Blacks were especially unwelcome
except by a handful of whites we
couldn’t figure out, even though I
was one of them—only there were no
other white boys on the streets
falling in love with Black girls
and letting the world know it then,
although every time I talk or write
about it out here in Hollywood,
these producers and directors and
executives I run into who are my age
all claim yeah, they were doing
the same thing—only I guess it was
in some really hip suburb somewhere
in the Midwest, because I lived
on the streets of Manhattan then and
take my word for it, there was no
other white teenaged boy out there
with a Black teenaged girl taking
the shit you got even there from
the assholes who couldn’t understand
something I’m still trying to figure
out—and they weren’t on the streets
of DC or Chicago or Detroit or St.
Louis or any of the other cities I
ended up running in or running away
to—but first I fell for a doe-eyed
dark-skinned thin-wristed Indian-nosed
beautiful Black girl from Atlantic City
who had just moved into an apartment
on Tompkins Square—I saw her in a
bar called Obie’s on Sixth Avenue
that I only figured out years later,
long after I hung out there, was named
for the awards they give for Off Broadway
theater, something I thought only the
rich and the snobby, or as the spades
said, the siddidy, went to back then—
what did I know? not much except the
glow in those deep dark eyes when she
looked into mine and I knew there’d
never be a time when I couldn’t see them
burning in my mind, and I was right,
there never has been—so there I was
in the city again, and it’s almost
thirty years later—we still keep in
touch, running our subsequent women
and men by each other every few years—
we even dated once almost ten years ago
and it was still there, the glow, but
I was more aware that time of what had
scared me back then, a kind of crazy
independence that made her unpredictable
—we were so young, not even 20 yet, and
the world was trying to kick my ass so
bad for loving her, even my spade bros
pulled my coat constantly over what
they thought was my inappropriate
fixation on this one lover, they used to
call me “Porgy” after we broke up and
I would wander into bars all over
Manhattan looking for her—bars like
Obie’s or Pat’s on 23rd near 6th where
she tells me to meet her at midnight
last Friday, she’s coming down from
what used to be part of Harlem and
is now part of “The Upper West Side”
with Pauline, they’re still friends
ever since I introduced them—and I
show up wearing almost the same clothes
I was wearing back then, my hair not
much different, just gray where it used
to be black, but not her, she’s black
where she always was, her hair, her skin,
her eyes—Pauline I wouldn’t recognize,
she’s a queen-sized grandmother still bitching
about her crazy friend, with that kind of
mock toughness that covers love so deep
and lasting it can’t be described—the
kind I’m feeling as I look into Bambi’s
eyes and I see this 17-year-old girl
still looking back at me, and I got to
take her hand and kiss it and she says
“Hey, that’s what made me fall for you
the first time we met” and I can’t forget
anything, even though we argue about the
details of that first night we don’t
argue anymore about the rest, especially
the best which we both remember together
as she says how glad she is that she
picked me to be the first—something
I didn’t believe for years, I just didn’t
trust her, because I didn’t trust myself,
the act I was playing back then, can you
imagine, a skinny little white kid from
New Jersey trying to act like a man when
all I wanted to do was look into those
eyes forever, maybe even cry a little
at the wonder of it all, but instead I
took on the world that tried to make us
wrong—I thought that was the way to be
strong—even after she was with other guys
—even when she wrote and told me she was
pregnant from one of them—I remember I
got some leave and made it to the city,
I was a serviceman then, with no stripes,
from getting into fights and courtmartialed,
and I end up at this bar where a guy we
called “Joe the Puerto Rican,” another kid
from the streets I knew, and his girl known
as “Girl,” says “Hey there’s Bambi’s old
man” and I slam the bar and say “Don’t
call me that” and he says “Oh man if you
hate that bitch now you’ll be glad to hear
this, she’s in this crib on 14th Street
and she’s all alone and fucked up man,
so out of it she don’t know who you
be—” and I guess I wasn’t just a poser
back then like some of my new found
friends, ’cause he couldn’t even see the
rage that was building in me toward him
that I was sitting on as he kept talking
“—hey man, you probably dig to see her,
fuck her ass up man, I can take you to
where she be” and he does, some fucking
hellhole way over the East end of 14th
Street and up some chicken littered stairs,
but when I got to the top with him behind
me, he points to a door and before he can
say anymore I turn and kick him in the
face with everything I’ve got and he goes
down the stairs to the bottom coming up
screaming “You crazy motherfucker” and me
