The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (38 page)

He was right, to a certain extent. The “local people,” as folks were wont to call the largely Italian population that was intermingled with the more exotic Villagey part, apparently did not care for the wild antics and bohemian carryings-on of the permanent visitors to their neighborhood. It was like the “townies” and the campus types. Like the “D.C. boys” and those of us up on The Hill down at the Capstone. Except with the blacks it was, as usual, even worse. The general resentment the locals felt toward the white bohemians was quadrupled at the sight of the black species. And there were plenty people with grim stories to verify Tim's charges. Like a guy I came to know named Will Ribbon, who went with this one white woman for years and lived down below Houston Street, where it was really reputed to be dangerous for white-black liaisons. He got jumped on by a gang of the young locals and they pummeled him and called his woman names.
Will goes home and gets his pistol, it was a Beretta, and he walks up and down Thompson Street and Sullivan Street down by Broome and Prince and Spring, looking for these guys. He even goes into some of those private clubs (reputed Mafia relaxation stations) hunting for these guys. When I started working down around that area I used to carry a lead pipe in a manila envelope, the envelope under my arm like a good messenger, not intimidated but nevertheless ready.

All this brought back harsh memories of Barringer where I had been part of a harassed minority under the Italian majority. I thought, Jeez, bastards followed me all the way over here. But it was Tim who prepared me for all of this.

I had another close friend, and he was from Newark as well. Tom Perry, older but runty like myself, maybe even shorter, much darker, and a dandy to the bone. Tom came out of a group of Newark black Hill intellectuals. Dudes I had glimpsed when I was coming up and just getting aware of my clothes, stalking Newark's Hill in search of the music. He was an old friend of Steve Korret's on the New York side. But in Newark, Tom was more closely linked with dudes like the super-hip “Stein” (called so because people thought he was heavy as Einstein), always “dap” and clean, Melvin Kemp, Ralph Brown, and Grachan Moncur, the trombonist. These dudes were so bad they used to
talk
about their clothes. They had definite tastes, were heavy into the English thing when most of us thought it was “Ivy.” In fact Stein and Kemp were so far out they wouldn't hang with certain people if they had on the wrong shit.

Tom Perry was hip like that. Dark and quietly humorous with the kind of biting irony to his observations that I felt close to. You'd see Tom and he had some kind of job in a store, and he'd be coming down the street with some impeccable Harris tweed jacket, charcoal-grey pants with just a hint of a flare at the cuff (in honor of Newark), maybe a cold-blue shirt and a beautiful paisley or Indian madras tie and a handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket that set it all off almost rakishly. Coming out of some bullshit job somewhere where he had to listen to some dull-assed white dude load him up with sorry shit, and Tom cleaner than sunlight!

Tom moved into the apartment under mine on East 3rd Street. When I first got to town he lived way over on Hudson Street with his wife, also from Newark, Maureen, who was even younger than I was. Maureen and I had gone to the same church and her mother was one of the movers and shakers in the Bethany class wars, a friend of my mother's but older and somewhat more flashy than my mother. She had an older son, who knew
Tom and Stein and the others, a very hip and intelligent dude. He got out of high school and went to work in one of the auto plants and he's been there ever since — almost thirty years. Still, when you see him on the street or with his binoculars going to the track meets or other sporting events — that's his thing, sports — he looks like some really taste-setting executive on his way to a late conference. (But his sister was something else again.)

The first time I went over to Hudson Street to see Tom he introduced me to the “speedball.” I didn't know anything about drugs, not even marijuana. And my first years in the Village didn't change much. I had neither the money nor the inclination to get into drugs. They just didn't interest me. It was no moral thing, I just didn't know anything much about them. But Tom mixed this heroin and cocaine, which people on the street call a speedball, and offered me a couple snorts. I didn't know what the shit was too tough, just the names of the stuff. But Tom was into “chippying” — using scag now and again — and his boy, Ralph, who came over every once in a while from Newark, would bring some stuff over. Tom would give me a little snort and it would take me up, but this speedball business was something else. I'd never really been that high before. The heavy drugs almost dropped me to my knees, but somehow I made it out and down the stairs. Tom was saying, “Hey, man, you gonna be all right?” And I staggered all the way crosstown to East 3rd Street, throwing up any number of times as the world whizzed in circles around me.

