New York in the '50s (15 page)

I took the IRT to 96th Street, and then a crosstown bus through Central Park to Third Avenue. I walked up Third, which was brightly lit, to 100th Street, which was dark. I passed a trash-strewn vacant lot and found a building like most of the others, marked 321. The door was patched with raw board where glass had been, and I pushed my way through and went up the stairs. There were voices in Spanish and sounds of frying; an odor that conjured up dead cats possessed the stairway. At the third-floor front apartment the girls greeted me.

We had roast beef, bread, and wine, and talked of the civil defense trial and Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. A small boy came in carrying a plate, and with lowered eyes said, “For my mother.” The girls piled it high with roast beef and bread, and the boy backed away, watching the strange feast with wonder.

I left late, and the street was alive with talk and music. A group of teenage boys huddled in a doorway, harmonizing on a rock 'n' roll song. The rhythm of a tambourine came from a storefront Pentecostal church's nightly revival. Older men played cards on a crate in the light from a barbershop window. At the end of the block a policeman twirled his nightstick.

After several more trips to the neighborhood, I decided it was far too rich and complex to be dealt with in a magazine article. I had found the subject of my first book. I didn't want to be a phony outsider who simply came to snoop, but a part of the life of the place I was writing about—in the way Mary Ann and the other girls were part of it in their own work. When the time came to begin the book, I would move to the neighborhood.

My crush on Mary Ann did not develop into the passionate romance I briefly fantasized, but became a lifelong friendship. Once in the beginning I took her home from a play, and in the hallway of her tenement I kissed her good night, and continued to hold her, not wanting to leave or let go, and she said in a plaintive voice I can still hear, “What do you want?”

We later laughed about her question, pretending the answer was obvious, yet I realize in retrospect she knew more than I did about
my tangled, about-to-burst feelings that night. I wanted a woman's love but wasn't ready for it, and I also wanted something else, something more, something I couldn't name but had instinctively come to this turbulent neighborhood to find—some connection beyond my ego-self, beyond the self that began around that time to go prone five days a week on an analyst's couch, something Mary Ann had connected to through her work with the children, something all of us young seekers had sensed in the air of those Friday night meetings at the Catholic Worker, something Dorothy Day knew and possessed and somehow conveyed a sense of to others. It was precious, elusive, unexpected, like the sudden sweetness of the harmony from the teenagers singing in the darkened doorway on East 100th Street the first night I went to the neighborhood. A chord struck and something opened: a flower, a door, a chapter.

FIVE

In Spanish Harlem

Oranges and Reds, purples and yellows—tropical colors flashed against the tenement grime of gray, on shirts of men playing dominoes outside
bodegas
and swirling skirts the women flaunted in the night. Long strung flags of washing—white, green, aqua, pink—unfurled against brown slabs of buildings that bordered the junk-glittered vacant lots. High pitch and sensuous rhythm of Latin music blasted from radios, and pointed black shoes scraped time in the streets. This was East Harlem, the Spanish part, another island within the Island, a transplant of vital new blood and dreams from Puerto Rico, the biggest newcomer influx of the fifties.

East Harlem was like an archeology of immigration, a history of America in one concentrated area. When central Harlem, or just plain Harlem, whose center point is 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, had become known as a Negro community by 1910, the area from Fifth Avenue to the East River, known as East Harlem, was still all white, with a population of Russian Jews, Irish, and Italians, and it was not until after World War I that Puerto Ricans began to move in, giving the name Harlem the new adjective “Spanish.” Puerto Ricans were followed by Negroes, and the polyglot nature of the neighborhood was still in evidence when I was there in 1957. Although most of my neighbors on 100th and 101st streets spoke Spanish, I woke one morning to the musical lilt of an Irish brogue
and looked out my window to see a white-haired, crippled man holding his upturned battered hat as he sang “My Wild Irish Rose.” Puerto Rican women leaned out their windows and flung down coins he hobbled to collect.

If my story of Spanish Harlem were an official one, it would begin with Muñoz Marín, then governor of Puerto Rico, but you already know it begins with Mary Ann McCoy. By the time I moved to East Harlem in the early spring of 1957, Mary Ann was already married, but I was lucky journalistically, if not romantically, for she still lived in the neighborhood and ran the day care center with the other Catholic Worker girls. They all helped me find an apartment to rent at 331 East 100th Street.

