Topic: In this paper you are to analyze the process by which Conley learned the dynamics of race and class through social institutions such as family and school. What are the social practices and discourses associated with those institutions that framed race and class identity for Conley? How did these institutional processes and the cultural knowledge they conveyed shape Conley’s understandings of race and class? How did those institutions shape Conley’s identity and social status? Be sure to support your assertions with evidence from the book (examples and quotations). 

Analysis. To address this question adequately, you will need to spend some time on analysis and organization before you begin to write. You will need to identify the structures, institutions, and practices you will focus on; examine the part each played throughout the book; and relate them to Conley’s adult life.

 Format: Typed, double-spaced, in minimum 12-pitch font, 4-7 pages. 

Honky

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

Dalton Conley
Honky

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2000 by Dalton Conley
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley, Dalton, 1969–
Honky / Dalton Conley.
p. cm.
1.White children—New York (State)—New
York—Social conditions. 2.Whites—New York
(State)—New York—Race identity. 3.Whites—
New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Afro-
American children—New York (State)—New
York—Social conditions. 5. Hispanic American chil-
dren—New York (State)—New York—Social condi-
tions. 6. Race awareness in children—New York
(State)—New York. 7. Social classes—New York
(State)—New York—History—20th century.
8. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Social
conditions. I.Title.
hq792.u5 c66 2000
305.26’09747—dc21 00-023774
cip

For Jerome

“Your mother is so white,
she went to her own wedding naked.”

ten
Welcome to America
121
eleven
No Soap Radio
133
twelve
Moving On Up
143
thirteen
Disco Sucks
151
fourteen
Addictions
165
fifteen
Symmetry
177
sixteen
Fire
191
seventeen
Cultural Capital
203
Epilogue
219
Author’s Note
229
Prologue
xi
one
Black Babies
1
two
Trajectories
9
three
Downward Mobility
19
four
Race Lessons
37
five
Fear
55
six
Learning Class
67
seven
The Hawk
79
eight
Getting Paid
97
nine
Sesame Street
111
C
o
n
te
n
ts

class, despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am
white, but I grew up in an inner-city housing project where
most everyone was black or Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of
privileges that were denied my neighbors but that most Amer-
icans take for granted. In fact, my childhood was like a social
science experiment: Find out what being middle class really
means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a so-
called bad neighborhood. Define whiteness by putting a light-
skinned kid in the midst of a community of color. If the excep-
tion proves the rule, I’m that exception.
Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe
them and they will likely put black or African American at the top
of the list. Ask someone of European descent the same ques-
tion and white will be far down the list, if it’s there at all. Not
so for me. I’ve studied whiteness the way I would a foreign lan-
guage. I know its grammar, its parts of speech; I know the sub-
tleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which
the native speaker has never given a second thought.There’s an
I am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle
Pro
lo
g
u
e
P
ro
lo
g
u
e

old saying that you never really know your own language until
you study another. It’s the same with race and class.
In fact, race and class are nothing more than a set of stories
we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our re-
ality. And there was no one who told more stories to me than
my mother, Ellen. One of her favorites was how I had wanted
a baby sister so badly that I kidnapped a black child in the play-
ground of the housing complex. She told this story each time
my real sister, Alexandra, and I were standing, arms crossed,
facing away from each other after some squabble or fistfight.
The moral of the story for my mother was that I should love
my sister, since I had wanted to have her so desperately. The
message I took away, however, was one of race. I was fascinated
that I could have been oblivious to something that years later
feels so natural, so innate as race does . . .
x i i

baby I broke free from her in the supermarket, ran to the back
of the last aisle, and grabbed the manager’s microphone. “I want
a baby sister,” I announced, my almost-three-year-old voice re-
verberating off ceiling-high stacks of canned Goya beans.
“I want a baby sister,” I repeated, evidently intrigued by the
fact that my own voice seemed to be coming from every-
where. Soon my mother’s shopping cart was rattling across the
floor of the refrigerated back row where all the meats were
kept. I can envision the two long braids on either side of her
head flapping maniacally, as if they were wings trying to lift her
and the cart off the ground. She was, in fact, pregnant. She had
explained to me what this meant a week earlier, and I had be-
come fixated on it, asking each day how much longer it would
be. My parents tolerated this first of my many obsessions,
happy that at least I was not resentful and jealous, though they
wondered why I so much wanted the baby to be a girl and not
another something like myself.
As my mother tells it, the week before I kidnapped the black
o
n
e
B
la
c
k
B
a
b
ie
s

