But, since I had never finished anything to speak of, never had anything in print beyond a line or two in this or that school publication, I had never projected my work beyond the hoots and hollers that were tossed my way by Lincoln’s hardcore “Rabble Crew” who insisted my disappearance from class was due to my complete dedication to smoking marijuana and that the only writing I did was scribbling apologies to everyone I had lied to when I said I was writing a book. And on this desk in front of me was not only a chance to slap them in their faces, but a check for $2,000. Imagine that? I could walk back onto campus next year showing the benefits of a two-grand advance, and have the opportunity to shove copies of a book with my name on it down the throats of the big-mouthed jokers in front of the student union, guys who’d made me look like a reefer-smoking idiot for months. And a chance to see my mother smile and justify her faith and squelch my uncle’s scalding critiques. All I had to do was sign that paper and walk out.
Walk out and leave my manuscript. Leave my manuscript like leaving a pet at the vet to have it neutered. Leave a deer on the taxidermist’s table to have its guts ripped out and replaced with sawdust, its head removed to hang over this smug, smirking egotist’s fake apartment fireplace. I tried to add it up again while I sat there feeling cold and clammy, poker-faced, like some leather-jacket-clad form of dead.
I got up slowly with what I’m sure was one of my worst attempts to look like I was smiling. The editor had turned away in his swiveling chair and was concentrating on not looking at me. So he probably didn’t see me pick up my manuscript and walk out of his office.
18
People speak in a certain key that’s similar to a musical note. When you talk to people naturally, it’s comfortable because there’s no strain or stress on your vocal cords. Sometimes when people speak too fast or make vocabulary choices that don’t ring true, it occurs to me that something is wrong with what they are saying. That was what I heard at the editor’s office in New York.
I have always told folks that I left with my manuscript that day because of a feeling. I did have a feeling. But I got it from a hearing. That day in the editor’s office I was so full of myself that I might have missed most of the discussion if every word had not been so momentous and magnificent to me. What I missed instead of words was meaning.
I heard every word. Almost as individual elements, isolated as though they had nothing to do with me or with each other. But I didn’t tune in on his meaning until the middle of a solo about Junior imitating Spade. I heard him hit a false note, a note that shouldn’t have existed in this conversation. Something like an F-flat. There is no such note. Not for a musician. And not from one musician to another. Not from people playing the same tune.
The editor wasn’t just testing me. There were more notes that didn’t belong. His voice went totally out of tune. I can’t read minds, but it sounded like he was establishing his domain over a rookie writer who wouldn’t be a factor after today. His intention was to hurt, to insult. Not to pay me, but to pay me off. For me to disappear and be grateful for a couple of grand.
I took the subway to 23rd Street with some semblance of a plan pushing its way through alternating pulses of panic. Plan B felt like what it was and what I didn’t want it to be, what I had never seen coming, had foolishly not even considered. Here’s some other shit I can’t talk to anyone about, that probably nobody but my mother would believe. An offer of two thousand dollars. An opportunity to have the book published that I’d thrown together on a beat up old Royal typewriter at the university cleaners.
A gritty Manhattan mist felt chilly and uncomfortable on my face and bare head as I emerged on the northeast corner of 23rd, one block west of the bakery where I would spend my remaining dollars before going to 17th Street and taking ten bucks from my mother’s cold cash, a coffee can in the fridge. I would leave her a note, a lie, and catch a bus back to Lincoln.
In front of the 23rd Street YMCA, I ran into Freddy Baron, a guy who had been a classmate of mine at Fieldston. He was with his father. It was good to see Freddy, and I had always liked his father, too. Freddy and I had played on the football team together our senior year, a team that finished 4-4. My favorite memory of the season was a game in which Freddy and I scored our team’s only two touchdowns in a 14-8 victory. Freddy scored his when he intercepted a pass from his defensive end position and ran it back forty yards. Mine was a bit more complicated. I was standing about ten yards in front of our punt returner, ostensibly to serve as a blocker. The kick, however, was high but short, and the would-be tacklers went past me, angling toward our return man. I fielded the punt and took it back seventy yards past the opposition’s massive right tackle.
Recollections of high school heroics were a relief at that moment, but none of us was feeling too good about standing there in the rain. The Barons had just finished a workout that included a mile run and a few laps in the pool. They were both flushed and looked fit and healthy. But within the thickening wall of April gloom, they proposed that I join them at their home for dinner and assured me that Mrs. Baron, who I’d also met, would be happy to see me again. I couldn’t have sworn I had better plans, so we got on a crosstown bus going east.
I caught up with Freddy, heard how unbelievably cold the winters were in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was adjusting to college life. I talked about Lincoln and how I’d finally dropped out of school and what had just happened at the publishing office that day. We had a pleasant dinner and Freddy and I went downstairs to the rec room to play table tennis and shoot pool.
