The lineage of Brooklyn hip-hop Tony and I had grown up listening to in our Ohio bedrooms had prepared me, in some small degree, to expect a rough-and-tumble “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” New York. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, many of the genre’s most salient and outlandish voices came from the streets we suddenly found ourselves living among; beyond Jay-Z, Mos Def and Lil’ Kim, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Foxy Brown are all from Bed-Stuy, where we unwittingly were. Carter’s vision of the space didn’t seem, at first glance, to leave much room for ambiguity. “Cough up a lung / where I’m from / Marcy son / ain’t nothing nice.” But ambiguity was everywhere in the Bed-Stuy of my youth.
My mother had taught me to keep aware of my surroundings, to not trust strangers, to run from trouble, to speak the king’s English to police officers, to feel comfortable saying “nigger” in the company of black folks who carried and transcended the past with me, and, perhaps most important, to distinguish between a Negro who seemed a threat and one who didn’t, which is largely the same as making that distinction with everyone else on God’s green earth. This is a skill that, however commonsensical, is more difficult than it should be for most of our country’s law enforcement apparatus, as illustrated by one risible spectacle after another of black men being jailed or beaten or killed under the flimsiest of pretexts by their sworn public servants on camera, but back then streaming video hadn’t really gone viral and Twitter wouldn’t exist for a few years to come; white folks mostly just didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Certainly this was the case for my roommate, who was likely encountering his first majority-black space, a place of great mystery and dread, a place that listening to all the soul records in the world couldn’t teach him to navigate comfortably at first. In some recess of his mind, I reckon, my roommate couldn’t stomach telling his parents he lived in Bed-Stuy in the first place. He imagined his blonde, Park Slope–dwelling girlfriend, who did social work for brown people all day, not being particularly fond of walking the streets of his imagined Bed-Stuy for a late-night tryst, one I’d inevitably hear through the tiny window that linked our rooms in uncomfortable intimacy, even if it was ten feet off the ground.
Rarely venturing too far east down DeKalb Avenue from a place we didn’t live, Clinton Hill, into a place one didn’t want to go that we actually did live in, Bedford-Stuyvesant, was just as easy. This is how we both behaved, the treading lightly, the assumption of menace, the casual avoidance of corridors where one felt unwelcome at worst and uneasy at best. Is this the general know-nothingism that guilt-free cultural colonialism requires, or the savvy self-preserving instincts of a sophisticated urbanite in a “transitional” neighborhood? While no longer as dangerous as it was during Carter’s coming of age, the streets I inhabited were not without reminders of the past.
The night after I broke my assailant’s arm with the door leading into my building, I watched as armed black patriots climbed onto their Bushwick roof and started firing assault weapons in the air as the July 4 fireworks commenced. A pair of white jeans I wore that day were ruined when I dived for cover into a murky puddle one rooftop away. That wasn’t as demeaning as getting rear-ended and being called a nigger for my trouble by some drunk Caucasian lady as I drove Ray and another friend back to the subway. Getting into my car later in the summer, I watched a homeless man get savagely beaten by a group of young men in Alphabet City and, for fear of my safety, declined to help him, feeling no small amount of shame in the aftermath. I drove back around the block to see if he was still there and in need of assistance, but he had gone, or had been taken, somewhere else entirely.
We lived in a black Bed-Stuy that, while more peaceful than in the crack era and the years that followed, was still less secure than the black Bed-Stuy of the postwar era, one that oddly offered less opportunity for someone like Tony, a musical savant with a real passion for a variety of forms. Although you wouldn’t know it from Carter’s work, hip-hop wasn’t the first musical genre that had Bed-Stuy gangsters and hustlers out starting musical acts. “The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood is an under-documented anomaly in the history of jazz music,” Vincent Ramal Gardner writes in his survey of Brooklyn’s jazz scene past and present, “We Were Surrounded by Giants.” “It comprises an area of just over 31/2 square miles, but the amount of concentrated jazz activity within its borders throughout the years is nothing short of extraordinary.” In a short time after the form’s mass popularization, bars and nightclubs that catered to gangsters and good-time girls were as likely to have jazz as the more genteel social clubs and ballrooms patronized by college-educated, well-to-do blacks occupying the gorgeous Italianate town houses north of the Fulton Street strip.
Tony, a gifted bassist with a great love of and appreciation for jazz, was suspicious of hip-hop as a form of musical artistry. “It’s really simple music, man, not that sophisticated at all,” Tony would tell me concerning the difficulty of constructing the average hip-hop track, earnest music student that he was. As I would look at him blankly, he’d add a “just saying,” an apology of sorts from the part of him that was squarely a white liberal.
Tony surely would have much preferred the Bed-Stuy of Gardner’s research to the one we were living in then. It was a time when “even the neighborhood gangs had jazz bands.” The previous order of black music had arisen out of a Bedford-Stuyvesant milieu equally as segregated, and as quick to change, as that in which Shawn Carter came of age. Bed-Stuy during the Depression, at the dawn of jazz’s ascendancy to the height of American popular culture, was a neighborhood in the midst of transformation yet again.
The Great Migration wave of southern blacks, seeking opportunity and the rule of law, fled north into its Victorian and Italianate brownstones not knowing the extent to which the forces of polite white society would go to keep them from earning their share of the American plunder. Despite this, idylls of black self-determination were carved out in cities across the North and Midwest. Bed-Stuy was, in many ways, among the most significant of them.
Bedford-Stuyvesant’s black character benefited from the overcrowding of Harlem as well as the Great Migration; as the completion of the A train subway line, which connected Harlem to Bed-Stuy, eased travel between the city’s two most significant African-American outposts, Bed-Stuy’s black population swelled. It became a welcoming place for many journeying south from Harlem or north from Dixie, a place where black lives could flourish amid the economic boundaries that fenced its prospects inward. Large row houses and brownstones were subdivided for renters, often by blockbusting landlords who exploited the fact that many of the transplants couldn’t acquire Federal Housing Administration–backed housing loans in non-redlined, whites-only neighborhoods. In Harlem, a significant amount of the housing stock during the twentieth century’s first half had passed into black ownership, but Bedford-Stuyvesant’s legacy of black home ownership dated to the 1830s.
