City Kid

by Nelson George

  Getting into bed was just a formality, anyway. I couldn’t sleep until I heard her key enter the door. Often I’d stand by the window and look down Livonia Avenue to the area under the elevated subway tracks, hoping to see Mommy coming home, schoolbooks under her arm, with her eyes peeled for muggers.

  We were both anxious and vigilant, with good reason. As Ma pursued her bit of the American dream, Brownsville was growing nastier and more predatory. In the hideous drug culture of the sixties that destroyed lives and, to a great degree, sapped the vigor out of the civil rights movement, a poor neighborhood like Brownsville was ground zero. I gauged the change by the growing danger I felt taking out the garbage.

  To get to the garbage disposal I walked down one straight hallway, made a left turn past two elevator doors, two stairway doors, and one window. When we first moved into the projects this had seemed more irritating than dangerous. My first inkling that this wouldn’t always be the case came from the glue sniffers. One or two guys would be standing by the window with small bags under their noses, inhaling from open bottles of Elmer’s glue till their eyes glazed over. They’d look over their shoulders at me, chuckling at my pajamas and house shoes. Unlike the later drug users of America, the glue sniffers weren’t very violent, since their high could be purchased for a dollar alongside a model of the Mercury spaceship.

  When heroin flooded the streets in the midsixties, it felt like a shroud fell over Brownsville. Everything got a little darker and more desperate as the glue sniffers gave way to a new kind of drug user—the junkie. Junkies would stand by the corner of Rockaway and Livonia, right by the subway exits Ma took at night, sometimes asking for money, but too often snatching purses, and occasionally taking lives. “Mugging” and “ripped off ” entered our urban vocabulary. People were getting beaten up, raped, and murdered all over Brownsville, as heroin escalated the brutality that poverty inspires.

  In 315 Livonia, junkies found haven in the stairways and elevators. They’d go into a nod, piss on themselves, and befoul the air. Our mailboxes, little metal coffins drilled into the lobby walls, were regularly either picked or pulled off their hinges. Mailmen became reluctant to come into project buildings. The day welfare checks were due for arrival became a time of high anxiety, as mailboxes, mail carriers, and welfare recipients became targets for addicts and muggers.

  But for me, the most psychologically damaging thing the junkies did (often in concert with plain old juvenile delinquents) was to either break or unscrew the lightbulbs on stairway landings. So walking up or down those stairs, you often had to walk up into pitch-black staircases. Obviously the elevators were the best option, though the lights on them could be broken too. The elevators were easily sabotaged if you pressed too many buttons at one time, something any kid could do, much less a determined mugger. Often, a dark stairwell was the only way up.

  For years Ma braved the junkies at the train station, the muggers on the streets, and the cretins in the stairway to make a better life for my sister and me. I used to look at the ceiling of the bedroom my sister and I shared and wonder what would happen to us if she was murdered. Who would take us? Perhaps my father’s family in the Bronx? Would we be sent down to Virginia to be with my ma’s family? Or would we be split up and get lost in an orphanage? Plan for the worst and hope the best—this remains my motto, and it comes from those long nights anticipating my mother’s return.

  Even as a child I was very aware that our future hung by a slender thread—the ability of our mother to survive the dangers of New York. Her obstacles weren’t all external. That injury she suffered as a little girl haunted her many nights in Brooklyn. I’d often walk into her bedroom and see a heating pad on her leg. I tried not to look too hard, because she had horrible scars on the inside of that leg that had never truly healed. On two occasions the swelling in her leg became so severe that she had to be hospitalized. I remember a male family friend carrying her out of our apartment, past our bedroom door, as we watched with moist eyes.

  Always, though, she came back home. Past the muggers and away from the doctors, Arizona came home, and we’d survive the latest crisis. For years our family was able to rise above the tide of tragedy that always seemed just outside our door, but not always by very much.

  A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE

  There’s a picture of my sister and me that sat framed over my fireplace for years. It’s a black-and-white, and was taken when I was three or four, and my sister still had only a few teeth in her mouth. The photographer, a balding white man with swatches of hair on either side of his head, set up in the living room and placed a white drop cloth on Ma’s Motorola hi-fi. My mother placed me on top of the hi-fi, and then my baby sister next to me. She was a yellow gal, same complexion as her father, and had slightly slanted “Chinese eyes.”