just begging him to come back for more
but he runs away and I open her door and
it ain’t no bigger than a walk in closet,
in fact I can see that’s what it is,
converted to a “room” with a cot-size bed
and in it someone lies breathing deeply—
I can’t see but I know it’s her by the
smell I can never forget—as quietly as
I can I slip in beside her, touch her hair,
her face, her skin—it’s hot, she’s sick
with more than bad drugs and hopeless
nights and whatever she’s been through
since our last fight when I ran away to
the Air Force—I take her in my arms and
she opens her eyes and even in the darkness
I can see that glow as I say “It’s me”
and she says “I know” and adds “Don’t fuck
me, I’m sick” and I say “No, no, no, no,
no, baby, I’m not here to fuck you, I’m here
to take care of you” and she get
s as close
to crying as I’ve ever seen her or she’s
ever seen me, she says “I just didn’t want
you to get it too”—and all I can say is
“God how I still love you” and God how I
still do, sitting there in the bar with
Pauline and her, as she thanks me for
rescuing her that time saying she owes me
so much as she remembers how the next
morning we were woke up by the landlord
banging on the door—I don’t tell her I
was already awake, staying up all night
holding her tight as she slept, watching
the light as it crept through the dirty
little window and over her skin and the
cigarette burns put there by men I wished
I could find so I take it out on the
landlord as I open the door and he demands
his ten bucks for the week and I go
after him to kick in his fucking head
but he’s already fled yelling about
the police so I know I got to get her
out of there—I help her into the one dress
she’s got to wear, everything else long
since pawned or stolen and I carry her
down the stairs and over to a friend’s
apartment near Washington Square, where
we can stay on the couch and day after
day I feed her and bathe her and slowly
she responds until one night, just goofing
with her I make her laugh, and it’s like
that scene in the story of Thomas Edison
when they turn on all the streetlights
at once for the first time in Manhattan—
that’s the way it felt in my heart—so
here we are in this bar almost 30 years
later and she’s thanking me for my part
in all that and Pauline’s talking about
Big Brown who used to put me down for
being with a Black girl, but who she liked,
cause he treated her right when he could
have killed her, and the time he got hit
with a butcher knife and The Dutchess who
acted so cold, but once when I was roaming
around on my own without any home and the
bartender at Obie’s wouldn’t give me a
drink or a smoke, he suddenly changed his
mind and laid down my brand, Pall Mall,
and a shot of my favorite J.W. Dant and
pointed at The Dutchess but when I started
to thank her she turned away the same way
Ralphie the junkie did even though I was
gonna kick his ass for selling me soap
powder once, he saw me and Bambi were
really hungry one time and took us to what
seemed like a pretty fancy joint back
then, not much more than a Howard Johnson’s
and bought us dinner and desert and
threw in a lady’s magazine for Bambi and
when I started to say thanks he went
“Fuck that” and walked away leaving us
standing there feeling light as the air
so happy not to be hungry anymore—oh
man, when I open up that door to those
days sometimes I think it was all a dream,
something I made up to seem tough to
later friends, but shit, there I was
last Friday night sitting with these two
grandmothers, one still acting tough but
so happy we’re all together she can’t stop
smiling and the other still acting crazy
but it doesn’t scare me any more or make
me mad, it makes me laugh and tell her how
cute she is and she says “Cute is
inappropriate for a 35-year-old woman”
and I say “Bambi, you’re 46,” she says
“37, that’s it”—I take her face in my hands
and say “Hey, I owe you so much too—”
and I realize I’m saying exactly what I
mean now because I am the man I was trying
to be back then when I was too high and
too young and too scared and too overwhelmed
by the feelings I had inside that made me
want to hide inside her eyes forever—
and right there in that bar with all those
people who don’t know and could never
imagine the history of her and me—we kiss
and her lips are the same as they were
like the taste and the touch of home that
I tried to describe in all the poems I
wrote for years to her—but all I can
say when we finally pull away is “Hey,
I don’t care how many husbands and wives
we’ve both had, you’ll always be my woman”
—and she says “I’m glad,” and it feels
so fucking great not to have to be bad or
hate half the world and scared of the rest
just because the best thing I knew when
I was 18 was the love I felt for the
beautiful crazy queen of all the lost souls
in our little New York street scene—hey
none of them became artists or songwriters
or famous or real estate brokers or rich—
a lot are dead or even more lost or sick—
sometimes when I’m in the city and I see
a familiar face on a gray-bearded Black man
digging in the garbage, I think is that—?