A century ago, the Weeksville settlement first brought black home ownership and self-determination to Brooklyn. The community of Weeksville, still one of four distinct segments of Bedford-Stuyvesant, was at its height in the 1860s, home to about seven hundred families. They collectively erected enduring and sophisticated institutions, forming schools, a hospital, an orphanage, and several old folks’ homes. The Weeksville Unknowns were among the country’s earliest black baseball teams (Weeksville’s women founded their own team in the 1880s), while the community was also home to one of the country’s first black newspapers, The Freedman’s Torchlight. Several churches, such as Berean Baptist, St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal, and Bethel A.M.E., were founded during Weeksville’s heyday, places of worship that exist to this day.
The speculators who sought to create an African-American refuge there in the 1830s had the same goals as the blacks who traveled there to escape southern tyranny in the 1930s. They were, consciously and ambitiously, attempting to create a place that was safe and welcoming for people like themselves, marketing the settlement to potential black home owners all over the country. Through landownership, black men, both those born free and those who had to seize their freedom from others, hoped to gain a foothold on the engine of American prosperity. For $250, a black man could own a piece of land in a place like Weeksville and be enfranchised; for the southern black man of a century later, the hope of securing factory jobs and the ability to avoid discriminatory poll taxes or literacy tests in order to vote were equally alluring motivators. This hope, of a place where they wouldn’t have to explain themselves or look over their shoulders or act with cowed deference, united the small coterie of cosmopolitan blacks from across the African diaspora who found themselves drawn to the rural hills and valleys of central Kings County since before the Civil War. Free or slave, northern or southern, American or not, Bed-Stuy has long been a place where blacks, across lines of class and region, could aspire to the same dream of safety and opportunity.
And, even if it weren’t, housing options were limited. The FHA mandated that developers receiving its financial support must enact restrictive covenants in the deeds signed by home owners, which frequently prohibited the sale of property to Negroes. According to an Economic Policy Institute study of the three hundred largest private subdivisions built in Queens, Long Island’s Nassau County, and the suburbs of Westchester from the height of the Depression until just after the end of World War II, “83 percent had racially restrictive deeds.” Preambles like “whereas the Federal Housing Administration requires that the existing mortgages on the said premises be subject and subordinated to the said [racial] restrictions . . . [except for] domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant . . .” were common. Because of this, Bed-Stuy was, and still is, a place of remarkable class dexterity within the black community. Due to the inability of blacks, during those immediate postwar years, to self-segregate along the lines of class, the young Lena Horne, a scion of the upper middle class who grew up on Macon Street in the heart of the neighborhood, got her start in many of the same clubs as her contemporary Billie Holiday, the daughter of a prostitute who had been imprisoned for sex work by the time she turned fourteen. Being black, even as high yellow as Lena, was a class unto itself.
Despite all this discrimination, despite the routine experience of having had the rights of citizenry tarnished and the most humble decencies denied being near universal, a pervasive nihilistic hopelessness of the type that colors the accounts of urban Negro life in Carter’s generation of mass incarceration and deindustrialization did not take hold. The people who were moving to Bed-Stuy were hopeful, bent on improving their lot. The inevitable consequences of widespread disenfranchisement, nonexistent employment opportunities, cheap drugs, and a surplus of guns were in an unimaginable near future. Deadly street violence would seem as foreign to the members of the more than 115 social clubs that existed in Bed-Stuy from the 1930s to the 1960s as to freckled girls born to Exeter Academy and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Competing over who could put together the most impressive big band for a dance until the wee hours, in one of the neighborhood’s many ornate theaters or ballrooms, wasn’t routinely lethal.
Bed-Stuy’s youth culture in this era was, as in Carter’s time, centered on music. Dance-oriented big bands were crucial to the fabric of the community, performing for “social clubs,” organizations of young blacks that existed primarily, despite the roots many of the groups had in the influential black churches, to throw raucous dance parties. Venues such as Fulton Street’s Brooklyn Palace and Atlantic Avenue’s Bedford Ballroom held more than 2,500 people for dances, while others such as the Sonia Ballroom, which once took up the entire block of Bedford Avenue between Madison and Putnam, housed 1,500 revelers at a time and was thought of as intimate. Black fraternal orders, such as the police union the Centurions, would meet there, while the Order of the Elks had their own local lodge, the Elks Ballroom. When the Elks first began renting it out for public use in 1932, it was the largest public hall owned by Brooklyn Negroes.
Legends of the big band and swing format, from Count Basie to Duke Ellington, performed regularly at social-club-sponsored dances. Charlie Parker, the great pioneer of bebop, had early bands made up largely of central Brooklynites, either recent transplants like Miles Davis or natives such as Max Roach. Before becoming acknowledged masters of the form, key figures such as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, and Charles Mingus cut their teeth at those Bed-Stuy ballroom dances in the years before bebop pushed aside swing and ushered in a revolution in the development of American music.
This pervasive scene, one that supported at least sixty-five jazz venues in the neighborhood roughly from 1930 to 1970, grew as Bed-Stuy became a predominantly African-American neighborhood. Bars like Farmer John, at Fulton Street and Bedford Avenue, or dedicated jazz clubs such as the Putnam Central at Putnam and Classon Avenues, employed schools of session musicians and sidemen, promoters and barkeeps, creating a dynamic economy around the performance and recording of jazz music in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The latter club was the headquarters of Debut Records, an independent label started by Mingus and Roach in 1952 that was among many that shot up in the neighborhood during the era. Most crucially, perhaps, the Bed-Stuy clubs allowed some of the great jazz musicians, from Davis to Monk to Blakey, a place to work in an era when a musician’s cabaret card, a license to work in a New York City establishment that served alcohol, from Prohibition until 1967, could be taken at the slightest pretense by the police, as was the case with each of them.
Jazz created a community of venues and performers in Bed-Stuy, and an economy all its own; live hip-hop performance and studio recording, on a granular level, hasn’t had nearly as much significance in the infrastructural life of the place, on the topography or the economy of Bed-Stuy, in the form’s thirty-five-year history. By the time hip-hop began to cross over into the pop-cultural mainstream in the 1980s, much of urban black America had become a place with much larger concentrations of intense poverty, where senseless spasms of violence carried on the winds of desperation were commonplace. Regardless of how many rappers came from those streets, aboveboard venues to showcase the emerging form they helped innovate didn’t employ nearly the amount of people as jazz clubs once had—large or moderate-sized bands of instrumentalists are unnecessary in hip-hop.
Tony, a well-schooled, out-of-work Bed-Stuy transplant with dreams of playing in professional bands, had picked the wrong era to be alive. In our era, my jazz-loving roommate was out of luck. Bed-Stuy was no longer a neighborhood where you could make a living as a sideman with a few weekly residencies. Unless, of course, you didn’t have to earn money to survive.
