Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  This same spirit of a failed status quo punctuates the drama in Big Words. John, one of Drumming’s three ex-rappers who have grown apart in the fifteen years since the dissolution of their critically praised rap group, is an ex-con and gifted lyricist. He’s been fired from his tech job when we meet him and told to suck it up by his white employer because, after all, the country was going to elect Barack Obama, black president #1—everything was going to be better. John spends the day navigating a strip club and having a meeting with a very attractive black woman, but he is simultaneously emotionally needy and unavailable, and more damningly, he has a past to suppress, one that is getting in the way of him changing into the person he needs to become to be happy. That he can’t tell her he’s been to jail, that he wants to play down his past as a rapper, for this welcoming but still slightly classier-than-thou girl, throws into stark relief a petty drama of Negro status anxiety that the movies rarely capture. And when it isn’t stress, or dementia, or torture, or true poverty, that drives most people slowly out of their minds, it’s status anxiety. It wasn’t for no reason that the late, great black crime novelist Chester Himes once opined, “Obviously and unavoidably, the black American is the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed, anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world.”

  A difficult past with contemporary consequences, ones we’re shamed into not acknowledging, or into forgetting, or at least not being too loud about, is the lot of many black men in Big Words, including John’s cousin James, who is gay and out of the closet, albeit mostly so in the context of his well-heeled publishing industry gig. He spends the day like Mrs. Dalloway, unhappily preparing for his election party, Caucasian assistant in tow—one who, surprisingly in the white-collar world in which he’s advanced himself, knows all about his exploits as a hip-hop wunderkind a decade and a half before, seeing as he’s the son of a hip-hop scholar who is indulging in a bit of it himself. Not just any hip-hop wunderkind, mind you. The type who spewed the vitriolic antihomosexual lyrics that were—and in many quarters still are—a dominant feature of popular rap music. A romance brews just under one of their interactions, as they drive around Brooklyn in suits in the black gay man’s nice car. There is an election party to prepare for, however, and a likely mildly jealous boyfriend, and a number of white lesbians, all of whom are privileged in myriad ways beyond their homosexuality, who will be waiting to celebrate in reverence and tears. Things remain on the platonic tip. No blown covers, no suppressed past exposed.

  The other character in Big Words still plies his trade as a barely employed hip-hop artist, burning the candle for a bygone era of the form like some latter-day Brand Nubian, headphones constantly wrapped around his neck. He gets involved in various hijinks during the day: he flirts with a bartender, manages his crumbling relationship with a girlfriend who rightly thinks him no good, and floats amiably throughout Brooklyn, in neighborhoods once more chocolate than Hershey’s, where these days you can’t throw a stone without hitting a gentrifier.

  None of them is through with the past, or with each other, and the mutual disaffection they share is palpable, even as the film’s tone hews mostly toward light dramedy. At the film’s end, much like in Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy, we know these men will never be as close as they were. Ultimately what they’ll reveal to each other is how little difference their solidarity would make, and how the disappointments of the past are all bound up with their present.

  The cracks in the facade of stability at 730 DeKalb became too prominent to ignore as 2013 became 2014. On the first Sunday of 2014, a record cold swept the city; I’d smoked at dawn on the landing of the rickety wooden staircase leading into the garden and felt the sensation of a thousand pins pressing against my flushed skin with each gust. I had planned to host a soiree to coincide with the Cincinnati Bengals’ NFL playoff game against the San Diego Chargers that day. The affair never went off, however; I awoke to a strong knock on the front door, just outside my room, and an overwhelmingly humid sensation. My downstairs neighbor, a Mexican cabdriver who spoke little English, gesticulated wildly. “Agua! Agua,” he exclaimed, “from the ceiling!”

  Pipes had burst all over our apartment that morning. My bed, an orthopedic number that had been a graduation present from my eldest aunt, lay on the floor alongside a wall that contained a burst pipe. It had been soaking in warm water all morning but I didn’t notice until I returned to my room with my animated neighbor and discovered a long trail of water leading across my floor. The paint along the wall near my bed had bubbled up, distending over the bed, and was warm to the touch.

