Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  It was only just beginning to dawn on me, in the wake of a record number of daily and weekly film critic firings at major newspapers and magazines, which began in 2006 and hadn’t let up two summers later, that film journalism might not be much of a career either. I thought I’d acquitted myself well enough while traveling to film festivals and interviewing directors for magazines like Variety and Filmmaker, reviewing films for long-defunct or mostly forgotten blogs like Spout and Hammer to Nail. Yet I could hardly earn rent anywhere in Brooklyn primarily writing $50- and $100-a-movie reviews, going to festivals for one $100 blog post where I would easily spend $200 in a week just eating.

  My spare time that summer went into editing the short film based on the Jonathan Lethem short stories, which I’d shot in my last months with Tony. My resistance against venturing out into the straight world for a non-film-industry job held strong despite my persistent poverty; the only compromises I would cotton to at the time were teaching jobs related to film, feeling certain that were I to begin down another path, I would quickly get trapped making money and being comfortable instead of making art. That summer, I reluctantly went back to film education briefly, teaching a course in the basics of production for underprivileged black and Latin kids in the Bronx.

  I liked the work, and teaching media literacy and production skills to young people of color who were more likely to be shamed or erased in motion pictures than the children I had taught two summers before in Long Island felt relevant and worthwhile. The programming aspect of the job was the most interesting, choosing which films to show them and why. Interesting guests whom I had met going to festivals—the Oscar-nominated director Benh Zeitlin, then a nearly crippled short-film maker, was among them—would drop by to chat and share their work. But it didn’t last long. On the very first assignment, one of the children lost a camera and the administrators at the DreamYard ACTION Center put the kibosh on my curriculum. After I was told I wouldn’t be allowed to have the kids take the cameras into their own communities and film themselves and their lives, I quit in a huff; what’s the point of trying to train young people to represent themselves and their communities cinematically if they can’t venture out into the spaces that make them who they are? Immature and restless, I had abandoned the kids, the type of brown folks I told myself I was out here to pay it forward to, as quickly and efficiently as I had fled Tony just months before. The betrayal was real and it wasn’t my last.

  After DreamYard I had taken two film-producing jobs in short order. Both paid little, but enough in combination with some festival prize money and a couple of journalism jobs to pay my rent. One of them, Judy Adler’s New Media, played at Sundance, and the other, Eric Juhola’s Nowhere Kids, at Tribeca, but both experiences ended somewhat acrimoniously. I wasn’t along for the festival ride for either, my name relegated to the “special thanks” on the Sundance title; I was fired after the other producer, who had attended Columbia University’s graduate film school with the director, lost the keys to the fifteen-passenger van we were using for the shoot and threw me under the bus for it. I had so neglected Nowhere Kids in the midst of the other production that, even after all the prep and casting work I had done, I was told I wasn’t needed anymore.

  My proximity to what I perceived as “success” in indie film kept me going, even as the setbacks piled up. Hadn’t I just had a film in Park City? When I went home to face those who raised me, I would bore them to death with my tales of the filmmaker’s plight, always hustling, begging for money. They perked up when I would relate stories of encountering the rich and famous, feeling like they were getting a peek behind the curtain that separates celebrities from the rest of us. I would regale them with tales of nervously approaching Actor X after a National Board of Review screening or Director Y at the Magnolia Pictures Christmas party. My favorite was encountering Spike Lee after the screening of Miracle at St. Anna. “Hey, Spike, where’d you find that T-shirt you wore to the Democratic Convention, the one with Obama dunking?” I asked him, genuinely curious. I had caught a glimpse of him on MSNBC during one of the afternoons of nonstop coverage I would consume ad nauseam now that I lived somewhere with cable TV. The shirt he’d worn, when interviewed by one fetching flake or another, depicted a soaring, Jordanesque Barack Obama, wearing a U.S.A. basketball jersey, mid-dunk on a hapless, suit-wearing John McCain. “If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that, I’d be a rich man,” Lee, who already appeared to be a rich man, told me, before hastily giving me the e-mail address of someone from a company called Undrcrwn. “Tell them I sent you,” he instructed, before departing our conversation without another word.

