by DW Gibson
Law school ends up, at least in my experience, being something like violence on the mind. It forces your brain into a certain way of thinking so that you’re not thinking creatively; you’re not sharing ideas with people. You’re not able to sit down and talk about interesting questions you’ve got going on in your life because you start to critique people’s thoughts in a way that is not entertaining and feels aggressive and no one wants to do it anymore. So basically, to maintain my sanity, I started having people over for brunch once a month on Sundays.
And college makes you think that, for life, you’ll just be able to hop over to your friend’s house whenever you feel like it and dig something out of their fridge. But you lose that after college. In this city there’s so many people but often you feel so lonely, anonymity becomes the hallmark. Groups of friends become less tight. It’s a lot of people who, present company included, have to schedule in advance who they’re going to meet with and when.
He’s right: here we are in the middle of March and I first asked him to meet for coffee at the beginning of February. Previous to this we met only once, at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend. Perhaps if we had a thicker history this might have happened sooner but I don’t think so: the brevity and rarity of Tarek’s emails led me to believe that control of his inbox is perpetually slipping from his grip.
I’m bad at keeping a schedule. It’s not how I grew up and it’s not my style. I’d rather just hang out with people—as simple as that may sound, and maybe irresponsible as that may sound. I don’t like arranging my meet ups with friends to be responsibilities, I prefer that the friendships themselves are the responsibilities.
The brunches are something I continue to do today. And now my sister’s involved and we both really enjoy creating that space and feeling responsible for a space like that. That’s the impetus for opening a business.
Me, my sister, and a friend of ours, we’ve been toying with the idea for a while and we’ve been looking at different spaces, trying to figure out what would work because it’s kind of a foreign concept to all of us. But it’s not foreign enough to deter us. I think it’s very doable while being cognizant of what’s going on in Harlem and the ways we would play into it or not play into it.
We’re thinking about how to feed back into this community—which I’m really starting to call my own. We’re considering what’s the best way to frame a space in this neighborhood that relates to all members of the neighborhood, whether it’s a coffee shop, or a communal space that doesn’t really exist right now.
The idea of community as where you go and hang out is important. Having other people around you doing stuff is something that has existed since the beginning of time. Interaction has also been a critical part of that equation and more and more that part of the equation has been falling by the wayside.
I saw someone post something today to the effect of “I’m creating a new social network, you know what it’s called? Outside!”
He laughs.
And it’s true, right? This idea of space, of communal space, warm communal space—it’s foreign in this city. It’s just so strange because so much here is communal. The transportation is forcibly communal here but in a way I think there’s not much communing that happens. And I miss it. That’s what I come from. That’s what I knew growing up in Ohio. And there’s no reason to not have it. It’s so easy to facilitate. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it while feeding ourselves and keeping the place open.
He laughs.
Someone once told me that if you really love cooking, instead of opening a restaurant, you should invite a bunch of people to your house, use the finest ingredients, and take a big stack of money and light it on fire and you’ll have had more fun than opening a restaurant.
He laughs.
That’s the message I’ve gotten. So that’s why we’re excessively cautious and thinking about what it is we want to do and what we want to create.
When we first were talking about this, we went downtown to all the different coffee shop owners, asking what they thought of opening a coffee shop in Harlem. People literally told us, “I don’t know if black people drink as much coffee.”
And we were like, “Excuse me?”
He laughs, still in disbelief.
“Thanks for the advice buddy.”
One product we’re considering building into whatever community space we hope to make is called manakish, which is basically a very thin pie that you put in the oven. It’s Middle Eastern. In essence it’s peasant food, really casual. It’s not meant to be more than a few bucks. What’s weird about this neighborhood is that if you look around there’s not a lot of grab-food-and-go places. It’s all fancier sit-down places that close kind of early. You do feel a separation of society when you go into any of these restaurants that maybe you don’t feel when you go into the grocery store for example. So that’s one thing we’ve been thinking about.