I had gotten a contract from a publisher to write my book, with what was then a standard advance against royalties for a first effort: the grand sum of $1,000. Half the advance, minus a 10 percent agent's fee, gave me a stake of $450 to get me through the project. It's a good thing I wanted to write about a poor neighborhood in Harlem rather than the high life of what was then known as the International Set (they were not yet jet-propelled) on the French Riviera.

I gave up my half of the apartment I shared at 10th and Bleecker with Ted “the Horse” Steeg and brought my clothes, pots, pans, and typewriter up from the Village. My new roommates were cockroaches, and George Orwell was my literary mentor; he'd been down and out in Paris and London, and now I was following the same path in New York's premier slum, purposely going to live in the place so I could write about it authentically.

I wanted to gain the trust of the people in the neighborhood in order to get them to talk to me, and I felt I had to prove I was not just another uncaring outsider come to exploit them. Mary Ann and the Catholic Worker girls had found that even when they operated the storefront day care center for the kids, they weren't really trusted until they moved onto the block.

I was studying Spanish, and although I could speak only stray phrases with an unlikely Hoosier twang, I got so I could understand some of the language when I heard it spoken, even in the quick, clipped accent of the Puerto Ricans. It also helped the whole enterprise when I found a Grove Press paperback of García Lorca's
Poet
in New York
, with English translations by Ben Bellitt on facing pages. Besides improving my Spanish, the book supplied inspiration through the poet's vision of Harlem in the passages I read from “Dawn” and “The King of Harlem.” With sirens and screams and sometimes gunshots waking me in the night to the sight of cockroaches skittering across a paint-peeling wall, this great lyric poetry helped me to see the mystery and beauty of where I was and what I was trying to do.

Roaming out from my base, I went in search of stories and immediately bumped into the biggest, most obvious one, the problem you couldn't go down the block without running up against—drugs. Heroin was spreading like a plague.

I learned that just a year before I moved to the neighborhood, a group of local people had gotten together to try to do something about it and formed a committee that met once a week in the back of the Family Center of the East Harlem Protestant Parish on East 100th Street, the very block where I was living. The parish was composed of three storefront churches in the neighborhood that were begun by a group of young men and women who had graduated from Union Theological Seminary after World War II, most of them veterans of the war. I was suspicious of a Protestant group of what seemed like missionaries to the slums, thinking all Protestants of the time were like Norman Vincent Peale, whom I considered a glad-handing country-club type of Christian, a pusher of easy steps to salvation.

I was prepared not to like the Reverend Norman C. Eddy, but since he, his wife Peg, who was also a minister, and their three children were now my neighbors, and since Norm was one of the founders and leaders of the neighborhood committee to help narcotics addicts, I was resigned to meeting the man. I expected, if not a glad-hander who would try to recruit me for Jesus, then some kind of long-faced missionary who'd warn me darkly of the wages of sin.

Norm laughed when I later told him I had feared he might try to save me from atheism the way I assumed he tried to save addicts from drugs. Norm was an open, vital man with an easy laugh and a sense of the ridiculous as well as the divine, and I had to admire
him in spite of my prejudice against preachers, especially Protestants, because he wasn't preaching his message so much as living it. He was a much-respected and familiar figure on 100th Street, a tall man in his late thirties with a crop of hair that even before he moved to East Harlem had turned prematurely, totally white. He wore a gray shirt with a white collar and a smile that seemed to come spontaneously from a sense of genuine joy.

After I got to know him, Norm explained that one of the reasons he was drawn to working with narcotics addicts was that they were forced to grapple with the deepest questions of existence. “Those are the ones—the Big Questions—I am most interested in,” Norm said. I added when I wrote about him: “And whom could Norman Eddy talk to within, say, the congregation of the Marble Collegiate Church?” That was the church of Norman Vincent Peale, my symbol of gray flannel Christianity.