When we got back to the apartment, Freddy ran directly into the bathroom and I was about to collapse onto the sofa when I saw that Mr. Baron was seated under a reading lamp in the corner with his reading glasses on and my manuscript in his lap. He read on for a few minutes after I took a seat near him. Then he closed it up and put it carefully back in the plastic cover.
He smiled, folded his glasses carefully, and put them back in their case. Of all the Fieldston parents, he had always been the most approachable, the most available to drive guys to a band rehearsal or stand on the sidelines alone to watch a lightly attended football game. He spoke with my mother fairly often. I had stayed at their house a few times, too. The Barons lived in Stuyvesant Town, on East 23rd Street, which was practically next door to West 17th by Manhattan standards.
“Gilbert,” he said in his rich baritone, “I’ve read about forty pages here and I must admit I don’t know a lot about the life you are describing. But I know more than I did because you know it so well. I’ve got two friends who write commercials and they’re always talking about the art of telling a story in one minute. That’s what they do. I’d like to show this to them and see if they couldn’t put a few things in the margins.”
When he stopped, Mr. Baron took a furtive look toward the bathroom, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out a fifty dollar bill and handed it to me. I understood that he didn’t want Freddy involved, but I hadn’t said anything about the current state of my finances. I appreciated his perception.
“Look,” I said hastily, “I’ve got a tax refund due . . .”
He cut me off.
“No,” he said seriously. “Let me tell you a story. When I was just getting started, I almost didn’t make it. I had rented a space and had my whole line of dresses and everything there. And I had made arrangements for everything to go out, most of the pieces had been ordered and I was confident that they would be moved. But my rent was due on the warehouse and if I paid it I wouldn’t have money left to ship the pieces out and all of my outlets had thirty and forty-five day leads before money would be coming in. I had cut every corner imaginable and it just wasn’t going to happen. It was about midnight and I was writing my landlord a note about getting everything out of there and a little about what else had happened when I saw him walking down the hall. When he saw my light on, he stopped by.”
Mr. Baron said the landlord came to his space and after hearing the situation, told him to ho
ld off on paying the rent, said they could work it out when the money started coming in. “I tell you Gilbert, I’d only talked to the man when I rented the space and seen him a few times going in and out. Very businesslike, short on conversation. But he raised my spirits. And I never forgot what he said then. ‘If you ever get a chance to help someone else get started, do that for me and tell them to pass it on.’ Then he waved and was off again. I believe in that, Gilbert. I don’t want this back, but I do want you to remember it and pass it on.”
Mr. Baron smiled and got up. “I’m going to hand this over to my friends and have them get in touch with you at this number.” The number on the manuscript was the pay phone at the diner across Route 1 from the dry cleaners where I worked.
I still felt washed out, but the kind of help Mr. Baron gave me was help in its purest form, when somebody does something for you for nothing. But I still intended to get him back that money in two weeks, three at the outside.
About ten days later, before I’d had a chance to square that debt, I was wrestling with the day’s dry cleaning load when the niece of the owner of the diner called me from across the road.
“It’s the telephone, Spider,” she said in her soprano. “It’s a call from New York.”
The lady on the phone was named Lynn Nesbit. She was a literary agent with a firm on the Avenue of the Americas. A week before, a friend had dropped a manuscript by and asked her to take a look. She had read it all in one sitting. The following day she’d shown it to a friend at World Publishing. They agreed that it needed some work.
“But would you be willing to accept five thousand dollars as an advance?” she asked.
I don’t remember whether I accepted before or after I fainted. Whichever it was, I agreed to meet Lynn Nesbit in her office in three days. I was so happy I could have peed in my pants.
World Publishing also bought the rights to Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a volume of poetry released simultaneously with The Vulture. That one I dedicated to my mother, because she always appreciated the poetry so much and had helped me with some of the lines and ideas. The novel I dedicated to Mr. Jerome Baron, “without whom the bird would never have gotten off the ground.” And I have tried to follow his advice and pass it on every time I have the opportunity.
19
After taking what would have been my sophomore year off from schoolwork and grades, I was registered to return to Lincoln in the fall of 1969. That summer, though, with the books in the process of being published, I used some of the advance money to buy an old Nash Rambler convertible, a 1965 with 100,000 miles on it. Before heading back to school, I drove to Fayette, Mississippi, with a friend of mine from Lincoln named Stevie Wilson to witness the election of Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’s brother, who was about to become the first Black mayor elected in the south since Reconstruction.
First we spent a slow-moving day slogging through nearly tangible humidity in my old home of Jackson, Tennessee. I spent a couple of evening hours with a girl who was starstruck over a New Yorker; Stevie drank.
I was going to Mississippi looking for something else to write about. I was afraid to think about being back at Lincoln with nothing to write about. I’d always wanted to write novels, but I had come to think that a writer was writing all the time and, after my mystery, I didn’t have any idea what I would do. There was no doubt that my state of mind had been attached to finishing The Vulture. And my ability to pay for returning to school had been connected to earning some tuition and room-and-board money. My personal credibility had been saved when I got the deal but I honestly didn’t know what I could do next.
