City Kid

by Nelson George

  JOINING THE LITERARY GUILD

  I was about fourteen when I saw an ad in Esquire magazine or the Atlantic Monthly (I always read well above my age) telling me I could join something called the Literary Guild for one dollar. The offer was a generous four books for a buck. Borrowing books my mother had purchased for her Brooklyn College studies, I’d already read the greatest hits of urban lit—Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. Plus Ma was a lover of commercial fiction, so I’d read several James Bond novels and books by Jackie Susann, like Valley of the Dolls.

  What was so seductive about the Literary Guild offer was not simply that I could get four books for a buck, but that if I was clever, those four books could become fourteen. According to the Esquire ad, you could order three Ernest Hemingway novels (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls), four F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, Tender Is the Night), four William Faulkner (Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying), and two Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; You Can’t Go Home Again) for that single dollar. I’d read some short stories from this bunch in anthologies (Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Killers,” Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”), but was aware of them more as legends than as actual writers.

  I figured that this was my chance to start my own, very adult library, without seriously endangering my allowance. So I clipped out the ad, inserted one dollar in an envelope, and hoped I’d soon be not just well read, but informed about literary history.

  The box came one morning with a buzz, as the mailman couldn’t fit anything that big in our box. I was out playing ball, employing my two moves (a low-trajectory Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sky hook, and a drop-step spin move I stole from Dave Cowens) as I led my three-man squad to decisive defeats. But my substandard game was forgotten once I opened that Literary Guild box. Inside were four sets of books, each color coded: Wolfe’s two were thick and sky blue with silver embossing; Faulkner’s were red with yellow letters; Fitzgerald’s pale blue with black spines; and Hemingway’s a dusky blue with white letters.

  For a while I just fondled them, touching the covers gently, rubbing fingers over the lettering, and smelling the pages, deriving a strange pleasure from the ink on the page and the pulpy paper used in these editions. Then I got nervous. Was I really mature enough to understand these books, or were they just symbols of my ambition and nothing more? The serious writing I’d read before had been about “the black experience”—meaning our ongoing struggles against racism. But I’d have no easy way of identifying with these writers, who were all white, and all dead to boot.

  I began with Gatsby. Not for any deep literary reason—just because there was talk of a movie, and I liked to be as on top of things as a child of the ghetto could be (I remember making sure I read The Godfather before seeing that flick). I believe it was my first time reading a book that was better than any movie. Whereas the Bond movies were all more fun than Ian Fleming’s books, and Coppola’s film was art compared to Mario Puzo’s pulp, Fitzgerald’s book was a sensational read, with his liquid, flowing sentences pulling me along.

  I totally identified with Nick Carraway. His cool observations and vaguely condescending, ultimately sad tone really touched a nerve. Even at fourteen I knew that Nick was me. I already had the sense of feeling slightly outside of things happening around me, even feeling outside of things happening to me. Sometimes it felt like I was standing next to myself. I always felt I was taking notes on a life I should have been living, and, to me, that was Nick’s curse, too.

  I didn’t really connect with Gatsby until I was a young adult. Still, even as a pimply preteen, I could understand Gatsby’s desire for reinvention in pursuit of love. I wanted muscles, but stayed a string bean. I wanted to be a shot caller, but was really a bricklayer. I wanted to be made smarter by my reading, but I could barely add higher than 2 + 2. The scene that still kills me is when Gatsby goes down in flames in a steamy Manhattan hotel room, trying to get Daisy to proclaim her love in front of her boorish, unfaithful husband, Tom Buchanan. I remember thinking that no matter how much you try to remake yourself, class differences could be difficult to overcome even in supposedly “classless” America.

  I’ve never cried for Gatsby, but I’ve come back to his character numerous times, seeing as an adult that his frustrated yearning for an unattainable woman is an apt metaphor for trying to rise in American society. I’ve met countless black Gatsbys, men obsessed with acceptance, who thought the “right” woman—be she light, bright, and bourgie or white with a pedigree—is as essential as the right bachelor degree to their crossover dreams.

