City Kid

by Nelson George

  My sister had been HIV-positive for a little over a decade when we sat down in 2003 for our little summit conference. During those years, my view of Andrea had shifted almost 360 degrees. So much so that I’m prepared to say that my sister’s acquiring the HIV virus was one of the most positive, transformative experiences of her life, a statement I agree is as perverse as it is true.

  Back in ’92, when Andrea first told me she was HIV-positive, I was sure she’d be dead in months. She was skinny and drawn, and her usual feistiness seemed to be ebbing away. You could see her eyes and her freckles, but the rest of the face seemed to be shrinking into her skull. The previous half decade had not gone well for her. Ebony had been diagnosed with a brain tumor at age ten and had battled the fallout from that surgery all through her teen years, suffering complications that sapped her self-confidence and strength for a time. Thankfully she made a full recovery. Ma had been granted legal custody of Ebony and Leigh in a court process that was painful for all of us. Andrea had married a man named Les who had just gotten out of jail. All I could think of was how Ebony and Leigh would handle their mother’s imminent death. Just minutes after she’d told me she had the HIV virus, I was already thinking of my sister in the past tense.

  Andrea, however, wasn’t having it. She didn’t plan to die, and wouldn’t give up on life. In fact, for once she embraced life with both hands, focusing all her intelligence and street smarts on survival. Les had tested positive for the HIV virus in jail. When he told her, “I knew I had it,” she said. “There was no way I didn’t.” Andrea’s next move was to the library. “First I went to the local branches in Brooklyn, and then to the main library at the Grand Army Plaza. I wanted to know everything I could about the virus. You gotta remember, back then there wasn’t a lot of info out there. People were still dying.”

  Following her reading Andrea began seeing doctors in Brooklyn, and was disappointed to find, as she explained to my camera, “I often knew more about treatment and research into the virus than they did. No wonder black folk were dying.” Shrewdly she decided, “I needed to go where the information was. I started going to the gay men’s health center in the Village, getting their pamphlets and finding out what the gay men were doing. They were starting to live longer. Some of the gays called us ‘Breeders,’ as if women didn’t belong in these places, but I didn’t care. I needed to know everything they did.”

  Unknown to me, Andrea had volunteered for various experimental treatments. She’d decided it was better to be a guinea pig than to be a passive victim. One treatment nearly put her in the hospital, as the lining of her throat and stomach became inflamed every time she swallowed. She tossed those pills as soon as she got home, but still she wouldn’t stop trying.

  “I got to understand how the doses of antiviral meds were overprescribed for women,” she told me. “They’d have you taking five pills of a medication based on what they’d tested on gay men. But I’m a woman. My system was different. I could feel what worked and what was too much. So I began deciding for myself how many meds to take. You gotta remember, no one knew anything about how these treatments affected women. And I knew myself better than they knew me, no matter how many tests they gave me.”

  Andrea’s trademark willfulness wasn’t just aimed at self-preservation. Despite the fact that she and her husband were both HIV-positive, Andrea was determined to have another child. My mother and I both thought she was being irresponsible and quite crazy. The truth was, she knew the odds better than we did. “At that time there was a one in four chance the baby would be born with the virus. I was willing to take that chance.”

  So, with a clear conscience, my sister got pregnant, and delivered Jade in October 1996, a lively little girl who was born HIV-negative. Not only did Jade give Andrea another chance at motherhood, but the pregnancy pointed her life in a new direction. “At Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan I participated in a program for women pregnant with the virus. I got to know the doctors and counselors there. I’d always stayed on top of all the treatments. I was good at talking to the other women about how to handle themselves.” After Jade was born, Andrea began doing some consulting there.

  Getting the virus, educating herself, and the pregnancy and birth had by 2001 transformed my sister. Drugs were out. The romance of the streets was history. She began eating well, and put on weight for the first time in her life. She began favoring gospel over R&B. She and Les—who was himself now drug-free—settled in together, building the most stable romantic relationship Andrea’s ever had.

