On this particular morning I wobbled out of my mother’s home on New Jersey Avenue and walked a block over to Pennsylvania Avenue, where, along with a batch of schoolkids and workers, I shivered as we waited for the number 54 bus to take us up Pennsylvania Avenue, the major north-south artery of East New York. At Livonia Avenue the bus went under the elevated IRT line, the same train that for years ran past my window at 315.
A couple of blocks up from the elevated train we rolled by Thomas Jefferson High School, which in the seventies was one of the roughest, toughest schools in New York, and known for NBA-QUALITY ballplayers (Sidney Green would rise from Jeff to the Nevada-Las Vegas Runnin’ Rebels, to the Knicks) and for terrorizing kids from other schools. Even when I was in college I kept my eye on Jefferson students, female as well as male, because their fearsome rep preceded them.
Up past Liberty Avenue’s A train stop, across Atlantic Avenue (and the bank that held my student loan), we navigated over to the J train, which held the distinction for being the slowest, most rickety subway line in the city. Back then most of the J stops in Brooklyn and Queens were elevated and without walls, so each time the doors opened a bitter gust of wind came through the train, blowing in tree leaves, rain, and sometimes snow. The cars were throw-backs, with no air-conditioning in the summer, except for small feeble fans, seats made of cushions that looked like kernels of corn, and all painted a drab industrial green. The whole experience was like being stuck in a Walker Evans New York City subway photo circa 1940.
As we rumbled through the unfashionable ’hoods of East New York and Cypress Hills toward Jamaica, I’d find a seat as far from the doors as possible and pull out a notepad. Starting in high school I became an inveterate scribbler, but it intensified in my college years. I had a little spiral notebook, so I could replace pages once the book was filled with my precious thoughts. I’d scribble in anything, though—black-and-white elementary school composition books, blank artist sketch pads, the backs of novels and textbooks.
Aside from documenting my teenage angst, this obsession had a very practical effect. I became a habitual, rather than instinctual, writer. That’s not to say I’ve never been visited by a muse or got feverish with an idea. It happens all the time. But I don’t need those things to happen. I write because I do. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t put pen to paper, even if it’s just to ask myself how I’m feeling. All the great musicians I’ve interviewed talk about woodshedding, playing for hours at a time, refining their chops. The same holds true for the workout regimen of great athletes. Gotta train those muscles. On the long rides to and from Queens, I trained daily with pen and paper.
Once the train arrived at 168th Street in Jamaica, I went downstairs and joined the mass of commuters at the bus depot. If Jamaica was the soul of black Queens in the seventies, then the bus depot was the heartbeat, where you boarded buses that connected Hempstead and Roosevelt with Cambria Heights and the white areas of Jamaica Estates, Corona, and Queens Village. There were white folks at the depot, but, by the late seventies, it was very much a black scene dominated by teenagers, who, despite the early hour, were already flirting and fussing in hormonal rampage.
The front and the middle of the bus toward St. John’s would be jammed with adults, while kids ruled the back. Once past the bus’s rear entrance you were in the smoking zone, with puffed Kools, Parliaments, and whatever other menthol brands they had gotten their hands on. The boldest among them started the day with a bit of reefer. One morning I saw a particularly progressive group with an expanding roach clip, so the holder could pass the joint down the line while never relinquishing control.
After people squeezed in from the E and F on busy Hillside, the bus rolled through Jamaica Estates, an area of large, leafy homes that folks in the smaller homes in Jamaica aspired to. After fifteen minutes St. John’s appeared on the left side of the bus, up on high ground and ringed by huge parking lots that supported its commuting student body. While the lots were fine for automobiles, those wide open spaces created a vicious wind tunnel that made walking on campus in the winter a chilly nightmare.
After braving the cold, you reached a cluster of buildings, some Gothic, some nondescript and modern, that constituted the university campus. Thankfully, on this bitter morning, my jazz class was in the first building on campus, so that the shelter of its walls made up for its gloomy gray exterior. The jazz class was in the basement and taught by a bookish adjunct, a rather straight-looking dude who wore white shirts and a dark tie most mornings, like Miles’s old pianist, Bill Evans.
