Bob Bartley held my résumé in his hands. I feared he would ask me about socialism, taxes, trickle-down economics. I would then face a choice: I could either tell him what I thought about these things, whereupon he would refuse to hire me to work on the Leisure & Arts page, or I could betray my principles, such as they were, and lie. I’d been here before, and I knew which path I’d choose.
He did not ask me about these things. We talked about Minnesota and Iowa, where, it turned out, we had both lived as boys. He’d been born in southwest Minnesota but grew up mostly in Ames, Iowa, while I’d been born in Ames, Iowa, and grew up mostly in southwest Minnesota. This struck me as appropriate, our moving in opposite directions at the beginning of our lives—me upward and to the left on the map, him downward and to the right.
Bob Bartley asked me only one serious question, with two leading follow-ups: What is your ambition in life? Do you, for instance, want to be a reporter? Or do you want to be editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal?
I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a reporter, especially not at the Wall Street Journal, where many reporters covered a single industry (airlines, pharmaceuticals) or even a single company (General Motors, Microsoft), had minimal opportunities to afflict the comfortable and even fewer to comfort the afflicted, and never detached themselves from their cell phones. Even though a part of me did want to be editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, which was the same thing as saying I wanted to be the most important person at the world’s most important publication, I knew I’d never get that chance, because I didn’t believe any of the things Bob Bartley believed. I figured I’d have to say something completely harmless, though not without a hint of some trivial ambition.
I said, No, I want to write historical fiction.
My answer pleased him, as I’d figured it would. It wasn’t long before I was told the job was mine.
When I moved to the Leisure & Arts page, I assumed I’d have no personal contact with the editorial writers, but my cubicle was situated smack in the midst of theirs. A couple of them came forward to welcome me, but most of them did not. The ones who welcomed me overlooked the fact that my politics were repugnant. Those who did not welcome me could not overlook that fact. Admittedly, by hanging posters of Emma Goldman and Ralph Nader in my cubicle, I made it a hard fact to overlook.
Though I had little in the way of social interaction with the editorial writers, I began to read their pieces very closely, sometimes even dipping into the archives to sample their obsessions over the decades. They wrote with the zeal of converts, as if they’d all been communists in their youth, and each of them rode a favorite right-wing hobbyhorse into the ground, month after month, year after year: not only cutting taxes and stockpiling weapons but the treachery and moral lassitude of the Palestinians, the deleterious effects of the 1960s on American moral values, the heroic necessity of Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship in crushing democratic socialism in Chile. The collective voice of the newspaper—the unsigned editorial—was always the furthest to the right of the range of beliefs held by the editorial board members, no accident on Bob Bartley’s part. He held the most extreme position on almost every issue and, because he couldn’t write three editorials a day himself, took great care in his choice of lieutenants. His fondness for partisan hacks led him to hire people who could just as well have been Republican speechwriters, as indeed some of them had been (Peggy Noonan) or soon would be (Bill McGurn).
For the most part, Bob Bartley held meetings only with people who shared his opinions, in a little conference room near my cubicle—meetings with men like Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who wrote the most famous volume of pornography during the 1990s, and William Bennett, the moralist who gambled away, at the tables in Vegas, the earnings from his books and speeches, which proselytized on behalf of virtue and self-discipline. I came to think of this conference room as the echo chamber for the vast right-wing conspiracy, though not because of its acoustics.
I tried once to engage in a reasonable discussion about politics with one of the editorial writers. She was a voluble young woman who’d grown up in Oregon and gone to college at Princeton. She worked in the cubicle next to mine, so I overheard her on the phone every day, talking the crazy with like-minded crazies—suggesting, for instance, that the U.S. Navy, after being pressured to stop raining practice bombs on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, should instead bombard the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, making it the opposite of a wildlife refuge. She cackled when she said this, though not because she was kidding.
She wrote a lot about the environment—she was reliably against it—and one time I told her I disagreed with something she’d written about federal forest policy. The essence of my argument was simple: I didn’t think trees should be cut down carelessly. She told me that trees existed to be cut down. She said she preferred clear-cuts—forests transformed into nonforests. She said clear-cuts grew back as peaceful meadows, which were aesthetically superior to forests. I disagreed not just on the aesthetics but also in regards to the effect on wildlife and watersheds. She said I had an unhealthy, sentimental attitude about trees; she accused me of wanting to hug them. I told her I didn’t want to hug them, I just didn’t think they should all die and take with them songbirds and squirrels and all the other life that make an ancient forest more than a stand of timber poised to become lumber. She said most trees would be better off dead, after which they could be given a more useful second life as furniture, houses, or fax paper.
We didn’t talk much after that, although we always exchanged cordial hellos when passing in the hallways.
It took me a while to notice that the only people who would speak to me on the streets of Bed-Stuy were over forty or strung out on crack. No twenty-five-year-old guy was going to strike up a casual conversation with a white dude in plain view of anyone else; even less likely a young woman. The women were magisterial in their ability to pretend I wasn’t there when we passed in the streets. I loved the irony of my status as an invisible man. The homeboys would cast a glance my way—surprised, bemused, sometimes aggressive, as if sizing me up, trying to guess my angle—but not the women. To them I was less than an ectoplasm, though I know they sensed my presence and must have been curious. I couldn’t blame them for their posture of indifference. In fact I was secretly grateful. They didn’t need any trouble, and neither did I.