Back on campus I hung out with a lot of guys who were into the jazz heavies, the ones you didn’t hear too often on the radio. We spent a lot of our time supposedly doing our homework, but really in each other’s rooms checking out the jams—Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock.
I also met Brian Jackson that Fall semester. He was a freshman with classical music training. I was playing keyboards one day and having awful trouble with the sheet music for “God Bless the Child.” Brian could play that stuff like it was easy. We hooked up in the music room; he showed me some music of his own and I started writing lyrics for it. He and I started writing songs for a group called Black & Blues, and worked together for quite a while doing songs for this group.
I’d been writing short stories since I was a boy, but it took until I was nineteen or twenty before I got my thoughts together to do a novel; in the same way, I was writing songs all along but they weren’t very good. But I continued to work on them. By the time I met Brian I was getting more of an idea of what I was going to do.
I managed at least one trip per month to New York City. The Last Poets had their East Wind thing going on, and a couple of guys I knew—the percussionists Charlie Saunders and Isaiah Washington—went with me to see that whenever I visited. I got to know all the Last Poets, too, because Abiodun Oyewole’s cousin went to Lincoln with me. I thought that they were bringing a new sound to poetry and to the community, and I enjoyed it. I was a piano player and played with different groups still, and the songs and poems that I had written had a musical tilt to them because they were compositions as opposed to just poems over rhythms. Their things were a cappella without music. I always had a band, so it was a different sort of thing. But we were trying to go in the same direction.
One Sunday night in November 1969, as I pulled in through the arch to campus after a weekend in New York, I was met by three guys before I’d even gotten near my dorm. It was Brian along with two guys from his jazz combo, Carl Cornwell, who played sax, and Leon Clark, the bassist. They were visibly upset and wanted to talk to me.
It turned out the drummer for the band, Ron Colburn, had died Friday night. They’d had a rehearsal that lasted until about midnight, and Ron, who was asthmatic, started having trouble breathing at the end. His inhaler gave him no relief, so the guys walked him to the infirmary. It was closed. Someone went to the security guard’s office and explained the problem and the guard let them into the infirmary. There was no oxygen. That meant they had to call the fire department in Oxford, three miles away. Though the ambulance hurried to Lincoln, there was no oxygen aboard the vehicle, and on the way to the hospital in Avon Grove, Pennsylvania, Ron died.
Brian and the other members of the band saw his death as unnecessary and felt something needed to be done.
So I did it. I closed the school down.
In all honesty, I could never have closed Lincoln by myself. But with equal honesty, I will confess that had the school closing ended in disaster, the blame would have been laid squarely on me. And I would have accepted it. Not for the sake of heroism or martyrdom, but because it was my idea, and because without the benefit of any elected campus position the pressure brought to bear on the university administration came from my direction and without any more formal constituency than the one I threw together that Sunday night.
On every campus there are key groups and special people that don’t necessarily hold offices in student government or any organizations but that command respect from the student body. On Lincoln’s campus at that time, there was one such group I wanted with me and felt I could not move without: the vets.
Lincoln had a group of brothers who were vets on two fronts. These brothers straddled the two Lincolns—they’d begun their quest for a degree under the old-school, all-male system, gone away to the armed services, and returned to a coed, state-related system that most of them agreed had diminished the tradition of their school. Most of them had chosen to return for sentimental reasons and because a degree from Lincoln still meant something to them. A lot of them had obligations and responsibilities placed on hold while they closed out the unfinished business of a degree. In short, they were folks with a lot at stake during this particular school year.
I went to see them first.
Having withdrawn from Lincoln for a year and returned with two books on my résumé gave me a veteran’s image, if not the
military service the term implied. I was at least looked at like something of a Lincoln veteran.
Along with the respect afforded the vets, there was one other tangible advantage to “old head” status. You got to live in Vet Ville, a cluster of barrack-like buildings at the far west end of the school grounds, behind the old gymnasium, often lost in evening fog.
Meetings were not commonly held in the Vet Ville bunkhouses, but news of Ron’s death and my visit got an interested majority to gather. The wardrobe varied, with some men in pajamas and bathrobes and others in jeans and the familiar green jackets.
I described as best I could the events that preceded Ron’s death. I also reminded them that during my first year, my next-door neighbor in the freshman dorm had died from an aneurism, and that another student had died after an accident. I reminded them of “Beaucoup,” an upperclassman who’d had a hernia misdiagnosed, and “Bird” Evans, whose badly broken ankle was treated as a sprain. My main point was that Lincoln was twice as large as it had been when the current facilities and medical provisions had been deemed adequate. They no longer were.
“So what are you after, Spiderman?” asked a brother standing near the door, using a nickname that had accompanied me from Chelsea.
I passed around a few copies of a list of what I labeled “requests.” There were seven items on the list:
The Last Holiday Page 11