Just Kids From the Bronx (27 page)

Although I was generally agreeable, I could also be an obstinate kid when it came to my fears. Our doctor was Dr. Loperfido and one time he chased me around his office to give me a shot. I was terrified. I picked up a shoe and I threw it at the doctor’s head. I actually hit him in the head. He said to my mother, “He’s got an anger management problem,” even before that became a term. “He’s going to be a problem.” And every time I’d be angry about something, my mother would say, “You know, that doctor was right.” I’m still terrified of blood. I knew that when they stuck that needle in, it hurt, and I didn’t like pain. Pain drove me nuts. I would get into flop sweat when we’d drive up that road to the doctor because I thought that every trip to the doctor meant me getting a shot.

To this day, whenever I go in for an exam, the doctor knows that they have to ignore the first blood pressure numbers they take because I have white coat fever. The doctor looks at me when I tell him that and he says, “Really?” and I say, “Let’s just do the exam and take the blood pressure again.” And at the end it’ll be 120 over 80.

Because I was always one of the smartest kids in my class, I thought I was superbright. When I went to Bronx High School of Science that all went out the window. I started to be interested in girls, and all that brightness just drained out of my head. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t go there, because I was definitely
not
the smartest kid there. I mean, I struggled to get a ninety-one or ninety-two. I think that was my average for three years, not four, because I had skipped one year from seventh to ninth grades. Ninety-two! And I busted my butt!

When I go to a reunion, I look at myself as a failure. They’re doctors and engineers and I became a baseball broadcaster.
Why’d you go to Bronx Science to become a broadcaster?
Everyone in that high school was the smartest kid in their elementary or middle school. They were the cream of the crop. I almost look at it like this: in baseball, when you get drafted, you go to a minor league team. Every kid who’s drafted is the best player in his city or town, and then all of a sudden he’s in where
everybody
was the best baseball player in his town. So in Bronx Science, everybody was the smartest kid in their school—and it was tough. It was very, very difficult for me. You start to doubt yourself. You start to doubt that you’re really smart.

I now give advice to kids. “Always work harder than everybody else, because you can control that. You can control effort but you can’t control being the smartest person.”

My struggles in high school actually made college easy. I went to Fordham and when I was done with Fordham I was done with school. I had had enough. If I weren’t a sportscaster, I know that I would be involved in something where I could use my creativity. I wasn’t really built for being a doctor or anything like that. I mean, can you imagine me
giving
shots? Thank God I’m doing well, but I still think that it can go away. My mom to her last day said, “You have to watch out. People want your job.”

My mom and dad got married in the Bronx County Courthouse. You could see that building from the broadcast booth in the old Yankee Stadium. I’d see that building all the time. In 2003, I was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame. The ceremony was in the Bronx County Courthouse, and my mom was there. And when my wife, Jodi, and I got our marriage license, we got it in the Bronx County Courthouse too.

MELVIN GLOVER (GRANDMASTER MELLE MEL)

Award-winning rap artist

(1961– )

When you’re brought up in a depressed neighborhood, the idea is that you want to leave the neighborhood when you are grown. Since there wasn’t a lot going on, you had to work a little harder to actually get out of the Bronx or else you’d just be stuck there. Where I lived, even though it was a bad neighborhood, it had good people in it, and with a little bit of support from the school that I went to and the block that I grew up on I could think of life goals. There was a lot of encouragement to go to places outside of the Bronx, and I think that my generation, and maybe the generation after, we were probably the last generations that wanted to move on. Nowadays, they want to be on the street and it’s more like they want to stay rather than be somewhere else.

At a certain point, I was still a good student. But instead of doing the curriculum, I was trying to be defiant against education and after a while, after I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to educate my way out of the Bronx, I started getting into music and hanging out on the streets and seeing a lot of the break dancing and hip-hop. I was about seventeen when I realized that the education thing wasn’t going to work for me ’cause I blew that, so I concentrated on doing the music thing. That’s when my brother and me, we started writing rhymes, doing parties, doing routines, and things of that nature. I spent a lot of time doing those things. We have to specialize in something and my field of expertise was gonna be entertainment.

I had a mother and father at home, but my father was an alcoholic. My mother kept us stable because she was a housewife who stayed at home. She was like the voice of sanity for my father because he was very drunk and just a little weird. I had four siblings. Two brothers and two sisters. The older ones were the two girls and they kinda ran wild, so my mother would always say, “You’re not messin’ up my life because, you know, you’re messin’ up your life if you run wild.” She was right. So I realized after a while that I was in charge of my life and I didn’t want to mess it up.

Left to my own devices, though, I wouldn’t have done the right thing, because I thought I had a certain amount of intelligence and I thought I was smarter than everybody. You know, I’m really not that smart because if I really was that smart, I wouldn’t have gone around with that wrong crowd. We were a couple of young dudes, and we’d hang out, getting high, smoking weed. We’d go around and commit these little petty crimes. I remember there was a teacher who worked in the after-school center. His name was Mr. Torres and he also taught in the sixth grade. He was short. He was maybe five-foot-five or something like that. It wasn’t like he was a big guy, but he was kind of husky. One of the gang guys really got to him so Mr. Torres said, If you don’t come to my class, if you don’t come to school, I’m gonna come and get you where you live. And I was in the fifth grade then, sniffing glue and picking pockets.