It was a litany of misfortune from the start. Early in the summer Tony and I moved in together, in 2006, my car was struck by a Hasidic school bus as it approached the Williamsburg Bridge on Delancey Street. As I was illegally talking to my Serbian club promoter ex-roommate on my cell phone, my car was sideswiped by the bus, knocking the driver’s side mirror. Flushed with fear and rage, I followed the bus as it fled the scene, the remnants of the side mirror dangling in the scalding summer wind, all the way across the bridge. Tailgating the bus aggressively and honking my horn as if my life depended on it, I convinced the driver to pull over in Jewish Williamsburg. It was as I was boarding the bus that I first noticed the Yiddish characters on its side; the curly-haired driver, his brown eyes betraying no emotion as a vast sea of children sat eerily silent in their uniforms of faith and watched on, claimed he hadn’t hit me. Berating him wasn’t making me feel any better; he seemed impervious to anything I might say, such as “Wait here, I’m calling the cops.” As soon as I stepped off the bus, he drove away. I tried to scribble down the license plate, but couldn’t find a pen in time. Then the rain started and the cops, predictably, never came.
“You were middle class in college,” my godmother said to me after I graduated, “but now you enter the world a poor Negro for the first time in your life.” Maybe so; my income and zip code certainly indicated such, even if the amount of West Elm furniture in my apartment suggested my proximity to affluence and ease. In such a place it was easy to look out at “Clinton Hill” from our seventh-floor window and dream. I smelled opportunities in those Brooklyn nights and wanted to believe that they would open themselves effortlessly, that I wouldn’t have to struggle too much, that grinding class and status anxieties, ones I could hardly fathom at the time, would not have to define my way of encountering the world. We seemed to be living through a hinge point in human history, and all I had to prepare myself for it was a loosely evangelical upbringing, a bachelor’s degree in film and film history, and a desire to make movies, but I believed in my own pluck. Unfortunately, facts kept coming to my attention that complicated this sanguine vision of the future.
I had never watched it while in film school, but shortly after I graduated, some friends from Ohio introduced me to HBO’s Entourage, an infantilizing wet dream of film industry life if there ever was one. Consuming episodes from the show’s first few seasons in the weeks before Tony and I moved to Bed-Stuy, I could pretend that that’s what making a little indie movie in Queens, or whatever outer borough I lived in, would lead to: easy girls and drugs, opportunities that proved immune to my own ineptitude. Reality ensued after landing in “Clinton Hill,” however. Being too broke to make a little indie movie in Queens, I taught film history and the rudiments of production to preteens at an arts summer camp on Long Island instead.
This involved driving an ailing mid-’90s Ford sedan from my “Clinton Hill” loft—a seventy-two-mile round trip on the Long Island Expressway in rush-hour traffic—to teach suburban kids about movies. It paid $6,000 for six weeks of work, enough to pay my $800-a-month share of our $2,400-a-month rent for the time being. It was fun showing the children movies they had no business viewing; we watched parts of Antonioni’s The Passenger and Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and all of Kevin Smith’s Clerks II. In a way, even while staying up at night wondering which of these rich grade schoolers would one day use their parents’ dime to make a mediocre but celebrated first indie feature in Queens, it was worth it. But the fact was that none of it, the indie film world I wanted to enter, the apartment in which I was living, the relationships with roommates and lovers, was sustainable. What would I do after the arts camp ended? The dread it embedded within my daily existence began to get tied up in my visions of Tony that “first” summer, lying about on the white leather love seat my mother had given us upon moving in, drinking Sapporos and watching my DVDs ad infinitum.
My great-aunt and good friend Catherine Daniels passed away that July, a few weeks after I was attacked. Having received the news from my father while on the Long Island Expressway, I had to pull over to sob. The following week I journeyed to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to see her buried at a country cemetery on an unbearably hot day in mid-July. She was my maternal grandmother’s best friend and had raised me every bit as much as my mother and father had. I remember crying much of the day, listening to Animal Collective’s “The Softest Voice” for hours straight as the jet pushed me, if not through my unshakable grief and shame, the 630 miles southwest and back again in one day and evening. I had not seen her, due to a family dispute involving my mother, in many years and now I never would again.
When I returned late that night, Tony was fucking his girlfriend, a blonde from another variant of Cincinnati privilege, on the Danish teak couch that he treated like an actual antique instead of a simulacrum of one. Tony knew not of Catherine’s death because of our increasingly uneasy communication. I hadn’t told him that I was leaving town and returning home to go to her funeral, and he hadn’t asked what was wrong as I sulked around in the days before; we saw and spoke so little to each other, only two months into our new living arrangement, that it hadn’t occurred to him I’d left when I returned that night. Even though she cooked steaks and pork chops and apple pie for him on many an afternoon of our youth, even though she concealed our mutual drug use in my mother’s house, nefarious activity that would have earned him great censure, I wasn’t surprised that, when I finally unveiled her passing, he couldn’t muster anything resembling common sorrow.
I began to notice in our new home together, for the first time, the sinews of assumed privilege that he would never be able to let go, and that I’d never, regardless of my proximity, be able to make my own. The way he didn’t remove his stringy hair from the shower drain or clean his dishes after he dirtied them, leaving them in the sink, were signs of someone who had always had someone to clean up after him. Something about having to work every day while watching him comfortably lounge around our place smashed the solidarity we had cultivated over many years and despite several setbacks. There was no way to talk about it comfortably without bringing up his inherited advantages, something neither of us wanted to dwell on. So we didn’t.
Despite our discord, as the summer wore on, I took to Taaffe Place, whether it was in Clinton Hill or Bed-Stuy. One could step into Sputnik, the Leninist-themed hip-hop bar across the street from my building, which occasionally hosted some of the late greats from a previous era of central Brooklyn rap culture (DJ Premier, M-1, et cetera), and think that some multiracial, class-diverse utopia had found its way to this tucked-away part of the borough. Those were months, which soon turned into years, of magical thinking.
All I wanted to do was make features. History had taught me, already, at a tender age, to expect less because of my color. Our careers, according to the black cinema texts, the essay collections and memoirs I discovered, were shorter, more fragile, less likely to speak to the thoughtfully lived experiences of our people—that’s just how the industry worked. Its power centers, like most other centers of authority and wealth in this country, were in white hands who saw little money in supporting the work of a Haile Gerima or a Julie Dash, a Jamaa Fanaka or Kathleen Collins, a William Greaves or a Charles Burnett. When these filmmakers were in their prime, the most significant institutions of American cinema weren’t much interested in helping their work get made. Why would I, a neophyte who had done nothing to suggest I could enter such hallowed company, be any different?
