New York in the '50s (17 page)

I went to club nights of pool playing and rock 'n' roll harmonizing and dances, with girls in toreador pants, high heels, and tight sweaters, and boys in sport shirts and turbans wrapped around their heads, with a piece of costume jewelry from home pinned at the front like a headlight—the headgear was that summer's fad. They played Fats Domino and Latin records, danced the merengue, and during slow, romantic numbers the ministers there as chaperones patrolled the floor to make sure couples were doing the Fish and not the Grind. In both dances, the boy and girl mashed torsos together, but in the Fish, the feet had to be moving, which supposedly made it less provocative.

When dances ended on Saturday nights the music kept pulsing in the streets, from radios and records and from groups of teenage boys who gathered in doorways to harmonize, hoping to become pop groups and grow rich and famous, the new way up from the old neighborhood. The Conservatives had their own singing group, the Persuaders, and from doorways you heard their crooning, as their heads leaned together in concentration and they focused on a chorus of “Doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah,” which sounded like a keening, plaintive lament.

One afternoon when I was hanging around the clubhouse, I met a young man I thought was a new boy, but he turned out to be a veteran of the old fighting gang, the Enchanters. He was about to be discharged from the U.S. Army after a hitch of peacetime service. Louie Melendez (the name I used when I wrote about him) was a small, fine-featured Puerto Rican with smooth, light skin and a thin mustache that made him look even younger than he was, like a pubescent boy who was trying to prove himself a man. He had an assurance about him, though, as he gave advice to Victor, a current member of the Conservatives, and told war stories—not of the Army but of the old gang.

“Right after World War Two,” Louie told Victor, “I remember I was just a little kid and guns first started showing up in the open. At first it was a real big deal. A guy would pull a gun in the street and everyone out on the block would scatter. Maybe it wasn't even loaded, maybe you couldn't hit a thing with it—all you had to do was pull a gun. Then people got used to 'em, and after a while it got so a guy pulled a gun and another guy would just stand there and ask him, ‘Well, you going to use that or not? You better use it or put it away.'”

When I told Louie later that I was a writer, he said he'd considered writing a book about the neighborhood himself, but nobody'd believe it. He said the guys at his own Army base wouldn't believe what it was like growing up in East Harlem. “You know, they say the Army makes a man of you, all the stuff you see and have to take. But those guys haven't seen anything. I say 100th Street makes a man of you.”

That summer of 1957 the manhood of the Conservatives was tested in their first trial of staying social when bopping gangs came into the neighborhood. Norm Eddy was called on to act as mediator one hot Friday night when two rival gangs whose members had guns came onto 100th Street to fight, and warfare was averted. That Sunday he gave a sermon on “Jesus and His Gang” at the storefront church on 100th Street, where many of the new Conservatives and their parents attended services. Norm asked them to show “a special kind of courage” to resist getting involved in the gang fighting, even though it might mean being called a punk. But he knew it wasn't easy: “When a club comes into the neighborhood with their pieces, it's hard.” Despite temptation, the Conservatives got through the tough hot months and kept to their social, nonviolent course.

At the end of the summer, after spending half a year in the neighborhood meeting people, taking notes, and going to every kind of event—from narcotics committee meetings to prayer meetings, gang-sponsored dances to political rallies—I moved back down to the Village to do the actual writing of my book. I was excited about it and felt a sense of responsibility, not only to the literary standards I aspired to, but also to the people I had met and come to care
about. They trusted me by letting me into their apartments and their lives and telling me their stories, and now it was up to me to tell the world, or at least that small segment of it that was willing to listen.

I sat at a massive old office desk in the living room of the apartment I shared again with Ted the Horse, at 10th and Bleecker, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee as I stared out the window and back at my notes, trying to conjure up the feel and sound and smell of the world I had entered for a while as a visitor.

Sam Astrachan came up from Fort Dix one weekend and I showed him the first chapter, walking nervously around the block while he read, wondering what his novelist's eye would see in my account of coming up with a planeload of migrants from San Juan on the cheapest flight to New York, which was bumpy and nerve-racking because for that price the cabin wasn't pressurized. Evidently Sam was pleased, for when I returned to the apartment, the cigarette was dangling more loosely than usual from the corner of his mouth because he was smiling.

“With this beginning, you can go anywhere,” he said. He held out his hand to shake and I took it, holding his always perspiring palm for a moment in relief and gratitude.

More specific encouragement came when
Harper's Magazine
and
Commentary
took chapters to publish from the manuscript in progress, but when I finished I was still dissatisfied with the personal introduction, which I felt was crucial to the book, and I went down to Princeton one Saturday and gave it to Murray Kempton to read. He sipped a beer, then put down the pages and said, “Take out of the introduction everything that didn't happen to you while you were living in the neighborhood.” In a single stroke, the self-righteous rhetoric and pompous generalizations were eliminated. It was the best one sentence of editorial advice I ever got.

Like all the young writers I knew, I was under the influence of Hemingway, and I wanted to make the book as honest and spare as his own first book of stories,
In Our Time
. He had interspersed the stories with brief impressionistic scenes from his own time, and so I wrote brief scenes from the neighborhood that I set between each chapter. I wanted to call the book
In Spanish Harlem
, in emulation
of Hemingway's book and his uncompromising spirit, but the publisher thought it sounded too stark. I didn't agree, but I came up with something more colorful, which at least
they
liked better. After all, I rationalized, hadn't Carson McCullers, at the suggestion of the same publisher, changed the title of her first novel from
The Mutes
to
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
?

