My friend Tade Reen, www.tadereen.com (check out his books… he’s an incredible author!) asked me to submit a short piece about my life growing up on the Lower East Side of New York for his True Story Friday blog. His readers seemed to like it so I thought I’d share it here as well:

I’ll start by saying that I believe a person’s true character and the best version of who we are emerges after experiencing varying degrees of pain and suffering. Like all of us, I’ve had a bit of both, but my story is no boo-hoo pity party. It took me a while to get here, but life is good, love trumps hate, and I’m playing with house money. So, here goes:

My mother was an Irish-Catholic girl from North Carolina. She moved to New York City in the late 50s where she met my Dad in the West Village. He was a Panamanian-Jamaican first generation immigrant, going to NYU by day, waiting tables, singing, acting and writing screenplays by night. They were married right after he graduated and I arrived a year later. 

My parents’ marriage was short-lived, and I was a year old when Mom moved us across town to a six-floor tenement building on Avenue D in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Back then, in the early 1960s, and for several decades later, our 14 square block section of the Lower East Side, known as Alphabet City, was one of the most dangerous and notorious neighborhoods in all of NYC. 

My recollections of those early years are a little blurry now, but I do remember that it was a magical time for both of us. Our apartment became the local tailor shop where Mom would hem, patch and make clothes for our neighbors, and once a week she would take me to Orchard Street to buy beads. Each afternoon, after she finished sewing we would string the beads into necklaces and then we’d sell them in Washington Square park every weekend. 

Even by Alphabet City standards we were at the bottom of the ladder. All my toys were gifts from neighbors and other families in our building regularly stopped by with pots of food because “they made too much and didn’t want it to go to waste.” Despite having less than nothing I was in heaven because my Mom turned every day into a new adventure… and then at night the real magic happened. 

We didn’t have a TV, but we had hundreds of books. There were books stacked all around that apartment, and we read aloud together every night. It wasn’t just reading, though. She would change her voice for each new character, act out scenes, and we would run and dance around the room as we pretended to be part of the story. I saw live performances of the Hobbit, Last of the Mohicans, Tom Sawyer and countless other classics when I was six and seven years old… It was incredible, and as I said, it was a magical time… While it lasted.

We were walking up Avenue D, returning home from our weekly bead shopping on Orchard Street, when we saw the fire trucks, the hoses, and the firemen battling the blaze coming from our apartment. We stood together on the corner watching everything we had go up in flames, and the only thing I remember saying was, “The books. Can they save the books?” 

They couldn’t, and it turned out it was the crazy guy who lived upstairs who torched our home. He’d kept asking my mother out on a date and after the final no, he kicked our door down, poured kerosene on everything and torched the place. Things changed for us after that.

We found a new apartment on St. Marks Place and Avenue A for $60/month, but it was roach infested and way worse than our broken down home on Avenue D. The block itself was also a lot different than what I’d been used to. Today, St. Marks is the place to be in the trendy, and renamed East Village, where 300 square foot studios go for $4,000/month. But, back in 1968 it was Alphabet City’s true gangster block where the local heroin dealers, the hardcore gunmen, bank robbers, jewel thieves, pimps, hookers and junkies all hung out. Shootouts, knife fights and bodies in the street were daily events back then, but for me it was all just part of an amazing and exciting adventure.  

That all changed one night a few months after my eighth birthday. Every other weekend my Dad would pick me up and that Sunday he took me to a movie matinee…The War Wagon with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas. Afterwards he bought me a cowboy holster and two silver cap guns. I remember him wanting to bring me upstairs that afternoon, but I was determined to show off my guns to my friends on the block and I told him I’d be sure to go home before dinner. 

It was mid-November, already dark and it had just started snowing. My friends had all gone in separate directions after a few hours of cowboys, Indians and outlaw shootouts and the block was empty as I galloped down the street with my hands on my six-guns. I couldn’t wait to show Mom my cowboy gear and galloped faster. I could see my front door when an arm clamped tightly around my neck and stopped me in my tracks.