Sure, from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee, many a Negro had made multiple features, but Lee was the only one ever to make them in the studio system, on his own terms, in a personal way that reached significant audiences. African-American cinema has never fostered careers with the wide-ranging and prolific nature of African-American literature. Show me black film directors who have had the opportunity to consistently make feature films of the reach and scope one can find in the myriad novels of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, James Baldwin and Alice Walker, Colson Whitehead and John Edgar Wideman. Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust was the first movie by a black woman ever released in theaters, years after Butler, Walker, and Morrison had delivered multiple books, including their masterpieces, to big audiences and great acclaim. This was simply, then and now, no country for black filmmakers.
Movies cost, generally, a lot more than I had stowed away. In my spare time, I finished a short film that I had shot in Manhattan the previous winter as my BFA thesis. I spent many a night at the Sandbox, a long-defunct, Gramercy-based, hip-hop-centered streaming video company. In the days before YouTube was sold to Google and the dreams of the Sandbox’s venture-capital financiers were no more, I loitered around the postproduction rooms editing a vampire film called Evangeleo into the wee hours, clandestinely using Final Cut Pro stations that were normally reserved for rap videos. It was a postproduction space vastly superior to the first-generation MacBook in my bedroom, and I used the Sandbox’s facilities for all they were worth, especially since all I seemingly had to do in order to work there was smoke out the right person every once in a while. Short films never pay any money, and no one acquires them generally; for most upstarts fresh out of film school these works only aspired to calling-card status, an attention getter that hopefully would screen at a significant film festival, one that would help make your name in the industry if it was seen by the right gatekeepers, at the right time.
I needed a new job at summer’s end if I was going to afford the $800 a month, and sniffing around on the Internet in the waning days of August, just as my summer camp teaching checks were petering out, I found a job as an assistant at the office of a well-respected independent film production company. They had produced movies I revered, and, hungry for the opportunity to be in the proximity of people reputed to have made actually artful movies, I tracked down their phone number when the website only provided e-mail addresses. I called and was granted an in-person interview. When I visited, climbing a long, dim stairwell to the second story on Worth Street in Tribeca, the once-dilapidated Lower Manhattan neighborhood that had grown chic with development, I found a disheveled office and slender black woman with tight braids who wore a red dress and specs. This was KiKi, the current assistant to the couple who owned the company. KiKi seemed cheerfully disgruntled from the moment I met her. She quit within weeks of hiring me; and like that I was the office manager.
The Triangle Below Canal (Street) had been a run-down Manhattan backwater in the Ed Koch years when Ghostbusters was filmed there, but by the time I began working there it was a hub for the city’s financial and artistic elite, its industrial space long demolished or converted into handsome modern housing, its streets lined with restaurants that attracted celebrities and bankers. Many of the most significant production companies and distributors were based in the area, from Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax and Mark Cuban’s HDNet Films to Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Institute; De Niro had long been a major investor in and ambassador for the neighborhood, starting the Tribeca Film Festival in the wake of 9/11.
I was told to make myself quietly indispensable at my sub-minimum-wage “office manager” job that fall, which mostly required that I field pushy phone calls from unpaid vendors, manage the ego of a former Wall Street character from Great Neck who was paying the company’s overhead in exchange for developing his rock-and-roll movie that no one thought was good, and reading scripts for other pictures that, a decade later, mostly still haven’t been made, regardless of their quality. The financier of a Harvey Keitel movie the company worked on had skipped town owing $125,000 to various individuals and businesses that had all been contracted through us—European co-productions such as this were part of the production company’s lifeblood—and the hard-to-reach Frenchman with a yacht who was responsible for cutting the checks was conspicuously absent when my bosses, through his amiable but clueless line producer, came calling for him. We were always “waiting on the tax credit to roll in,” the percentage of the movie the city and state were willing to pay for in exchange for the shoot being in New York, to make the rest of the vendors whole. No one seemed to have any idea how long that would take.
Amid the torrent of angry dog trainers and caterers, best boys and script supervisors who wanted their wages, I watched videos on YouTube (then in its first year of popularity) and scanned the office for paraphernalia from the Golden Age of Indie Film—Harmony Korine’s underwear, so the legend went among the junior staff, was an item of particular interest, resting as it allegedly did in a cardboard box amid detritus from the set of one of his earliest films—while submitting my own Evangeleo to film festivals. I used my office manager job to my own ends, having meetings for productions I was doing on the side, faxing copies of my own script to other producers, ordering padded envelopes for DVD screeners of my thesis film. Evangeleo got accepted to a student festival in Los Angeles, where I squandered my world premiere status back before I knew that was a big no-no, and then the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Founded in the shadow of Sundance, which ultimately produced the likes of Christopher Nolan, Slamdance was a big deal for me. My bosses were impressed enough to help me get the legendary rock band Sonic Youth, with whom they’d worked on a foreign film soundtrack, to let me use their music in the film for free. For the first time I felt, however small and powerless, a part of the world of independent film I’d read and thought so much about as a young man.
But disillusionment soon set in. After I took over from KiKi, the company agreed to pay me only $800 a month, well below minimum wage. It was, in theory, enough to pay for my apartment, assuming I didn’t eat and walked four miles each way to work. Although it felt like my life could quickly become like the ones sold to me in the film school brochures, even if I was working for less than minimum wage at the office of a production company I revered, “independent film” seemed to operate almost solely on graft and exploitation. I had passed up the chance for a much-better-paid job at an agency that specialized in representing theatrical performers because I wanted to be close to the action of making movies of the type I had spent my late adolescence and young adulthood idolizing. Tribeca was still nicknamed “Indiewood,” given the number of production companies and distributors based in the neighborhood back then. To work on the periphery of the scene for what amounted to $26 a day plus lunch, which I paid for with petty cash, was the first, and in my infinite insecurity, perhaps only way to get a foothold.
Independent film producers are notoriously fickle, ego driven, and occasionally, in the case of Scott Rudin, prone to throwing phones, but my bosses never treated me that way. The two principals would be temperamental occasionally, in vastly different ways from each other, but in the short time I worked for them as their office manager, they taught me a lot without trying at all. But they were too busy surviving the end of the golden years of independent film to worry about my development, and unlike my peers working as barely paid quasi-interns at similarly sized indie outfits, I didn’t get to work on any movies that actually got made.
