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Authors: Nelson George

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BOOK: City Kid
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Without a doubt, the central conceit of
Arms
—that a wounded soldier could win the heart of his nurse—was a ripe adolescent dream. War heroism rewarded with sensual compassion is a male romantic fantasy. Only its bittersweet ending redeems the story. That the protagonists of both
Sun
and
Arms
were injured, yet noble and still virile, spoke to me, even though I was as healthy as the next horny adolescent.
The incredible sense of inadequacy and vulnerability kids feel, that overwhelming anxiety that they can't measure up—in school, in sports, with girls—can seem, and often be, as mentally unbalancing as an injury to the body. At least an injury can heal. I spent much of my adolescence wondering if I would ever measure up. Reading about Hemingway in biographies, I came to understand that that adolescent insecurity had lingered with him, both fueling his art and wrecking his relationships.
Hemingway's magnum opus,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, written with epic intentions and on the full belly of international celebrity in the 1930s, doesn't have the same confused, romantic yearning at its core, and suffers because of it. This tale of a professional terrorist (as we'd call Robert Jordan now) was closer to Hemingway's persona than his personality. I savored Jordan's righteous heroism, and his boning of the coltish Maria, but Bell didn't move me in the ways Hemingway's more callow, less self-assured men did.
On the heels of all of this reading, Fitzgerald and Hemingway became heroes of mine. The irony being that if I'd encountered either man, it's likely that they would have seen me as a potential shoe-shine boy. Black folks were a fleeting and none too dignified presence in their work.
Gatsby
features Nick Carraway's notorious sighting of a “ridiculous Negro” driving in a fancy car on a Sunday afternoon in Manhattan. Hemingway was quite comfortable with the word “nigger” whenever a black man showed up in the background of one of his stories. Basically, black people were irrelevant to them, which, in retrospect, I believe played a part in their appeal for me.
Through my socially conscious, dashiki-wearing, school-teaching mother I'd sampled the books “for black boys looking for images of themselves.” Sadly, like food that is good for you, those books interested but didn't excite me. I was all too aware that they were supposed to be “good for me.” Filled with ghetto drama, racist whites, and short money, neither
Manchild
nor
Black Boy
nor any of the others hit with the shock of the new like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. To employ a phrase whites once typically used to describe their fascination with black music, I found this white literature “exotic.”
So the lack of blacks, especially since the authors were clearly uncomfortable with them when they showed up, didn't upset or offend me. I wasn't seeking role models in their work. I desired excitement, surprise, and literary style. I did read them for social history as well as literary pleasure, but not as empowering sociology. (Only later, as an adult writer, did I come back to many of my mother's books, particular the work of Richard Wright, whose struggles off the page I find quite moving now.)
I was hooked on Hemingway (and, to a lesser degree, Fitzgerald) like one of the marlins Papa hunted off the coast of Cuba, and began to read all I could by and about him. Carlos Baker's big biography (considered definitive at the time) became a trusted friend, and I looked into A. E. Hotchner's kiss-ass memoir too. At this point I was a fan, excited by my entry into a book world so different from the world of fleeing Jews and migrating blacks I lived in. But it wasn't until I started on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories that I crossed the line from consumer to chronicler, from reader to writer.
Nick Adams—young Hemingway—was sprinkled throughout his brilliant first collection of short fiction,
In Our Time
, and Hemingway came back to him again in
Winner Takes Nothing
before anthologizing all the stories in one stand-alone volume. Nick evolved from the young son of a Michigan doctor to a runaway hobo to a soldier over the course of these stories, each one a spare, allusive, pristine example of the writer's art. In the rhythms of Hemingway's prose, and the careful detailing of Nick's existence, I began to formulate the idea that I could write about my life in a similar style.
And so, that summer, after dipping and diving into classic American literature, I got pulled by a profound tidal wave of ambition and decided to write my own story. Hemingway gave me license to see the details of my life as significant: summer baseball, my absent father, my lust, my interaction with white folks, my interest in history. From first adolescent encounters with Hemingway until beginning college at age eighteen, I penned about sixty pieces centered around a surrogate named Dwayne Robinson (my mother almost gave me the middle name Dwayne, though she settled on Daryle, so it seemed an apt dual identity). Some were simply Hemingway knockoffs, others were stylistically more ambitious sketches of moments in my day.