“How old will I be when the baby’s born?” I asked one day.
The next morning I continued my questioning: “When I’m
five, how old will the baby be?” Soon after that I started to
worry about its sex: “When will we know it’s a sister and not a
brother?” Skin color never entered my line of questioning.
My parents did their best to engage my curiosity, each in
their own way. While my father, Steve, used colored pens to
handicap the Racing Form, he gave me some markers and told
me to draw a picture of the baby. I rushed through this en-
deavor using only the black marker and produced something
that looked like his sweat-smeared copy of the Form after a long
day at the racetrack. Steve, a painter, had just gotten into a
black-and-white phase himself and was touched by my color-
less effort; he pinned it up on the wall above the dining room
table, where it hung for years.
In contrast to my father, with his visual orientation, my
mother, a writer, took a verbal approach. She instructed me to
think of an adjective for each letter of the alphabet to describe
how I would like my younger sibling to be.We only got through
“a-door-bell,” my word for adorable, and then to brown before I
got exasperated and insisted that she tell me what the baby
would be like—as if she knew and was holding out on me.
Finally, I could stand the wait no longer. About a week after
the supermarket incident, I swiped a baby myself. While play-
ing in our housing project’s courtyard, I found an unattended
stroller. In it was a toddler just a few months younger than me,
with cornrows braided so tightly on her little head that they
pulled the skin on her face tautly upward. I remember that she
H o n k y B l a c k B a b i e s

was smiling up at me, and I must have taken this as permission.
I reached up to grab the handles of the carriage, pushed it
across the shards of broken green and brown malt liquor bot-
tles that littered the concrete, and proudly delivered it to my
mother, who was sitting on a bench with a neighbor.
“I found my baby sister,” I declared, jamming the stroller
into her shin for emphasis.
“No you haven’t,” my mother replied, putting her hand over
her open mouth. She turned to her neighbor on the splintered
green bench. “Do you know where her mother is?”
The child’s parents—leaders of the neighborhood black sep-
aratist organization—lived in our building, on our very floor.
By now the baby was crying, and I was jumping up and down
with excitement, laughing with delight at my success. But my
laughter soon dissolved into tears, for my mother immediately
seized the plastic handles of the stroller and returned it from
where it came. She made a beeline across the concrete, over the
black rubber tiles of the kiddie area and under the jungle gym,
all the way to the other side of the playground, where a woman
was pacing frantically back and forth, her Muslim head scarf
flowing out behind her like a proud national flag. When my
mother finally reached the woman she apologized repeatedly,
explaining that she could certainly empathize with the experi-
ence, since I escaped from her sight several times a week. The
woman said nothing, her silent glare through narrowed eyes a
powerful statement in itself, while the baby and I went on
screaming and crying a cacophonous chorus.
After the kidnapping, the separatist mother did not speak to
3

us for a month, as if we had confirmed her worst suspicions
about white people. Then, just as the springtime buds were
starting to blossom, she talked to my mother in the elevator.
“April is the cruelest month,” she said, as if T. S. Eliot were
code for something.Whenever my mother would tell this part
of the story, her voice would soften and trail off. Only later did
I figure out that she remembered it so vividly out of a sense of
liberal, racial guilt—guilt over her surprise at hearing a black
separatist recite English poetry.
“Yes, it is,” my mother responded, wracking her brain as she
tried to remember which poet had said that. She thought
maybe it was Ezra Pound, the Nazi sympathizer, and that the
woman was making a veiled expression of anti-Semitism.Then
she quoted the poem back to the woman: “Winter kept us
warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow . . .”
The woman didn’t say anything else, continuing to stare at
the numbers as they descended from twenty-one; she got off
the elevator at the ground floor and smiled at my mother. At
this point in the telling, my mother’s voice would rise with the
satisfaction that she and the woman had shared a moment, a
literary bond. But later that night, well after midnight, the
woman, her husband, and my ersatz baby sister were dragging,
wheeling, and pushing all of their belongings across the hall-
way to the elevator in a caravan of suitcases, each one over-
stuffed and bulging, as pregnant with mystery as my mother
was with my imminent sibling. The woman was screaming at
her husband to hurry up, so loudly that she woke up several
families. Parents poked their heads out of steel doorways,
H o n k y B l a c k B a b i e s