  Not as imposing, but still quite pleasurable, was This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first novel. Its details now escape me, except for the air of romantic yearning for adventure that hovers over the book, and that young men like me will always be susceptible to.

  My attempts at Wolfe and Faulkner were much less fulfilling. I found Wolfe’s overblown verbiage boring. I dipped into both of his massive novels and nearly drowned in pages of worthless adjectives. I decided to postpone reading more Wolfe for another time, one that’s never come.

  My relationship with Faulkner was more complicated. Despite all the references to his greatness in all the literary criticism I read, the man’s white Mississippi pedigree and Southern milieu was a turnoff. I knew race was an obsession for him, but I really wasn’t that interested in an alcoholic white man’s view of “the question.” I knew (at least, according to the great critic Alfred Kazin, whom I’d been reading to better understand my Literary Guild selections) that Faulkner shouldn’t be viewed (or, at least, solely viewed) through the prism of politics. So with all that in my young mind, I cracked open The Sound and the Fury and was confronted with the limitations of my fourteen-year-old imagination.

  The shifting point of view and subtle narrative line was just too much for me to grasp. Armed with only my ambitions as a reader and a couple of books on American letters as a guide, I bailed on Faulkner and have returned in dibs and dabs over the years, obviously a major failing in my literary self-education.

  I was only one out of three with my Literary Guild authors when my life changed and a love affair began. Like scores before me and, I hope, many generations after, I found a personal guru in Ernest Hemingway. In that summer I turned fifteen, and then in so many sweet summers since, Hemingway’s elemental elegance and hard-boiled humanism spoke to me as style and attitude. I devoured The Sun Also Rises and then A Farewell to Arms, fixating on the details of fishing, bullfighting, ordering in European cafés, and driving through the Swiss Alps.

  Though not as pristine as his classic short stories, in terms of how Hemingway squeezed every ounce of meaning possible out of “and” and “but,” these novels were like cool, clear water that reflected back and quenched my thirst. Over the years I’d come under the sway of many artists, but none as artistically ambitious, stylistically influential, and creatively accomplished as Big Papa. (Speaking of big men, whenever I hear the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning,” with its economical storytelling and matter-of-fact violence, I think of Hemingway.)

  Sex was a huge attraction for me in both Sun and Arms. I never did quite understand what was physically wrong with Jake Barnes in Sun. Did his dick get blown off, or his testicles? I mean, could the guy go to the bathroom? The hot-blooded object of his desire, Lady Brett Ashley, tried to roust him a couple of times, only to frustrate them both. This ambiguity was, of course, central to its charm. At the time I only had a vague notion that there was a malady called impotence (at that age I got an erection just walking past a pretty girl). If I found out what Jake had, could I catch it? I’d read the passages dealing with the injury over and over, ultimately trying to decode the tragedy as a preventive measure.

/>   Without a doubt, the central conceit of Arms—that a wounded soldier could win the heart of his nurse—was a ripe adolescent dream. War heroism rewarded with sensual compassion is a male romantic fantasy. Only its bittersweet ending redeems the story. That the protagonists of both Sun and Arms were injured, yet noble and still virile, spoke to me, even though I was as healthy as the next horny adolescent.

  The incredible sense of inadequacy and vulnerability kids feel, that overwhelming anxiety that they can’t measure up—in school, in sports, with girls—can seem, and often be, as mentally unbalancing as an injury to the body. At least an injury can heal. I spent much of my adolescence wondering if I would ever measure up. Reading about Hemingway in biographies, I came to understand that that adolescent insecurity had lingered with him, both fueling his art and wrecking his relationships.

  Hemingway’s magnum opus, For Whom the Bell Tolls, written with epic intentions and on the full belly of international celebrity in the 1930s, doesn’t have the same confused, romantic yearning at its core, and suffers because of it. This tale of a professional terrorist (as we’d call Robert Jordan now) was closer to Hemingway’s persona than his personality. I savored Jordan’s righteous heroism, and his boning of the coltish Maria, but Bell didn’t move me in the ways Hemingway’s more callow, less self-assured men did.

