Still Life in Harlem (15 page)

It is easy enough to go there and see what they have, those who have, and what they who have not are missing out on, the same as it would be easy enough for those others to come see what their brothers and sisters in Harlem are lacking. It is easier still to stay where you are and pretend not to know, pretend not to care.

As soft and flexible as it seems, the frontier is nonetheless a hard-edged line that segregates the two worlds. Whether these two worlds seem separated by the grassy knoll of Morningside Park or by the soft border of 110th Street, also called Cathedral Parkway, or by any other geographical boundary, they are separated as well by the rigid boundary line of color and money. They are two worlds so physically distinct and so separated—not just separate—that something as ubiquitous in the rest of Manhattan as a taxicab is essentially nonexistent in Harlem. South of Cathedral Parkway, the symbol of the city might easily be a tricolored flag: white of course, and green like money, and then yellow. The yellow would be the yellow of taxicabs.

Certainly there are taxis in Harlem. But as you go in either direction along any of the avenues—south or north, down toward paradise or uptown toward Harlem—the careful eye cannot help but notice the comings and goings of the yellow cabs, their existence on one side of the line and their mysterious disappearance on the other. They are replaced on the Harlem side of the line by what are called the gypsy cabs.

The line—the line—the line that separates, the line that isolates, the line that turns Harlem into the prison it has become.

If you stroll downtown from 133rd Street where I live or from higher up, you will cut across the dark heart of central Harlem, dark as dark can be, and on through the soft edge of Harlem to the border area where Harlem ends and the rest of Manhattan begins, that buffer zone where the one world meets the other, where there is spillage and there is seepage and you stand as if in two different worlds at the same time.

In the buffer zone there are black people and there are white people and there are the brown Hispanics who to the undiscerning eye can seem black or brown or even sometimes white, and who are regarded in much the same way—if not by themselves, then certainly by the outside eyes looking in—that blacks are. Harlem belongs to them too now, to the Cubans and to the Mexicans, to the Dominicans and the Puerto Ricans whose neighborhood was once the lower east end of Harlem but then spread along the southern rim and up the West Side. Now those edges have blurred. It is impossible to tell sometimes where black Harlem ends and Hispanic Harlem begins, and you are as likely to hear Spanish in many parts of Harlem as you are to hear English.

Harlem belongs to all of us now, these blacks and Hispanics who, though at odds with each other in many ways, share in many more ways the same circumstance and fate and isolation, the same restrictions imposed by place. They all live in this land beyond the buffer zone, and the demons within Harlem and the demons without that conspire to make black life the prison it has become in Harlem and to maintain this prison conspire as well to lay the same dark shroud over the lives and conditions of the Hispanics.

Antonio Morales, who lives in East Harlem, has come to recognize that in New York City, in all of America in fact, it matters very much whether you're black or white or Hispanic. In fact, he says, it's the only thing that really does matter.

“It is all about race in America,” he says. “Makes no difference how they try to dance around it, it is all about race: what you are, what you get, what you don't get. And if you're black or Chicano or Puerto Rican, all you have to do is turn on the TV and see what you are never supposed to have. Oh, they want you to want it, all right, and they want you to think you're going to get it. They want you to think it's all there in front of you waiting for you to just grab it, that it's all in your reach, all in a day's honest work; all you have to do is play the game they want you to play and the way they want you to play it. That's what they want you to think. That way, when you don't get it, you know it's always something
you
did wrong that keeps you from getting in on the good shit. That way they can keep you dissatisfied with yourself, always down on yourself, always wanting something you ain't never going to have, and always thinking you're nobody 'cause you don't have it: that new Benz, that gold Rolex, that high-powered job. That way they can keep you down, that way they can keep you here, always dangling just enough of the good life and letting you taste just enough of it to keep you plugged in and keep you from tearing the shit down—not just this shit you see all around you here, but the whole shit. Which is what we need to do: burn it all down and start over. But they keep us from tearing down their shit because that's the shit they got us thinking we want, and if we burn all that shit down, we ain't never going to be able to get it. So we burn our own shit down instead, trash our own neighborhoods, and let everything fall apart. We don't care about nothing 'cause for the most part they keep us drugged and they keep us calm by letting us have a nice color TV—with cable, of course!—a nice car, and promises that if we're good little boys and girls and if we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, we can enjoy a nice life too—not
as
nice, but a nice little life. In the meantime, those straps are attached to boots that are standing on our throats. They don't want us to have good jobs, or really anything decent at all. If they did, don't you know they could make jobs for us. They don't want us to be part of their world. And they don't want us living anywhere but here. This is what they really want us to have.”

He makes a sweeping gesture with his left arm, for he has no right arm, and shows you the street he lives on.

“This is all they want us to have.”

We walk together along the street he lives on, East 111th, back in the other direction along the next street, and up toward 114th and Malcolm X, where the Dominicans sit for hours and hours on folding chairs and play dominoes in the afternoon. Antonio goes there to play every now and again. But there is something else going on there too. Either it's some kind of illegal gambling, or it's drugs. Someone is always peeping out around the corner.

Did you see any cops in the subway? Or down the block? Any cops coming this way?

As we walk, Antonio stays to my left and a little in front as he points out the decay—as if it needed pointing out.

I realize, watching him, that if you just look at his walk, at the way he moves his body, if you could ignore the color of Antonio's skin, you would swear you were watching a black man walk. It is the same swagger, it shouts the same message: Look at me, notice me, I am here and I am a lion on these mean streets; don't fuck with me!

Someone, however, did. It's how Antonio lost his arm.

Antonio, like a lot of the fellows he knows, like a lot of fellows on the street for whom there are no good jobs, nor anything close to a decent job, and no way to afford what gets dangled before them—and before all the rest of us too, I suppose—as the sine qua non of wholeness and happiness, Antonio used to be in the drug trade. He was lucky; all he lost was a few years in jail and his right arm.