After that, Tom and I, on some weekends, would score and I'd get fairly mashed up. Not so much at this point, but some time later, Tom and I would always be copping and getting zonked and wasted. But around this time, Tom and Maureen moved into the same building. They had to move out of Hudson Street, and I saw one of the apartments vacant in the building and told them and they moved in. Maureen had just given birth to a little girl and Tom had gotten another of the store-type jobs he'd get to make ends meet. But that entire apartment building was kind of funky. On one floor there was a family of Gypsies, and during this cold winter the door of their apartment couldn't quite shut, so that the blasts of icy air would shoot straight in on them. I don't know whether they had any heat at all. Tom had a couple of kerosene-type heaters and I had my stove with all the eyes on and the oven door open.

I'd begun to write now. Slowly, pitifully (to me), I began to eke out a few words. A couple of poems I wanted to keep, though I don't think I kept any. I'd even written a few pages of a play, a musical, because the girl I'd
been almost going with when I got home from the service had a musical troupe and said she wanted a play. I'd begun to write it not knowing what the hell I was doing. I titled the play
A Good Girl Is Hard to Find
, probably in reflection of my generally womanless state. I'd mentioned I was going to write a musical at Steve Korret's one night, if not full out before the attendants of Korret's court, at least to one of his friends who was known in the circle as “a composer.” In my naive pretension and presumption I asked if Silva, the composer (who was named this because he looked like a villainous actor, Henry Silva), would do the music. He nodded yes. Other people in the circle assured me that Silva was a composer, and I assumed he was serious. But I never finished the play. And Silva never produced any music that I know of. I think he was one of those people I began to find out about who never
did
anything but hang around the Village claiming they were this or that but who were just that — hang-arounders. Some of them only hung around for women, some just to hang, but I was surprised as I discovered more and more people like this.

Really I was fearful that maybe I was one of these people too. Because as it dawned on me that these hang-arounders abounded down in the old Village, then I began to be more and more skeptical, in some moments, about myself. After all, what was I doing? Hanging around. Walking the streets. Sitting in coffeehouses talking. Reading a bit, quite a bit actually. Trying to find out anything about everything. But what, really, was I doing? Nothing took me down as much as that pessimistic perception.

What it meant really was that I was developing some critical faculty, I suppose. Beginning to peep through this “paradise” of my own making, created by my own needs, and see its reality. There were many people who were earnestly trying to create Art (which more and more I focused on as my “purpose”), but there were a whole lot of people — and Korret knew quite a few of them — who were all pretense and prevarication. Sham artists whose claim to being artists was a justification for their bohemian lifestyles.

This became even clearer once I began to get into the habit of writing. Once I started actually writing more regularly, it caused all kinds of other things to happen. For one thing, people began to look at me, regard me would be more like it, a little differently. I think some people down there actually thought that the act of my writing harmed them in some way. Maybe because they were just profiling and here was some naive young dude trying to write for real. They mighta been around for years
tap-tapping every once in a while, now some know-nothing colored kid is gonna come on the scene — what? writing? Bullshit!

I wrote a story, a rather longish story, at that time my maximum creation. It was called “The Marathon Runner” (hopefully, it is lost), influenced, I would imagine, by Franz Kafka, who I had gotten into deep. The short stories really turned me on, even though I didn't fully understand them. “The Hunger Artist,” “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” plus
The Trial
and
The Castle
. I liked that eerie otherworldly style of Kafka's, the heavy symbolism. Yet I was too young and inexperienced to understand the heavy social commentary of that symbolism. I got mostly its air, Kafka's style, feeling that that style carried something of deadly seriousness about it. I did not really understand that Kafka, indeed, was talking about the rise of fascism.