  On the heels of all of this reading, Fitzgerald and Hemingway became heroes of mine. The irony being that if I’d encountered either man, it’s likely that they would have seen me as a potential shoe-shine boy. Black folks were a fleeting and none too dignified presence in their work. Gatsby features Nick Carraway’s notorious sighting of a “ridiculous Negro” driving in a fancy car on a Sunday afternoon in Manhattan. Hemingway was quite comfortable with the word “nigger” whenever a black man showed up in the background of one of his stories. Basically, black people were irrelevant to them, which, in retrospect, I believe played a part in their appeal for me.

  Through my socially conscious, dashiki-wearing, school-teaching mother I’d sampled the books “for black boys looking for images of themselves.” Sadly, like food that is good for you, those books interested but didn’t excite me. I was all too aware that they were supposed to be “good for me.” Filled with ghetto drama, racist whites, and short money, neither Manchild nor Black Boy nor any of the others hit with the shock of the new like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. To employ a phrase whites once typically used to describe their fascination with black music, I found this white literature “exotic.”

  So the lack of blacks, especially since the authors were clearly uncomfortable with them when they showed up, didn’t upset or offend me. I wasn’t seeking role models in their work. I desired excitement, surprise, and literary style. I did read them for social history as well as literary pleasure, but not as empowering sociology. (Only later, as an adult writer, did I come back to many of my mother’s books, particular the work of Richard Wright, whose struggles off the page I find quite moving now.)

  I was hooked on Hemingway (and, to a lesser degree, Fitzgerald) like one of the marlins Papa hunted off the coast of Cuba, and began to read all I could by and about him. Carlos Baker’s big biography (considered definitive at the time) became a trusted friend, and I looked into A. E. Hotchner’s kiss-ass memoir too. At this point I was a fan, excited by my entry into a book world so different from the world of fleeing Jews and migrating blacks I lived in. But it wasn’t until I started on Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories that I crossed the line from consumer to chronicler, from reader to writer.

  Nick Adams—young Hemingway—was sprinkled throughout his brilliant first collection of short fiction, In Our Time, and Hemingway came back to him again in Winner Takes Nothing before anthologizing all the stories in one stand-alone volume. Nick evolved from the young son of a Michigan doctor to a runaway hobo to a soldier over the course of these stories, each one a spare, allusive, pristine example of the writer’s art. In the rhythms of Hemingway’s prose, and the careful detailing of Nick’s existence, I began to formulate the idea that I could write about my life in a similar style.

  And so, that summer, after dipping and diving into classic American literature, I got pulled by a profound tidal wave of ambition and decided to write my own story. Hemingway gave me license to see the details of my life as significant: summer baseball, my absent father, my lust, my interaction with white folks, my interest in history. From first adolescent encounters with Hemingway until beginning college at age eighteen, I penned about sixty pieces centered around a surrogate named Dwayne Robinson (my mother almost gave me the middle name Dwayne, though she settled on Daryle, so it seemed an apt dual identity). Some were simply Hemingway knockoffs, others were stylistically more ambitious sketches of moments in my day.

  A ritual evolved, especially on weekends, holidays, and those long, hot New York summers, during which I escaped by creating ultraromantic visions of myself. I’d buy little notebooks—mostly small spiral numbers with replaceable pages—and I’d fill them with my attempts at short stories and narrative essays. I’d sit up all night scribbling, and then commandeer my mother’s manual (later electric) typewriter and fill the pages with my musings. My mother and sister both have memories of me tapping away until one and two in the A.M.

  Occasionally I’d try to write standing up, as Hemingway reportedly did, but my legs were no match for Papa’s. I even tried writing while drunk, or at least a little tipsy, like my great alcoholic heroes. Thankfully, I was always a sober sort, so the relationship between inebriation and creativity escaped me, particularly since what I wrote under the influence was crap.