We’ve also been thinking a lot about the ways in which our identities and what we’re doing mix with the identity of the community in which we live and want to be a part of—whether or not we want to impose our identity onto the community or feed into a broader identity. We’re spending a long time thinking about whether or not we want to be another ethnic restaurant gentrifying the community or, instead, if we want to be somewhat thoughtful about our role here.
I think that to some degree you have a new neighborhood and you have an old neighborhood. So those are two communities. But at the same time you have all these immigrants that have been here longer than the new neighborhood but not as long as the old neighborhood. There’s a huge West African community that has been here and they bring their culture with them in the way that I do and the way that you do. There’s a sort of communal reality to that.
But people feel offended by newer communities that don’t appreciate the history and don’t appreciate the difficulties that were in the community before we got here. To some people it’s offensive, I think, and for good reason.
I’m projecting myself onto a history that I haven’t experienced but: I feel like it’s as if I were to go back to whatever village in Palestine where my grandparents are from and see what’s being done with it now, I would probably feel the same hostility. I would feel expelled. In that case there was an actual expulsion but in Harlem there’s a de facto expulsion in a lot of ways—whatever it is: price, access, comfort, community. So I imagine that’s the feeling I would have, and it’s not a good feeling. It’s an angry feeling. So I relate to it and I sympathize with it in a real way. And it makes me wonder if I should stay here. And so that’s another reason I feel like I’ve got to feed back into this community in a way that does more than just take.
8.
Raul is bouncing his knee, and his body with it, but somehow his voice remains steady as his eyes scan the sidewalk:
I try not to be judgmental. Puerto Ricans, they criticize everything. I try not to be like that.
But new people, they come from wherever they’re from and they try to make New York like where they’re from. So why don’t you just stay where you’re from? You know what I mean? In Brooklyn, ask a kid how to get to Prospect Park. They can’t tell you. But they can tell you how to get to somewhere in Iowa. People are very book smart and scholarly, savant, but they don’t know common things to get around. They’re very clumsy that way. I hate these kids that come from other places that are here for two or three or four years that are like, “Oh, I feel like I’m so New York.”
You have nothing to do with this place!
People get here and they think they represent New York. No, you don’t represent New York at all, dude. You’re misinformed. Get a good decade underneath your belt. You start getting attached to the city.
Raul is six feet tall, his chest is broad and thick, and he hesitates at nothing. His eyes are dark, almost black. Only his resonant voice fits his age, forty-six. Everything else about him seems younger—with his gym shorts, colorful Nikes, and a ho
oded sweatshirt with front pockets where he can hide his hands, Raul generally looks like he’s going to or coming from a pickup game. When winter descends, he covers the uniform with a puffy jacket from The North Face.
He’s just back from watching that movie—the title escapes him but it had LA gangs and cops and blood.
I took my grandmother to see that shit.
He cackles. Raul’s always cackling, and when he does it is equal parts sinister and vulnerable. There is a hint of something underhanded or plotting in his cackle but you also hear a need—a longing for some discernable response. Show me, Raul seems to say—show me that we are connecting. And if that doesn’t happen quickly, he’ll pull out his phone to check for messages, browse status updates, temporarily exit.
He leans on a wobbly sidewalk table at a taco shop just north of Houston Street, not far from his apartment. He takes a moment to gauge the girl sitting alone at the table next to us; she is the only person within earshot but she’s wearing earphones, swaying away in her own universe, and so he continues:
That’s the second movie my grandmother’s seen in her whole life. She’s from Puerto Rico. It’s a dead town. There’s a theater a couple of blocks up the road but according to my mother, she didn’t go. I was like, “Ma, she’s never been to a fucking theater?”
She just moved here because she’s old and she got sick. Her husband died. He was a bootlegger, womanizer. He had businesses, grocery stores, wives, a lot of wives, a lot of kids. He was bugged out. He was no walk in the park. I didn’t miss anything.