  Unlike me, Andrea Patrice George was a demonstrative child, with a loud voice and an intense disposition. On that day, though, it didn’t take much for the photographer, using funny faces and a big smile, to get our attention. Ma stood next to him, encouraging us both to smile. In the picture Andrea is reacting to the offer of candy, reaching out for it with a palpable sense of joy. I’m smiling too, looking as bright eyed as any happy little boy should. It’s the only picture I have of us looking that happy together, and the earliest document of a relationship that would go wrong at some point, and stay wrong for too many years.

  I loved Andrea from the moment my mother brought her home. I didn’t know until decades later that my father had been very slow in coming to the hospital to see her. It was a big blow in the battle between my parents that was slowly coming to an end. Maybe some of my mother’s anger found its way into the womb, because Andrea was willful from the word go, both stubborn and tough, vulnerable and sensitive. Reading her rhythms was never the easiest thing to do.

  For some reason, when we first moved into 315 Ma stored all the cereal in floor-level cabinets in the kitchen. Andrea, not satisfied with just having cereal for breakfast, would pull open the cabinets, pry open the boxes, and gleefully spill the Cheerios on the linoleum. Then, laughing, squash the cereal with her hands. When truly inspired, baby Andrea, who was as fascinated with cigarette butts as with cereal, would dump out the ashtray onto the floor, creating a mess of crushed cereal and ground-up ash that drove Ma crazy.

  Once the boxes had been shifted to higher cabinets, Andrea moved on to more practical toys, but always with her own peculiar spin on their purposes. I had a Mickey Mouse telephone made of metal, and it had a string cord that connected it to a hard, black receiver. It was all hard edges and rough surfaces, the kind of toy that would never make Toys “R” Us’s shelves today.

  I loved imitating Ma on the phone. Andrea quickly picked up the habit too, except she had no interest in sharing the toy with me. One day, right around the time of the photo, we were crawling around on the floor, and a battle over the Mickey Mouse phone ensued. I wanted to play with it too, and she wouldn’t let me. I pulled at the receiver and, with surprising force and quickness, she slammed me between the eyes, nearly knocking me out. Then Andrea laughed triumphantly.

  I’ve never forgotten the Mickey Mouse battle, not because of the small knot I received, but because I felt it spoke to the dynamic of our childhood relationship. I was the older brother, trying to be in control, and failing, while my sister was bold, had little fear, and was often reckless.

  When I was around seven or eight, and just beginning to understand that I was growing up in a tough neighborhood, bullies would try to intimidate me. They’d try to steal my Pensy Pinky rubber ball, cheat me at games, and ask for money. Out of nowhere my little sister would show up and challenge them. “Don’t mess with my brother!” she’d demand. After chuckling a bit, they’d either leave me alone or mock me, saying that my sister had more balls than I did. I told her to stop; I could fight my own battles. Sure it was a sign of real love, but it was damned embarrassing, and it made me seem more bookish than I already did in a neighborhood where that w
as perceived as weakness. Maybe I was just more than a little jealous of her fierceness.

  But she could be playful, too. Christmas 1970 is one of my favorite memories of our childhood. We were Jackson 5 fanatics, and for the holiday season Ma had bought us The Jackson 5 Christmas Album. Bonded by the Jacksons singing “Little Drummer Boy” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” we danced around our living room with giddy energy. We were just in the moment together. She didn’t try to act cool. I didn’t try to boss her around. We were equal in the joy of those records. It was funny, in retrospect, that we both loved “Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” so much because, despite its candy apple cuteness, there was something melancholy about the notion of our single mother getting kissed in our living room.

  From the time of her birth until we moved out of Tilden in the midseventies, Andrea and I shared a bedroom, a closet, and a dresser. As a result, our bedroom became a physical and psychological battleground. We had one room and one parent, and that became too much for two siblings to share comfortably. There was an invisible line between the two beds, so toys and clothes had to be placed on the proper side, or yelling and fussing would ensue. Who got more dresser or closet space was a constant battle.

