For a time, squalor and degradation were all I could see in the streets, or all I chose to see—and not just in the world around me but in my own mind. At my day job I could impersonate a competent, self-possessed young man, but my inner life festered with diseased visions:
At the laundromat today I saw a poster tacked to the wall. It said the 79th precinct’s homicide squad is looking for information about the death of a livery cab driver who was found murdered in his car on the corner of Marcus Garvey Blvd. and Monroe St. on Feb. 1. The thought of it chilled me: a dead body forty steps from my front door, shot for the cash in his pocket.
On the stoop across the street a man lifted his shriveled penis from his pants and relieved himself on the topmost step. His urine steamed in the cold. It steamed in its arc and steamed where it splashed on the concrete.
Think of the cool reassurance of gunmetal in palm. The dull and languid hereafter, the painless hereafter. Think of the bliss of death.
I’d been in the neighborhood a couple of months when I was given a raise at work, and one of the ways I celebrated was by going on a little shopping spree at Century 21, just up the street from the paper. I bought a suit jacket off a sales rack, a DKNY number that fit well enough, though it was a touch long in the arms. On another sales rack I found a pair of pants that more or less matched the jacket. I bought three new dress shirts and four ties to go with them. To complete the ensemble, I rode the train up to Eighth Avenue and Forty-first Street, to a hat shop I’d passed many times on my walks through the city, and I bought myself a sharp-looking fedora, black, with a red and yellow feather in the band.
Most of the men at the paper wore white shirts and patterned ties that looked like they’d been bought a generation or two before. If you looked closely you could see little stains on them where they’d caught a splash of soup or a dribble of mustard, possibly during the Reagan administration. I opted for colored shirts—salmon-pink, lime-green, cornflower-blue—and ties with a bit of pizzazz in their patterns. The fedora, though, was the real flourish, a gesture of pure irony. It offered not a clue about who I really was, where I’d come from, what I believed.
A natty socialist at the Wall Street Journal. A white guy in a black neighborhood. Strange how comfortable my discomfort became.
In other words, I was asking for it.
The woman who was supposed to move from Detroit and share the apartment never did. After a while, another friend of Mary’s became my roommate. Beth had just ended a long-term relationship with a woman and decided to explore the complications of hetero life by seeing a married man. Among the palest people I’d ever encountered, she was impossible not to notice on the streets of Bed-Stuy—she made me look swarthy by comparison—but she carried herself with an air of oblivious good cheer that made me believe she’d remain immune to trouble. She wasn’t around much anyway. She stayed most nights with her boyfriend Dave in Manhattan, in the apartment he’d taken after leaving his wife.
Dave came to Bed-Stuy once to spend the night. I never saw him there again, but he told me a story I never forgot. He’d taken the train partway, then the bus. It was rush hour and the bus was full, so he’d had to stand. In front of him a woman held a child to her chest. The child couldn’t stop staring over her mother’s shoulder. Block after block the child stared, her eyes, according to Dave, revealing an intensity of awe unlike anything he’d ever seen.
I’m pretty sure the kid had never seen a white person, Dave said.
When the bus drew near Dave’s stop, he scooted a couple of steps toward the door. Just before he got off, the little girl reached over her mother’s shoulder and, in the most tentative way imaginable, touched Dave’s cheek with her finger.
It was almost as if she couldn’t believe I was real, Dave said. Once she realized my skin felt like anyone else’s, you should have seen her smile.
As I walked the streets of the neighborhood that story kept returning to me. Not because anything so dramatic happened to me, but because I did feel the force of people’s curiosity—the sideways glances I got as I walked the streets, the questions I fielded from the neighborhood elders while buying a carton of orange juice in a bodega. A lot of people assumed I was a Jehovah’s Witness peddling the literature of salvation, since that was about the only kind of white person who made an appearance in the heart of Bed-Stuy, the kind harvesting souls for Jesus. This was the funniest joke I’d heard in months, all the funnier for its repetition, but I didn’t laugh for long.