For a while I lived without a home telephone, so I made my calls at a pay phone, around the corner on Marcus Garvey. One afternoon I left a message for a friend I planned to meet that night for dinner. I hung up and turned to find myself in sole possession of the gaze of a woman maybe fifty years old, wearing a green and gold head scarf. She walked with an erectness of posture that made me think she might be some kind of neighborhood ambassador, there to take the measure of me.
Happy New Year, she said. You new to the neighborhood?
I live on Monroe Street, I said. Just moved in.
Well, welcome. You know, there’s another couple in the neighborhood. I saw them in the Laundromat a few weeks ago. Young folks like you.
I hadn’t seen a white face yet. The closest I had come were rumors, secondhand reports of sightings, which sort of disappointed me. I wanted the other thirteen to have fled. I wanted to be the one and only.
I’m sorry, she said. That was a foolish thing to say. You know what I mean, I hope.
You mean about the other couple?
She nodded, looking rueful.
Of course, I said. It’s pretty obvious.
Well, kinda put my foot in my mouth.
There’s no point denying I’m white. It’s a hard thing not to notice.
It felt good to speak frankly, as if by stating the irrefutable I was doing my part to advance the cause of racial understanding.
This neighborhood is ninety-nine percent black, she said. When you see white folk here they catch your attention, like that couple I told you about. They had dreadlocks and all these tattoos. Real eccen
tric-looking, but nice.
When I’d tried to imagine the other thirteen white people, that’s what I typically pictured—white Rastafarians, that most peculiar of oxymorons.
I know what it’s like to stick out in a neighborhood, she said. The other day I went out for a typewriter ribbon. It was Hanukkah, so all the Jewish stores were closed. I didn’t realize it was a Jewish holiday until I found a couple of stores locked. So I went back home and looked in the yellow pages and called some other places. I found one that had the ribbon I needed. Except it was in Greenpoint. I had to take the bus, and after I got off the bus I was lost. I went into a bar to ask for directions. The place was filled with old white men, Polish or Irish or something. What nationality are your people?
French and Irish, I said.
May the road rise up to meet you. That’s Irish. I’m African and Hispanic. Anyway, I’m in this bar with a dozen old white men, somewhere in Greenpoint.
Looking pretty scary half drunk in the afternoon, I said.
Oh, yes.
I know. I’ve been in those bars.
You got that right, darlin’. I told the bartender I was lost. He looked at me a little funny but he took me outside and pointed down the street and showed me where to go. He was pretty sweet about it. In the end we’re all human no matter our color. We live in our neighborhoods but we’re all in this together. The border of the world ain’t the edge of our neighborhood.
I’m finding it instructive to live somewhere where I’m conscious of my skin color, I said. I’ve never had that experience. What you find first are the kindness and curiosity of strangers. At least here.
Most places, she said, most places.
It seemed as if we’d sussed out an essential truth about the human condition, and there was nothing left to say.
I should run, she said. I’ve kept you long enough.
Happy New Year, I said. Maybe I’ll see you around.
Indeed you will, she said. Keep faith with the Lord and all will be well.
I never saw her again.
I worked ten to six on weekdays, so I was usually around the neighborhood only at night. Young people flirted outside the Fried Chicken Palace. Deals went down on Marcus Garvey. The heat in my apartment was oppressive that winter, the steam radiators working full bore without modulation, so I left my bedroom windows open. Lying in bed reading by lamplight, I could hear the night sounds below: a shout in the street, the thump of a bass line from a passing car. Most of the time these sounds were a comfort to me, evidence of a complicated social life I could access vicariously. I knew I’d never be a real part of the community, but that didn’t matter. I wanted a situation where nothing was asked of me, nothing expected, and while you could find that pretty much anywhere in New York if you were a refugee from the hinterlands, it seemed purer for me in Bed-Stuy. At night I would often see groups of men my age gathered in the barbershops, cutting each other’s hair and laughing, dapping, telling jokes. There was no way in hell I could have joined them, I knew that, but I didn’t mind. Scenes of joy in camaraderie only reinforced the bitter bite of my bittersweet solitude.
I devoted my free hours to reading, as I mostly had since my brother’s death, reading being one of the surest escapes from the cocoon of solipsism in which I was otherwise so comfortably nestled. One book in particular seized me that winter: James Baldwin’s collected nonfiction, The Price of the Ticket. I’d read parts of it years earlier, and now I picked it up again, looking, I suppose, to his fierce intelligence for an anchor in the swirl of impressions I’d encountered in Bed-Stuy. Instead the thing that gripped me to the point of obsession was a passage from the essay “Nothing Personal,” which a footnote said was “written with Richard Avedon” but sounded like vintage Baldwin:
. . . sometimes, at 4 a.m. . . . with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor—the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self—death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way.—And many of us perish then.
But if one can reach back, reach down—into oneself, into one’s life—and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day. . . . What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him.