I remember it was a Sunday before the Monday when school started, and I was supposed to go and hang out with these guys, but figured that I had to stay in the house because on Monday, if I don’t go to the class, Mr. Torres was gonna come to my house and get me. So that Sunday, these three guys kidnapped two girls, took ’em up to a roof, raped both the girls, and threw one of them off the roof. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that I used to hang out with these guys all the time, but I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with it. I had made up my mind that I was going to go to school because of Mr. Torres and deciding that basically saved my entire life, right there, because everything would’ve been totally different if I had been with those guys. Crazy!

When we were younger kids, we’d play basketball, softball, but we also played football. We didn’t have a football so we’d take a milk container and a soda bottle and wrap the soda bottle in newspaper and stuff the soda bottle inside the milk container and shape it like a football. And we’d play football on the street. That’s the way we’d pass a lot of time. That was before we got older and people started messin’ with drugs. We didn’t have football equipment, but we made our own football equipment, and we had fun doing things that regular kids were doing, but we just had to improvise a little bit.

And that same concept was basically what hip-hop was, because we had block parties and indoor parties. You’d make do. Between that and music, that’s what basically kept me from going to jail. The one thing I’m not going to say was a great achievement was that I never went to prison. I’ve been arrested, but I don’t have a criminal record. I was buying cars, but I didn’t have a license. But I hung out with the good guys and I started doing music.

It’s not like I’m the most talented guy, but I grew up in a black household where my father listened to country music, to Sinatra and to Dean Martin—we watched a lot of TV—and Mel Tormé. We listened to a lot of different types of music. Like Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin. The Temptations would’ve been more like the music we had, but format and the structure were more like the others. How they handled the mike. How they worked the crowd. Upscale entertainment. That’s how I saw entertainment in my head. That was like what it was all about to me.

The hip-hop culture is music and entertainment. Hip-hop is a term that’s used to describe it all. There was no such thing as hip-hop music. It came out of disco and all kinds of music, like jazz and anything that had that beat. It was jazz, it was rock ’n roll, it was reggae, it was R and B. It wasn’t necessarily a dance, but they created moves, and a patchwork, like a quilt. All those different styles of music. Then the rhymes went onto that quilt and over time it was called hip-hop. That’s how the whole thing started.

The main thing about the generation that I came up in, from the perspective of being a fan and the music we did, I think it’s so commendable that the people all came from the same area. From a four- or five-block radius. We didn’t just settle for what was brought to the table. Brooklyn. The kids call it Crooklyn, but we did music in the Bronx. That was our thing. We are able to go all over the world. By 1980, 1990, people all over the world were doing hip-hop. It’s a certified music genre and it’s all because we just wanted to have fun in our Bronx neighborhood. We just wanted to have a good time. And we knew that a lot of other people could have a good time, and I think that those people have a lot of enjoyment in their lives from what we started back then.

JAIME (“JIMMY”) RODRIGUEZ JR.

Restaurateur

(1962– )

I started helping my father sell fish on the street near Westchester Avenue and the Bronx River Parkway when I was about sixteen. He went to the market early in the morning and then we set up the outdoor fish stand where we sold shrimp and lobsters. We always bought a lot because my dad was saying, “Make the money on volume. You buy it and you make a couple of dollars, all on volume.” After a couple of years we weren’t allowed to sell there because we created congestions and didn’t have a license for that corner. So we went to the Cross Bronx Expressway and Webster Avenue underneath the highway. We created chaos there, too, with single parking, double parking. Neighbors complained. Other businesses complained. So then we moved to the side of the highway. We rented the property and built a shack that you could close. A typical wooden shack like you’d see in Puerto Rico on the side of the road. It was small, and they couldn’t kick us out there because it was private property.

My dad taught me from an early age,
You buy, you sell. You make a couple of dollars, you don’t hold on to what you buy. You sell
. Flipping. So my friend David’s father, he had a used-car dealership license, which allowed us to go to car auctions at an early age. Between working with my dad with whatever money I would make, I’d buy a car and put a “for sale” sign on it. I would have two or three cars at home as well as at work. I’d buy a car for maybe a thousand and then sell it for fifteen hundred, seventeen hundred, so by the time I was nineteen I had about a hundred cars that I had bought and sold. It was about buying, selling, and a quick flip.

At one point, I would have five or six cars of my own. My own car went from being a thousand-dollar car to a two-thousand-dollar car so that eventually I was driving a sixteen-thousand-dollar car, a twenty-thousand-dollar car—my own personal car. I’d always have a “for sale” sign on it. It didn’t matter if I sold it. I had a resale certificate and would just go to an auction and get another one. Between seventeen and twenty years old I was always driving something, advertising it, and selling it.

My earlier dreams were about baseball. About being a baseball player. My uncle was a Major League Baseball player. Ellie Rodríguez. He played for about twelve years in the major leagues. Actually, I went to Puerto Rico for a year to learn from him, but I wound up staying with my grandfather instead. The one bad part about baseball here is that it’s seasonal, where everywhere else it’s like ten, twelve months. When you’re working and your job is six or seven days a week, Saturdays and Sundays, you can’t really go to play baseball—so that changed my mind about it all.