  Before long there was water all over the house as uninsulated pipes throughout the property began to burst. I spent much of the afternoon ladling water from strategically placed pans along the walls into buckets, hoping Neftali would return our calls for a plumber. He never did, and ultimately we called our own. I had started a batch of Cincinnati-style chili in our Crock-Pot in hopes the party could be salvaged, but once it became clear that finding a plumber on short notice in Bed-Stuy on the coldest day of the year was damn near impossible, I called it off, slurping chili and bourbon alone as I frantically scooped water and watched the Bengals lose. When a plumber did arrive to stop the bleeding, much of the flooring and walls had been terribly damaged. A jagged hole, larger than a square foot, sat right next to my new waterbed.

  The heat went out the following week. It stayed off for a full seven days, the absurdity of the situation compounded when Neftali brought by some completely inadequate space heaters and said it would be taken care of soon. You get what you pay for. I was a food-stamp-collecting adjunct professor and I knew I’d never find rent this cheap again, in the only neighborhood I’d ever really thought of as home in New York. The episode was weirdly assuring, though; he’s not going to raise the rent, not after this, I must have thought.

  It was going up across the street, however. All over the neighborhood, whenever I ran into my friends, often in the new bars that seemed to be springing up everywhere, our once-interesting conversations would naturally drift to the subject of pricing Negroes and first-wave hipsters out. Feeling secure that such a thing wouldn’t happen to me here was foolhardy, of course, especially when I withheld my rent in order to get the hole in my wall fixed, a risky move for someone who didn’t have a binding lease; we paid Neftali, as I had Bo, in cash. I thought I had little other recourse than to get the wall fixed and my bed paid for. “Nafty,” as we called him, didn’t take kindly to this. A contentious phone call (“Sorry about the pipes, the bed is not my problem”) led to a meeting, a full clearing of the air, in late February.

  Neftali showed up with another man, a skinny and wiry Hasid named Dell. My roommates and I were all surprised by his presence, but immediately we recognized him. He owned, or perhaps only managed, the building across the street. They spoke in Hebrew between themselves for a second, Neftali pointing at various places in our foyer and hallway, living room and kitchen, Dell nodding in agreement and occasionally casting the four of us a sideways glance. “So it’s been a difficult winter,” Neftali began, solemnly, standing next to our makeshift movie-screen wall, next to a giant indoor growing chamber Andrew used for raising cannabis. “And we have to make some repairs to make sure this type of thing never happens again.” We all nodded in agreement. Damned right! Neftali’s face darkened after saying this. Dell looked at us with a nervous intensity. Something was awry.

  “When are you thinking about making the repairs?” I asked. “Because I just feel very strongly that I shouldn’t pay rent until my bed is replaced and the hole in my wall fixed.”

  Dell shot daggers at me with his eyes. My roommates looked on warily. We each paid rent separately to Neftali, not as a collective, so my withholding rent didn’t mean so much to them. Albert had abruptly left in the weeks preceding, having taken a job in the medical marijuana business in Northern California. Formerly a member of the community himself, his departure, even if Al
an, too, was Jewish, eliminated the bridge between us and Neftali. He had no reason to remain loyal.

  “We need to do them immediately,” Neftali replied, ignoring my complaint, which had been left at an impasse in our phone conversation.

  “You need to pay your rent immediately!” Dell intoned, shocking all of us a bit with his aggression. I stared daggers right back at him. I didn’t trust this motherfucker for a second. The two men standing before us shuffled their feet uncomfortably.

  “But when we begin, you all can’t live here when we do the repairs,” Neftali said, claiming they’d be too invasive. Brooks, who worked with Neftali in Manhattan and had heretofore remained stoic during the whole thing, awoke suddenly. “Well, you have other apartments we can move into during that time, right?” Neftali shook his head, claiming he didn’t have anything else for the time being. “When can we move back in?” Alan asked, already knowing the answer but still in denial about what was happening.