  Mostly, I was intoxicated by my own words. I didn’t show them to many folks—only some to my mother, English teachers, and girls I hoped to make girlfriends. Mainly I just reveled in their creation, watching the pages of Dwayne Robinson stories grow, hoping they’d amount to something grand one day despite their flaws. Years later I’d name the lead character in my first novel, Urban Romance , Dwayne Robinson, and I tossed in a bit of one of those adolescent stories. I would also use Dwayne Robinson as my credit on a cheesy TV movie I rewrote, a joke that I richly enjoyed.

  Ultimately, the most important thing wasn’t Dwayne but that I’d found a calling. One afternoon that summer I came home and ripped down all the posters of baseball players I had taped up. Down went the Yankees’ centerfielder, Bobby Murcer. I’d followed Murcer’s career since he first joined the club and was touted as the next Mickey Mantle. He’d never be that, but Murcer was a solid major league ballplayer, one of the first whose career I’d followed from the day he’d gotten called up until he retired. It was tough to take Murcer off the wall, but down he came.

  The pictures from Sports Illustrated and the Daily News that had covered my walls were replaced with photos from Rolling Stone, Esquire , and book jackets. Up went a shot of Eldridge Cleaver smoking a pipe with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Up went a photo of James Baldwin from the novel If Beale Street Could Talk, and Jimmy Breslin from his book about Watergate, and Hemingway from a literary magazine, and any other writers I could find. I was acknowledging that my baseball dreams, while not yet completely over, were no longer my chief focus. I was going to be a writer, an idea that would have sounded absurd if I hadn’t sent that one dollar to the Literary Guild.

  BK EARLY SEVENTIES

  When I was an adolescent the uniforms of the New York Knicks were filled by secular gods (Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Dick Barnett, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe) and in order to keep up with the team in the long, dark ages before cable, all of New York listened to the broadcast announcer Marvelous Marv Albert. His voice was always nasal, but was higher pitched back then. His delivery was as sharp-witted and as sarcastic as only a real Brooklyn native’s could be. In the corridors of East Flatbush’s Meyer Levin Junior High school Marv Albert imitators were legion. Bruce Gelman and I, both of class 7-14, were just two of the thousands battling to be the best Marv Albert, while using
our pens as mikes as we walked the staircases of JHS 285.

  “Frazier brings it up the right sideline,” I’d say. “He passes to Bradley, who takes two dribbles and feeds into Reed in the post. Back out to DeBusschere. Over to Bradley. He stops. He pops. Yes!”

  Then my dark-haired friend would reply, “Frazier at the top of the key. Passes to DeBusschere. He’s trapped in the corner. Passes back out to Frazier, who dribbles left, stops, fakes, and then bounce pass to DeBusshere, who lays it up and in!”

  The only championships this franchise has ever won occurred while I was in junior high and then high school, back in 1970 and 1973. Combine these with the titles won by the Mets and Jets at Shea Stadium in ’69, and these were amazing years to be young, love sports, and be alive in New York City.

  These glory years coincided with my attending two schools in East Flatbush, Meyer Levin Junior High and Tilden High School, which were separated from each other by a narrow street. With my teenage years came my first awareness that race and class were intertwined, and that in Brooklyn, whether a neighborhood was black, Puerto Rican, or Jewish was just a matter of what point in history you walked its streets. It wasn’t until I attended Meyer Levin that I found out that Brownsville, just a twenty-minute bus ride away, had a history that predated the projects and the brown folks who lived there now.

  One afternoon in a Meyer Levin hallway, I got into a conversation with a white mother who was volunteering in the principal’s office, who said she too had grown up in Brownsville. She knew all about the fish market on Belmont Avenue. She knew about the elevated subway that ran down Livonia Avenue. She knew about the Brownsville Boys’ Club and Abe Stark Philanthropic summer day camp that was run there.