Waking up in the middle of the night, I wondered if this was the first indication of the dread process we all feared, the fifties version of Faustus—selling out. The novelist Herbert Gold, feeling he had to defend the publication of his short stories in
Playboy
, used to say, “I'm not selling out, I'm buying in.” It made me nervous—I was writing for
Playboy
myself. Murray Kempton wrote a column lamenting the fact that Mike Wallace was going national, warning that Wallace wouldn't be able to do the same kind of tough, intelligent interviews he did on his New York TV show. The devil comes not with obvious lures, Kempton cautioned, but the offer of a bigger audience.

When
Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem
was published in the spring of 1959, Harrison Salisbury wrote in the
New York Times:
“To read Mr. Wakefield's book is to walk into Spanish Harlem and suddenly share its life, its problems and its tragedies.” That was everything I'd hoped someone would say. The kind words cushioned the blow of the advance sale of only two thousand. (That was proof I hadn't sold out!) Like the authors I knew with disappointing book sales, which included almost all the ones I knew, I was comforted by recalling that James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
sold only five hundred copies when it was first published.

Though
Island in the City
never achieved that kind of fame, I was proud when it was republished in paperback in the sixties, and again in a hardcover library edition in the seventies. The greatest personal reward came from a few young men and women I met a decade or so later who said that reading the book had inspired them to go into social work or sociology in hopes of making a difference in the life of such neighborhoods. That eased the disappointment and guilt I'd begun to feel about the real utility of such a book—it hadn't improved the lives of the people I wrote about, but it helped my own career. That it led a few individuals to contribute something
of their own lives made the whole enterprise seem more justified and justifiable.

Though I didn't stay on and live in East Harlem when I finished my work on the book, I kept going back up to see my new friends and sit in on meetings of the narcotics committee, sometimes helping out as a volunteer press aide and publicist for its causes. I really kept returning to the committee because I felt at home there and akin to the people—the addicts and those who were drawn to help them.

Later I read a book about addiction that Nat Hentoff recommended,
The Fantastic Lodge
, in which the author, herself an addict and writing under a pseudonym, said that everyone involved in narcotics, no matter which side of it—from judges to cops to junkies to pushers, as well as the social workers, ministers, nurses, and doctors who try to help—all are involved because “they have eyes.” That, of course, would include people who choose to write about it.

According to that perceptive author, we who surrounded the addicts, whether with threats or help, were ourselves in some way addictive personalities drawn to drugs. Whether we actually used them or not, we were mesmerized by the subject, by the life-transforming power of the substances. Maybe this only meant that, like Norm Eddy, we were interested in the Big Questions. Whether we were on some level intellectual or emotional junkies or fellow travelers of dope I don't know—in my own case, I suspect it's true—but I do know I was comfortable with those people up at the narcotics committee and felt I was one of them, out on the edge, at some dangerous and real frontier of experience that was far removed from the men in the gray flannel suits, the country-club Christians, the organization men, the frightened herd that composed the lonely crowd.

It certainly wasn't some somber sense of good works that took me back to the narcotics committee, but the good times I had talking and going out after meetings for beers with friends like Norm Eddy, Pee-Wee, Maria, and Seymour Ostrow, the wry attorney who graduated from Yale Law School and chose to set up a practice in East Harlem instead of going to work for one of New York's prestigious downtown firms.

Sy was an anti–organization man who knew the language of the streets as well as of the courts and political clubhouses, and was always dressed in a three-piece suit with razor-creased pants and shoes shined to a high gloss. Once Maria Flores, looking over my scruffy clothes, gently suggested I try to dress a little more like Sy Ostrow. His tongue was even sharper than his outfits, as he proclaimed a cynical atheism while giving of his time and expert services to the work of the East Harlem Parish and the poor who needed representation against the System.

Like Norm Eddy, Sy possessed what Hemingway said was essential to any good writer, and I soon saw was also necessary for professionals working effectively in the city's deprived neighborhoods—a built-in shit detector. Sy most of all liked to mock the phony do-gooders who came to exploit the slums for quick headlines to promote their own careers and then disappeared: the lawyers who lost interest in cases that dropped out of the newspapers and who failed to show up in court to meet their clients; the political and religious vultures who sucked support from people in need and then were off making speeches when their help was needed in the streets.

Besides the mutual respect and friendship those of us who volunteered for the narcotics committee felt for one another, we believed we were playing a small part in making things happen, in changing the way things were, and there was a sense then that individuals working together could actually have some effect on the monstrous problems besetting the greatest city in the nation. In my very minor role as a free-lance press aide or publicist for the committee, I testified before a city hearing on addiction urging hospital beds for addicts, joined the picket line outside Metropolitan Hospital, and persuaded some reporter friends to come up and cover that protest, which helped bring about the opening of a ward for addicts at Metropolitan Hospital.

In a larger community effort the committee helped get the Met-calf-Volker bill passed in Albany, which recognized drug addiction as a disease rather than a crime and gave freedom to volunteer groups to treat addicts. We joined forces with other organizations throughout the city. Ed Fancher, publisher of the
Village Voice
, co-ordinated these different groups throughout New York, and there
was a feeling of alliance, of the Village and East Harlem being able to work together and make something happen in far-off Albany.

A lot of new things were happening in East Harlem in the late fifties, and not only from the work of the narcotics committee. After the gang that went social, the Conservatives, got through the summer of 1957 without fighting, there seemed to be more opportunities for expression than the usual outlets of bopping and taking drugs. A wealthy downtown donor was sponsoring classes in the arts, with Geoffrey Holder teaching dance and a young painter from the neighborhood teaching art.

Louie Melendez, the former Enchanter, was home from the Army, and he introduced me to the artist friend he'd grown up with in the East River Housing Project. Ray Grist was a cool, handsome young guy with ramrod posture and a precise, distinct enunciation whose family came from St. Thomas in the Caribbean. He was teaching the art class and was eager to know about music, theater, and literature.