My grades plummeted almost immediately. I attended Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, and while I had been a good student in the ninth grade, the following year I more or less dropped out. I failed everything. I left home in the mornings and simply didn’t go to school. Just like Mommy did years before me, I began my own process of running, emotionally disconnecting myself from her, as if by doing so I could keep her suffering from touching me. After years of waiting, I was finally the king in my house, the oldest kid, with the power to boss and torture my younger siblings the way I’d been bossed and tortured, but now that the moment had arrived I spent as much time away from home as possible. I quit church and avoided my deeply religious godparents. I was the first kid on my block to smoke cigarettes and reefer. I joined a soul band, Black Ice, on the other side of town, playing any instrument I could round up—sax, flute, and bass, all borrowed. We played Kool and the Gang songs for hours, smoking weed, drinking Old English 800 malt liquor, and rehearsing in the drummer’s basement for days at a time until the guy’s mother threw us out, at which time we’d find another place to jam. The band attracted legions of followers—girls, of whom at fourteen I was still deathly afraid, and new friends, cool cats named Beanie, Marvin, Chink, Pig, and Bucky, who smoked cigarettes and reefer, digging the band’s sounds. “Oh yeah…you can play, man. You are smokin’…”
My new friends and I shoplifted. We broke into cars. We snuck onto the nearby Conrail/Long Island Rail Road tracks and broke into freight cars, robbing them of bicycles, television sets, and wine. Once, a cop caught us up there looking to steal but we had no goods on us. He lined us up against a freight car and searched us, then smashed one kid in the face with his blackjack—the kid had tried to say he wasn’t with the rest of us. He led us around the freight yards at gunpoint for about an hour, waving his gun under our noses and saying, “You nigger scum. I should shoot you right now.” We thought we were going to die, but he let us go. It didn’t deter us. At one point we found a freight car so full of wine we stole crates and crates of it. Half the teenagers in St. Albans were wandering around drunk for weeks. The cops tried to crack down and one night caught four of us dividing up cases of the stolen wine on a dead-end street. They rushed in on us, two squad cars with headlights off and cops in the front and back, engines roaring, tires squealing, while we scattered like flies into the junkyard nearby. I barely got away. I was running behind my big slow friend Marvin and couldn’t make it to the fence on the other side of the junkyard where everyone else escaped. I dove under an abandoned dump truck and lay quiet, still clasping a bottle of cheap, peppermint-tasting wine in my hand, gritting my teeth, and nearly peeing on myself as I watched the cops’ shoes and saw the beam of their flashlights zipping around just inches from my feet. The next day I got so drunk in relief I couldn’t make it home. My friend Joe carried me to my house, where I fell down, got up, pissed in the street in front of my sisters, who were desperately trying to get me into the house without Mommy seeing me, then collapsed. When I woke up hours later, Mommy was sitting at the foot of my bed, whipping belt in hand. She whipped me mercilessly, tears in her eyes. It did not help. My friends became my family, and my family and mother just became people I lived with.
I was obviously hiding, and angry as well, but I would never admit that to myself. The marvelous orchestrated chaos that Mommy had so painstakingly constructed to make her house run smoothly broke down when Daddy died, and Mommy was in no fixing mood. My stepfather’s final admonition to me went unheeded as I absolved myself of all responsibility and stayed out of the house as much as possible, thus avoiding the emotional impact of watching Mommy suffer. She, in turn, suffered more, having no one to help her keep the younger ones in line. In addition she had no money to pay heating bills, and light bills, and phone bills, sending every dime she had from my stepfather’s pension and her small work salary and social security to my siblings in college and grad school. Gradually the house slipped farther and farther into disrepair. I ignored it. To earn dough, I sold reefer, keeping a stash of it at the railroad tracks. When I ran out, I talked my friend Joe into robbing a dealer who we knew had a big stash. Joe had a .22 caliber pistol and I carried a straight-edge shaving razor I’d found among my stepfather’s things. We strong-armed the dealer for the weed, and when he protested I hit him and he backed off. When we ran out of dough from that, we snatched a purse on Newburg Street from an old black woman who screamed and hollered while we laughed and ran. We got $1.16 and Joe felt sorry for the woman and refused to do it again, so I did it alone, waiting in the dark doorway of a closed barbershop as the women got off the bus, ripping the purses out of their protesting hands as they cried out in fear and shock. Punk that I was, I did feel sorry for them, their screams echoing in my ears as I ran, my heart beating so hard it felt like a brick pounding against my chest, but not sorry enough. I was numb. I felt I was getting back at the world for injustices I had suffered, but if you sat me down and asked me which injustices I was talking about, I wouldn’t have been able to name them if my life depended on it. I snatched old women’s purses just as I had seen my own mother’s purse snatched when I was eight years old, but in my mind the two acts were not related. I had no feelings. I had smothered them. Every time they surged up, I shoved them back down inside me the way you stuff clothing in a drawer and shut it. Reefer and wine helped me to forget any pain, and as the pain and guilt increased, my problems with drugs worsened.
