The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (37 page)

Bird was probably the patron saint of the generation preceding mine, as he was an arch-bohemian in the downtown Village sense, including his famous trysts and marriages with several white women. Wild flights of art, heroin blind, and “pulling grey bitches” were Bird's trademarks. Or so at least it was told. Jimmy Baldwin's
Notes of a Native Son
had come out about that time and I stared at it in the old Eighth Street Bookstore, admiring the cool black face that stared back at me. And to me, Jimmy was the last great black arts figure who related to Europe as center. But even Jimmy is transitional in this sense, since he began to travel back and forth and was no longer the classic black exile in Europe.

I was like blotting paper for any sensation. All perception, watching and looking, listening, trying to emulate and understand. A young boy just back from the outlands, still outlandish himself, but wanting to learn whatever anybody claimed was valuable to be learned.

And now I wonder what I looked like then. Wandering the streets trying to check something out, not only thinking that almost everyone I saw or met hungered and thirsted after knowledge the way I did, but figuring that they had been around the Village, that they had been on the scene for a while. I doubted anybody I saw in the San Remo or Pandora's Box or Rienzi's had been stuffed away in the brown-and-yellowness of HU or imprisoned in Aguadilla in an air force suit. Who could be that stupid and gullible? Only your reporter.

Meanwhile, I no longer had a job. One afternoon I went to lunch and never returned. I really went out to lunch. Suddenly, leaving the Gotham Book Mart with Mrs. Steloff's freshest hoydenisms ringing in my ears convinced me that on my newfound freedom trek I did not need any new top sergeant. So I simply split, no explanation, nothing, just gone gone gone.

This made for problems though, like cash. I was not sure what I would do. Didn't think about it and in the suddenness of my “decision” didn't even care. I just walked, and was glad to. It crossed my mind a couple days later that maybe I could get on unemployment. I hadn't worked long enough, but I remembered someone had told me that veterans had some
weeks of unemployment compensation coming. But then the contradiction to that, I thought, was that I had been Undesirably Discharged. Maybe that would cancel out that unemployment. I had to find out.

The little apartment on East 3rd Street was stark and cold. When they said cold water they were not shitting. I turned on the slender gas range, opening the oven door and lighting up all the “eyes” on top. Sometimes I'd sit reading with my feet thrust into the oven, the chair tilted back, with a heavy sweater on. I had also begun to write a little, a few scratchings, but not much. Everything was still too new, too strange to do any real writing. I didn't even know what I wanted to write about. Except the kind of poems I'd written in Puerto Rico, abstract and big-worded, talking about stuff of which I had only the remotest idea.

For eating, I'd usually buy a few canned foods. I shouldn't say “foods” because the shit I ended up getting was only marginally edible. I couldn't (and still can't) cook, so mostly what I did was heat up canned garbage. I'd always be eating something like Spam (ugg!) or canned Chef Boyardee spaghetti (double-ugg!), really loathsome stuff like that. Sometimes I'd heat that shit up, then didn't want to eat it. And it would sit there getting cold in an already cold apartment and I'd stare at the concoction I was supposed to dump down in my stomach. Usually, I would get hungry enough to gobble it down very quick and still be hungry.

The hungriest I've ever been was at HU, where, spending the money my parents sent me right away, I had no money left for the cafeteria (before my mother and father got wise and started sending the money directly to the cafeteria food plan). Broke, I'd live off Nabs (those little Ritz cracker and peanut butter sandwiches) and orange soda.

But even in that hunger there was a kind of collective kid glee, probably at the prospect of actually being hungry, a virtually unknown phenomenon, so I guess that was kind of exotic. East 3rd Street hunger maybe had a little of that element in it. Alone, in my cold-water flat, knowing almost no one in the whole of that huge city, and now without a job and very little money, the exoticism was not the factor that I thought about. Such a hunger as can come to exist in such circumstances has a much more dire impact, because of the aloneness, the kind of solitary nature of your situation.

I could have called my parents, but I absolutely did not intend to do that. That would have been an admission that I had failed, that I was still a little boy. I was twenty-three, an adult, I could take care of myself. Actually, the college and air force stints had made me more self-reliant
and even though I was getting ready to get in a bad fix, I knew I could handle it.