A ritual evolved, especially on weekends, holidays, and those long, hot New York summers, during which I escaped by creating ultraromantic visions of myself. I'd buy little notebooks—mostly small spiral numbers with replaceable pages—and I'd fill them with my attempts at short stories and narrative essays. I'd sit up all night scribbling, and then commandeer my mother's manual (later electric) typewriter and fill the pages with my musings. My mother and sister both have memories of me tapping away until one and two in the A.M.
Occasionally I'd try to write standing up, as Hemingway reportedly did, but my legs were no match for Papa's. I even tried writing while drunk, or at least a little tipsy, like my great alcoholic heroes. Thankfully, I was always a sober sort, so the relationship between inebriation and creativity escaped me, particularly since what I wrote under the influence was crap.
Mostly, I was intoxicated by my own words. I didn't show them to many folks—only some to my mother, English teachers, and girls I hoped to make girlfriends. Mainly I just reveled in their creation, watching the pages of Dwayne Robinson stories grow, hoping they'd amount to something grand one day despite their flaws. Years later I'd name the lead character in my first novel,
Urban Romance
, Dwayne Robinson, and I tossed in a bit of one of those adolescent stories. I would also use Dwayne Robinson as my credit on a cheesy TV movie I rewrote, a joke that I richly enjoyed.
Ultimately, the most important thing wasn't Dwayne but that I'd found a calling. One afternoon that summer I came home and ripped down all the posters of baseball players I had taped up. Down went the Yankees' centerfielder, Bobby Murcer. I'd followed Murcer's career since he first joined the club and was touted as the next Mickey Mantle. He'd never be that, but Murcer was a solid major league ballplayer, one of the first whose career I'd followed from the day he'd gotten called up until he retired. It was tough to take Murcer off the wall, but down he came.
The pictures from
Sports Illustrated
and the
Daily News
that had covered my walls were replaced with photos from
Rolling Stone
,
Esquire
, and book jackets. Up went a shot of Eldridge Cleaver smoking a pipe with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Up went a photo of James Baldwin from the novel
If Beale Street Could Talk
, and Jimmy Breslin from his book about Watergate, and Hemingway from a literary magazine, and any other writers I could find. I was acknowledging that my baseball dreams, while not yet completely over, were no longer my chief focus. I was going to be a writer, an idea that would have sounded absurd if I hadn't sent that one dollar to the Literary Guild.
BK EARLY SEVENTIES
When I was an adolescent the uniforms of the New York Knicks were filled by secular gods (Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Dick Barnett, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe) and in order to keep up with the team in the long, dark ages before cable, all of New York listened to the broadcast announcer Marvelous Marv Albert. His voice was always nasal, but was higher pitched back then. His delivery was as sharp-witted and as sarcastic as only a real Brooklyn native's could be. In the corridors of East Flatbush's Meyer Levin Junior High school Marv Albert imitators were legion. Bruce Gelman and I, both of class 7-14, were just two of the thousands battling to be the best Marv Albert, while using our pens as mikes as we walked the staircases of JHS 285.
“Frazier brings it up the right sideline,” I'd say. “He passes to Bradley, who takes two dribbles and feeds into Reed in the post. Back out to DeBusschere. Over to Bradley. He stops. He pops. Yes!”
Then my dark-haired friend would reply, “Frazier at the top of the key. Passes to DeBusschere. He's trapped in the corner. Passes back out to Frazier, who dribbles left, stops, fakes, and then bounce pass to DeBusshere, who lays it up and in!”
The only championships this franchise has ever won occurred while I was in junior high and then high school, back in 1970 and 1973. Combine these with the titles won by the Mets and Jets at Shea Stadium in '69, and these were amazing years to be young, love sports, and be alive in New York City.
