Still Life in Harlem (20 page)

I knew she was not lumping me into a category with the white folks on that bus. Still, she had accused me many times before of playing at some game—or worse, of being like (in my estimation) Pig Foot Mary: here today, gone tomorrow, profit in my pocket.

I could have asked her what she would have me do instead, if I should turn my back forever on Harlem and not care at all, just go on about my business, but I already knew what she would say. I already knew what she wanted—without her ever having said it.

What she
had
said to me more than once was: “No. You can't turn your back. You need to be here. I don't know what the reason is, but there
is
a reason for you to be here. You're supposed to be doing what you do, here today, somewhere else tomorrow, feeling life, feeling this particular life—for now. Maybe you're here to be a witness, to record all this stuff for some reason. I don't know.”

She made me think suddenly of my father, who also, I have imagined lately, sees me, now that he takes my writing seriously, as the same sort of witness, someone who will tell what needs to be told, for nothing lives on merely because it once happened; lives vanish without a trace. It is the storytellers who remember and tell their stories, the writers who re-create them and keep them alive. And the story of Harlem, like the story of my father, like so many other stories, needs to live on so that Harlem's children and our children and our children's children will one day know just how much was endured, and how much was overcome for their sake. Thus they may one day draw strength from the strength of those who went before them, and pride from pride, courage from courage.

For this reason, if for no other, I felt I needed to be here.

“But remember,” Ann said, before she left me that day. “It's one thing to come here, another thing to really be here. You can't have the real thing just by living in Harlem a while and pretending to be poor.”

It is true that in wanting to have the true black experience I had allowed myself to become poor. In somehow buying into the myth that life in an inner-city ghetto is the only
real
black experience, that you have to be poor and desperate to be truly black, that you have to be on welfare to understand what goes on here in the black community, and in my feeble effort to really care, I have taken no jobs while I've lived in Harlem. In my effort to be like
them,
I earned no money. I spent every cent I had, then borrowed and spent some more. The pressure of living in debt increases for me daily. Even so, my experience can never be what
they
experience. I can always change the shoes I stand in, and instantly with them change my circumstance.

My father, in asking if I regretted the life I had so far lived, was wondering the same thing: What now? And what for?

For a long time after I moved into Harlem, I had no telephone. Again, it was an exercise in being poor. I don't know if Harlem is so different in this regard from the rest of Manhattan, from the rest of the country, but you need never travel far in search of a pay phone here. Very often the public phone on this corner or the next one, or the phone in front of the bodega up the street, inside the laundromat, or at the grocery store, very often these are not just instruments of convenience or of last resort. The pay phone here is primary. That's why there are so many of them. It seems cheaper to pay as you go, rather than shelling out a big sum once a month whether you use the phone one time or ten or two hundred. In New York City you pay for each call you make from your home. When you're very poor, the pay phone in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, probably seems a bargain.

I tried this for a long time in the beginning of my time in Harlem, having for my telephone only the public phones on the streets. It wasn't too bad at the start. At least I didn't have to run up and down the stairs each time I needed to use the thing. Whenever I had to make a call, I only had to look from my front-room window. I could see the phone down at the corner of 131st. I rarely had to wait in line. I could see if the phone was being used. I could not tell, however, if someone had ripped the handset away. It happened frequently. When that phone had been destroyed, there was always the grocery store half a block away on Amsterdam Avenue. It was a corner that was usually crowded. I often had to stand there and wait.

To what end all of this, I do not know. Trying to be like
them,
I suppose, trying still to know, still playing at being one thing or another until at last I tired of the inconvenience. It was the same as the living in Harlem: I could always leave, always change my circumstance. If I wanted a phone in my apartment, I could have one. Finally I did.

It was a combination of things that led me to get my own phone. I could never receive phone calls, for one thing. For another, the harshness of that first winter finally set in, and I decided I didn't very much like standing outside in the cold. If these reasons weren't enough, when night fell, of course, there were always the rats.

“Pop, Pop,” I yelled once into the phone as I talked to my father about one thing or another. “Guess what, man, guess what. I just saw a rat as big as a Buick. It wasn't running, it wasn't even scampering. Man, it was just out for a Sunday stroll to the garbage and then back home.”

“That's nothing,” he said. “Brother, until you've seen a rat stand up on its hind legs, salute hello, and call you by name, you ain't seen nothing.”

He didn't laugh. There was no giggle in his voice. He told it straight, as he did his best stories, telling me about a place he once shared with a family of rats.

“They used to call me Mr. Harris,” he said. “But after a while I was seeing them so regular they started to get kind of familiar. They started calling me Sam.”

Practically every time I used the phone after that, I spotted a rat or two or three. Nearby was the pickup point for someone's garbage. Just opposite, there was a chink in the stone wall. Rats went with ease and boldly from one to the other. I seemed to be the only person on the street even slightly unnerved. But the sight of rats will do that to me. Rats make me shudder.

I was walking home late one evening. If it was not quite the witching hour, it was certainly the hour of the rat. Convent Avenue that night was a rats' playground: rats on the trash cans, rats in the gutters, rats scurrying along the curbs.

At the corner of Convent and 128th, there is a vacant lot. A thousand rats must live there. The lot is overgrown with thick weeds that shuffle from time to time and rustle as if they are caught in a breeze. It is the movement of the rodents living there and stirring beneath the brush.

Out of the growth this night and onto the sidewalk strayed a baby rat. The adult rats in this neighborhood grow quickly into bold savages large enough to intimidate cats and small dogs—and me, of course. The baby rat was small enough that I continued on. I wanted to see where it would go, what it would do. I walked almost directly behind it. Directly behind me came the shrieking mother rat. She was large enough to scare me, and enraged that I seemed to be threatening the little one. She ran after me, nipped at my heels, and had me hopping and dancing a few seconds before I broke into a full sprint and ran to the end of the block. When I stopped to look back, the mother rat was still coming.