Still, he was around thirty, which made him a youngster on St. John’s teaching staff, and that he knew anything about jazz made him inherently hip at a very conservative place. I was already into Coltrane and Miles, but on those cold mornings I woke up to the energy of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, the big band power of Ellington and Basie, the artfully enunciated sounds of Ella and Sarah Vaughan, and the eloquent syncopations of Monk.
This weekly immersion in jazz, augmented by compilations and best-of collections, filled in the blanks, not just in the journey of this special branch of music, but in the history of African American culture. The through line that struck me back in college, and would later inform my work, was the interconnected nature of black music.
So many of the famous players in jazz played R&B or blues and did session work for labels like Motown and Atlantic Records to feed their families. I didn’t see the rigid distinctions between the genres of black music that the histories written about jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, and rock and roll in their narrow-mindedness suggested. Even back in college I could tell that these barriers were more the projections of the writers and members of the audience than of the musicians themselves.
From my reading and listening I was always struck by how many different things were happening simultaneously in black culture. Since black people were so segregated for most of the twentieth century, and black radio so eclectic in its programming up until the seventies, I just felt that everybody in the community had an inkling of what was going on. Ray Charles may have been the rare musician with the freedom to explore the interconnections on record, but I was sure he wasn’t alone in hearing them.
For years after that class I held on to my notes, partly because it gave me a very clear if simplistic historical outline of jazz, and also because I found it incredibly difficult to toss out anything related to black history. I was becoming a pack rat of books, newspaper clippings, magazines, and ticket stubs. It was the beginning of a just-in-case mentality that would make clutter a huge part of my living conditions.
For the rest of my morning at St. John’s I’d work my way across the windswept campus, taking largely unmemorable classes in my major, communications arts.
As important to me as the jazz class in my development was a weekly class on foreign film by Professor Alan Seager. I’d read references to Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Rossellini, and the other international masters in Andrew Sarris’s erudite Village Voice reviews, but it wasn’t until this class that I’d see any of their films. Over the course of one semester I saw 8½, The Seventh Seal, Yojimbo, The Bicycle Thief, and a few other gems. Watching these varied and masterful films felt like an electric wire had been attached to my eyeballs.
Just as the records on my mother’s hi-fi had given me some sense of America outside New York, these great foreign films showed me that America didn’t have a lock on rich culture or cinematic art. It was years before I’d travel outside the States, but the work I saw in this class opened me up to the world. (Years later, when I became a director, it would be the work of foreign filmmakers that influenced me the most.)
Akira Kurosawa made a particularly strong impression, since the echoes of Yojimbo in Clint Eastwood movies were so obvious, and appealed to the Forty-second Street devotee in me. Moreover, I was happy to see nonwhite people onscreen in such rich variety and nuance. Kurosawa made masterful work outside of Europe and America that in fact influenced the cinemas of both. I
became a Kurosawa fanatic, marching down to the Bleecker Street Cinema or up to the Thalia on the West Side for double features of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, or to see Throne of Blood and Rashomon. My first viewing of the three-hour-plus Seven Samurai made my head spin, since it so profoundly pissed all over The Magnificent Seven, Hollywood’s pale version of his epic.
Kurosawa’s huge vision, his ability to both manipulate masses of warriors and create scenes of quiet intensity, exploded with possibilities that the work of the European masters did not. Kurosawa willed into being a cinema of strength and nuance with nary a white man in sight. I had had no idea how much I needed to see films like these until I had. It made films deeply grounded in the specifics of ethnic group or national culture seem essential.