So I sat with my feet in the oven and read or tried to scribble on a yellow legal pad. Or I would walk around peeping in windows, looking at books and people, finding out things I thought I needed to know. And had no money. But I started to react in more aggressive ways to my new state. I began going into various delicatessens, usually on the far West Side, Greenwich Village proper, and trying to boost certain things I needed to survive. My best shot was those nice barbecuing chickens they sit on the counter after taking them off the spit. Occasionally, I'd catch the store clerks in the right position, off one of the chickens, and hat. I also began to discover various ways of advancing my economic position (at least easing my hunger) just like the big corporations, and in the true spirit of American free enterprise I began to rip off what I could, modest enough, but effective. I discovered that the bread trucks and milk trucks left their wares in the doorways of the stores before those stores were open. I'd shoot out early in the morning and cop a couple quarts of milk and a half dozen rolls. So I had breakfast. Somehow I'd cop some hated Spam or some cheese and I had lunch. Dinner I'd deal with the flying chicken routine, when I could.

Sometimes Steve Korret invited me to dinner and that was, to me, unbelievably great. Sitting in that neat white apartment with all those books and talking and eating, staring respectfully in awe at Steve's gorgeous wife, Charlene. I'd also begun to meet some other young people on my own, usually around the coffeehouses I'd stop in from time to time. There was Ernie, a young brother from the West Indies, who was also trying to write poetry. And we hung together, after a fashion. Sometimes he'd even come over to my scrambled-up little joint and we'd sit around talking about poetry, looking at each other's work, and figuring out how to survive with no money. (Some years later I think Ernie did go back to the West Indies and away from the hated cold weather.)

There was Ed, who was still in school up at CCNY, majoring in philosophy. Ed was a robust, actually a big fat dude, always smiling or about to smile. He was a poet as well, but deep off into Eastern philosophy. Both Ed and Ernie knew Korret, but they were too young to be in that circle. The three of us would sit in Rienzi's over cider or cappuccino (I never liked espresso) and talk about what we knew and what we didn't. We liked the idea of sitting around being young poets, young black dudes trying to find a way in the world. Sometimes that world seemed wayless, sealed up, surrounding us with high walls of anonymity, racism, pennilessness, the
norms of U.S. life for young black men (or old black men, or young black women or old black women, or middle-aged, etc., etc.). But we all gave off optimism like life rays, and actually encouraged each other by our willingness to be out there in that world saying, “Hey, we gonna be writers, dig it?” And not caring what anybody thought about that.

I still was in general awe of being “free,” brown, and twenty-three, post-HU, post-error farce, and swarming all over the Village in search of myself, but now I was becoming somewhat more acclimated. I was meeting people my own age and saw that many of their problems and designs were like my own. Our conversations helped bring the Village and slowly the entire world of the intellectuals and artists more clearly into focus. I could begin the process of measuring what actually existed and how I stood in relationship to the real, not the youthfully subjective. I could begin to see what had really been accomplished and by whom. My perception was slowly deepening.

Also, a little later, Jim Mitchum showed up downtown. He'd gotten out of the service later than I had gotten thrown out. And now he'd finally wound his way around to where I was, still carrying the camera over his shoulder and still speaking in that stilted roundabout way of his. He was still living up in the Bronx but I'd see him too from time to time and he'd hang out with us, or just the two of us. Ed, Ernie, Jim, and Roi sitting in some coffee shop, late winter/early spring 1957 and for a couple years after that, plotting our rise to the tops of the buildings. Laughing at each other's jokes and each other's conceits, taking serious interest in each other's work; I guess trying to understand the world.

There was also a wilder guy I met about the same time, Tim Poston. Tim was also a poet, but older than the rest of us. He lived in a furnished room over near Cooper Union. In fact, you could look out of Tim's window and right across the street from Cooper Union was a big billboard with a picture of Trujillo on it, then dictator of the Dominican Republic. U.S. support for Trujillo was so great in those days (like its support for the Peruvian fascists today) that they allowed him to have this really huge billboard bringing greetings to gullible U.S. citizens. Some days we'd sit there drinking wine with Tim (Tim only drank wine) and staring out at Trujillo.