I took pains to keep my life as a punk a secret from my mother. I stole a bunch of blank report cards from the school library rather than have Ma see my horrible grades, which were basically zero since I never showed up. It was a complicated project requiring real ingenuity and a friend named Vincent, who helped, but I made the mistake of asking my sister Kathy to fill out the one I used for myself, because I was afraid Mommy would recognize my handwriting. Instead of putting down my usual grades—I had been an A student—Kathy wrote in C grades. Mommy looked at the grades and said, “James is no C student.” She picked up the phone and called the school and got the shock of her life.
She could not punish me, she knew that. I was too old, too strong, and too far gone. She enrolled me in summer school and I got thrown out. My older brothers came home from college and admonished me, beating me from one end of the house to the other. I still got high and stayed out all hours. Finally Mommy sent me to stay with my sister Jack who had moved from Harlem to Louisville, Kentucky, with her new husband. “Jack will straighten your butt out,” she sniffed. I told her I doubted it.
I loved Jack. She was a small, pretty, Christian black woman with freckles and brown eyes that missed nothing. She wore elaborate wigs and talked real down home, with a heavy, deep accent full of “I ain’ts” and “Come owns.” She sometimes wrapped her head in scarves and worked as a cook and domestic, usually for white people, but beneath her domestic look was an intelligent, clairvoyant woman who understood more about me as a mixed child than I understood about myself. Jack had lived in Harlem for ten years before moving to Kentucky. She knew more about the street than I did.
Going to stay with Jack for the summer was not punishment for me. It was sweet liberty, and I stayed there three straight summers, always managing to get tossed from summer school in New York City just to get sent down there. Jack was too busy to keep a watchful eye on me, or so I thought. She had a young baby, worked full-time as a cook in a cafeteria, and had a husband who was a handful. The first time I came to her house she told me, “You want to hang out? Go on out, you’ll see. But if you come into my house with a gun, I’ll shoot you myself,” and she meant it. She let me run around, albeit reluctantly, with her husband, Big Richard, whom I worshiped. He was a tall, thin, chocolate-skinned man with a mustache, who favored shades, short-sleeved shirts, shiny shoes, and sharkskin pants, and always held a lit cigarette between his teeth. Big Richard was a cool customer who ran with some rough characters down in Louisville, but while many of his friends had been cut, stabbed, maimed
, and shot, Big Richard always stayed injury-free, because his brain worked like a bilge pump, immediately sucking info out of any situation, his mind clicking behind those dark shades at all times. He could walk into a nightclub and sniff danger instantly, backing out right away. “Someone’s going to get shot in there,” he’d say, and sure enough, the next day you’d hear that someone got tagged.
Richard worked at the Brown and Williamson tobacco plant, but all day and night before his shift started, he and I would go hang out with his boys on “the Corner” at the Vermont Liquor Store, a couple of miles from Jack’s house at Thirty-fourth and Vermont Avenue on the city’s west side. The three summers I spent at Vermont Liquors on the Corner—which Big Richard pronounced “Coner”—were my true street education.