During high school I’d discovered that there was more to Manhattan than Times Square, a realization driven by cinema. Through the Village Voice, I learned about clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village that, once I turned eighteen and entered college, I began to frequent. But more important were all the art movie theaters around town. Across from Bloomingdale’s on the East Side were the Baronet and Coronet, and a little farther up, their neighbors, the more sophisticated Cinemas I and II. Later I began haunting the downtown revival houses—the Bleecker Street Cinema, Theater 80, the Waverly (soon home of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s midnight screenings), and the Elgin (where The Harder They Come would become a staple). Up on Fifty-seventh Street was the Playboy Theater, which had a one-dollar movie policy on Saturday afternoons for second-run features.
At the same time that revival houses and the Village Voice were expanding my mind, opening me up to ways of life I’d never known in Brooklyn, my interactions at St. John’s were showing me the limitations of being parochial. In the cafeteria at St. John’s Marillac Hall I saw every day that, despite better laws, the advances of the civil rights movement, and the hopes of the preceding generations, on an everyday basis real social integration was a struggle. By the vending machines were six to eight tables known as “the black corner,” from which disco anthems flowed from boom boxes, and where girls practiced the hustle, and the African American community gathered to gossip, play the card game “spades,” and, even, have lunch. In the pre-hip-hop era, before black street culture had become intertwined with white youth rebellion, there was a huge cultural gap between the black students and our white classmates. There were no “wiggers” at St. John’s at that time, at least that I remember. If we were gonna have meaningful social interactions with our white schoolmates, it was usually on their terms (meaning listening to Billy Joel, wearing dingy jeans, or smoking hash, not cheeba).
There have been entire books written on the topic of black self-segregation in white college lunchrooms, so I won’t devote much time to “the black corner,” other than to note that its location on the St. John’s campus was determined as much by finance as by sociology. HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program), which gave stipends to much of the black student population, was located down a hallway from the black corner, so kids congregated there to await meetings with advisers. Whether you received money from HEOP or not (I didn’t), these tables had evolved into a central meeting spot on a campus where the black presence was otherwise limited to the basketball court.
It was in the black corner that I fell in with a crew who shared my interest in music. Some knew a lot about jazz. Others had the funk down pat. My closest friend in the bunch, Jared McAlister, had very eclectic tastes, and we’d talk music for hours, while lamenting the prevalence of Dan Fogelberg and Dave Mason on WSJU, the campus radio station, before heading off to our after-school gigs. Jared had landed a copy boy position at the Daily News, where he’d then stay employed as a reporter and editor for over twenty years.
Back then we were just young guys with dreams. We’d ride a bus from Utopia Parkway to Union Turnpike, a journey that took us past the Kew Motor Inn, a widely advertised short-stay hotel whose copy promoted waterbeds, Jacuzzis, and weekend rates. Among St. John’s students it had a legendary status as the place for teachers and students, upperclassmen and coeds to sneak off for rendezvous.
I only had one assignation there, and it wasn’t very sexy. She was a fair-skinned dancer with light brown eyes, who didn’t attend St. John’s, but lived out in the bougie enclave of Cambria Heights. Don’t remember how I met her, but apparently she already knew of the Kew Motor Inn’s reputation, and was intrigued enough to accompany me there one Saturday after her dance class.
When we checked in the dancer was given a flimsy bracelet, as a gift at the front desk, one that was already falling apart by the time we reached the room. It was an apt bad omen for our rendezvous. The room contained a king-sized bed with rose-tinted floral sheets, a mirror mounted on the ceiling, and an unappetizing view out the window of Grand Central Parkway. It was a ridiculously unsexy room. We lay on the bed and looked up at each other in the overhead mirror, feeling amused, embarrassed, and not very aroused. Being a boy, I still wanted to get busy, but my dancer friend, her curiosity about the Kew Motor Inn now satisfied, brushed off my advances and was out the door within a half hour of our arrival. Out about $120, not a small sum to a horny college boy, I contemplated phoning some other girls (“Hey, I’m in a room at the Kew Motor Inn. It’s da joint. You wanna stop by?”). Thankfully, I thought better of that tactic, and went home.