  As summer went down and fall crept in, the entire apparatus of American wealth was threatened by the bundling and selling of less-than-savory mortgages as collateralized debt. We turned on the TV early that fall, staring into the apocalyptic gloom that came over the pale, makeup-covered faces of the anchors for FOX News and CNBC with something approaching glee. Bailouts for unaccountable financial institutions was the order of the day, but talk of helping “Main Street” was constant. We wondered, but what of Malcolm X Boulevard and Stuyvesant Avenue? The kids I encountered in my new corner of the neighborhood had never known any of this prosperity the television told us was slipping away from normal folks as the Dow Jones plummeted. The gap between the people bringing us this news and the people receiving it couldn’t have been starker. Schadenfreude is a powerful emotion, common among those with nothing, and we could have bottled it by the liter early that fall.

  We’d been raised on Fight Club and Howard Zinn, all of us, M&M, Kevin, Liam, and I, and saw strange dignity, if not a poetic justice, in the potential collapse of capitalist institutions. Now it was real—every day the hole seemed to get bigger as the NASDAQ continued to tank. The brinksmanship of Bush’s Republican Congress initially refusing to prop up the banks they’d let run amok—along with an antiregulation Democratic president in the go-go ’90s—seemed deeply irresponsible to all of us, even if we liked to watch Rome burn. The economic abyss of a major depression, like the one our grandparents had lived through, was intangible to us, but we were egging it on. At least we’d have something worth living through. Anyway, Obama was right around the corner, ready to save the day. In those heady days of 2008, the promise of Barack was irresistible.

  Just as so many African Americans did, I identified with the Democratic nominee for president in a more visceral way than most of the electorate. He had been, like many young people of my political persuasion, enraged and embittered by the Bush presidency. At an antiwar rally in Chicago in October 2002, he said, “I am opposed to the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne,” in reference to the forthcoming Iraq War. Here was a man who was on the same side as me, who perhaps hadn’t been standing next to a burning effigy of George W. Bush, protesting the war in D.C.’s Farragut Square as I had during the fall of 2002, but he at least understood why I might have been standing there, putting my liberty on the line for what I believed. Unable to say the same about nearly any candidate I had ever encountered, he represented Change I Could Believe In.

  Although Obama didn’t necessarily seem perturbed by the military-industrial complex and wasn’t much interested in single-payer health care, he preached a commitment to transparency and exuded a searching intelligence that excited me. Not surprisingly, for many black folks I encountered, Obama’s policies were of little import. They just liked that he was one of us. Or at least looked like one of us. He was a tabula rasa that way; in Obama, whites had a seemingly “transcendent” figure onto which they could project their best intentions, liberal desires for a sleek, multicultural, postracial America, while blacks could be happy that we were finally gonna have a nigga up in the White House running the show. I drank the Kool-Aid like everyone else, going door to door for him in Cinc
innati, working phone banks, sharing cookies and pie with old ladies at Ohio for Obama HQ. I thought we were doing something special. I thought we would indelibly change America. I was still thinking magically.

  Shortly after Obama was elected, I signed up for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The mordant-looking, mostly windowless five-story brick structure at 500 DeKalb Avenue would have been at home in 1970s Minsk. It was a stone’s throw from our old loft on Taaffe Place.

  I waited among the multiple strollers, pushed by either Hasidic women or blacks from various Caribbean nations, a few slumming hipsters in beat-up New Balances, a few tatted-up Crips in throwback Brooklyn Dodgers hats, and then the polo-wearing men with unshakably weary faces, faces that had seen two- and three-hour waits at 500 DeKalb many times. This collection of diverse human misery and mundane suffering was mostly muted by the white cinder-block walls and the seemingly sterile, almost clinical quality of the building, but occasionally an eruption of emotion, usually over denied benefits due to a lost wages report or a botched falsification of income, jolted us all back into consciousness, away from our private tales of trying and failing to make it in a new, winner-take-all America.