The men on the Corner were southern working men: plumbers, carpenters, painters, drunks, con artists, retired army lifers from nearby Fort Knox, tobacco workers for Brown and Williamson, and some just plain ol’ hustlers. They were big, muscled men with white teeth and huge arms, who wore work clothes and undershirts, painters’ pants, and work boots; they smoked filterless Pall Malls and Tareytons and drove big cars—Electra 225’s, Cadillacs, and long Olds-mobiles. They liked fine women, good whiskey, crap games, and the local softball league, in which they fielded a team of good-natured alcoholics. They played other teams of good-natured alcoholics, and while fistfights occasionally broke out, rarely was there a gunfight afterwards. The men on the Corner were honorable drinking men, with their own code of ethics: A man’s word was his bond, you never insulted anyone’s woman, you didn’t drink from the same bottle as a man who confessed to oral sex with women, you never cuffed the dice during crap games, and if you pulled out a gun—which you shouldn’t do—you’d better use it before it got used on you. They had names like “Red,” “Hot Sausage,” “One-Armed James,” and “Chicken Man,” an old drunk who was my favorite.
Chicken Man was a small man with deep, rich, almost copper-toned skin, a wrinkled face, and laughing eyes. He wore an old fishing hat that seemed to cover his entire face, and plaid pants that left about two inches of sock and four inches of ankle showing. He smelled of liquor and beer all the time but he kept a pocket full of candy which he laid on the various children who came by the liquor store to see him, some his kin and some not. You could see him coming from a distance, appearing out of nowhere like an angel, his silhouette seeming to rise from the ground in the simmering heat, though he actually emerged from one of the ramshackle houses that lined the road a half-mile away. He’d stagger up Thirty-fourth Street like a wandering bird lost in flight, his hands spread out at his sides like he was flying, waving at cars that honked at him, arriving on the Corner at two P.M. drunk. He’d set up shop on the Corner like it was his office, sitting in the front of the liquor store on a wood crate and drinking till he ran out of liquor or money, at which time he’d stagger off, blindly drunk, laughing at some silly philosophy he’d just laid down. Chicken Man was a sweet man. He was completely incoherent when he was drunk, but when sober he was one of the chief philosophers of the Corner. He’d sit on his crate like King Tut, his arms folded, his head shaking, and he’d watch traffic pass, commenting on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, money, liquor (“Don’t mix corn liquor and cheap wine—ever”), and women (“Never pork a woman on her period—her body’s giving off filth”). Chicken Man laughingly called white folks “Mr. Charlie,” or “Chuck.”
“How Mr. Charlie got his name,” Chicken Man explained one day, “is from when you’re drunk. You call on him like this: ‘Chaaaarrrllllieeee.”’ He feigned throwing up. “But when you’re real, real drunk you call him Chuck, like this: ‘Chuuuuccckckckkkkk!”’ He feigned severe throwing up.
“What about Ralph?” I asked, knowing full well that when a dude threw up, we called it ralphing; at least in New York we did.
“Forget Ralph. He don’t count. Mr. Charlie counts. Now buy me a beer.”
The men on the Corner seemed to pay no attention to Mr. Charlie. The closest they came to him was when the police rode by, sometimes stopping to ask if anyone had seen this or that person. They were met with stony silence, or sometimes even jokes and laughter. The men did not seem to be afraid of the police, nor did they dislike them. Their lives just seemed complete without the white man. I liked that. Their world was insular, away from the real world that I was running from. They called me “New York,” and let me sit out there all day, practicing my flute and smoking all the weed I wanted. I turned fifteen on the Corner but could act like I was twenty-five, and no one cared. I could hide. No one knew me. No one knew my past, my white mother, my dead father, nothing. It was perfect. My problems seemed far, far away.
One of Big Richard’s good friends was a guy named Pike, who had dark skin, a moustache, and an easygoing manner. I stole a few car batteries with Pike until somebody saw us in their driveway at night, flicked the porch light on, and took a potshot at us. “You don’t need to be doing this no way,” Pike said, panting for breath when we were in the clear. He wouldn’t let me run with him anymore after that. Like most dudes on the Corner, he looked out for me. When I protested, saying I needed money, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m gonna get you a job in a turd factory, making all the money you want.”
“What’s a turd factory?” I asked.
“It’s a factory where they make turds.” He explained this to me one afternoon while he, Big Richard, and I were cruising around in his car. Big Richard was riding shotgun, chomping on his cigarette, and staring out the window to keep from laughing.
“I want the job,” I said. “What do I do?”
