City Kid

by Nelson George

  I didn’t get Led Zeppelin at first. It was loud and abrasive, with some vague mystical mess going on lyrically. Then Roland, a big, strong, half-black, half-German neighbor with a passion for football and marijuana, invited me to go visit a friend of his. Kevin was a frizzy-haired stoner whose bedroom was lined with black-light posters of couples performing the Kama sutra. There were two white parakeets in birdcages by his bed, and he had quad speakers sitting in the room’s four corners.

  I was never much into drugs. What had happened to my mother’s friend Eddie had dulled my curiosity. Even when my friends started getting high in the 315 staircase, I usually passed. But Kevin had a bong, which I’d heard of but never seen, and he had hashish, which I knew of but had never smoked.

  So Kevin lit the bong. He released the parakeets. He turned on a black light. I took a hit of hash. He put on Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir. It flowed through the quad speakers. John Paul Jones’s keyboards sounded majestic. John Bonham’s drum kit boomed. Jimmy Page played resounding power chords. The birds flew over my head. The sexy couples seemed to be moving. I took another hit. I laid my head back. And in the moment of sound, vision, and drugs, finally, I understood Led Zeppelin.

  After we moved out to Spring Creek I became a long-distance runner. Across the street from Fairfield Towers, where Starrett City now stands, were large tracts of empty land that on their far side abutted the Belt Parkway. On afternoons after school and on weekends, I’d run down Flatlands Avenue, past Fairfield Towers and private homes, and onto the dirt and scattered streets of asphalt on the edge of Brooklyn. Listening to my feet bounce off the ground and my own steady breathing (there were no Walkmen or iPods back then), I sought that so intoxicating runner’s high. I loved the splendid isolation of running, and it spurred on my writing, driving me deeper inside my head, feeding a desire for introspection that was becoming a defining part of my personality.

  I had dreams of running marathons and joining the Kenyans in the elite of long-distance running, but that idea died as soon as I joined the Tilden High School track team. Running solo had always been fun and relaxing. However, being timed and having to practice, and to have strategy meetings before competitions, sucked the spontaneity out of it for me. Plus, I wasn’t that fast. Nothing like running through Prospect Park with several hundred other kids passing you by to clarify your place in the world.

  I wanted to run at my own pace, but alas, my own pace was too damn slow. During one race in Prospect Park I tripped going through a big meadow with the finish line some two hundred yards ahead of me. Instead of getting up, I lay on the grass, listening to the thump of teenaged feet all around me. I watched the passing parade of high school colors from ground level. It was a strangely beautiful moment of defeat that I remember as one of the highlights of my track and field career. I can still feel that moment—the crisp air, the smell of the grass, a bruise on my right knee from falling, and my labored breathing. I’m a lot more sanguine about that athletic misadventure now because I understand that this failure, and what I felt, smelled, and saw, was part of my journey toward becoming a writer.

  When I read over my short stories and diary entries from those years, they are filled with attempts to capture moments like my track and field stumble. Maybe it was because of all the Hemingway I was reading, but I was lingering a lot over passing moments—catching a breeze on a hot summer day, overhearing Al Green on a mailman’s transistor radio, watching cute classmate Diane Dixon’s Afro shift slightly in the breeze when the window opened in Spanish class.

  Running and, more profoundly, writing were so seductive to me because they served (and still serve) as a form of meditation. Just as running put me in an introspective state, the act of writing itself felt lovely, often sensual. I loved how time passed when I was writing, that an hour, or two or three, would just disappear as I wrote on a notepad or banged at my mother’s electric typewriter.

  I’d already disconnected from organized religion, finding a very mercenary professionalism in most temples of worship that turned me off to most religions, including the Baptist denomination my mother was raised in. However, it was through these meditative moments that I had become aware that there was a heightened level of existence I very much wanted access to.