but last Friday night at least 3 of us
were still alright, and together again—
can you dig how far I’ve come since then?
And I ain’t talkin’ about Hollywood.
SPORTS HEROES, COPS AND LACE
Jackie Robinson was my first real sports hero,
my first real hero period.
My father once took me to see Jersey Joe Walcott
work out for one of his fights.
It was in a summer camp in the North Jersey hills.
We called them mountains back then.
Jersey Joe was already getting old, but he was game
and carried himself like a champ.
I even got introduced to him by my father’s friend,
and I remember how nice he was.
In fact I was struck by it, by his openness and
friendliness and unexpected gentleness
when it was obvious he could have easily killed
anybody there with his bare hands
if he felt like it. My father was a sporting man.
He played the ponies every day
and knew everybody at the track and even made a
little book on the side.
We always watched the Friday night fights together
on the old console black-and-white TV.
The Gillette song and that announcer with the high
nasal voice and my father
leaning out of his chair, already an old man to me,
but sporty, with what seemed
like closets full of sporting shoes and sport coats
and even a camel’s hair overcoat
I used to sneak a feel of every time I went into the hall
closet. He’d point out Jake Lamotta,
call him “the possum” because he could play dead,
let a man batter him for what seemed
like hours and then when the opponent dropped his guard
tear him apart. He had heart, it was said.
But all these guys seemed somehow tarnished to me, even Jersey
Joe. They were like my father’s friends,
nice enough guys, who always treated me right, even if
I hated that they called me “little Jimmy.”
I’d tell them
my name is Michael
so then they’d call me Mikey, but they were okay.
Even the ones who were obvious bums
like Boots and Mary, and Frenchy, and all these characters
my father had grown up with and run
with and continued to help out til the day he died.
It was like living inside a
Damon Runyan story, and I dug the romance of it,
because despite the idea people
usually have who have never lived that life, it is romantic,
in fact, that’s one of the appeals
of that world, any kind of underworld, the bookies
the petty crooks and over-the-hill
champs, there was a glamour and
a romance there, even with the old bags and bums like
Boots and Mary, hey, I used to see
them holding hands as they searched the ground for butts.
But it wasn’t until Jackie Robinson
entered the big leagues that I found a hero of my own.
The man had something more than the romance
of the streets and sporting life and my father’s friends
and closets of my home. The man had what
my father feared and desired most—“class”—the thing
my father’s friends would toast him for.
And it was true that in our neighborhood my father had
some class and carried it as best he could.
But in the face of people more comfortable in this world
and self-assured, my father would get
awful humble, and almost do a kind of white man shuffle
that made me feel that maybe I wasn’t
good enough either. He’d pretend that we were better off
where we were and among our own kind,
and we all grew up believing the other Americans, the ones
whose families had been here for a long time,
whose kids went to college and whose fathers and uncles
ran the businesses that really mattered—
we were taught they weren’t as happy as we thought we were,
especially when we partied or married or
someone died. But inside, I knew it wasn’t pride, it was
some unacknowledged form of ambition suicide.
Don’t think beyond these streets, these ways of being or
you might get hurt. We knew our place.
And then Jackie Robinson entered major league baseball as the
first of his race, and I saw a kind of
dignity in the face of the obscenities that greeted him
everyday on the field and it made my chest
swell with pride which didn’t make any sense since I was
obviously white and knew nothing about
this man except that he could stand up to the lowest forms
of hatred and not let it effect him,
at least not in any way I could see. And I saw a model for me,
Another Way to Play Page 14