Category Archives: Court Street

GET THAT NIGGER!

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This is an excerpt from the memoir. In a day when too many are still addicted to violence, it seems real violence, like that in this chapter, ought to make your gut churn.

It is 1981 and I am walking down Court Street in Brooklyn with a friend of mine named Charlie. We hear angry voices behind us yelling and screaming. We turn and see a young black man running his heart out down the center of Court Street. He is coming towards us and maybe 20 angry young white male teenagers are chasing him. The young black man who looks to be in his twenties runs past us, his face lit wild with terror.

Voices scream, “Get that fucking nigger! Get that nigger!”

I tell Charlie get to the other side of the street, lets stay with this.

We are running on either side of the angry crowd of young whites now, watching what happens. Some are carrying sticks, pieces of two-by-four. One carries a piece of rebar about the length of a baseball bat. I am hoping the young black man gets away.

He doesn’t.

They catch him and the angry young white boy with the rebar slams it across the back of the young black man. He crumbles to the ground. He tries to get up but another angry young white breaks a piece of wood across his back. The young black man now wobbles upwards, but he is downed again when a bottle smashes across his head. There is blood everywhere now. He is on the ground screaming.

“Please God don’t kill me! Please God! Please God! I have a wife and children! Please God! Please God don’t let them kill me!”

I lock eyes with Charlie and motion for him to call the police. I move fast into the crowd, reaching the young black man through a barrage of kicks and punches. There is a pause in the violence, a sudden quiet, the angry mob not knowing what to make of me. I pull the young black man up into my arms and hold him against a parked car so it shields him on one side. I shield him on the other.

We are surrounded by anger and hatred, the white teens reach past me to punch him and I push him down out of their reach. They are the clean cut Italian boys from the neighborhood, I am the long haired one with an earring and beard. I know I am a look they are not used to, a look they are wary of. Ignorance is not bliss. Sometimes its an ally. One boy reaches in and I drive my hand into his throat, pushing him back into other boys and glare as viciously as I know how. I know they must think I am willing to kill one of them.

Again some surge forward and try to reach past me and punch him. When this happens, I push the young black man back into a crouch , keeping him out of reach and firing hard vicious words like bullets back into the the pack of angry white teens. A pack that is now nothing more than a single rage-filled being: seething, pulsing, breathing as one, dripping with hate.

I say, “The fuck you doing? You really want to kill him? You want to go to jail for him? You want to die tonight?”

One reaches in again and again I drive my hand into a throat. Our eyes meet. I know if this mob explodes into us I will have to damage or kill someone quickly. Suddenly a big Italian man joins me in protecting the young black man. He is older than all of us, huge and burly and powerful, no nonsense. His presence nearly stills the mob completely. Later I find out he is one of the powers in the neighborhood and deeply respected by all.

Police units arrive and take the bleeding terrified young man to the hospital. I thank the big Italian man. He says, “Hey, I hear him say he got a wife and kids. That’s all I gotta hear. The man’s got family.”

The police say they are taking the young black man to Long Island College Hospital. The police are from the 84th Precinct, the same precinct that will save my life three years later.
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MEMOIR EXCERPT: SECLUSION

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NOTE: This excerpt was written about a period of time in my life in 1985.
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At my kitchen table, drinking coffee, smoking a joint, get me out of here. I am done with the world outside my window. My switch is turned off. One second there is light, the next, all is dark. I am better in the dark now. I’d been the protector of friends, girlfriends, strangers too.

Once in Brooklyn me and a friend of mine see a young black man running down Court Street pursued by angry whites. Catching him they hit him with a pipe and beat him. He is on the ground screaming for his life. My friend and I race in, grab the battered young man, shielding him with our bodies against a car, raging back at the crowd pressing in, promising to damage someone bad if we have to go down too, the crowd pressing in, looking to get at him, terrified and bloodied. A man, older than me and my friend, a big Italian man, comes out of his store and joins us in our protection. Police arrive and take the bleeding terrified man to the hospital.

I am at my kitchen table drinking coffee, my switch is off. I can’t protect a man running down any street now. I can’t protect me anymore. I can’t leave my apartment. I can think of no reason to want to.

I am listening to Bruce Springsteen. I listen to nothing but Springsteen. There is something there, something safe, grounding, deeply familial. His songs bring me to memories of safe places and safe times; summers in Ocean Grove with my father’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa. I gobble up the ineffable magic and mystery of boardwalks and Asbury Park, beaches, and the forever ocean; they bring me to Rumson with Mommom and Poppop, my mother’s parents; they bring me to a time when the world was safe, when my father was still in it. Springsteen’s words are strong and real and emotionally courageous and, best of all, honest. Over and over again I listen to Independence Day and No Surrender, although I know I have surrendered I know my independence is gone, his songs remind me of what was, and help till the soil of what could be.

It is raining hard and there is thunder and I am, for the moment, happy. I cannot hear thunder without thinking of Beethoven. He has been in my heart since forever – a glorious presence of thunder and beauty, of sweetness and heart. The rain strikes the kitchen’s Plexiglas window and rivulets run down. The entire world I know is in this rain and, for the moment, I rejoice because I am part of this world again, for the moment.

There are times I catch myself believing the day might come when I will actually be happy, free of this apartment cell. A day when there will be a yard and flowers, roses even; and there will be wildflowers. I will make sure of that. There is something explosively free about wildflowers: Queen Anne’s lace, Chicory, Bull Thistles, Golden Rod, black-eyed Susan’s, Daisies, Asters, so glorious a tapestry. I will be able to sit and look and smile and swell with happiness. Still, I believe things like this are possible – maybe.

I remember when I was homeless wondering what business a boy like me had having dreams and hopes like this. I remember when my biggest dream was to be able to sleep in clean sheets with a real pillow and a clean pillowcase. And, if I was really lucky, there would be a refrigerator filled with food, eggs and orange juice and real butter and fancy stuff like mayonnaise and mustard and, of course, ketchup; and ice cream! I remember these dreams and hopes and I remember believing too that dreams like these don’t come true for homeless boys. They don’t come true for boys who failed their mothers by quitting dance. They don’t come true for a boy whose father’s died because the boy was such a terrible bastard. A day or two after my Dad died I asked my mother if the doctors did every thing they could to save him. She said, “Maybe if you hadn’t been such a bastard he would’ve had enough strength to live.” Her eyes were stones.

Maybe the wildflowers will come.

At my kitchen table, I remember hard cold nights. I am 17 walking down MacDonald Avenue in Brooklyn near Church Avenue. It is mid-winter and cold sears through my clothes and bites into my bones. It is past midnight and nowhere to go. I am tired. My feet hurt. I’ve been walking for hours. I am tired of trying to find a place to stay warm every night and, if I’m lucky, sleep. I stop walking and decide to give up. I stand there, the cold, free of my movement, bites down harder. I wonder what I give up means. It means kill myself or keep walking.

I keep walking.