  Just as pleasing to witness was how conscientious a mother Andrea was to Jade. Perhaps making up for lost time, Andrea was involved in every aspect of Jade’s life, helping with homework and getting her into dancing classes, karate courses, the extracurricular works. For several years it’s been a spring ritual for me to join Jade and Andrea at the Univer-Soul Circus, and a winter one for us to see Jade in The Nutcracker. A few years back I went to a day care center to attend Jade’s graduation. To my surprise, and to that of Andrea as well, the teaching staff gave my sister an award for her contributions to the PTA. I was filled with pride, truly moved by how the teachers spoke about her.

  It was a feeling that I’d have often in the weeks after our interview, as I followed her to various HIV support group meetings. After her time at Bellevue, Andrea moved on to other HIV outreach groups, including a Brooklyn-based organization where she promoted safe sex, gave out condoms, and cleared up misconceptions about how HIV is caught (and hepatitis C and D too!). To see her make her presentations and command her audiences of black and Latino women and men is to see echoes of my mother as a schoolteacher. Andrea, much like my mother, was a natural leader, whom people easily responded to. It was eerie that after all those years, and all that conflict, Ma and Andrea had ended up sharing something as important as the same blood—a gift of advocacy and instruction.

  I’d sold a pitch to HBO about a doing a film about contemporary race relations. Through the process of developing that idea (which in 2003 turned into the fine Jim McKay-directed Everyday People), I got to know the folks at HBO Films, specifically president Colin Calender and a vice president, Sam Martin, one of the few black studio executives in LA who actually gets to make movies. It took years to get Everyday People made, but the struggle built a bond of trust between myself and the executives there.

  So when I pitched them the idea of doing an HIV film based on my sister’s journey, they let me pursue it. As I’d learned in my previous film experiences, getting a movie made is like pushing a boulder up a mountain wearing roller skates. One step up can turn into three steps back in one phone call. The script, which I called Life Support, was spiritually and personally the right thing to do, so I laced up my skates and kept pushing that boulder.

  At a certain point I, and HBO, felt we had a good script, but I didn’t have a movie until Queen Latifah agreed to star in it. There were very few actresses I could see embodying Andrea’s commitment, cunning, and contradictions. I needed someone who could realistically be “street,” yet wasn’t the over-the-top caricature Hollywood (and too many black actresses) substituted for humanity. Before Latifah had become a product spokesperson and a red carpet presence, Dana Owens had been a New York-area gal who rocked the microphone with feminist gusto.

  Plus, we’d actually worked together before. Back in ’93 I had written and codirected an antiviolence public service announcement that she appeared in. It was my first time directing, but she’d already been building her chops as an actress with some small film roles and her part on the sitcom Living Single. A reason raptors (rapper actors) are so popular is that their MC personas are usually artistic creations as well designed as a movie character. That voice that pops out of your iPod is a heightened, sometimes cartoonish version of who they truly are. It was clear to me back then that Queen Latifah/Dana Owens was well in control of that duality.

  Sending the script to her agents felt like running into a brownstone’s stone walls. Thankfully, du
ring my years at Billboard, I’d had contact with Latifah’s manager, Shakim Compare, a shrewd brother who’d grown his business alongside Latifah’s career. He read the script, passed it to her, and, after some anxious weeks of waiting, set up a meeting with her at a San Fernando Valley recording studio.

  My producer, Shelby Stone, and I cooled our heels in the studio’s rec room, munching on pretzels, watching an NBA game, and knocking around balls on the pool table. All the while I’m in my head practicing the same speech I’d been rehearsing on the plane ride cross-country. It was passionate and intense, and proved totally unnecessary. Soon as we sat down at a patio table Dana said, “I know this woman,” and that she wanted to play Ana Willis, the character based on Andrea. I was so intent on my little rap that her words, at first, flew right past me.