The postwar world of middle-class complacency was just what Norm Eddy had fled. He came from a well-to-do family in Hartford, went to Yale, joined the ambulance corps of the American Field Service in World War II, and served as an ambulance driver at the battle of El Alamein, and in Syria and Italy. Once, in the desert, literally on the road to Damascus, he had an experience of “the spirit”—like a vision or visitation of the power, truth, and beauty of God—that changed his life and set him on a path that led to Union Seminary, the ministry, East Harlem and the Family Center on East 100th Street.

In the barren back room of the center, folding chairs and benches formed a circle beneath fluorescent lights that were still wound with red, green, and yellow crepe-paper left over from the canteen dances for neighborhood kids on Friday nights. The first hour of the meetings was for addicts and their families to come and talk with a volunteer psychologist in a sort of group therapy; during the second hour, anyone in the neighborhood could come and hear a speaker talk about narcotics. Doctors, sociologists, jazz musicians, cops, social workers—all came and gave their views and had them challenged in discussions that were angry, funny, and tough.

At my first meeting I saw Louis Leon, known as Pee-Wee, the young Puerto Rican who had gone to Norm Eddy the year before I moved to East Harlem and asked his help, and out of that was born
the narcotics committee and its ongoing work. Pee-Wee was a big, heavyset man who grew up on 100th Street, and by the end of high school he had seen most of his friends get hooked on heroin. When I met him, at age twenty-one, he told me there were thirty-six guys in his high school class, and though he had lost track of some, he knew of only three who were “out doing something”: himself (he was working in construction), an engineer, and an airplane pilot. The rest, he said, were scattered in jails and hospitals from New York to the Federal Narcotics Facility in Lexington, Kentucky.

Pee-Wee had spent the summer after high school trying to get his friends who were addicted to go to Riverside Hospital, on North Brother Island in the East River, the only facility for treating addicts under the age of twenty-one. Anyone below that age could be sent there by voluntarily petitioning a magistrate—or be assigned for treatment as part or all of a criminal sentence. An addict over twenty-one had nowhere to go for medical treatment unless he went to Lexington. The alternative was jail: an addict could apply to the Department of Correction to be sent to the prison on Rikers Island or to the Women's House of Detention in order to be locked up so he or she couldn't get drugs; this meant going cold turkey, a torturous process. Pee-Wee Leon didn't have much luck persuading his friends to voluntarily commit themselves to this agony, nor did he know of any alternative. In desperation, he went to his minister.

Sitting in the tiny backyard garden of the house where he lives now, on 105th Street in East Harlem, five blocks from where he lived when I met him more than thirty years ago, Norm recalls that time when the young man from his church asked for help. “Pee-Wee was one of our church's youth group who I knew very well. He loved people, and he saw his friends throwing away their lives on heroin. He came to me totally discouraged and said, ‘What are we going to do?'” Norm pauses a moment, then laughs. “Like all good Americans, we formed a committee.”

Norm and Pee-Wee asked two women from the neighborhood to join them, one whose daughter was addicted and one who worked as a secretary for the parish, whom I called in my book Maria Flores. Maria was simply concerned with the spread of drugs among people she knew.

“We decided we'd educate ourselves and others,” Norm recalls, “and we sent the word out. We got seventy-five to a hundred people coming to meetings just to hear about different aspects of the problem. Heroin had been a very hush-hush subject, something people didn't discuss, so there were a lot of myths about it, and people hid their fears and problems, not wanting others to think they were addicted or had an addict in their family. Bringing it out in the open gave people a chance to learn and ask questions and share their concerns. We got people from the police department to come, and doctors and psychologists. We got Bill Dufty, who had just collaborated with Billie Holiday in writing her autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues
.”

I remember meeting Dufty at the
New York Post
, where he worked as a reporter, and Murray Kempton introduced me to him as the most intelligent man he knew. I sometimes sat in Murray's office while he and Dufty, who I thought looked like the youthful, journalistic Orson Welles of
Citizen Kane
, held elliptical conversations about New York politics interspersed with references to history and literature, rendered in hip talk so obscure I could barely follow it. But I found it immensely enjoyable, rather like a verbal Charlie Mingus concert. I got to know Dufty's flamboyant wife, Maely, at meetings and fund-raising events of the narcotics committee.