In a climate in which hedge fund investors and venture capitalists were by and large pulling out of indie film, I marveled at how they stayed in business despite lacking trust funds. Part of it was partnering with a well-known music supervisor and once-prominent movie star to share office space. (His perpetually stoned lackey came in once a week to gather the mail and stare at the wall.) But another way was to limit their labor costs to unpaid interns. During the first week of 2007 I was told that they would no longer pay me $800 to run the office.
I had been spending too much of my time on my own film, on the verge of its major festival premiere in Park City, I was told. I was welcome to hang out at 1 Worth Street anyway, given the affection they had built up for me, but they had decided to hand over the reins of office management to my intern Frank White, a skinny, wild-eyed actor/musician/whatever I knew from making movies in college. I had hired him after seeing him at a photo exhibit upstate, while at the Woodstock Film Festival with one of the company’s films, which had played at Sundance and was directed by someone scarcely older than me. “You’ll be a better employer than employee,” one of my bosses said with odd affection, claiming I wasn’t meant to “clean the brushes” but was supposed to go and be an artist myself. She allowed me to keep the keys and use their office for casting or taking a meeting. I had no idea I’d be doing just that, and a lot more, at 1 Worth Street for another half decade.
My mother paid for my ticket to Park City, beaming with pride. I found lodging on Craigslist, traveling with my cinematographer, David, and another ex-roommate, but I quickly learned that as a young man traveling from party to party on those snowy mountain streets, one may end up sleeping in all sorts of places, from hilltop mansions to the hotel rooms of ginger-haired Canadian journalists. While in bed at the latter locale, I discovered it was an inopportune time to be wearing the swag underwear I received from a Slamdance filmmaker as a keepsake to remember his film by, especially when the garment in question was tighty-whiteys branded with the film’s inelegant logo. I was suddenly flirting with young starlets and sharing bathroom line conversations with television actors, competing for girls with Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the legendary Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski. “Lay off my lady friend,” he told me, with the utmost seriousness, in the refrigerated-drinks aisle of a 7-Eleven well after midnight, before we shared a cab with the Canadian redhead. If only he had taken my advice to let me be dropped off first!
It felt glamorous, that initial Park City, even if I was playing the minor league festival with the rest of the Sundance rejects, such as a pudgy college girl from Oberlin named Lena Dunham, whom I had met on the plane to Salt Lake and later shared a van with to Park City. When I got home, even though I was still broke, I had some more swagger in my step and was sure it was just the beginning of a swift ascent into directorhood. I supposed, after Slamdance, that I was about to take off on a long and prosperous festival run; but following its acceptance in Park City, Evangeleo was rejected from twenty straight festivals. I was humbled, to say the least.
I had to keep making a living, especially without the production company money covering my rent at Taaffe Place every month. Although I wasn’t a technician, I took jobs on sets in my spare time, driving trucks for $100 a day on bad indie movies that would sell at Sundance for millions, or assistant directing disastrous short films for first-timers dipping into their trust funds for a taste of the indie film life. I still did work from time to time at a production company, driving around the art director of a Manoel de Oliveira movie as he scouted Staten Island locations, or serving as a production assistant on a CNN commercial, but money was getting increasingly short and my mother was, at the time, increasingly unwilling to help. Another executive at the production company was also a journalist who ran one of the more respected magazines covering the world of independent film. He offered to let me write for his publication and I accepted, but I wasn’t aware at the time that this wasn’t actually a job, it was simply a means of acquiring free travel and lodging in exotic places by writing for the house organ of a nonprofit. It was just a more glamorous means of scraping by.
It was a barrel-chested bouncer and social worker named Bo, a fellow resident of 227–241 Taaffe, who became the second person after my Independence Day assailant to tell me we didn’t live in Clinton Hill. “This is Bed-Stuy,” Bo said, a cynical smile crossing his lips as I pondered this. It was probably sometime in late 2006. He had told others, mostly whites who had recently moved into the building, this same thing many times, explaining that calling this block of Taaffe Place “Clinton Hill” was just a branding effort. In those dreary middle aughts, Bed-Stuy was propelled endlessly back into itself by Craigslist housing ads. Every year, before Bed-Stuy was hip among the developer set and the people they shepherded into gussied-up brownstones and recently converted lofts, another street on Bedford-Stuyvesant’s western or northern fronts would be digitally rechristened as part of a different neighborhood entirely. Bed-Stuy was a place that many Caucasians, aware of its reputation and history only from rap songs and television news crime reports, didn’t want to live.
Bo and I never really became close the entire time I lived there, never stepped into each other’s home; he nodded even when he was in a hurry and generally was happy to share an elongated anecdote in front of the building or outside the elevator, but wasn’t interested in playing host or coming over to watch the game. He was an excellent talker, loquacious and descriptive, but he carried a sadness with him, a sense that he was witnessing a transformation he wasn’t comfortable with. Bo was the first person I met who was actually from Bed-Stuy, who had grown up just a stone’s throw away, and who was one of only a couple of black men I got to know on the block of “newly renovated lofts,” the other being Mike Rolston, a filmmaker and electrician who lived down the hallway from Tony and me on the seventh floor and eventually moved into a houseboat on the Hudson River. He doesn’t have to worry about being a gentrifier there.
Back then, the idea that an amorphous, systematic conspiracy concerning the geography of central Brooklyn was afoot seemed implausible. I wasn’t deluded enough to think that lofts inhabited by kids with mysteriously inexhaustible checking accounts and spliff-smoking wannabe filmmakers had always existed on Taaffe Place, across the street from the Lafayette Houses and catercorner to the police station where Spike Lee shot exteriors for the underrated Brooklyn hood/cop/drug/redemption Harvey Keitel drama Clockers (that cop station rests on the Clinton Hill side of Classon Avenue, BTW), but what was wrong with them being here now? I didn’t much think about it, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it.
My roommate spent increasingly more time inside our home with his bass, trying to attain perfect pitch by playing incredibly slow chord progressions over and over and over, to the great, unending annoyance of his roommate, who was trying to figure out how the hell to make a living. He suggested, in low mumbles over his cereal, that he was looking for a job, but the vulnerability that we had shared with each other in shards throughout our late boyhood, despite the tough, taciturn personae we also sometimes wore, began to disappear, replaced by an unrelenting sense that our selves lacked worth without vocation. There was never any specificity to his desire in those years, and for someone as driven as myself, I judged him, seeing it as a waste of his advantages. I tried to help in whatever small ways my underemployed self could, attempting to have him meet one person or another who worked at cool culture industry company X or Y.