  Not long after committing, Dana and my sister began talking on the phone, finding kinship in their shared astrology sign (Pisces), knowledge of Brooklyn streets, and sharp senses of humor. I don’t know everything Andrea told Dana. The details didn’t matter to me. What was crucial was that my leading lady and my sister came to an understanding of the character’s motivations. Those talks gave Dana the tools she needed to build Ana Willis’s world.

  Andrea, along with Jade and her husband, Les, were regular visitors to the set. On the days she didn’t stop by, Dana often asked about her. For Andrea, having an artist of Queen Latifah’s stature play some version of her smoothed over any lingering nervousness about the project. For Dana, having Andrea around gave her a tangible touchstone to build the character upon. The genius thing was that Dana never imitated Andrea. In fact, she tapped into her own history in Brooklyn (where she’d hung out quite a bit as a teenager), and in several improv scenes, crafted dialogue that made Ana Willis different from both herself and Andrea yet still grounded in the film’s rough reality. Her Screen Actors Guild, NAACP Image Award, and Golden Globe wins are all testament to Dana’s magnificent performance.

  My mother’s voice would also be represented in the film. Anna Deavere Smith, who played my mother and is famous for her ability to imitate accents in her marvelous one-woman shows, interviewed Arizona extensively. One of the best-liked scenes in Life Support features Anna’s character scolding her granddaughter, played by Rachel Nicks. It works powerfully, because much of that dialogue came right from my mother’s mouth. There’s nothing like the voice of a mother telling a child to do right to resonate with audiences.

  Casting Queen Latifah was the easiest aspect of preproduction. Making Queen Latifah’s schedule work was the hard part, since she had rehearsals for the movie of Hairspray looming, an R&B vocal tour, and sundry personal appearances already on her calendar. Because our window of opportunity with her was small, we only had a twenty-day shooting schedule, plus five weeks of prep. So there was no room for error on my part. I had to be prepared, and I had to be decisive. I also had to make sure I hired reliable department heads. Being at the center of all those decisions was new to me, and often quite challenging. Plus, I had to cast the rest of the movie at the same time, including actors to play fictional versions of my mother, my nieces, and my brother-in-law. Amazingly, it all came together, and in fact, the actual shooting was a blessed experience. For example, our able line producer, Mark Baker, got Life Support offices at Steiner Studios, a recently opened production facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard not far from Fort Greene. That meant that throughout preproduction, and even on a couple of shoot days, I could walk to and from work, giving me essential moments of calm during very densely packed days.

  As I’ve observed throughout this book, my hometown has always nurtured me, giving me an endless array of things to write about. With this film, it was my turn to give something back and capture Brooklyn’s dingy majesty. The borough was changing seemingly every day as we were shooting. The gentrification that began in Park Slope and Cobble Hill had spread to my ’hood Fort Greene, as well as to Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights. The ripple effect of monied, mostly white refugees, along with the impending construction of a score of high-rises in downtown Brooklyn, was raising rents, pushing blue-collar families out, and, in many ways, was changing the feel of large areas of the once hardscrabble borough into a place safe for lattes.

  I wanted to capture some of the character I grew up with and found some unlikely touchstones. In the kitchens and dining areas of Jewish homes in Parkside, Jamaican homes in Crown Heights, and African American residences in Prospect Heights we found a remarkable sameness: big wooden breakfronts, ornate and unused display dishes, lace tablecloths, fruit-filled glass bowls, and plastic furniture covering as far as the eye could see. Some particular combination of economics and aesthetics had rendered hundreds, if not thousands, of Brooklyn homes with the same furniture and attitude. While my characters were black, they were also the working poor, just like members of the borough’s other long-standing tribes, so the design of the kitchens and dining areas in Life Support reflected that particular unity of lifestyle.

  My favorite exterior symbol of Brooklyn’s ugly beauty was Atlantic Avenue, one of the borough’s major thoroughfares, which runs from downtown all the way into Queens. Atlantic isn’t as internationally known as Flatbush Avenue or as architecturally rich as Eastern Parkway, but I was born at a hospital on it in 1957, and for years, as I took taxis out to JFK airport, I’d seen corners and structures on Atlantic that would look great on film.