One night I went to meet my uncle in Manhattan. He was in the city on business from Seattle. He’d invited me to dinner on a client’s expense account, a seven-course affair at a fancy TriBeCa restaurant, so I put on a new shirt and tie, my new jacket, the fedora. I was strolling down the street toward the C train, looking forward to an evening of food and wine and talk, whistling to myself—I’d been listening to some Sinatra before I left, the famous live recording with Count Basie, in particular “Fly Me to the Moon,” that swinging masterpiece—when I was jumped from behind. I say jumped, but that doesn’t do justice to the force of it. I’m not sure if the guy meant to keep a grip on me or not. He hit me so hard I flew about eight feet before I landed on the sidewalk. It all happened so quickly, I suppose I acted on pure adrenal reflex. I jumped up and ran. Halfway down the block I stopped to catch my breath, having heard no footsteps behind me. I’d lost my glasses and my hat, and my knees and palms were scratched and bleeding. The rest of me seemed intact, if severely jangled. I couldn’t see very well without my glasses but I did notice a man walking toward me, lit from behind by a streetlamp, his face obscured in shadow.
Mister, he said, your hat.
He held it in his outstretched hand.
I was still too stunned to speak, and there was something about him that made me nervous—perhaps the fact that he seemed more concerned about returning my hat than inquiring about my well-being. He said it three times—Mister, your hat—and held it in front of him in one hand, like a priest administering the Eucharist. I extended my hand to take it from him. Just as my fingertips touched the brim he yanked it away. I turned and ran toward the street. A tree and a parked car blocked my path, and in the half second it took me to change course, he jumped on my back. I carried him across the street in a piggyback ride before he wrestled me to the sidewalk.
Don’t fucking move, he said. My friend’s got a gun and he ain’t afraid to use it.
I was on my hands and knees, gasping for breath, unable to see the guy on top of me, and I thought: You think I give a shit, you fuckers? Go ahead. Go ahead and kill me.
A pair of feet appeared in front of my face, spread in the posture of a man about to take target practice.
Hand over your wallet. And nothing stupid or you’re gonna get hurt.
The guy on my back gave it to his friend, who emptied the cash—fifty bucks—and dropped the wallet on the ground.
Don’t look up, don’t follow us, and don’t call the cops and we won’t have to hunt your ass down and shoot you.
They ran down the street, laughing as they went.
I stood, testing my ankles and knees. I brushed myself off, flexing my elbows and fingers. I touched my lip, which was swollen and bleeding. I ran my tongue over my teeth and found them all still there, though I spat a mouthful of blood.
There was a car sitting in the street, idling, its lights on, its muffler sending little thought-balloon shapes of exhaust into the air, but when I went to its window I found it unoccupied. Up the street I went, hobbling a little, stooping to look for the shapes of my glasses, my hat—the hat my muggers had used like bait to hook some idiot fish by the mouth.
For a while afterward, my fear boiled up in plain view. I’d risen to the surface of things, all right, though not in the way I’d hoped—or perhaps exactly in the way I’d hoped. I was surprised by the vehemence of my outrage; I hadn’t expected to feel so protective of my own skin. My sense of distinction in the neighborhood, my illusory belief in my own goodness and
even bravery, it all vanished. Though I ought to have counted myself lucky—I’d merely suffered a few bruises, lost fifty bucks—I instead felt forewarned, as if the mugging were merely a teaser of what lay in store for me. It exposed a part of me I’d managed to avoid knowing was there, the run-of-the mill bigot, the guy who casts a jaundiced eye on a whole group of people for the actions of a couple of punks redistributing the wealth with the finesse of middle linebackers. It was sport, what they’d done. They’d wanted my money, and I must have looked like I had a lot more than it turned out I did.
For a week or so I imagined crossing the river to Jersey and getting my hands on a nine. I’d shove its snout into someone’s ear, the next person who dared look at me crossways. I’d become the one to fear instead of the one who feared.