Underneath our civility, however, I began to feel a slow, creeping desire to avoid him, to keep away the great silences that suddenly began to mar our time together. His subtle dominance of our living space, engendered by the two-thirds of our rent his parents were paying, floated just under the surface of our domestic unease, casting a terrible pall over our conversations. Everything that had once been easy between us became stilted, loaded, a dizzying vertigo that caused me to choose my words carefully and feel easily embarrassed—was I ashamed of the entry-level labor I was doing, work that Tony had the luxury to avoid? Not necessarily, but I began to feel that the world was not designed for us to have anything resembling equality of opportunity in our pursuits. I don’t doubt that Tony knew this. He was, then and now, too wise not to, even if he doesn’t see anything particularly wrong with that. One night, he came home drunk and, after a conversation about a Thomas Mann novel of outsized fortunes and destinies born into instead of made, he said, savagely, “Do you think it’s any other way now?”
It shook me, that assertion, but of course he was right—regardless of the possibilities the wealthiest country in the history of the world provided for transcendence, his fortunes would be tied to, in no small part, his family wealth, just as mine would be tied to my own family’s fortunes, ones that would not prove immune to the tumult the housing market was just beginning to undergo at that time. America was, we were discovering—regardless of the increasingly porous cultural divisions between high-, middle-, and lowbrow—no longer so good at class mobility. According to a study by Pablo Mitnik and David Grusky at Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, “the amount of money one makes can be roughly predicted by how much money one’s parents made, and that only gets truer as one moves along the earnings spectrum,” claimed The Atlantic in 2015. This seemed obvious to me a decade earlier. Tony’s assertion that “It’s their money” wasn’t quite true in the America we lived in—when the rubber hit the road, the real advantages of familial wealth were ones that he was just beginning to experience, his debt-free $50,000-a-year college education being just the tip of the iceberg.
At first it really didn’t seem possible that he would never get a job in the two years I lived there, or even so much as appear to be looking for one, eventually allowing the sheer fact of his effortless affluence to overwhelm our shared space and, in the end, our friendship. For one thing, I didn’t think his parents would allow it. I saw the same looks of exasperation on their faces that Christmas holiday when they asked me about his job prospects as they had shown during the previous fall, when his mother came to New York for Tony’s birthday and treated us to steak at Peter Luger. I would suggest, disingenuously but with unfailing faux sincerity whenever she would pull me aside, that he was working really hard to find a job. Making some reference to what a terrible job market it was for millennials would usually cinch it; Tony could leave in good stead yet again, free to play his bass or listen to soul records or sip Sapporos while reading Thomas Mann novels with a friend to vouch for his tough luck.
When I would see posts about internships at The Village Voice I would print them and give them to him or leave them on our kitchen table. They would sit there for days, unfussed at. Where was the good ol’ boys’ club when you needed it? Surely this intelligent young man, who read real literature and thought about things with seriousness, would find his way in the world. Regardless, such proximity to the advantages of time undisturbed by the pressure to earn, a luxury he had and I didn’t, began to weigh heavily on me.
I continued to try to help him find work but I spent more time wishing I simply had the support to attempt to make meaningful art of my own. I had produced a short—poorly—late that winter, by the friend whom I was speaking to when I was mugged the summer before, but it hadn’t gone well and I was increasingly relying on cheap anesthetization to put up with all the newfound stresses of adulthood in the unforgiving city. I found affordable weed (my drug of choice since a dangerous bout with acute liver failure in high school made alcohol anathema) wherever I could—in fact, I couldn’t sleep without it. I’m not quite sure when I became so dependent; it more or less coincided with the onset of adulthood.
While collecting the mail from the lobby of my building, I noticed some very young brown children across the street. The boys wore white T-shirts and carried themselves in a way that suggested they were harder than they had any business being at their age. When I saw them conduct a transaction from the opposite sidewalk one afternoon later that summer, I had an inkling they carried. One day I worked up the gumption to approach one of them. “You got herb?” I asked gently as he sat on a nearby stoop. He eyed me hard, his irises green like mine, his skin a delicate caramel. He nodded and told me to call him Little G.
The boy couldn’t have been more than thirteen. He was probably no younger than ten. I could never really tell and I was certainly too afraid to ask. He didn’t say much, this young yellow child. I couldn’t stop looking at him, probably in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable; he looked so much like me. It was as if I were scooping buds from a skinny younger brother of mine, one that as an only child I had never had. He was too young and inexperienced to know the danger he was constantly putting himself in, dealing nickels to loft-dwelling gentrifiers and bangers and desperate folks like me less than a hundred yards from a police precinct. Yet he took on the air of an experienced hustler, projecting an edgy confidence you knew was not hard-won but a mere pose, out of a desperate need to reject the fears that a childhood in the projects brings, let alone those known to affect the willful, abject criminal, servicing the desires of the emergent leisure class just to get over.
I was so relieved to meet someone who would sell me nickels; Little G remained my primary pot dealer for much of that year. I occasionally saw another guy named Clay, a Jewish teenager in a Yankees hat who spoke a thick, almost throwback New Yorkese. In a year in which I swooned in and out of poverty despite my lush, subsidized-for-one-tenant-only pad, I was rarely able to justify the twenty dollars for his product. I’d known him for years, always walking his fluffy dog while he dealt; he lived with his mom in the Fifties, amid a row of elaborate old town houses and gleaming apartment buildings with red-coated doormen, just north of the United Nations headquarters on the far east side of Manhattan. I’d have to go there to score his product, which reserved it for outings that demanded Manhattan-quality headies.
Clay would meet me on the street, walking his dog the whole time as he spoke a mile a minute, slipping the pot into my jacket pocket while I retrieved a twenty-dollar bill. One time, while waiting for Clay on the sidewalk in the middle of a winter snowstorm, I ran into Gordon Parks, the revered African-American photographer and the first black man to direct a studio film, walking toward his home. I stopped him—we shared a birthday, after all—and quickly told him of my great admiration. “Thank you, young man,” he said, but before he could ask me about myself or I could tell him about how we shared a birthday, Clay came barreling across the street and I had to end the conversation to settle my fix.