“It could have been worse,” he says. After he thinks about that a few seconds, he says: “I don't know about that. Maybe dying is not so bad after all.”

Many of his partners and competitors have died on the streets: overdosed, shot to death, pushed out of upper-story windows.

“I guess dying beats going to jail forever,” he explains. “You get a little taste of what they say life is all about, you blow up big, and then you die while you're still whole, before they take away your manhood and your self-respect. It sure as hell beats this poverty shit.”

Just before going to jail—the first time—Antonio was ambushed while he sat on the front stoop of his building, playing a few games of dominoes before dinner. He was shot several times, either by the police, some say, demanding more protection money, or else by rival drug dealers, or else by pistol-packing punks in the neighborhood jealous of the clothes and the cars and all the attention Antonio got. He wouldn't tell me how much money he had made and spent, but he said it was a lot.

“What do you do with that kind of money?” he said. “It's all in cash. You can't walk down to the bank with it and start buying savings bonds. They want to know where you got it. The tax people want to know. The stores, though, they don't care; they like your cash, even pretend to like you too. So you find ways to spend the money, stupid ways, the stupider the better: clothes, a couple of cars you don't need, some jewelry. And then you got to spread it around a little bit too, you know, trying to have a good time with your partners while the good times last, 'cause they don't come easy and they don't come often enough around here. It's amazing how many friends you get when you start tossing around cash, buying things for everybody. But let a man get shot a couple of times, lose an arm, go to jail, his income starts to fall off: man, people will desert you like a motherfucker.”

He takes a few deep breaths and blows them hard through his nose. Then he is quiet. The swagger in his walk is not so pronounced now. He doesn't rock so much from side to side. In his face there is a frown of confusion where there had been one of defiance. He reaches for the arm that is not there and squeezes the stub.

We walk over to Malcolm X without another word.

There is another drug dealer I know, he goes by the name Nicky-No-Arms. He won't talk about it, but he is reputed to have killed many men: those who got in his way, those who would not or could not pay what they owed him, those who jeopardized his reputation or put at risk his income. He has made much much money. He has spent just as much. And he has stayed many nights in jail. He lost his arms when rivals in a drug-turf war kidnapped him one afternoon, held him down, and whacked at him with axes. They hacked off his arms—above the elbows—to teach him a lesson. Nicky and his boys had encroached on their territory. It was not a thing to be done. Why they didn't just kill him, no one seems to know, but it didn't discourage him from the drug business. Now he is more feared than before. Now he has little left to lose. He wheels himself around the neighborhood as bold as you please in a specially rigged land cruiser that he can drive without the use of his arms.

And then there was Henry.

Henry hit the streets when he was thirteen years old, selling crack cocaine. His was the only income in a household of five. In their home there was no other man older than his thirteen years. His three younger brothers had three different fathers; none of the men lived with the boys and their mother, Jolene. She didn't work. Who would mind the kids? she asked me. So she stayed home, stayed on the phone most of the day, or in front of the television, and the only people on the block making money were the drug dealers on the corners.

Henry once said to me, “That's all we knew, man. We never saw anybody going outside the house to work. All the women in the neighborhood did was talk on the telephone or watch the TV or sit around out front on the stoops and complain about this and that. If they did anything at all, once in a while they cleaned the house. And the only men we ever saw with anything that even looked like a job were the crack dealers. And they were damn sure the only ones who had anything like clothes and cars and money. So what am I supposed to do? I'm thirteen years old, I'm the man of the house, and we got no food 'cause the food stamps only last us to the middle of the month. I want to be like a man, I want to take care of my family, and the only men out there working are working the streets. What would
you
do if this is all you know?”

You should have seen the way he talked to me, this now seventeen-year-old man, four-year veteran street-corner drug dealer. His arms flailed out wide, two at a time, one at a time, always back hard with a pop to the chest, one hand slapping his chest, one hand sailing out for emphasis. And he had that walk. They all have that walk.

He looked so tough in his NFL jacket and his overpriced basketball shoes, his trousers baggy in the butt and loose everywhere, a nine-millimeter pistol stuck in the elastic band of his underwear. He looked so tough, his face as tired already as an old man's. If you saw the two of us standing side by side, you would be hard pressed to say which of us was older. But he was just a kid. He should have been in school somewhere, or on some playground chasing a ball around.

“School!” he once shouted at me. “Man, this is the school. Here is where you learn what it's all about.”

What it was all about, of course, was the money. Now there was food to eat, “all kinds of food,” he said, “any kind of food you want, just go on up there and have my mamma fix something for you.” He was the man in the house; he gave the orders now.

“She needs an old man like you around the house sometimes anyway,” he said. It was good to see him laugh.

Upstairs in the crowded apartment there was too much bad furniture and not enough space. Two old sofas were jammed in a corner next to a small table. Flimsy kitchen chairs were in the living room. The walls were crowded with tasteless pictures, some religious, some political, some adverts cut out of magazines. And there was Jolene, not much more than a kid herself, just sitting around, exactly as Henry said she'd be.

She had Henry when she was fifteen—because she was in love, she said. Yeah, it was an accident, but “I wasn't thinking about giving up
my
baby. And Henry's father, his name was Henry too, he was a fine young thing. You could see he was going somewhere with
his
life. Well, he sure enough did. He got me pregnant with another baby, and then he went on about his business. Not another word out of him. Just gone. And the other two: that was just me being stupid, needing a man. One man already had a wife, and the other fool was just looking for somebody to fatback on—looking for somebody to take care of him. That got old quick, and I threw his ass on out of here.” She snapped her fingers three times with a flourish.