  The corner of Nostrand and Atlantic in Bed-Stuy became a key location for Life Support. We shot outside of the Yemen Grocery Store there, as well as at a Chinese take-out spot down toward Fulton Street, and then around the corner on Atlantic at the fancifully named (and foul-smelling) Hatlantic Recording Studio. The most poetic shot in the film, beautifully framed by my director of photography, Uta Bresivitz, was a long shot of Ana Willis dragging her ever-present wheelie cart underneath the tattered tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, not far from the Atlantic Avenue hospital where I was born.

  Equally pleasing was to find that Birdel’s, the record shop I used to visit with my mother in the sixties, and that I later traveled to as a reporter to document the “Rapper’s Delight” phenomenon in ’79, was still in business; it can be seen in deep background in several Nostrand Avenue shots. Joe Long, now in his seventies, was still selling music—CDs, vinyl, even eight-tracks—which was a wonderful connection of my past to my present.

  I wasn’t always aware of how connected I was to some of our locations. We were using the exterior of a technical high school a few blocks from Atlantic when Andrea walked up and reminded me that back in the seventies this institution was called Alexander Hamilton High School and we’d attended Model Cities classes there. This same building was the scene of my education in newspaper nuance almost forty summers earlier.

  The most important Atlantic location was a private school located next to the elevated section of the avenue in East New York. Turned out the school was run by the ex-husband of a woman who had worked with my mother in Brooklyn schools for decades. Soon as I heard that I really wanted to shoot there. But the deal was sealed when I went up on the roof. From up there you could see the Tilden projects in the distance, a tall cluster of sixteen-story buildings where I’d lived my childhood.

  In the last scene of Life Support, the film’s emotional climax, where red balloons are released in honor of friends who’ve died of AIDS, the Tilden projects and all of Brownsville is visible. It was a long, hot, exhausting day shooting on that roof in late June 2006. But I did it joyfully. It felt like my life and work had, at least for those hours, come full circle, that those two threads of my life had been weaved into one thick tapestry.

  The last thread was music. Maxwell’s live version of “This Woman’s Work” had haunted me since I first heard it on MTV Unplugged. Kate Bush’s lyrics and Maxwell’s spellbinding vocal connoted all the feelings of love and vulnerability associated with childbirth and parenthood. Even from the script stage of Life Support I knew this song was the perfect accompaniment
for the rooftop scene.

  I’d known Maxwell since before his first album was released. He’d contributed a sexy, wordless vocal to the music that supported my first serious short film, To Be a Black Man, a decade before. Making Maxwell’s participation even sweeter was that the suave crooner was from East New York himself—another Brooklyn homeboy in thrall to music and the search for transcendence. Stuart Mathew-man, the bandleader for Sade and someone I first met back in ’85, not only scored Life Support but had worked with Maxwell on Black Man too. The circle was complete.

  Just as the decision to write Life Support reclaimed my sister for me, the process of directing the film reconnected me to the streets and thoroughfares that had molded me. It was that connection that allowed me to direct the actors, edit the film, and choose the music with great clarity. Life Support isn’t a true story. I took liberties with the characters, situations, and conflicts within my family to create a workable drama. All the lessons I’d learned in my writing career came to fruition on the film. And the fact that I wasn’t a character in the story had a profound effect on me, liberating me from any self-consciousness about the material and allowing me to focus on making a film about black women, a group as consistently unrepresented and abused by filmmakers (black as well as white) as any in cinematic history.

  In terms of our real life story, I wish I could report that all’s well that ends well, but, after all, we’re talking about family. The tensions between my mother and sister continue, and I imagine they will linger until death do them part. Ma taking custody of Ebony and Leigh was a breach of the mother-daughter bond that may never be closed. Andrea still resents it; Ma still resents having to do it. It is the manifestation of a war of wills that’s not gonna end just because I made a movie about them. Movies are finite; life flows on.