I worried about Little G, sure, and knew not how to process the marked immorality of buying drugs from a child this young, regardless of my poverty. The Ryan Gosling character from Half Nelson, a dope-addicted youth basketball coach and junior high school teacher, was a sorry one to identify with, but identify I did. He’s genial, handsome, and reckless in all the same ways I aspired to be at the time. When he gets caught freebasing in a school bathroom by one of his players after a game, a twinge of guilt always touches my features. The movie, which won Gosling an Oscar nomination, climaxes with him in a seedy motel room buying drugs off that same youngster, played by the remarkable Shareeka Epps, who has been needled into the underworld by Anthony Mackie’s pusher-with-a-conscience. I always thought a less charming but more honest actor would have made that character more ambiguous and potentially unlikable; regardless, I had the pervading sense we were in the same class of douche bag.
Little G, like most children his age, wasn’t reliable, and caution didn’t come easy to him. At first he refused to come up into the building to sell, afraid as he was of leaving a well-traversed street in broad daylight to be caught on camera in the confines of an empty hallway. I eventually convinced him the latter was a safer bet than his normal spots. He was frequently late and his weeks-long disappearances caused me to occasionally call one of the Mexican delivery services that ran through much of the city, the ones I swore off because of their less-than-stellar quality. Getting high on marijuana in Brooklyn in this era meant, without the capital to consistently afford the high end, indoor-grown delivery weed produced and sold by middle-class, mostly white New Yorkers in Manhattan and the nicer precincts of Brooklyn, that I was forced to choose between black juvenile delinquency or murderous Mexican cartels. Bad faith everywhere you looked.
Eventually I started going to an illegal speakeasy I was introduced to by some tatted-up girl I met outside of Sputnik, where a surer bet was to be found on a nightcap spliff. That night she took me to 729 Myrtle, where, behind a black security screen door and below a bank of discreet video cameras, was the door to Percy’s, an unlicensed bar where one could watch the NBA playoffs and buy cocaine, bud, and spirits. It was the underground Cheers of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most nights the crowd was relatively sparse, though on certain weekend late nights one could find a hundred cokeheads and sundry onlookers in that illegal bar, the smell of crack wafting out of the bathrooms, trannies and johns and gangbangers all operating in harmony. Although I became something of a regular, I was always a bit terrified when I entered on the busier nights, assuming in my infinite bad luck that I would be there when the place finally got raided.
Although upon entering one encountered a three-hundred-pound, thirty-something, hard-eyed black man standing by a bank of security monitors, Percy’s was run by elderly Negroes who qualified for social security and seemed like odd, gentle survivors from the blaxploitation movies I had endlessly pontificated about to unsuspecting classmates in college. I bought weed from them regularly, especially a woman who would sit in the corner and squint until I leaned over and asked her for a twenty. Frank White, who had taken my job at the production company, went even more often than I did, the rare white regular in that mostly brown milieu.
I thought often of Little G when I would see him hustling out on the street. I gradually stopped buying from him once I found Percy’s, but would still see him wandering around the neighborhood from time to time, and witness his transactions with others in gloom, ruminating upon what few opportunities the child had. Was school a place where, as it was for me, the opportunity to learn and grow was made to seem commonplace for him? Did he have parents who went to PTA meetings and who read to him at night while he drifted off into Gulf War nightmares fueled by the CNN-fed triumphalism of the first Bush era? Did he see white people as his peers or his oppressors? Were there other plausible options for him, from his point of view, besides dealing dope before he could legally drive? Who took care of him in that ramshackle building across the street from my loft, near where he spent his days ducking in and out of the gentrifiers’ lobbies, slinging bags in stairwells?
Little G faded away before I had the chance to figure it out. I stopped seeing him effortlessly roam the project courtyards, the ones my roommate always declined to cross, regardless of whether it was the quickest way to our apartment from the G train and despite the fact that the police station was always in view. A rumor of juvie caught wind among Little G’s friends from the block. A brief sighting as I walked along the projects, north on Classon, cops across the street at the Eighty-eighth Precinct joking on the sidewalk behind me, made me think not. His eyes, green as mine, flashed toward me for a second, a wetness in them I’d never seen. I forced a smile, but G didn’t return it. And then he was gone.
I had by far a nicer apartment than any of my friends and I was miserable whenever I was there. It felt like it was hardly mine at all even if half the furniture had come with me from home in a giant haul from one of my hoarder mother’s troves of model-home-ready furnishings. The nicest items had been ordered from catalogs by Tony’s mother; the sinewy South Asian rug, the coffee table Tony insisted we use coasters on, the elegant black bookshelves and dinner table, the green Danish couch that was ultimately broken at a party I held, while Tony was out of town, by a drunk woman, also from Cincinnati, whose body had come between us several New Year’s Eves before.
Still, while underemployed and paying my own rent and eating the cheapest food I could muster, I too had something of a safety net. In an emergency, my mother could, and would, and did, in those less strident years, send me money, her staunch desire to see me grow independent of her out in the world giving way to a form of financial sympathy engendered by unconditional love. She sent me several thousand dollars that year, enough for me to make my rent many times when the till ran nearly dry. A shame in my heart, engendered by the help from home, lingered still. Depression would reign during these seasons, even as I thought, with a measure of unchecked optimism, that surely one day soon I would be able to make a living in the movies. It must have been even worse for Tony, who completely relied on such assistance from our earliest time together as postgraduates. But when I would glimpse an errant ATM receipt he’d leave on the countertop that separated our kitchen from the living room and see that he had $10,000 in his account following a $200 withdrawal, the difference in what constituted “assistance from home” for both of us became overwhelmingly apparent and my sympathy for him dried up.
As the year wore on, most of the free time I did have I passed smoking weed in my stairwell or Fort Greene Park, all in order to avoid the increasingly melancholic vibe of our apartment. For the bulk of that summer, I walked from Bed-Stuy to Manhattan’s Chinatown, an hour away, in order to eat lunch. I couldn’t afford subway fare, refused to ask my mother for (more) money that she wouldn’t give me anyway, and Eldridge Street’s Dumpling House was the only place I knew where I could eat a fully satisfying lunch for $1.75. I’d pass Pratt Institute and the increasingly gentrifying precincts of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee’s old office, a converted firehouse, sits on the corner of the neighborhood’s grand park. Sauntering past the Carol’s Daughter outlet not far from it, I imagined I’d buy my mother, or a wife I’d have someday, body-care products when scurrying for a last-minute gift from the parkside residence I’d have one day. Turning toward the bridge once I reached Flatbush, sailing near Junior’s and in the process encountering the smell of cheesecake wafting from the doors, the first pangs of exhaustion would set in—I was terribly out of shape back then; the poverty was always forcing me to settle for Kennedy Fried Chicken for dinner. I’d enter the colossus of Manhattan from its southeastern flank, seeing the towering city in front of me for the twenty minutes I’d spend walking over the Manhattan Bridge, B and D trains fluttering by. Once I descended into Chinatown I’d go north on the Bowery, past the shop where I used to buy Chinese-region DVDs, soaking in Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 long before they were released stateside, and then I’d dart over to Eldridge Street on Grand, passing the pickup soccer games that take place on the pitches within the skinny park that separates Chrystie and Forsyth Streets between Houston and Canal. I ate at Dumpling House on many a summer weekday afternoon, at the lunch counter or on a nearby stoop, trying to figure out how to make a buck or two with a camera and always plotting another film, despite the obviously dire financial straits I was in.