  As we got older this forced intimacy grew even more complicated. I began masturbating seriously around age eleven, so I’d have to time my self-pleasing for when I was sure she was sleeping and/ or had her body turned away from me. It made an uncomfortable, clandestine activity feel even more risky and embarrassing. Every now and then I’d catch her giggling as she watched from under her covers.

  That sense of sexual discomfort cut both ways. I remember a summer afternoon when we were sitting watching television. Suddenly Andrea stood up looking shocked. She made a small animal sound, and then ran into the bathroom. She started calling for our mother, who quickly followed her in. I heard a lot of anxious whispers, but I couldn’t make out any words. After a while Ma came out and walked over to me. Her eyes were sparkling and her voice amused. “She just got her period,” she whispered, but not quietly enough. Andrea opened the door to yell in a rage, “Don’t tell him!” She was angry at Ma for betraying her sudden secret, and at me for the undoubtedly silly smirk on my face.

  Ma finally got us out of the projects when we were both adolescents, liberating us from the tensions of sharing a room. I had mine and she had hers. But that necessary change exacerbated the growing distance between us. The days spent conversing, much less playing or dancing, together had ended. Even how Andrea achieved in school differed from how I did—while I was a reading/writing maven, Andrea excelled at math. We had a classic left brain/right brain split.

  By the time I was a teenager I sometimes experienced nostalgia for the days when Andrea had followed me around. That big brother/little sister affection had been replaced by indifference or downright hostility. I remember a particularly nasty argument in the kitchen over something, and it started getting physical. I grabbed her and tossed her to the ground for stepping to me with way too much attitude. I was much taller and stronger, so as far as I was concerned, she could fuss all she wanted, but she wasn’t gonna swing at me and get away with it.

  Vengefully, Andrea pulled a knife out of a cabinet and came at me with it. I sprinted to my room and closed the door, as I heard the knife bounce off the wood. We fought often, but this knife incident was a new low. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she cared if I lived or died, and that made me sad when I wasn’t thinking of kicking her ass. Her favorite song when we were kids was the soul ballad “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” by the Persuasions, and for too many years my sister and I lived out this melancholy title.

  PEER PRESSURE

  As a child, my interest in reading greatly fueled my erotic imagination. My mother was a big reader of pop pulp fiction: Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, Valley of the Dolls, Peyton Place, The Carpetbaggers. By nine I was already a voracious reader, and I’d sneak into her bedroom to check them out. I soon figured out that there were code words on a page that meant sex scene: “bosom,” “loins,” and, my favorite, “vulva.” When I saw them on a page I’d stop skimming and slow down.

  These words were often modified and amplified by “heaving,” “inflamed,” “engorged,” and “sensitive.” Any combination of these words meant characters were having sex. I got so good that within ten minutes of opening one of Ma’s paperbacks I had identified two or three scenes. It would be my pleasure afterward to show these passages to my friends, displaying both my reading skills and growing sexual sophistication.

  Like a lot of city kids I lost my virginity on summer vacation. Either in July or August Ma would ship Andrea and me off to Virginia for a couple of weeks, where we’d shuttle back and forth between Grandma George, Uncle Son, and Aunt Frances. We usually had the most fun at Frances’s place, since she ran the loosest house, had fun kids (cousins Becky, Chubby, and Quinton), and was the most dynamic character. Aunt Frances was a big-boned brown woman, with wide hips, a hearty laugh, and a passion for beer, bid whist, and men.

  Neighborhood kids circulated through Aunt Frances’s house all day. It was there that I met a local gal I’ll call Tammi. I was about eleven, and she was maybe three years older. Like a lot of Virginia gals, Tammi was what we called “healthy”—wide hips and a butt that undulated when she walked. Back then I was frequently complimented for having curly eyelashes, and Tammi found them quite cute, along with my New York accent.

  One afternoon, in a neighbor’s toolshed, she let me fondle her beautiful brown breasts, which started a stirring down below. I was in that phase of boyish adolescence when just the sight of a sexy woman got me uncontrollably excited, so the feeling of sucking Tammi’s breasts was just unbelievable. I didn’t really know what to do after that. Tammi did. She pulled down her pants and panties and lay on the floor. She unbuckled my Lee jeans. I remember how we wiggled about the toolshed floor, my knees against the concrete floor, the smell of gasoline from cans in the shed, and the sounds of kids running in the distance.