My mother’s originally from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I guess she kept annoying the doctors because she’s good at annoying people, so they’re like, “Yo, go to another hospital!” So she went to Coney Island. That’s where I was born.
She bounced on my father when I was three. Then she was hanging out here in the East Village with her girlfriends. There’s two kinds of people: live in Brooklyn, stay in Brooklyn, or some people are curious to see what the fuck is over the bridge. My mother crossed the bridge. Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, she still lives there to this day. Rent control, papi!2
He cackles.
Me and my friends used to walk around. My mother said, “Don’t go past Third Avenue.” We went all the way to the Hudson River. Forty-Second Street, we used to cut school, we’d jet up there. You go to Forty-Second Street and see kids from all over the city and meet them—the Bronx, Staten Island. Everybody’s gonna be at the arcade buggin’ the fuck out.
It was real up there on Forty-Second Street. The hookers and shit. The pimps, all dressed up. It was bugged out. Crazy realities up there. I remember I had a friend, a Chinese kid named Jimmy, he worked in a shoe store on Forty-Second and Eighth. He would get me some things, you know, wholesale or whatever. One time these dudes were fighting and they came into the store. It was crazy, knives and stabbing each other. It used to get ill. Mid-’90s, they started taking everything down, started building it back up. Toys “R” Us, Dave & Buster’s—all that big, clean shit. Funny enough, I enjoy it as an adult. It’s nice up there. People think it’s corny. I ride my bike and when I come back from Central Park I always go through Times Square. I like it. I’ve changed and that place has changed.
I ride my bicycle for exercise—and to keep up with New York City. Do you go to FDR Drive, look at the water? They fixed it up real nice. Better late than never. You can sit underneath the Williamsburg Bridge sometimes. I like to ride my bike down by Water Street. Cherry Street. It’s like the neighborhood that time forgot over there. It’s real peaceful. It’s not that gentrified.
Growing up in the city, you get a double education. We hung out with older cats. They were thieves and criminals but, you know, you listen to them all night. Education, man. You learn a lot by watching.
My mother and my stepdad, they were in love. Beginning of everything they were bugging out.
“You want to go to Puerto Rico?”
“Alright, let’s pack a bag and jump on the first plane.”
Get drunk or get happy on the drop of a dime. They tried to break up a few times but he reeled her back in. I was a little kid. Twice, we came back. He was cool. He was a—he had businesses—a fur business and businesses and stores and stuff, okay: he was a banker. Before there was the Lotto, he played numbers and shit. He had a candy store that was the front. And in the back was numbers and you could bet on anything you wanted. He was in charge of the south side. The Jewish mafia was over there. He was Puerto Rican but he was good with numbers so they hired him and he took over the whole neighborhood. Being a banker is very important. He was in charge of everybody, the whole neighborhood. Zip code. It’s a lot of responsibility. That’s how he met my mother. He saw her and that was it.
It was a good neighborhood, the East Village. It was bugged out, rich people, poor people. Everybody’s on top of each other. I was like eight, seven and I had this friend, his name was Richard, black kid—we were like brothers so we would walk around intrigued by the city itself. We didn’t know what the hell was going on, we was just buggin’ out. We’d go all the way to the West Side Highway, when the West Side Highway was still up high and we used to climb up there. I used to look at the graffiti on the walls. I noticed it. I wondered why somebody would do that. I was curious.
I loved to play basketball. It wasn’t going to be my ticket but I still loved the game as much as anybody else. I was the first dude ever to rock green suede high-top Nikes in 1979, I was fourteen. Everybody was like, “What the fuck are those, dude?” I saw Magic Johnson wearing them—I was already reading Sports Illustrated when I was a little kid and dudes in my neighborhood weren’t reading Sports Illustrated.
I went to a lot of high schools. I played on the team and I would never go to school. I wasn’t really a student athlete. I was an athlete student.