I’d done some systematic reading in the literature of suicide, most of it amounting to a thumbs-up or -down on whether it was permissible. That question held little interest for me. No matter what judgment Kant or Schopenhauer offered on the subject, thirty thousand Americans a year did themselves in, hundreds of thousands more worldwide. I intuited the raw impulsiveness of the act. You either got there or you didn’t; the route was mysterious, and no religious prohibition or philosophical text seemed likely to sway a person in the throes of suicidal despair. Who has time for The Myth of Sisyphus when the gun is right there within reach? (“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus had written. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”) Anyway, in the case of my brother, the deed had been done. It hardly mattered whether I condemned him or offered my posthumous blessing. He was dead and he was going to stay dead, no need to bury him at the crossroads with a stake in his heart.
Baldwin had a point of view on the morality of the deed, but even as he made his judgment he expressed a nuanced sympathy for the lost and the damned. He saw that dark night through their eyes. To find my brother’s state of mind—my own state of mind many nights—expressed so clearly offered me a different sort of anchor than the one I’d been looking for. I repeated that one ringing line to myself—all lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him—so often that it became a mantra, a reason for living another day. It gripped me so fixedly I ignored a pertinent warning that came not long after:
Then one selects the uniform which one will wear. This uniform is designed to telegraph to others what to see so they will not be made uncomfortable and probably hostile by being forced to look on another human being. . . . It is necessary to make anyone on the streets think twice before attempting to vent his despair on you.
Before I moved to Bed-Stuy, I’d been under the impression that the crack epidemic—always so called, as if it were some virus beyond human agency, akin to Ebola or monkey pox—had run its course in the city. There were no longer any stories about it in the papers, but every other day or so, on my walks to and from the subway, I’d find an empty vial in the seams of the sidewalks. Their stoppers came in various colors, and soon I had a little collection—yellow, red, white, purple, green, blue. In the mornings before work, when I’d try to write and fail, I’d pull them out of my desk drawer and hold them in the palm of my hand, wondering what it felt like to have that kind of high, that kind of need for a high. Out in the streets you could see the crackheads coming from a block away: stumbling, weaving, a beatific smile on their faces if they’d just smoked up, their eyes meat-red and their noses smeared with snot. If you got close enough they smelled something horrible, like they were already dead and beginning to rot.
There was a woman who hung around the bodega on the corner asking everyone who passed for cash or beer. She may have been no older than twenty-five but she had only half her teeth left. The skin on her face was swollen so tight I feared it might rupture if she so much as coughed. Her shoes were sometimes mismatched. Other times she went barefoot. I could tell she’d once been a great beauty. She still had the legs, although they were awfully skinny now, and her eyes were huge and lit from within as if she’d seen the Rapture coming.
Mister, wooyoo bry me and ache bull? she slurred, the first time I saw
her.
I’m sorry?
Mister, wooyoo priss doobie faber an bry me an ache bull?
It took me another moment to understand she was asking for a forty-ouncer of malt liquor.
My first impulse was to say, Honey, that wouldn’t be doing you a favor. But what sort of favor could I do her? She terrified me, she’d ruined herself so completely—as if committing suicide in slow motion.
Do you smoke? I said, making the universal symbol for a cigarette, index finger and middle finger splayed in front of my lips. I didn’t want her to think I meant crack.
She nodded.
In the bodega I bought a carton of orange juice, asked the clerk to throw in two loosies.
I handed the woman a cigarette, lit it for her, lit my own. Her hand shook as she held it. She thanked me, told me I was a nice man.
I thought: No, I’m not. I am not a nice man.
Instead I said: You’re welcome.
As much as there was a part of me that secretly feared—and even more secretly craved—being harmed in Bed-Stuy, there was another cloistered and delusional part of me that thought I might be redeemed by intimacy with squalor and degradation. Those words appeared more than once in my journals around that time, and what was a better synonym for the squalid and degraded than a crackhead on the streets of Bed-Stuy? Despite the veneer of higher education, I was still an ignorant white boy. I’d never seen a Spike Lee movie, never listened to a word of Biggie Smalls, but I knew the motto Bed-Stuy Do or Die, and with no appreciation for the obvious irony I’d taken it as my own. I may have read Baldwin but I hadn’t understood.
Mired as I was in my own dark trip, I wasn’t terribly interested in the social texture of the neighborhood—in its history, in the stories of the people who lived there, their struggles and hopes, fears and dreams—and truth be told, I didn’t want to get all that intimate with squalor and degradation, whatever they might mean. It’s not like I was prepared to take a crackhead home and give her a hot bath and a home-cooked meal. I got a little tingle from being in proximity to self-inflicted suffering, but I didn’t want to have to do anything about it. I constantly reminded myself that I hadn’t gone to school to be a social worker. I’d chosen a course of study that taught me various tricks for how to observe the workings of the world, to take notes and write them up in stories, so I took notes, as much out of habit as anything. I knew I had zero chance of convincing an editor at the Wall Street Journal to let me write a feature on the myriad ways the American government and moneyed interests had turned their backs on Bed-Stuy, a neglect—a spiteful, willful neglect—that was nothing short of criminal.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 6