  Neftali blushed a bit. One could have cooked an egg on his pink, sweaty forehead. This was stressing him out. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “When it’s finished, it will probably be in the hands of a management company.”

  I let out a guffaw.

  “Oh, I see, we’re getting kicked out,” Al lamented, with a rueful laugh. Dell looked at us hard, a fire in his eyes. Neftali’s eyes went to his shoes, but he couldn’t hide his intentions from us any longer, didn’t want us to keep the place and was willing to forgo our rent in order to get us out. The winds of change, and the money that rode in on them, were too much to resist.

  We had seen the writing on the wall. By the dawn of winter, a new group of Caucasian hipsters that had moved next door to us, with their blow-up baby swimming pool and Adele songs and Christmas tree lights in the backyard, were paying much more than the African-American family that had lived next door to us in the fall. In January of that year, the New York Daily News ran a story claiming the price of one-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood had climbed 15 percent in 2013, from $1,587 to $1,835. It reported on graffiti artists who had taken to spray-painting “Gentrify Here” on the walls of the new luxury tower going up a few blocks east of us on DeKalb, and landlords who “bully tenants out of affordable housing, only to flip the property and lease it at a market rate—often at more than $2,000 for a one bedroom.” What had once been a surgical strike was growing into a full-scale invasion.

  The bullying began in short order. Neftali would frequently call, asking if we had made plans to leave. I would find Dell peering up at my window late at night, menace in his eyes. “Let me come in to fix the wall,” he would say, unannounced, near midnight. “Why won’t you let me come in and fix the wall, huh?” he repeated again, when he and Neftali cornered me in my room another day and questioned my character. Dell said something about how “you people” always behave in the process. I asked them to buy me out but they refused; they knew I had no lease and they were not inclined to help me out in any way, shape, or form. So I continued to withhold rent, daring them to begin eviction proceedings.

  I had learned, through a housing lawyer named Marty Needleman, that those proceedings could take up to eight months but that in no uncertain terms, unless they continued to harass me with documented illegality (a strong possibility), there was no way in which I could keep the place. At first we were defiant in our desire to stay, but slowly my roommates each peeled off. Albert was already gone; he had moved to California in February to work in the aboveboard medical marijuana industry. Brooks, not wanting to cause undue ire at work, where he was subordinate to Neftali and in need of his help to advance in the largely Hasidic domain of B&H Camera and Video, decided to leave in short order as well. Al and I seemed determined to stick it out, but eventually he folded too. Instead of looking for a new place, I wrote a screenplay, in a sort of desperation, that mirrored various elements from the affair. I hoped to shoot it in the apartment, planning to stay as long as I could.

  But no money materialized to do it and my mother, in Ohio, nervous for my well-being, insisted I leave. It was mildly terrifying, being alone in the apartment at night, looking out the blinds to find the Hasidic answer to one of Ray Liotta’s cinematic tough guys ominously staring up from the street below, but even if this was exactly the type of situation my mother hoped to have me avoid, I found it sort of thrilling, too. Fuck these guys. The piss-and-vinegar side of me kept saying, “You have as much a right to live here as anyone else.”

  I threw a party for my students upon the completion of their senior year and invited thirty years’ worth of Purchase film alumni to celebrate their graduation, but in a way it was also a goodbye. Structuralist experimental movies played in the screening room we had fashioned out of the common area, and the state-sponsored French-cut duck breast flowed. Had I become what I set out not to become: a man of broken dreams, at the end of the party, a misbegotten mentor to others?

  In spite, we gleefully kicked a larger hole in the wall of my room. The next day I pilfered as much of the furniture that had been left there by Albert, Brooks, and Al as I could and left the beer bottles and trash where they were on the way out, giving the keys to Rudy, a Dominican kid from across the street with whom Albert and I would smoke and watch football during 730 DeKalb’s all-too-brief halcyon days. I told him to squat if he liked; if he held out a month and started to get his mail there, potentially he could stay as long as eight, given the city’s relatively protective rules for tenants of all sorts. He took me up on the offer.

