a closet; it was listed as the office within a three-bedroom, two-bath, two-story apartment. The four of us paid $2,800 for the place in total and knew it was a pretty good deal. It was also illegal, technically; dwellings of this sort could not contain four people. Neftali, our landlord, was a mild-mannered redheaded Hasidic man who worked with Brooks, the Cincinnatian, at B&H Camera in Hell’s Kitchen. “The nice thing about this place is it’s stable,” said Albert, the pot dealer. “You know he’ll never raise the rent that much.”
I took to the place. Andrew, the survivalist with the bad skin, kept a garden out back of organic vegetables that he almost never harvested. I was happy to pick up the slack, hosting dinner parties powered by the fresh cucumbers and Swiss chard, tomatoes and kale that he grew in our backyard. Albert and I converted the common area into a screening room, painting one whole wall the proper silver color to maximize reflectiveness and purchasing a BenQ projector using Brooks’s discount at B&H. It took us one long afternoon, breezing in and out of the room to the rickety wooden back stairwell that led into the garden to catch some fresh air, Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” emanating in waves from the portable iPhone stereo. We went back and forth over the white wall, trying to achieve just the right even silver sheen to bounce light off. Andrew, the longest-tenured tenant, was nonplussed about the change at first. Despite being consumed with prepping for a dystopian future, he really hated household change. Once the screening room was set up, however, he never failed to happily watch Game of Thrones on the rig whenever he could.
We entertained people on a weekly basis, throwing massive barbecues in the garden, creating a social mix that few in this quickly gentrifying and self-segregating neighborhood would have fathomed. Kids like Rudy, an underemployed Dominican twenty-something who hung out at the barbershop across the stre
et, would tend to a fire that warmed pot-gorging Hasidic guys and prudish Argentinian women, journalists from august magazines and directors of hit movies. Ours was an unusual groove, but we made the most of it, seeing the $750 each of us paid for the $2,800-a-month place as a last refuge amid the storm of rising rents.
At some point in the years previous I had become the stuff of Grover Norquist’s nightmares, scraping by in central Brooklyn with the accoutrements of both the destitute and the refined. The newfound delicacies at the Metropolitan Market—which was a drab, pedestrian ghetto grocer when Tony and I would wander past it in 2006, and had morphed into a place that carried kombucha and kefir in the interim—felt like the only responsible way to spend my welfare money. My $160 in food stamps, increased by the Obama stimulus from $120, went not just to daily sustenance, but to barbecues for dozens of people powered by state-sponsored D’Artagnan duck breast and lamb chops.
I had never had much of a foothold in the middle class as an adult, chasing the hazy dream of making a living directing movies, but that fall I saw the glimpse of one down a corridor I had studiously avoided. Based largely on the critical success Redlegs had received, I was asked to teach at my alma mater, SUNY Purchase. The adjunct position called for me to co-teach the senior-level production course in which the BFA thesis films were made, and paid $9,000 for the whole year, just little enough for me to stay on food stamps. I took it in a heartbeat, just like I said I never would.
Tony would appear in front of me from time to time, on the streets of Bed-Stuy or in front of a café in Bushwick, on the F train toward Manhattan or next to the elliptical machines at the Bed-Stuy YMCA. We’d generally ignore each other, although at the YMCA that was too hard, so we’d make terse if seemingly friendly conversation before going back to ignoring each other. He was mustached early that fall, heavier in that way men get when they eat potatoes and wheat. We were standing on the stoop of his building, one his parents had in the five years since we stopped living together bought for him to reside in and manage near the corner of Jefferson and Bedford Avenues. He had just turned thirty and his brother, in town from Cincinnati, insisted we all get together. We were uncomfortable. The booze, at a ’70s-themed dive bar called One Last Shag, had helped. But by the time we got to his property, things had gently soured again.
He told me, with a weird matter-of-fact quality, “If blacks just stopped shooting each other, we’d have a murder rate that was the same as Sweden’s.” It was a little under a year after Jordan Davis was killed by a white man for playing his music too loud, a little less than a year before Eric Garner was choked to death by a white cop trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes a short drive away from us, in Staten Island. His brother, who is, beyond being a much bigger hip-hop fan than I, set to inherit the family’s multimillion-dollar real estate and plasma center fortune and collects the rent of Tony’s tenants at his Ohio office, echoed his sentiments. They continued belaboring this point, which we may have gotten to via gun control or some other moribund political topic, for some time, long enough to actively bore Tony’s newest blonde girlfriend. When she asked to go back inside, Tony complied, adding a “just saying,” as he went back in, absentmindedly accidentally locking his brother and me out of the building as we continued smoking a joint.
We rang and rang the doorbell, but when neither Tony nor his girlfriend returned, I left the ex–dope pusher and budding real estate entrepreneur with his equally blonde girlfriend on the stairwell and sauntered in a subtle disquiet back to my own imperiled Bed-Stuy dwelling. Walking through the cool early night, I thought a lot about the ignorance I had just witnessed. These were crimes, “black on black,” that were often committed by broken people who are largely motivated by fear and rage and hopelessness and material desperation. The materially and spiritually oppressive policies and mores of white men concerning this country’s Negroes had nothing to do with any of that fear and rage and hopelessness, went the logic I had heard from my well-meaning friends, people who had never known the petty unfairness of class from the bottom or the middle, let alone the societally enforced dread of growing up poor and brown in our most dangerous inner cities. Neither did I, of course. But, even if I didn’t know that life from experience, I knew its contours intimately and had begun to choose solidarity instead of aspiration. To refuse the “loyalties of my class,” as Tony would have once put it. Problem was, I didn’t know what my class was anymore.