I was big for my age, but I was eight, and no match for the psycho who choked and dragged me into a nearby building. I remember the guy’s crazy eyes and stinking breath as he held me against the wall with one hand and tried to get my gun belt off with the other. It was a good thing that I was too young to realize he was a sick pedophile trying to molest me. I thought he was trying to steal my pistols and I twisted, kicked and screamed trying to keep them. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, he got scared. He stopped fighting to get my belt and pants off, put both hands around my neck, and started choking me out. I tried to scream for my Mom, but I couldn’t breathe or make a sound as he squeezed harder. Everything was going black when a woman who lived in the building grabbed a garbage can lid and started beating my attacker in the head with it.

After she pulled me away from him and took me home, my Mom immediately called the police. The big twist of events was what happened after the cops arrived. I thought they were there to help and protect me. It was my first direct contact with law enforcement, and even though we lived in a war zone I looked at them as real life super heroes. That fantasy died that night. 

I remember my mother screaming at them when they threatened to take me in for breaking into the building I had just been dragged into. My attacker, who was white, claimed that he saw me breaking in and tried to stop me. Then he said he was choking me/trying to subdue me because he saw that I had a gun. 

I’ll never forget what one of the officers told my mother: 

“You’d better keep control of that nappy headed little N****r or we will,” and the other one, towering over me, pointed his night stick at me and said, “We’ve got our eye on you kid,” before they left.

“You may be light-skinned, but that doesn’t matter. This system, this country, sees you as the enemy and wants to put you in a cage and keep you there.”

Everything changed after that night. My mother shut down and became distant and sullen. I didn’t find out until years later that she had been severely abused as a child and she’d somehow internalized my trauma. She simply disappeared for a while. I knew then and there that I had to find my own way forward in life. 

The hookers on the block informally adopted me. They would hug me close, brush my hair and make sure I ate every day, but it was Mrs. Mintz, my 3rd grade teacher, who was my guardian angel. She became my surrogate mother-therapist-counselor and cheerleader. We talked a lot about what happened and what was going on with my mother, and she constantly told me that I was not a victim. I was a fighter. I was a survivor and more importantly, I was the hero of my own story. 

When I think back on all the ups and downs since then I can still hear Mrs. Mintz repeating those loving messages over and over again. She was also my rock after my second encounter with the police when I was a 4th grader… and she wasn’t even my teacher then. 

I was playing hide-and-go-seek with two of my friends around the corner from our same St. Marks apartment. My boys were up the block, and through the windows of a van parked in the street I was watching them creep towards me when a cop started beating me with his night stick. He hit me four or five times before a couple of neighbors dove on top of me to shield me from the blows.

The cop said I was breaking into the van and that I was under arrest. Even after he found out that I was 9 and everyone said we were just kids playing in the street he still wanted to put me in cuffs. By that time 40 or 50 people had gathered around and made a wall in front of me while a few others used shirts and handkerchiefs to stop the bleeding from the back of my head. More squad cars arrived and after a tense standoff the cops left and a bunch of good Samaritans helped me get home.

The following week when I was back in school, Mrs. Mintz shook her head sadly and said there was a good number of hateful, ignorant and racist people in the world, but there were far more who were loving and kind. “You may not see or feel them yet, but the good ones are coming for you. Just be patient. You’ll see,” she said. 

I remember thanking her for her kind words, dismissing her naïve view of the world I lived in, and thinking that everything she’d just said was pure bullshit. 

It was right around that time my mother’s new boyfriend moved in with us. He was a Jewish drug dealer which was kind of a rare thing in the neighborhood, and he looked down on all the other hustlers because they sold heroin and he only dealt weed and coke. Not sure if he was still looking down on the other St. Marks crews when he joined them in prison a few years later, but that’s his story not mine.

He said he’d heard about what happened to me and he had a sure fire cure. From that day on, after I finished my homework, he would light a joint and pass it to me as we bagged up supplies for his customers. The smoke filled haze of my preteen and teenage years set me adrift for a very long time.

While all this was happening my father had started a successful printing and publishing business and as a result I was able to go to the Little Red School House, a private school in the West Village… Yes, that’s right… My junior high school was called the Little Red School House. Try saying that out loud in LES back in 1971!