  Lucky for me, it was writing that seemed to connect me to a higher power. I could also feel this connection when running, listening to music, and sometimes walking down the street (later I would add making love, but that wasn’t happening in my teen years). But I could only consistently conjure it up when I put pen to paper. If my prose wasn’t divine, and it rarely was, or is even now, the process of writing itself always was and is. As a result, the act of writing filled a spiritual gap in my life and fueled a work ethic that I, in retrospect, realize was a joy ethic. The more I wrote, the more likely I was able to invoke the deity inside me. So I became a most grateful workaholic, dedicated to writing something every day, no matter how small or inconsequential, as if I was praying to a God with no name.

  TILDEN TOPICS

  After reading all those great American novels I acquired through the Literary Guild, I’d imagined my future lay in writing a great American novel too. But in high school my focus slowly changed. I was writing tons of fiction and fictionalized stories. They filled up a green metal file cabinet—some typed, some handwritten, others just scrawls on bits of paper. At the same time, all of this introspection alienated me from people. As teenagers often do, I felt I wasn’t connecting with my people, like I was standing outside of things, a state of mind that would intensify over time.

  To combat that feeling I joined the Tilden Topics, the school newspaper, figuring that being part of it would allow me to ask questions, and asking questions would allow me to learn things about people, and hopefully about myself. Joining the Topics gave me an excuse to be nosy, and I exploited it, using my reporter title to fill my notebook with stories that were never written and quotes I never used. My output might have been limited, but these efforts pulled me out of my literary cocoon and into the world. For years afterward I used questions as conversation starters, and really tried to listen to people when they spoke to me, developing a patience for other people’s musings that continues to serve me well.

  It didn’t hurt that Tilden High was at a turning point in its own history. The class of 1975 I entered the school with in ’72 was predominantly white, but every class afterward was predominantly black and Hispanic, with a huge increase in West Indians. The white flight and black influx that I’d seen firsthand in Brownsville was occurring in East Flatbush. The civil rights-era tactic of school integration, alongside the failing city services of the seventies, was changing the color of my schoolmates with every semester. At local diners Jewish knishes were replaced by West Indian beef patties. In the surrounding streets the local accents were no longer Hebrew or Sicilian but patois. Soccer balls kicked by brothers in tams filled the air outside Tilden’s gray stone front steps. Of course, the black/ white racial tensions of the time flared up from time to time, but there was this new element in the mix—African American versus Caribbean American, niggers versus coconuts, soccer versus basketball. We resented their presence, and didn’t understand their words, their food, or their attitude. All of which gave me a lot to write about, even if not a word of it would ever be published.

  For the first semester of my senior year I participated in a city-wide program that allowed students to work at a business four days a week, getting real-world experience in exchange for school credit. So from September to December 1974 I took the subway to Nevins Street, and then walked a few blocks over to Atlantic Avenue to the storefront offices of the Brooklyn Phoenix, a weekly that covered the brownstone areas of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Fort Greene (which I’d move into a couple of lives later).

  The Phoenix was trying to carve out a niche as the chronicler of these “emerging” neighborhoods way before the banking establishment of the city decided to help with mortgages and loan
s. While the far end of Brooklyn, where I was living and going to school, was losing old-school white ethnics, the brownstone areas closer to Manhattan were just beginning to see signs of what we now call gentrification. The weekly’s staff was filled with young, long-haired, white, liberal types, who had a rather condescending view of the blacks and Puerto Ricans these protoyuppies were replacing. I’m not sure if it was a little joke on their part or just insensitivity, but they gave me—the black kid—a regular assignment of calling the local precincts to write a police blotter column on local crime. I’d talk to the cops and write up muggings, breaking and enterings, and rapes. It was my first introduction to cop coinage like “perps” and their laconic attitude toward violence.