Emotion trumping intellect, problem-solving with guns: maybe they ran in the family.
It was just a few days later when the verdict came down in the murder of Amadou Diallo. Like many New Yorkers I’d been appalled by the poor man’s fate: a West African immigrant street peddler, in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot by four members of a Street Crimes Unit in the Bronx as he fumbled for proof of ID. The officers had fired forty-one shots at Diallo as he stood in his apartment vestibule, holding in his hand nothing more threatening than a wallet—a black wallet the cops took for a gun. On February 25, 2000, a jury acquitted the cops of all wrongdoing. The news was loud and clear and not exactly breaking: the police could shoot an innocent man on the streets of New York and there would be no consequences. An innocent black man, that is. It was hard to imagine a similar verdict if the victim had been a white man in Manhattan.
On the day after the acquittal, walking through the city as I often did on weekend afternoons, I came upon a parade of protesters streaming down Broadway, chanting, It’s just a wallet, not a gun, no excuse for forty-one. As with many public protests in the city, I agreed with the protesters on principle. Like them, I thought the verdict was a travesty. Unlike them, I didn’t want to reduce my feelings about it to a refrain that stated the obvious in the form of a rhyme. I remembered, all too vividly, chanting, No justice, no peace, in the streets of Minneapolis in 1992, one of the emptiest slogans I’d ever uttered, as if I had any intention of continually disturbing the peace in the absence of justice for Rodney King or anyone else.
I watched them pass by and then I walked on.
Going home that night from the subway, I came upon four young men having an animated discussion outside a bodega on Marcus Garvey. When I passed within earshot I heard one of the men say, No, no, this is fucking bullshit, bro. It’s time we fought back against these motherfuckers. I’m talking real firepower. We gotta send a message. They put a bullet in one of us, we put two in one of them. Forty-one for Diallo, eighty-two for him—and he pointed at me, thumb and forefinger at a right angle, in the shape of a gun.
I turned away and walked on.
A week later I saw a flyer announcing a gathering at Ebenezer Baptist Church, not far from my apartment. The Reverend Al Sharpton, it said, would be the keynote speaker. When the night came I polished my black dress shoes, donned my finest churchworthy threads, and went to see what the reverend had to say.
I took a seat in the balcony as the choir began to sway and sing. Just as I’d shed my coat and settled in, a man came to the end of my row, pointed at me, and said: I have a lady I’d like to seat there. Would you mind moving?
I looked around. There were numerous empty seats nearby, seats closer to the aisle, but his tone insinuated that it didn’t matter one bit if I minded. It was a little power trip, and I played my part. Who could blame him? Such chances must not have come his way often. I nodded, gathered my coat, and stepped away. For a while I moved through the church, looking for another place to sit. I decided I’d do best to stand in the back of the balcony. On my walk around the church I’d counted two other white faces out of perhaps three hundred—one carrying a TV news camera, the other a microphone.
The program began with half an hour of gospel music from a choir dressed in blue and gold robes. The entire congregation stood and sang and clapped. The energy was electric, contagious, like nothing I’d experienced—certainly not in the dour Catholic services of my youth, with their mournful hymns, their repeated messages of inexpungable guilt. At that moment, swept up by a communal energy for the first time in a long time, I felt prepared to give something of myself. I wanted to be asked to do something useful, something brave in the service of justice. I didn’t know what the something was but I knew I’d be ready if I heard it. I’d spent too much time thinking about a subject that scrambled all categories of justice, and I was growing sick of my befuddlement. I wanted answers.
The likelihood of my hearing them seemed to diminish noticeably when the first speaker welcomed us to “reservation headquarters,” by which metaphor I would have been a visiting agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Reverend Sharpton spoke last. In high biblical cadence he sketched a series of proposals to rectify the injustice of the Diallo killing. When you go to the polls on Tuesday for the presidential primary, he said, reject the corrupt status quo and write in the name Diallo. We want to have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of votes for Amadou Diallo. We want to show the powers that be that this city will not move on until justice is served!