“You sit in a big chair and the turds float down this long stream of water, and you separate the big turds from the little turds.”
“How do you do that?”
“They got a tool you use. Or you can use your hand. Whatever. It don’t matter. It’s good money, man! You want the job or not?”
“I want it, man! I want the job! Take me there!”
I finally did get a real job pumping gas at a station about a mile from the Corner. The man who ran it was named Herman, a big, burly black man with a wide chest who was mean as the day was long. My first day on the job, the mechanic at the station, a young light-skinned black guy, told me, “Don’t cross Herman. He put two men down already.” I didn’t ask any questions about those two cats, just made sure I wasn’t the third, because Herman was a big, mean, irritated, angry, butt-kicking dude. Every night just before closing time he’d hand me a bucket full of gas and a mop and say, “Mop this goddam floor and don’t smoke while you doin’ it neither.” Then he’d stand right outside the door and smoke and watch me mop the entire floor of the auto shop. Nobody ever robbed Herman’s station while I was there, nor did any customers ever fool with him.
My job was to pump gas, change tires, fix flats, and generally keep out of Herman’s way, which I more or less did, but I got into a fistfight with one of his friends, a scar-faced, scratch-a-match-in-the-palm-of-his-hand homosexual who was harassing me. Who knows, maybe it was my girly face and New York accent, but he got funky with me one afternoon and I punched him in the face a few times before he went under his car seat for his pistol and chased me around the station. The ruckus caused a big stir and Herman fired me on the spot. I retreated to the Corner, plotting revenge and seeking wisdom from my main man, Chicken Man. A sober Chicken Man had two words of advice. “Forget it,” he said.
“I can’t forget it. I should’ve gotten a gun and shot him,” I said.
Chicken Man chuckled. “You don’t know shit from Shinola,” he said. “Is that how you want to end up, goin’ to jail for him? Because that’s where you’ll end up, doing time and hanging on this corner when you get out. Is that what you want for yourself? ‘Cause if you do, you can have it. Go on.”
“I’m a smart guy,” I said. “I don’t have to take that kind of shit. Nobody knows how smart I really am, Chicken Man, but I’m smart.”
“And nobody?
??ll give a damn neither!” Chicken Man snapped. “Everybody on this corner is smart. You ain’t no smarter than anybody here. If you so smart, why you got to come on this corner every summer? ‘Cause you flunkin’ school! You think if you drop out of school somebody’s gonna beg you to go back? Hell no! They won’t beg your black ass to go back. What makes you so special that they’ll beg you! Who are you? You ain’t nobody! If you want to drop out of school and shoot people and hang on this corner all your life, go ahead. It’s your life!”
I had never heard Chicken Man talk so severely and what he said didn’t really hit me, not right away. I said to myself, “He’s just a drunk,” and continued my adventures. Not long after, however, a guy named Mike, an easygoing, humorous six-foot-eight guy who had always encouraged me to get off the street, had an argument on the Corner with his girlfriend Mustang, a fine, lithe black woman with a large black ass and a foxy wiggle. As the argument progressed, Mike began slapping Mustang around so hard I wanted to jump in, but Chicken Man stopped me. “Leave that alone, New York!” he hissed. “That’s between him and his woman. Don’t never get between a man and his woman.” Mustang left the corner in her car, burning rubber, promising to bring her new boyfriend back to kill Mike. The Corner quickly emptied—there was nothing like the threat of a gunfight to make everyone go home. The next day Big Richard gave me explicit instructions to “stay off the Corner,” but I snuck over there anyway and watched as Mike came by that afternoon, rumbling up in his big Buick, playing Marvin Gaye on his eight-track player. He cut the engine and got out whistling, totally cooled out, like it was another day at the office. He walked to the back of his car, opened the trunk, and calmly pulled out a lawn chair, a towel, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun with both barrels taped together. He set the lawn chair in front of the store and sat down on it. He put a bottle of J&B scotch on the ground on one side of him, a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine on the other side, placed the shotgun on his lap, and put the towel over it. “I’m gonna set here and drink and rock and I’ll wait for him,” he said coolly. He sat there for two days, rocking, drinking, while the men tiptoed around him, keeping one eye on the road and one eye on Mike. Mustang’s new boyfriend never showed.