  The schizophrenic nature of the journalistic lifestyle I observed almost put me off the profession. Every week the temperatures at the Phoenix rose as deadlines approached. People sniped at each other over editorial decisions, and erupted over edits. I watched with concern as these adults sparred. Once the paper was put to bed, the voices softened and wineglasses emerged, and everyone gathered together and went out to dinner. I’d never before seen the crazy mood swings endemic to this high-stress profession. If that was my future, I wasn’t sure I wanted it.

  Still, the idea that journalism could be more than just the facts, that it could even be an art form of its own, got into me. In the midseventies the phrase “new journalism” kept turning up in all the magazines I read, along with the names of its key practitioners: Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer. I reread James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, now with a new appreciation for it as journalism, feeling a connection to it I’d never had to Baldwin’s novels.

  After my tenure at the Phoenix I began grabbing the Village Voice whenever I could. It was a weekly repository of new journalism, which is what first drew me to it. Quickly, however, I found that it was the Voice’s critics, particularly the lead film reviewer, Andrew Sarris, and his rock counterpart, Robert Christgau (who did a monthly “Consumer Guide” column on new albums and singles), that had me a regular reader. Through their erudite commentaries I learned about film genres and musical movements, and got introduced to Sarris’s auteur theory and Christgau’s prickly pronouncements.

  Through their writings and the work of the many critics they edited, I found new names to study—James Agee, Georgia Brown, Ralph J. Gleason, Dave Marsh, and many others. I’d haunt the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, each writer leading me to others, each cinematic or musical reference guiding me to others. Back at Tilden for my last semester, I felt suffocated taking classes and writing notes. I’d gotten a taste of a world out there that I was anxious to get back into.

  In the meantime I continued to read and learn. Two books of criticism entered my consciousness, altering my perspective, though they were very different from each other. Missing from my readings in new journalism and cultural criticism were black voices. Rolling Stone, Esquire, New York mag, the Village Voice, and other temples of quality writing had precious few African American writers. The work of the few who cracked these markets seemed a touch soulless, as if they’d left the race card out of their deck.

  Then I came upon LeRoi Jones’s Blues People, his 1963 meditation on race, jazz, and the blues. It was the first serious work I’d read about the nexus of black music and American culture by someone who had grown up steeped in it, and it reverberated with me. Through Jones I was given a context to understand John Coltrane as a musician and spiritual figure, as well as the aesthetic gulf between the R&B world I’d been raised in and the rebellious free jazz that inspired Jones. Later I would quibble with elements of his argument, but the idea that our music was in a constant struggle with the forces of capitalism to define its own direction struck me as right on (and still does).

  While by the midseventies Blues People was a widely acknowledged classic, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train was published in 1975 and, for me, remains the essential book of rock criticism. Marcus’s goal was to help us see rock music as an extension of, and even an addition to, United States history, one that shed light on many of its unspoken mysteries.

  Marcus, like most white critics, loved himself some Elvis. My feelings about Elvis pretty much correspond with those of Chuck D, so the lengthy Elvis material didn’t mean much to me. However, two chapters in the book turned my head: his exploration of the demonic lore surrounding Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, and a stunning portrait of Sly and the Family Stone. I hadn’t heard of Johnson before, or the tall tale of him selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads. When I finally heard “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Love in Vain,” Johnson’s voice felt as ancient as a tomb, and so dark it was hard to hear any other music for weeks afterward.

  Quite simply Marcus’s chapter on Sly’s rise and fall, his impact on white rock and black pop, and his many mysterious decisions was the single best essay I’d ever read about a black pop musician. It became the model I aspired to as a critic (and still do). It hit me that hard. I read the Sly chapter over and over on the IRT subway, wondering how many years it would take for me to pen something as thoughtful and nuanced about the music I loved.

  In May 1975, just before my graduation, I did a farewell column for the Tilden Topics. Looking back on it now, it reads like a precursor to the work I’d do later. It definitely sets up where I was in the world back in May 1975.

  On May 13 a meeting of the graduating seniors was held in the auditorium. Problems concerning graduation were discussed by teachers and then by students with opinions to express. These ex-Tildenites to be decided by a show of hands on the difficult (really!) question of what robes to wear to graduation. It was blue and black, thank you.