The lovers at the center of Shaka King’s wonderful and unfortunately titled film Newlyweeds, which opened that fall I lived at 730 DeKalb, are young, black dreamers of Bed-Stuy. The two are flatmates drifting through a romance both chemical and genuine: Amari Cheatom’s Lyle is a repo man for a rent-to-own electronics and appliance store, while Trae Harris’s Nina is a museum tour guide; both spend most of their adult lives stoned. He’s a little angry and she’s not; neither of them, it turns out, is a particularly good listener (she dreamily talks of going to the Galápagos, for instance—Lyle isn’t savvy enough to realize she’s serious). Despite this, they’re funny together and create a blazed-out cocoon where they can mutually blot out the troublesome world around them. There is plenty to blot out.
Class tensions exist on the periphery of the relationship. She’s a member of the black bourgeois of Brownstone Brooklyn and he is not. The unspoken context of much of their interpersonal troubles throughout the picture, especially those pertaining to her Cosby-ready Brooklynite parents, is that his work and class background are somehow beneath her. They proceed with their affairs, undaunted by this possibility until the law’s dark hand descends on both of them for blunders that bespeak not just the consequences of pot on otherwise nimble minds, but also the lot of any two young black people caught in a justice system that now often functions as a revenue generator for the prison industrial complex. The two face a crossroads long prescribed, and not just by her penchant for bringing by seemingly affable scholarly brothers who hit on her, or her inability to keep her fresh-baked pot brownies out of the hands of nosy grade-schoolers on a museum tour.
The movie asks the question: do the ties that bind these young potheads, for better and for worse, appear stronger than the forces of increasingly entrenched economic immobility that might otherwise drive them apart? Toward the end, the narrative eventually forces them to ask these questions of themselves in a series of quite beautiful scenes that are simultaneously satisfying and ambiguous. Even if they do remain together, what future do they have? By film’s end, our heroes, like most young black couples in Bed-Stuy, don’t have a definitive answer and neither do we.
While Nina has the support structure of a traditionally middle-to-upper-middle-class black family to lean on, Lyle has none of this, and is subtly looked down upon by Nina’s elders for it. After watching this film, you’re inclined to ask, “Are black people looking out for each other in Obama’s America, regardless of class and creed?” What new horizon could possibly await Lyle? He’s not a particularly cunning or deft character, one whose entire conception of adult happiness revolves around marijuana, but is nevertheless honest and compassionate, someone who tries—often with disastrous results—to give the benefit of the doubt to poor people whose debt-laden goods it’s his job to take. This is a man who, at sixty, if the world continues as it is these days, will need basic income guarantees to support himself; the skills he’s acquired will surely be automated in the years to come. He lives in a borough that will soon be beset by the rising oceans. He is, in effect, fucked. With all of this to worry about, he still must also be concerned with his liberty being taken, all because he likes to inhale the smoke of a naturally grown and remarkably popular plant while living in a brown body.
In these dying days of marijuana prohibition, when even John McCain can muse on national TV about the possibility of the war on marijuana being abandoned (he dare not speak of disastrous consequences for large swathes of his fellow citizens directly), Barack Obama, former middle-class member of a stoner circle called th
e “Choom gang,” still believes, at least publicly, that people like Lyle and Nina belong in jail. Of course, a reasonable person must assume in order to retain their sanity that he doesn’t actually believe that. It’s less depressing to assume that he just doesn’t find it politically expedient to claim he doesn’t. But this might have been the least of our disappointments at the time.
As good as he was at allowing us to imagine a better future, at least way back then (way back in 2008!), Barack Obama was incapable of leading us there. Or at taking stands that were the logical and difficult extension of his pretenses toward justice (legal, economic, global) and inclusion and a better world for all. Nowhere in the homilies of ’08 do I recall hearing about unaccountable drone warfare and southern blacks being unable to share in the benefits of the Affordable Care Act because it didn’t protect them from the malfeasance of their state legislatures. These were things I had, by casting a ballot twice for Barack Obama and progressive legislators, imagined I was voting for. In the specter of the obfuscatory and naked racist nonsense propagated by Americans who still consider themselves “conservative,” it’s easy to forget the hope of those halcyon days of 2008, especially since I was high for most of it. Now it’s almost like all of us have forgotten to believe in our ability to effect change in a profound way, to reach for utopia in our time. We also do this, the forgetting, at our great peril.
But not Neil Drumming. He remembers. In his debut feature film, Big Words, a dramedy about three ex-rappers that had come out the previous July from black cinema darling Ava DuVernay’s African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, the filmmaker grapples with that historic day and night when more than a hundred million of us turned out to the polls to defeat a failed status quo and made Barack Obama the first nonwhite president of the United States. Drumming examines that day by meditating on the lives of three mildly broken-spirited black men of Brooklyn, each of them struggling with or making excuses for ignoring Election Day 2008 in Kings County. This proves a valuable way to frame a narrative about the difficulties of overcoming the past and of forging new identities for yourself when you’re an American black man.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 12