But I worked away at “The Marathon Runner,” writing in my yellow legal pad, for weeks. I even had drawings of the course the marathon runner of the title ran. It was a somewhat metaphysical rumination about the runner running, I guess inwardly and outwardly aspiring to some unknown absolute as I was, the narrative full of philosophical abstraction and labored symbolism. But it was mine. And after this story, I no longer had as much difficulty getting some of my feelings down on the page.

I brought the story to Steve Korret to read. He would be the person I brought this sign of genuine promise to (so I thought, shyly enough). I was no mere hang-arounder, I was for real. I was going to write. This was no bullshit. Korret seemed startled when I handed him the story. He had seemed somewhat startled, or maybe it was just sardonically amused, when I told him I had written a long story I wanted him to read. But now that I'd handed him “The Marathon Runner,” he almost colored (except he was too dark complexioned for red to register). He grinned in a fixed way like I had done something to him that was not really all that pleasant, and he was surprised I would do that to him, my old friend and maximum mentor.

When I saw him a couple of times before he finished reading the story he would comment aloud to Charlene or to whoever was around, that I had written a story and had given it to him to read and that he was reading it. He made it seem more portentous than I thought it was — the giving of the story to him to read — it was almost as if it was some kind of challenge that I had issued to him. And I could pick that up.

It was at this point that I reflected that I had never seen any of Steve Korret's writing. Except the letters he had written to me when I was in
Puerto Rico. Two letters. I remembered also that he had once spoken of his “work” and showed me vaguely some pile of papers and note cards. He said he jotted things down on note cards. And now I think he showed me some more of his work, typed irregularly on yellow Swedish bond, interspersed with hosts of note cards. This was after he had announced that the story I'd given him was “ambitious, very ambitious,” but he said no more, grinning broadly when he pronounced my ambition. What he showed me was rambling, yet trying to find focus for focus. It was abstract and philosophical; it was speculative philosophy of a metaphysical bent, deeply influenced by Eastern religion. Yet I had not the vaguest idea of what it was trying to say. I blinked and kept scanning until he took it from me. Steve laughed deeply, he had given me back “The Marathon Runner” as he pronounced my ambition.

I didn't know what to make of that, though I could sense a kind of tightness — the accepting of a challenge that I hadn't meant to issue. I was just trying to be true to myself, to my own dreams and fantasies. I hadn't realized I'd encroached on someone else's and I still didn't know how.

It was Percy Knight, an old friend of Steve's and a very fine person, who shed some light on the situation. Percy was part of Steve's circle, but Percy had no pretensions that called for membership in bohemia. Percy lived in Brooklyn and worked for the Transit Authority. He was an intellectual and, I always thought, a philosopher. It was Percy who always pronounced the most ironic and thoroughly comic of the Zen “jokes” and tales. I looked to Percy as an older brother, a
real
person from whom you could receive some actual information about the world. Always smiling and cool, Percy said to me simply, “About that story you've written, Steve tells me it's very good.” He paused. “I knew it would be.” And smiling coolly, as was his wont, he talked about other things.

The story came at a time when I was beginning to roam a little more on my own. It was probably the confirmation of this development. Before, I had been under Steve Korret's tutelage, armed and guided by his stance and opinions, but now I moved a little away from this conscious and unconscious center. The story had a lot to do with it. Perhaps it was the pronouncement of an independence I didn't even realize I needed to pronounce. I was living from hand to mouth, very tenuously. The rent, increased to $32 a month, seemed an enormous amount. Finally, Mitchum moved in with me to share the rent, but still I had no consistent source of money. Jim had some sort of job and this kept me from getting tossed out of that joint on my head. Tom lent me a few dollars, and there were some
other scams. But I had to get a job. I looked in various newspapers, followed certain clues, but still nothing. I was getting desperate.