  Three years ago graduation seemed a lifetime away. 1975?! Hell, I’ll be dead by then. But the time passed and after a couple of apparently dead summers and three seemingly boring winters, it’s all over. During that period, many things ended; Richard Nixon’s political career died of self-inflicted wounds, Reed and Dave DeBusschere retired, the Baltimore Colts collapsed, the energy shortage came and went (was it really here?), the Black Panthers disintegrated and everybody got bored with the space program.

  In that same span many things began: the Islanders were born, Abe Beame became mayor, the Boston Celtics were reborn, Jerry Ford went from frog to prince (remaining a frog at heart), the Miami Dolphins emerged as the Green Bay Packers of the ’70s, girls continued discarding outer garments to the fascination of the opposite sex (meaning me), the Vietnam War really ended and the painful reflection began. Muhammad Ali was champ again, while Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Lee, and Senator Sam Ervin all became superstars. The supermarket, the belly of America, was increasingly a very, very expensive place to visit.

  A lot stayed the same, like the solid boring New York Times, the rising interest in nostalgia, the New York Rangers and the Dallas Cowboys in roles as perennial bridesmaids, Stevie Wonder stayed Stevie Wonder, Walt Frazier remained “Clyde” and Al Green stuck to his sound and no one argued with the results.

  On the local front we lived through a passable production of Guys and Dolls, an almost great football team and then two lousy ones, two bad baseball teams and one almost good, three almost good basketball teams, a couple of small fires, more than one burglary, Mr. Morris and Mr. Goodman, a dead student union, an influx of West Indians and an outflux of white students. This, among other things, made up our collective history.

  Doesn’t seem right, does it? History is something written about people dead and gone, but we’re still alive and going.

  But, you’ll see, things never really become old; they remain in our minds, as exciting, depressing, frustrating or funny as they were when you first felt it. Tilden High will always be inside you no matter how hard you try to forget. These three years haven’t really ended and, perhaps, they never will.

  NYC LATE SEVENTIES

  It was a Wednesday morning in the late 1970s. I pushed myself out of
bed, hearing the sounds of Miles and Monk in my head. As I looked out of my window at the presunrise darkness and the forlorn winter trees, I conjured “So What” and Straight, No Chaser in my ears to motivate me on an unforgiving day. I’d signed onto a history of jazz class that, due to its prime place in the curriculum of the fine Catholic university I attended, was scheduled once a week at 8:00 A.M. Determined to one day be the world’s greatest music critic, I’d signed up enthusiastically, and then battled my common sense all semester to get to class on time.

  Other than attending the St. John’s jazz class this day would be typical of most others from the years 1977 to 1979, the years I traveled daily from East New York, Brooklyn, to Jamaica Estates, Queens, to Harlem, USA, to the heart of Times Square, and sites beyond. These were years when I spent a third of my day on an MTA bus or train, pursuing my dreams via the number 54 bus, the J train, the number 32 bus, the number 44 bus, the E and F trains, the D train, and the number 2 train home. I did homework on the buses. I wrote articles on the subway. I learned. I hustled. I made mistakes. I made friends. These were the years I studied the ways of magazines and record labels, gained role models and access to free tickets. I was an apprentice, and New York City was my mentor.

  I’d won a scholarship to attend Oberlin College in central Ohio, via a competition presided over by legendary congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. A much smaller scholarship was available to me more locally at St. John’s. My guidance counselor couldn’t believe I wouldn’t take the Oberlin offer and get the hell out of New York. But I wasn’t gonna leave my mother and sister alone in Brooklyn. Moreover, I wasn’t going to a school where the closest big city was Cleveland! Staying in New York to attend St. John’s was absolutely the best decision of my life. New York may have been on the ropes financially, and in disrepute nationally, but it gave me an education impossible anywhere else in the world.