Tim had been around the Village for quite a while when I ran into him. Both Ernie and Ed spoke of him as a talented poet. Ernie and Ed, though young, had also been around the Village for a while. Ed making his forays from the Bronx, but based at CCNY. And Ernie not long over, but longer than I, from the islands. When I finally did get to see some of Tim's poetry,
I was also impressed. He'd been influenced by surrealists of one kind or another, and he was kind of wiggy anyway. Tim's problem was that he drank too much and when he drank too much he acted even wiggier than usual. He would scream and laugh too uproariously and even occasionally get into bad scenes with folks who did not appreciate his essentially funloving innocent nature. Tim drank so much he developed certain mental problems or perhaps the alcohol just emphasized certain problems he already had. But he was a hard case when he was in his grapes and he was in his grapes much of the time.

Tim and I got pretty tight. At one point, he was one of my closest friends. But he was a definite pain in the ass, a problem to know. If you knew Tim, then you not only had to put up with him but had to try to help him out of the various scrapes he'd get into. Or he'd come over to your crib and nut out, just collapse and lie across your bed with his mouth open, snoring like the Charge of the Light Brigade. But he was a good poet. At the time I knew him, he had already (unlike most of us) developed a distinctive style — surreal, cynical, and funny, just like him. He had scraps of poetry all over his nasty little furnished room. Tim's room looked even wilder than my apartment, I guess because he'd been there longer, in a smaller space, and had more time to accumulate mountains of debris. All kinds of bottles he hadn't thrown out, books thrown everywhere, in a room not much bigger than a cell.

I liked Tim, I guess, because he was a
real
poet. He had a sureness to his hand (not as sure as it would have been if he'd managed to stay sober over longer periods) that came with practice and knowing what it was he wanted to say. The rest of us, Ed, Ernie, and I, didn't know what the hell we wanted to say. Ernie was under the Dylan Thomas tarp which those years threw upon so many. Ed was trying to write haikus or tankas and deal with Eastern philosophy in the traditional forms of the East and Middle East, and I don't know what I was doing, just abstractions and big words about whatever — who knows?

Plus Tim gave me a look at the Village, at the life downtown, that I couldn't get from Steve Korret. Steve had a circle that functioned at the fringe of another, more fashionable circle (I see now). Steve was who I wanted to emulate. Straight, erudite, slightly mysterious, knowledgeable, ensconced in a beautiful little white apartment with a gorgeous brown wife. But Tim was out, he was on the fringe of everything. He looked at the whole scene with another eye, a jaundiced, drunken, very cynical eye. The way he lived was bottom-of-the-barrel bohemian, no frills or
pretension. He was almost a bum. He had a harder life, hence a harder view, than Korret's, and somehow this fascinated me. Also, he was older and I felt this gave me some kind of security or something, some kind of basic connection with the whole life and style of the place and its varied denizens.

I think that another important quality I got from Tim was that he helped me, with his cold cynicism, to see through the make-believe fairyland subjectivism I had about the Village. He allowed me to peep the widespread stupidity and even racism of the place. (Hey, I even came to the Village thinking the people there, those vaunted intellectuals and artists, “World Class Thinkers,” could not possibly be “prejudiced” because that was dumb shit. That's how naive I was, how deeply subjective and desirous of a new world!)

Tim would tell me some outrageous story, laced with his steely cynicism, then fall out, as much at the story as at my reaction, my widening disbelieving eyes and childish grimace. That would knock him out and he'd hand me the bottle of cheapest wine to turn up just like him.

Like it was Tim who hipped me to the dangerous state of race relations in the Village. And other of my friends did, too. I found out myself from a few bad incidents. But Tim would fall back in his chair chortling and spilling the wine on his pants or shirt. “And watch out for the Italians, Leee-Roy, they'll bop you in the head. They don't like us black boys. They'll beat you up. Especially if you with a white woman. I always carry a blackjack with me or a knife.” And he'd show you this limp-ass blackjack didn't look like it could do anything. “Watch out for the Italians, Leee-Roy.” It'd crack Tim up.