  As 2009 began, there was a dizzying polarity between the social capital granted me by independent film and my dire economic straits. After receiving admittance to a training program for young film critics sponsored by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, I traveled to a major foreign festival for the first time, beholding a world of movies that remains behind a veil for most nominally cinema-savvy Americans. Fed a steady diet of our own parochial fever dreams in an unending and brutal loop of electronic propaganda from which few escape, it was refreshing to feel like I was glimpsing the world of cinema I had been told, when I was sitting in my film school reviews, would make a place for me, being assured by humble white people, failed artists themselves (they were teaching, after all), that I would be one of the lucky ones.

  Yet the clock eventually always struck midnight on my festival trips and my luxury carriage, now a pumpkin, always found its way back to Bed-Stuy, usually in some sort of financial desperation, even if I wasn’t paying for the trips. The money from the 800-word Web pieces usually didn’t cover my travel and dining expenses while in those pricey locales, so I spent many a night scouring the hallways of five-star hotels, looking for half-eaten room service meals I could pilfer. It was no way to keep paying the rent in Bed-Stuy, wherever I lived in the neighborhood; Jimmy McMillan hadn’t run for mayor yet, but I already knew the rent was too damn high.

  I would spend afternoons having “lunch” on the pool deck of SoHo House with Lena Dunham and Jaime, a friend from Cincinnati who lived in SoHo and made the Forbes “30 Under 30” entrepreneur list for her personal chef staffing and cookbook enterprises, wondering if I could pay for anything besides celery sticks. We’d gawk at Rod Stewart’s harem of possibly eighteen-year-old girls a few couches away, then I’d scrounge for change to get back to Brooklyn on the A train. At the Tribeca pastry shop Pécan, where Lena and I liked to go to talk about making $25,000 movies or a piece she wanted to write for my criticism blog, the Cinema Echo Chamber—her first published postcollegiate writing appeared there—I established something resembling a line of credit with a sympathetic employee. It created a dissonance, a twenty-first-century double consciousness, interviewing the French auteur Olivier Assayas about his newest film in a lofty Central Park West hotel room before schlumping back to the ghetto with my food stamp card to poach for deals at the only organic market that existed at the Bushwick/Bed-Stuy nexus at the time, Mr. Kiwi’s.

  The Korean-owned grocery was just beneath the Market Hotel, then an illegal concert venue that, until it was shut down and subsequently reopened as an aboveboard operation, was the premier place to see the slightly bigger acts, from Bishop Allen to Willis Earl Beal, who were still into DIY spaces but not slumming it at Goodbye Blue Monday. The field adjacent to the building that contained both spaces was used one night early the next summer for a concert by Dan Deacon. He’d come a long way since throwing parties in his G Street condo on the Purchase campus a decade before. It was then that I thought I knew the dam had broken and the hipsters had taken Bed-Stuy.

  Three years after leaving school, and I hadn’t even made my first feature. My own sense of entitlement made me feel like this was some kind of moral failure, that I was listing, but my peers were still encouraging me to soldier on, Lena especially. “Saw your peep show screened tonite at the jane hotel and it was AMAZING. i think my favorite of them all,” she remarked to me in an e-mail that July, after our friend Ry Russo-Young, who had starred in my Lethem short and went on to direct a movie, Nobody Walks, that Lena cowrote, had shown Lena a short of hers that I had appeared in, fully naked. “i’m so sry to hear about dicey financial times/stresses. i really relate—money is so tight these days, one canceled day of work and i’m way over my head. you’re such a resourceful dude, and so talented, that I don’t worry for you in the long run :) but i do know how exhausting it is now.”

  I spent the summer of 2009 trying and failing to finance movies. A couple of features I had lined up to produce fell through; we couldn’t find the money for them and the directors wanted to move on to something else. The short I had made the previous summer wasn’t getting into the same festivals Evangeleo had. Meanwhile, my friends from my trip to Slamdance—like the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie or Lena—were going on to their second features. Children of privilege who also happened to be very talented, they were more easily able to navigate the financing aspect of independent movies than I. “Indie film is a rich kids’ game,” a rich kid had told me at my summer film camp, way back in high school. His often-absent dad had produced Michael Bay’s Armageddon and occasionally stuffed $1,000 in his son’s boots. My dad was often absent too, but he’d never even allowed me to borrow $100, let alone given me $1,000.