Passing the Kew Motor Inn, a negative landmark in my young sex life, was a signal that the Queens part of my day was ending. At the subway I got off the bus and got on the E train for the next leg of my journey. I rode to Fifty-third and Seventh Avenue, transferring downstairs to the D train for the ride to 125th Street, and Harlem. Once off the train I wasn’t walking across the franchise restaurant, highly gentrified, increasingly clean-cut boulevard of the twenty-first century. This 125th street was still ruled by heroin kingpins, numbers runners, and street hustlers of every variety. In this Harlem there was no Starbucks or Pathmark, no Magic Johnson Theaters. Yet you could buy damn near anything on the street, from carburetors to law school textbooks to the contents of a woman’s makeup case. Peddlers walked up and down 125th Street hawking in every barbershop, bar, and restaurant.
Harlem faces always seemed harder than those of Brooklyn folk. I mean, I came from Brownsville, so I’d seen my share of steely stares. Harlemites, however, just appeared extra raw to me, like there was a lower level of poverty and pain you accessed just living above 110th Street. Harlem girls definitely intimidated me. Felt like they were as likely to rip you off as kiss you. So I didn’t try to be too smooth when I was uptown, saving my feeble game for the cuties I met out in butter-soft Queens.
The Amsterdam News was located on St. Nicholas Avenue, between 125th and 126th streets, around the corner from the Apollo Theater and across the street from the Nation of Islam bean-pie shop, a busy check-cashing place, and the Star-Lite bar, where vets of the paper got their afternoon taste. Classified advertising was on the ground floor, where rows of middle-aged sistas answered phones and kept an eye on all the building’s visitors. To the left of the front door was a steep four stories of staircase. In my youth I took the steps two at a time, going past the administrative offices on the second floor and the comptroller on the third, and bounding up to the fourth, where editorial was located.
There I entered a long room of antique typewriters, dusty piles of newspapers and files, and overhead lighting that gave off the harsh neon aura of a 1950s pool hall. In general the Amsterdam News offices felt like an opened time capsule. The most modern fixtures in the space were the rotary phones, and they looked like they’d been installed during the Kennedy administration. The reporting staff, to my young eyes, was as ancient as the furniture. All of the male staff reporters (which means all of the staff reporters) were either gray or bald, and they had the bearing of men who had sat hunched over their whole lives.
There was “Tex” Harris, a feisty little light-skinned man who wore a jaunty French beret that belied a nasty mouth. Tex was the paper’s Inq
uiring Photographer, whose head shots of ordinary Harlemites ran on the editorial page. However, Tex took much more pride in the cheesecake shots of young beauties that he pinned over his desk. There was Simon Anknewe, a grouchy, taciturn, pipe-smoking Nigerian who looked askance at everyone and everything.
Even more cynical than Anknewe was Les Matthews, aka Mr. 1-2-5 Street, a column that melded blind items, press releases, and gossip that glimpsed into the heart of Harlem. Les wrote terse one-and two-sentence items, like “James Jones made his singing debut on 125th street, while his father Jesse was iced on 116th street.” This ex-boxer wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, and had tiny eyes and huge burly shoulders. Matthews typed hard with his two index fingers, punching the keys so hard he had to use three pieces of copy paper between his bottom sheet and his carbon, lest he punch holes in the paper. Les’s laugh was harsh and dry, more sardonic than merry. The banter among all of these black journalists was bitter and caustic; they expected both white racism and black incompetence to rear its head in nearly every juncture of human existence. In their eyes, the Am News staff was rarely disappointed.
Less hard edged and marginally more optimistic was arts and entertainment editor Mel Tapley, an oatmeal-colored gent with a wiry black comb-over slicked across his head and glasses that were perpetually perched there, when not hanging upon the tip of his nose. Tapley’s desk was a jungle of press releases, brochures, mail, and copy. He was a gentle man who had the demeanor (and cartooning skills) of a true artist and who, to take care of his wife and daughter, had taken on a demanding, not very rewarding 9-to-5.
City Kid Page 10