There’s the cackle again.
Tenth grade I went to La Salle Academy but I wasn’t going to play varsity because the dudes were mad good. I went to Seward Park when Seward Park was ill. I was shitting on myself when I went there. It was ill kids from Avenue D. But I played on the basketball team and I knew all the black dudes so I was good money. We used to smoke weed over in that park on Essex.
I played at West Fourth court but it wasn’t because I was all that. One of the coaches put me on a team just because he knew my mom. I played once in a blue moon. The greatest thing that happened was being on the court at the same time with Joe “the Destroyer” Hammond. He was the greatest player that never made the NBA. The Lakers drafted him but he was also a big dealer. They offered him money to play and he was like, “I make half a million on the streets.” I was killing motherfuckers for this old man. You should have seen the picks I was setting. It was better for me than meeting fucking Obama.
It’s interesting because nobody that hangs out at that park is from that neighborhood because the A, the B, the C, the D, the F—all the trains leave you right there. So you have all these kids come from bumfuck whatever to this park. Once you step inside you’re no longer at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street. You’re in another world. It’s hustlers in there. They’re playing dice, they’re playing cards, they’re smoking weed and selling stolen goods, you could put bets down, it’s fucking crazy. They have dudes that been hanging out there for thirty years, forty years. It’s generational in there.
Last five, six years the level of competition went down the drain. Now it’s just dudes want to play at West Fourth to say that they played at West Fourth because the fuckin’ court is so fuckin’ famous. It sucks now. If you want to relive your youth with your fuckin’ high school friends and you give a check, you’ll get on the team. No background checks.
Raul has some pictures from his playing days that he wants to show me. So we pay the bill and move to his apartment, which is a loft crowded with stacks of clothes and magazines and—well, all kinds of things: autographed baseballs encased in plastic pedestals are lined up on a rectangular table; coffee table books share a co
rner with promotional VIP swag. Raul is nothing if not a collector. His apartment feels like a small warehouse with an unmade bed shoved in the corner. There are a few sections of wall that aren’t buried behind inventory, and most of them display something remarkable: a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing, a framed Babe Ruth baseball card.
Opposite the bed, a dozen pairs of Nikes rest on individual acrylic glass display shelving just as they would in a department store. Raul walks to the far end of the loft, where the sun streams through big windows overlooking the street, and shuts off his television, which is somewhere in the clutter—you can tell it’s there because the local news is on loop. He moves behind a giant forest of shoeboxes, stacked in a dozen or so inexact columns reaching near the ceiling. Despite the chaos, Raul knows where everything is. He emerges from behind the boxes with a stack of old Polaroids and the ingredients for a frightfully large blunt.
He goes back and forth between singling out pictures and assembling the blunt. One image reveals a teenaged, mustachioed Raul on a subway car. He has a friend on either side of him and each boy holds his own jar of ink—the same ink that’s brazenly wiped across their shirts and jeans. Raul points at his younger self:
That’s a fuckin’ punk right there. That’s a punk! He thinks he’s a man. He knows everything. You can’t tell him nothing. If I knew then what I know now—he shakes his head.
He was alright, he’s a good kid.
I used to write—graffiti, whatever. It’s just like a thing amongst them, the gods, they don’t mention that word graffiti. It’s writing. I fuck up and call it graffiti all the time.
He points at the picture:
That’s my friend on Ninth Street. I used to keep him near me because he had mad ink and supplies in his house. And he knew how to get into spots. It was kind of like my first little crew. You notice the train car is mad clean. Used to catch them clean. You put your shit on the trains, the kids in the Bronx are going to see you and you’re gonna be a celebrity up there, everybody’s gonna know you because the trains connect the whole city. So you’re gonna pick a line by your house, or a line that you can get to, and a yard that you have access to and you’re gonna try to dominate it. Whoever dominates is the king of that line. That’s a big deal.