  75 South Elliott Place

  Whenever I brought up where I lived with my family in Ohio, they always mentioned Spike Lee. He was synonymous with Bed-Stuy, even if he’d never actually lived there. And I’m sure the worlds of Crooklyn and Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, forty and thirty years gone, respectively, have some bearing on the Bed-Stuy I’ve lived in, but I haven’t found it. The black barbers and jazz musicians I know don’t live in such elegance, nor do they have such striver-centric social anxiety. Why would they? The brownstone on Arlington Place where Spike and Co. shot Crooklyn recently sold for $1.7 million. In these days of the form’s increasing cultural irrelevance, there isn’t a hit jazz record on earth that would sustain for its creator that kind of mortgage. Or a haircut.

  In the years I had lived at 551 Kosciuszko Street, I frequently walked down Stuyvesant between Lexington and Quincy, the block where Do the Right Thing, Lee’s sole narrative masterpiece, was shot. Whenever I’d ask a young man who was more or less the age Martin Lawrence was in that film if he’d ever seen it, he’d shake his head no or pass me by without a word. It’s almost always empty in the middle of the summer, that block. The busy and bustling community depicted in that film was a fantasy. Which is not to say those early Lee films don’t represent a certain reality of the place. But it was a vision of Bed-Stuy as much less poor and desperate and sad than it actually must have been in those years, a Bed-Stuy that was more like the liberal, middle-class neighborhood where Lee himself grew up: Fort Greene.

  When Do the Right Thing came out in the summer of 1989, the media worried that it would cause race riots. They shouldn’t have. In Lee’s films—like in the blaxploitation films he generally found wanting despite his affection for some of the performers—the nationalists, the Muslim rabble-rousers, the dudes who “want some brothers on the wall,” always get short shrift at the end: they are embarrassed, or jailed, or, in the case of Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing, they die a violent death. In his more nuanced films (including Malcolm X), they transform into more complicated individuals, people willing to grasp the ambivalence of Negro existence and understand that the white man is only part of the problem and, naturally, an even bigger part of any lasting solution. Watch the films. That’s actually what’s in them, from Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop (Mr. Lovejoy, the sharply dressed black nationalist gangster antagonist, is seen as a shark and charlatan) through Bamboozled (where Mos Def’s nationalist meets a violent, undignified end). The revolution n
ever comes, only imperfect compromise with the nefarious forces of racial animus or institutional corruption. Those forces are rendered benign not through greater understanding but through mutual resignation to the status quo. Neither Lee nor his cinema has ever been revolutionary. The resilient but embattled Negro middle class consumed Lee’s images for years, letting him give the nationalists just enough rope to hang themselves. Lee was the middle class’s champion no less than Bill Cosby, a child of their aspirations and the troubadour of their anxieties. But they didn’t show up for his more difficult Brooklyn tales, like He Got Game and Clockers. And eventually he was begging all of us for money on Kickstarter.

  On a Sunday night late in June 2014, a few weeks after I moved out of 730 DeKalb Avenue, I stepped into the School of Visual Arts Theatre in Manhattan for the world premiere of Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus with a sense of foreboding. It was in the air of the place, a mild gloom, despite being packed with well-dressed and excited Negroes of every shape and size and color, the ebony and the high yellow, most of them notably well off. For my part, I was less than casket sharp, as they say in parts of the South, but playing the schlubby journalist at festivals is something I’ve grown accustomed to. Soon enough I spotted other members of our sartorially challenged tribe, in T-shirts and poorly fitting jackets, clutching their press tickets. Those pale journalists and a smattering of indie film folks, lackeys for the small and midsize distributors still interested in a new Spike Lee Joint, made up most of the whites in attendance. In these parts, they seemed exotic.