When someone asks you how you are, he said, you reply: Amadou. Let his name ring from our lips daily, hourly, on every street corner in the city! Let me hear you say it—Amadou!
Amadou.
Amadou!
Amadou.
He continued with a proposal to cripple the city’s financial institutions by withdrawing black money from white banks. Then he closed with a retelling of the biblical story of David, which he linked to his own interactions with Diallo’s father.
I told him, he said, I told him that in spite of my funny suit and the fact that I’m a Christian and you’re a Muslim, we are brothers, separated long ago on the continent of Africa!
The reverend’s sermon was a slightly better plan for fighting racial injustice than the one I’d heard on the street: trade two bullets for one. Then again, in that plan I’d have served some purpose, a nice white target in the dark. My money wasn’t black. My money was green, and it was clearly safer in the bank than on my person. If I started going around muttering Amadou, I’d have been seen as a danger to myself or others. I’d been a fool to think I was among the reverend’s audience just because I was in the reverend’s audience.
As the music wound down afterward, I made my way toward the exit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar face—my landlord, Ben, the suave Trinidadian. I sliced sideways through the crowd, placed a hand on his shoulder.
Ben, I said. Good to see you.
I’m not sure what I expected—perhaps a little friendly chitchat, an exchange of impressions on what we’d just witnessed. I thought he’d at least acknowledge me, the gay-friendly dude who paid his rent on time. But he must have seen a whole mess of trouble he didn’t need, because he recoiled slightly, as if he didn’t know me.
I stood there dumbly, a pariah. In a moment he was gone, lost in the crowd.
Walking home along Fulton Street, then north on Malcolm X Boulevard, I knew my time in Bed-Stuy was up, and that it must have looked to the outside observer like nothing more than an exercise in cheap voyeurism—slumming, quite literally. To say out loud that I knew a thing or two about the emotional devastation wrought by gun violence: How far would that have gotten me? About the only commonality in the stories of Diallo and my brother was that white hands had held the guns.
When I knocked at Ben’s apartment the next week, he didn’t answer. I slipped a note under the door, giving him notice that I’d be gone by the end of the month.
I never saw him again.
Lover Boy
My new boss, Raymond Sokolov, was the sophisticate among my immediate colleagues at the Journal. In 1982 he’d founded the Leisure & Ar
ts page as a daily staple of the paper. Prior to that he’d been a book and movie critic for Newsweek, a food editor at the New York Times, and a columnist for Natural History magazine. He’d written several books, among them a biography of A. J. Liebling. With his diminutive stature, his shock of white hair, his round spectacles and colorful bow ties, he had the appearance of a mischievous, throwback intellectual, a holdover from the glory days of PM and the Herald-Tribune. He was no ideologue when it came to politics. He seemed, from what I could gather in our oblique conversations, to be a sensible moderate—except on Israel, where he may have been to the right of Bob Bartley—but he had a streak of iconoclasm, a desire to tweak the sensibilities of the powers that were, which gave him a raffish charm. Working for him was a pleasure, as long as you didn’t screw up. Once he’d read a piece, he washed his hands of it and preferred not to think of it again. Negotiating his changes with writers could be tricky when they didn’t approve. I quickly learned that was my problem, not his. He left his subordinates alone to their work, and his trust made me want to do it justice.
Copyediting is peculiar work, a realm for word geeks and control freaks, part art and part science, and ultimately an exercise in professional anonymity. It’s not as if readers have the chance to compare a writer’s first draft with the printed version—look how much was needed!—so my work went completely unnoticed until a mistake showed up in print. The better I did my job, the more I receded into obscurity, even from Ray, so that I came to understand the ultimate goal was an erasure of my existence beyond interactions with the writers whose work I smoothed over, and the people in production who brought it all together in the end. Copy editors were the Zamboni drivers of the newspaper world. We kept the surface polished so the writers could perform their little pirouettes.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 7