  Any hope of receiving even a modicum of this kind of support in adulthood was put to rest by the housing crisis. It had engulfed my mother’s savings and business, as well as the black middle class as a whole. My father’s financial prospects had come to ruin a decade before, after his janitorial firm lost a key contract, but neither I nor she could have imagined how home-building for the black middle class would disappear overnight for reasons that remained mysterious and unyielding. The idyll of prosperity that was my mother’s subdivision, sitting amid malaise-ridden, postindustrial central Cincinnati neighborhoods, was beginning to show its cracks. No financial help from home would ever be forthcoming again. No first feature was creeping out of any checkbook from my relatives either, all of whom found my work both interesting and odd.

  As 2009 wore on it seemed the great recession would neither morph into a great depression nor end anytime soon. 551 Kosciuszko grew a bit more ramshackle, entropy allowing it to revert back to its messy, grease- and dust-ridden self. M&M increasingly invited half a dozen of his musty friends from New Orleans to stay at our place for weeks at a time. I was never sure if the odor was from their unshowered bodies or their equally rancid dogs. Liam moved out in protest late that summer, and Milton, a middle-class Jew from Michigan who was the only McCain voter I knew in Bed-Stuy, replaced him.

  The need to save money was ever more paramount, which meant that once again I was in search of ever-cheaper weed. I began buying nickels from some of the teenage Haitian or Dominican boys I’d see around our hood. Eventually a lanky, gold-grilled, thirtyish black dealer named G, who lived around the corner on Pulaski with his two kids and Spanish wife, became my primary means of acquiring bud—he sold a nickel bag that one could roll three spliffs from, despite the numerous seeds one might find in his low-quality schwag. He was a good man to know in the neighborhood.

  G was from South Carolina. He had fled poverty there, but had not acquired many skills besides dope dealing to lift him out of it. He was popular on his end of Pulaski Street, where he’d often play basketball with other young hustlers
from his block, with a rickety hoop stationed at the edge of the street in front of a fire hydrant. I’d frequently spy him walking his children home from P.S. 48 a few blocks away; he’d routinely buy an empanada or a grape soda for the youngsters at the bodega on the corner of Stuyvesant and Pulaski on their route, beaming at the youngsters. G loved his kids and was neatly tied into the fabric of the neighborhood, a trusted figure among many people. These folks were just hanging on in conditions many would refer to as grim, but where they took some warmth and comfort in community.

  G didn’t have a cell phone that worked consistently, so more often than not I would go looking for him in his building, where the front door was usually open. The putrid stairwell leading up to his third-floor apartment was infested with rotting wood and fast-food detritus. Usually I would find him in his apartment, playing video games or watching football. Sometimes, when he wasn’t around, Patty, a light brown woman who lived on the first floor, her shock of thinning white hair premature for being so early in middle age, would sell to me instead.

  I had been introduced to him by PJ, a charismatic Haitian teenager who lived with his mother and younger brothers in a squalid apartment across the street. Crackheads lived in the basement apartment beneath PJ and his family. I’d spy them from my window sweeping the sidewalk or taking out the trash gingerly each dawn before their morning beer, leering at one another and the new day outside in that serene, docile way they seem to have when they aren’t screaming their heads off. From my window I once watched PJ, who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen when I met him, dropkick one of them, as I entertained a friend from college.

  Despite his ability to end a fight with decisive violence, PJ was an infectious lightning rod of activity and good humor. He would watch football with M&M and me on Sundays, bouncing in and out of our always-open door and the bustling street that awaited him. Frequently looking for work in security or maintenance jobs that just didn’t exist, we tried to employ him with occasional jobs as best we could. Liam would occasionally find some more consistent employment for him, painting or doing manual labor of some sort. We all sensed he would need some help staying out of trouble. But being a runner for the tatted-up white girls that lived across the street flipping weed was the most stable job he could keep.