These glory years coincided with my attending two schools in East Flatbush, Meyer Levin Junior High and Tilden High School, which were separated from each other by a narrow street. With my teenage years came my first awareness that race and class were intertwined, and that in Brooklyn, whether a neighborhood was black, Puerto Rican, or Jewish was just a matter of what point in history you walked its streets. It wasn't until I attended Meyer Levin that I found out that Brownsville, just a twenty-minute bus ride away, had a history that predated the projects and the brown folks who lived there now.
One afternoon in a Meyer Levin hallway, I got into a conversation with a white mother who was volunteering in the principal's office, who said she too had grown up in Brownsville. She knew all about the fish market on Belmont Avenue. She knew about the elevated subway that ran down Livonia Avenue. She knew about the Brownsville Boys' Club and Abe Stark Philanthropic summer day camp that was run there.
But what really tripped me out was how she pronounced Pitkin Avenue. Everybody I knew in the projects said “Pick-in” as if the “T” was silent and the street was a metaphor for selecting items, which felt apt, since it was Brownsville's main shopping strip. The lady said “Pit-kin,” with a heavy emphasis on the “T” and “kin,” which, technically speaking, was the correct way to say it, yet it felt foreign, and, coming from her middle-aged self, sounded old-fashioned.
It was my first inkling that my Brownsville, a place of public housing, of bodegas and brown-skinned peoples, had housed others. Until then we—blacks and Ricans—seemed to exist in our own world, in areas that were a bus ride, a long subway trek, or a goodly car ride away from the Jews and Italians who shared Brooklyn with us. I'd already figured out that my home city was a place of enclaves marked by invisible lines of ethnic demarcation, and that wrong turns carried risks.
But what the woman hipped me to was that this geography wasn't stable. In fact, not only was it mutable, but it was changing all around me. In my Brooklyn circa the 1970s there were the predominantly black and Latin 'hoods of Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant; the Italian and Jewish areas of Flatlands, Canarsie, and Flatbush; and the rapidly growing Caribbean population of East Flatbush. Downtown Brooklyn was the land of movie theaters, the huge Abraham & Strauss department store, and Saturday afternoon Chinese food with Ma and my sister. Throughout my adolescence and teen years, blacks and Ricans and the white ethnic areas were in transition, as wealthier whites fled the borough in reaction to us angry brown hordes. Busing was definitely one of the engines of change, but not always the yellow kind.
It took two city buses to get from Brownsville to Meyer Levin, and later Samuel J. Tilden High School. My magic carpet was my precious school bus pass, a wallet-sized card that granted free admittance to subways and buses. Public transportation meant I didn't have to suffer the ignominy of exiting a school bus, but everyone knew where we were from anyway. After all, we came on the same city buses, knew each other, and, most noticeably, were usually all shoved into the same classes. It was possible at Meyer Levin to travel from darker Brownsville to predominantly white ethnic East Flatbush and yet have only fleeting classroom contact with your white schoolmates.
When I entered junior high in 1969, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatlands were overwhelmingly peopled with white Italians and Jews. By the time I graduated from high school in 1975, all that was ancient history. In fact, I believe, my senior class at Tilden was the last predominantly white one in the school's history.
My personal journey was a little different from that of a lot of my Brownsville peers. Back in elementary school I'd been a star, partly because I was painfully well behaved, was as well spoken as my role model, Sir Sidney Poitier, and because I could read my ass off, which was greatly valued by teachers and administrators. Unfortunately, my reading ability overshadowed my many weaknesses—I had a speech impediment (despite therapy I still mumble), and couldn't do math to save my life. I think reading was so easy and so much fun that I didn't apply myself to math with any seriousness.
When I got to Meyer Levin my reading scores from elementary school landed me in class 7-14, which was an elite group. And, within a few weeks, I knew I was in over my head. A crucial part of my failure was that in the fall of 1969 there was a long, bitter teachers' strike over community control of local school boards.
It's little remembered now, yet it was a seminal moment in New York's racial history. Ground zero for the strike was about ten blocks away from the Tilden projects in an area known as Ocean Hill-Brownsville.
BOOK: City Kid
2.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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