Over time, signaled by the ways in which my roommate and I began to wear kid gloves around each other, neglecting to broach subjects that would summon his thinly veiled shame at being unequipped to find a job that he didn’t feel was beneath him, we stopped hanging out at all. I would go weeks without talking to him, preferring solitude when I could find it in a loft in which you heard everything the other was doing regardless of the drywall. The reality of our disconnection became an altogether undeniable force in our lives, as we grew too far apart to spend nearly any comfortable time together. I would often stay in Harlem at our childhood friend Ray’s roach-infested home or with a film school buddy, a tall, rail-thin, and devastatingly intelligent gay Jew named Jimmy who lived in the spare room of an elderly couple on the Upper West Side. He turned tricks on Craigslist for kicks and spare dollars when we weren’t kvetching about some film or album we found unworthy, two kids who had hardly made a thing. Whatever I could do to absent myself from my “Clinton Hill” apartment, I would.
Tony and I never once admitted to each other that we lived in an overpriced Bedford-Stuyvesant loft, one that was slowly choking away my solvency and our friendship. And I never once admitted, to him or to myself at the time, that despite all this, I loved my roommate, so much. I’d never had a brother, and over a decade he had become one to me. I didn’t want to move out. So I kept borrowing money on credit cards and deferring my student loans. “But now you enter the world a poor Negro for the first time in your life” wasn’t quite true, but lifelines from home were not, unlike Tony’s, seemingly unlimited.
Neither was my shame. In the ’90s, just as my interest in indie film was emerging right along with my mother’s career in real estate development, she would ask me how much I’d need to make a first film. Even in high school, I was savvy enough to say $200,000. She said she’d get it for me; my mother’s prescience didn’t extend to the lean times that would emerge in the housing market in which she planned on making a fortune, times that would permanently shelve that promise. I’m sure she thought, given how everything was growing in those halcyon days of centrist liberalism and cheap debt, that by the time I came of age and transformed my teenage dreams into the legitimate ambitions of a grown man, helping me raise such a sum wouldn’t be difficult.
Acknowledging several realities, not just about geography and history but relative privilege and shared values, was impossible for me to avoid in the long run, but in my unwillingness to confront the obvious at the time, my inability to work up enough gumption to say to my friend, “Look, I’m drowning. Either we find a cheaper place to live, or help me with my rent. I know you can,” I inadvertently doomed any chance of mutual recognition on our part, of the love I had for him growing into the type of friendship I had always imagined for us, gruff old cats like Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, one of our favorite movies, telling ghost-laden stories about the past for a laugh and a sigh.
At the nadir of my postproduction-company-job scouring during the final months with Tony, I had been an overnight production assistant on the first season of I Want to Work for Diddy. My whole job was to stay up all night, in the control room of an unfinished set that was being constructed on the fourth story of a large, ex-industrial building on Duane Street, of which the production had reserved three floors just to stage lights and crafty, wardrobe, and production. The sheer amount of money that went in service of this flimsy and tasteless premise could have funded dozens of indie films, I was sure. It paid me $100 a day to stay up all night and eat snacks. Situated in Tribeca, only a few blocks from where the production company office still was, I’d sneak off to the offices of my former employer and nap on the couch not far from what used to be my desk until dawn came and the possibility of being discovered posed a threat. The one time Sean Combs did visit the set during my stint there, a gleeful panic rose through the entire six-story Tribeca edifice in such a profoundly silly way as to suggest the Christian rapture had dawned on a sect of Satanists.
In the fall of 2007, I temporarily moved out of 227–241 Taaffe Place. Tony and I had a lease, so we moved someone in to sublet while I traveled, but at the time I had no real intention of coming back. I spent a couple of months in Ohio, writing cold pitches to indie film production companies about a movie I wanted to make in Cincinnati, before heading to Martha’s Vineyard, where my aunt had a home and I thought I’d write a Manchurian Candidate–esque thriller set in a future America where war with Iran is imminent and climate change is out of control. When I arrived back in New York just after Thanksgiving, it was to live in Ocean Hill, east of Bed-Stuy, with a film school classmate, his boyfriend, and their leggy, somewhat unhinged performance artist roommate from Florida. Eventually I moved back to 227–241 Taaffe in early 2008, shortly after Obama won the Iowa caucuses.
Tony and I tried again, but the same baggage was there and I couldn’t keep paying $800 a month; it had been over a year since I had stopped getting paid by the production company, and although I was taking on more writing jobs, writing online dispatches from film festivals for Filmmaker magazine and Variety and applying for grants feverishly, I had yet to consistently replace the income. Still, as soon as I moved back in, I spent about $1,200, mostly on credit, making a new short film, an adaptation of a couple of Jonathan Lethem short stories that he was encouraging people to option for free. It was about a couple who speak in metaphors to each other about biospheres being interjected with new elements instead of having the more frank conversation about infidelity that they are avoiding. It wasn’t very good, that film, but it was a strange monument to where I had lived and what had happened to me there. I fled shortly after making it, telling him of my plans only days before, as our communication had grown nonexistent. He didn’t help me move out—sitting in his room petulantly and listening to the sounds of furniture being pushed or hauled—as our place in each other’s life came to an end.
Would it have mattered if we’d known we were in Bed-Stuy? I don’t know. It might not have meant much to me then. But “Clinton Hill” was bullshit, so I thought, and Bed-Stuy was a place of black history. Somewhere in that painful time I was beginning to understand that where I lived had an importance beyond what I had previously grasped, one that my relationship with Tony, and our very presence in the space, potentially threatened. When I see Tony on the street now, coming out of a soul food joint on Nostrand or on the opposite side of an F train car, I avoid him. It’s too much to bear, the burden of what Bedford-Stuyvesant revealed about us that we dare not speak of.