When I got clear, I stopped. I wanted to laugh. There was nothing so very funny about it.

“It's like I told you, man,” said Eliot Winston when I told him about it. “We just get shit on.”

On the day he said this, we were walking down Park Avenue, Eliot Winston and I, telling each other stories. I was telling him the rat story. He didn't find it amusing. He was telling me a horror story of his own, about his brother. He didn't find that story amusing either.

Suddenly he shouted.

“Just once, goddamn it! Just once I would like to know what it's like to be white in this country.”

It is one of his favorite things to say when he is especially frustrated, but I wondered this time if maybe he hadn't meant to say “rich.”

It was the morning rush hour and it was springtime, so the sky was still a little bit dark. The air was cool and crisp. Eliot took a deep breath. There were tears in his eyes, I thought from the bite of the cold air.

We had walked from 125th down into the nineties, and the landscape had changed completely. Tall buildings rose up all around us. Gone were the shabby storefronts with their barred windows, the four- and five-story tenement buildings, and the boarded-up shells in Harlem that nobody seems to own. Gone too were the vacant lots. The real estate in this neighborhood is too valuable to be wasted, to lie empty, or to be used for ugly housing projects. There are none here. Instead Park Avenue is lined on both sides with elegant high-rise apartment buildings that give way to the towering office buildings of Midtown. This is a part of town where beauty counts, where it matters how things look.

Eliot and I stopped there on the corner and looked in both directions, up Park Avenue toward Harlem, down Park Avenue toward the rest of the world. The railroad that runs aboveground in Harlem has gone underground by the time it reaches Ninetieth Street. The elevated tracks have gone from the center of the avenue. The rest of the way down to the forties, the center of the street is taken up by islands of grass and flowers. Park Avenue here has the look and feel of an urban paradise. It is a long way from Harlem.

Park Avenue that morning, as every morning, was crawling with cars that looked to me like some kind of molten lava spilled from the volcanic tops of these tall buildings, poured into the canyon floor below, and creeping slowly downtown. The lava glowed red taillights, white headlights, dimming as the day brightened, and yellow. Most of the cars were taxis. New York City, from this view in the middle of this street at this time of the morning, is a beautiful place. It is a different world from the world fifteen blocks away.

“Naw, man,” Eliot said. “If I'd have meant rich, I would have said rich. I said white, and what I meant was white. Money ain't got nothing to do with it.”

He had a look around and reassessed.

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe money's got a little something to do with it.”

I remembered then a story my brother Tommy had told me the previous summer.

My brother lives in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. He is one of the millions who ride the trains into the city each day, who come in to their high-priced jobs and then go out again, who encounter places like Harlem usually only in passing, if at all. But on a hot Saturday afternoon my brother got a big dose of Harlem out in the suburbs where he lives.

It was the first summer after I moved to Harlem. Tommy and I had met, as we often did, for lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his office in Midtown. I was telling one story about rats, and another story about a man I had once seen shot (in New York City, but not in Harlem). I was complaining about how long it had taken for the ambulance to come. The one cop who finally did arrive stood around doing nothing but waiting like the rest of us. It was a story that came up because of a car accident I had recently seen in Harlem, where it always seems to take forever for an ambulance or for the police to come when you need them.

My brother, who is never glum, all of a sudden looked very grim.

He had been playing baseball the Saturday before, he told me, in a park in the leafy suburbs near his house. When his game was finished, he sat to watch another group of amateurs play. My brother loves baseball, he loves to play it, he loves to watch it, it doesn't matter if it's professional baseball or amateur baseball, big kids playing or little kids. He just loves baseball.

Somewhere on the field a man walking his dog had a heart attack and collapsed. The man was white.

Knowing my brother as I think I do, I would say he was probably more concerned about getting the game under way again than about the man clutching his chest. My brother checked his watch, he said. Someone else went and called an ambulance.

There is a look Tommy shares with my father, whom he resembles much more than I do. It is a look that holds seriousness but is edged with humor. It is a look that speaks of the kind of laughter that keeps you from crying, that keeps you from going too crazy.

“Someone had to go and call the ambulance,” he said. “I mean, someone had to leave the field, find a phone, and make the call.”

He told the story to be funny. He tells all of his stories to be funny. This time, though, he wasn't laughing.

“The ambulance came in about two minutes,” he said. “Then another one came. And then two more. Finally a fire truck showed up.” He laughed a little bit at the fire truck and then was all seriousness again.

“Two fucking minutes,” he shouted. “Can you believe it?” He was shaking his head. “Man, it must be great to be white and living in America.”

Eliot Winston was saying the same thing. He wasn't laughing either.

“They get the roast chicken,” Eliot said. “We used to get some of the bones. Now we just get the chicken shit.”

A black woman came round the corner where we stood. She was holding hands with two white children, walking them to school.

Another woman came hurrying up the street. She was being dragged by the seven dogs she was paid to take each day for their morning walk.

“Money's got something to do with it,” Eliot said. “But it's more than that. Being white's got more to do with it, being white and not wanting anything to do with people who are black except to let them watch your children, clean your house, cook your dinner maybe, and walk your dog, that kind of shit. The whole problem is that white people are white, that's all it is. And white people think like white people. They just don't get it and, man! they just don't want to get it. And that's the real kick in the ass, let me tell you. It's a kick in the ass so hard you can't help but open your eyes wide. That's why in them old movies black people are always walking around with their eyes bugging out. It's 'cause they been kicked in the ass so hard and so often, their eyes just stayed like that.”