  Back in Brownsville I bragged about my lost virginity to all the brothers on the basketball court. While it gave me some respect, it had still happened down South (everybody “got some” down South). When was I gonna have a Brownsville girlfriend? That’s when Cynthia came into my life. She was a butterscotch fourteen-year-old cutie known around the Tilden projects for her shiny black bangs and neon-blue coat. To the amazement of many suitors, she picked me to be her first boyfriend.

  One day Frankie, a Puerto Rican buddy of mine who lived on the third floor of 315, arranged a meeting between Cynthia and me at a nearby school yard. By the time we’d walked the three blocks home we were holding hands. Because she lived in 305 and I across the parking lot at 315, we could sit in our kitchens looking at each other as we talked on the phone. My first relationship made me giddy and proud, like I had some heretofore unknown value. My self-esteem skyrocketed, but my confidence was neither deep nor strong.

  You see, my boys greeted my first romance with snickers. After a touch football game a couple of guys said they’d been walking with her in the rain. “So,” one kid I never did like said, “I had to pull out my rubbers.” To the delight of everybody but me, he pulled out a pack of Trojans. In retrospect, I think he did it as much to show everyone he had some as to humiliate me. But this incident, plus the constant barrage of my friends’ cherry-popping tales, caused me to blow it with Cynthia.

  One afternoon I found myself miraculously alone for a few hours in 6C. I got Cynthia to come over. I pulled the curtains shut in the living room, screwed in the red lightbulb Ma used for parties, and put on an Al Green record. I laid down the law: “We need to start having sex.” Cynthia’s exit line from my den of seduction was devastating: “I thought you were different.”

  Only after the fact did I realize that Cynthia had approached me precisely because she perceived me to be a nice, cute, nice, book-reading boy, and not one of the wannabe fly guys that filled the Ville. I was probably what Cynth
ia wanted, and, if I’d just been who I was for her, good things would have come my way eventually. Yet in Brownsville circa 1973 (and to this day), it was hard to embrace non-Super Fly aspirations. So, like the sad dude in the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her,” I sat by the kitchen window watching for signs of Cynthia, trying to figure out how to balance what the local culture demanded versus who I was.

  A THEATER ON PITKIN AVENUE

  Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville was a thriving commercial shopping strip that had been pioneered by the Jewish merchants to serve the Hebrew families that had once populated the neighborhood. When I was a little boy many of the stores still bore Jewish names, and even the more generic-sounding businesses (Thom McAn’s, Wool-worth’s, East New York Savings Bank) were largely run by folks with Jewish surnames. But by the midsixties stores began to close, as their old clients split for other Brooklyn neighborhoods like Canarsie, to the suburbs of Long Island, or to the hurricane corridors of Florida. Often they were fleeing my family and the others like us who were turning Brownsville black. The bonds blacks and Jews had shared during the glory days of the civil rights movement broke down in neighborhoods like Brownsville where Semite merchant and black customer now eyed each other with mutual suspicion.

  Sometimes blacks, Puerto Ricans, or Arabs took over the stores. More often, however, these places either shut down or were burned down, leaving holes on Pitkin that wouldn’t get filled for decades. You couldn’t totally blame them. Heroin had turned rough streets mean. Purse snatching, shoplifting, muggings, and armed robbery abounded in and around Pitkin. The phrase “ripped off” entered the vocabulary as a verb for crime. I used to put my money in my sock whenever I had to go over there. It made for smelly but somewhat safe dollar bills.

  One oasis from the change was the Olympic Theater, located at the far end of Pitkin, just a block or two before the avenue melted into Eastern Parkway. To get there from the Tilden projects you could take a bus up Rockaway Avenue, passing the Brownsville projects, a church, cheap furniture stores, the fish markets of Belmont Avenue, and on up to Pitkin. At Pitkin you then transferred to another bus for the long ride past its stores and vendors. Or, if you were like me, trying to hold onto every slim dime, you walked up to Pitkin and then across it to the Olympic.