blinking as they peered into the fluorescent hallway. Finally my
mother asked the woman to keep it down, since we were try-
ing to sleep. I imagine that she asked sheepishly, cowed by her
chronic white guilt.
“Noise?” the woman yelled back as she pushed a shopping
cart full of overstuffed manila folders down the corridor. Her
eyes were as wide with adrenaline as they had been narrowed
with seething rage the month before. “The noise is your kid’s
Big Wheel going up and down, up and down the hallway all
day. Don’t tell me about noise.” Despite her reaction, the din
soon ebbed, and all that was left of the separatists was a quite
literal paper trail that led back to their apartment, whose
glossy, brown-painted door stood ajar. I don’t need my
mother’s storytelling to recall the open door. An open door in
that neighborhood was something strange and unusual. It usu-
ally meant something was seriously amiss—that a woman was
fleeing an abusive husband, that a robbery or even a murder
had taken place. For me, the open door came to have the same
association with death that a hat on a bed does for many
people.
Insomniac that she was, my mother stayed up and waited
eagerly for the sound of the newspaper dropping outside our
door. She savored her morning ritual, in which she brewed
dark-roast Bustello-brand Puerto Rican coffee to accompany
the Daily News.That morning my mother read in the paper that
the separatist group had taken credit for a bomb planted at the
Statue of Liberty the day before. The bomb had been defused,
but it still caused a panic among the tourists. Just as she was
5

reading that the FBI was searching for the members of the sep-
aratist group, the racket in the hallway started up again. She
peeked out, and there, as if arriving on cue, were the investi-
gators from the FBI, identified by the large yellow letters on
the backs of their nylon jackets. Within an hour they, too, had
cleared out, padlocking the family’s door and pasting layer
upon layer of tape over it, yellow strips with black writing that
formed negatives of the jackets they had worn. The tape read
crime scene, do not enter—as if we had a choice. I was fas-
cinated with this tape and peeled it off strip by strip when I
played in the hallway. My mother saved some for my room,
guessing correctly that I would like it after a few years, when I
understood what it meant. A couple of months later the pad-
lock and tape came down, and a few weeks after that a Chinese
family moved in. We never saw the FBI again, and the FBI
never saw the separatists.
In retrospect, my baby-seizing mistake was understandable.
The idea that a brown-skinned baby couldn’t come from two
ashen parents wouldn’t have entered the mind of a two-and-a-
half-year-old. After all, a young child has not yet learned the
determinants of skin color, much less the fact that in America
families are for the most part organized by skin color. More-
over, in the projects people seemed to come in all colors,
shapes, and sizes, and I was not yet aware which were the im-
portant ones that divided up the world. At that age, the fact
that my parents were much bigger than me was of much
greater consequence that the fact that most of the other kids
my size had darker skin.
H o n k y B l a c k B a b i e s

I even felt culturally more similar to my darker-hued peers
than to the previous generations of my own family. For one, I
didn’t talk like my parents, who had migrated to New York
from Pennsylvania and Connecticut. I spoke like the other kids
in the neighborhood. On the playground everyone pretty
much spoke the same language with the same unique accent,
no matter where our parents came from. While adults might
speak only Spanish, or talk with a heavy drawl if they came
from down South, our way of talking was like a layered cake; it
had many distinctly rich flavors, but in our mouths they all got
mixed up together. When we “snapped” on each other, little
did we know we were using the same ironic lilt and intonation
once employed in the Jewish shtetls of Central Europe. This
Yiddish-like English had mixed with influences from southern
Italians, Irish, and other immigrant groups to form the basic
New Yorkese of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with
open vowels and dropped our rs: quarter was quartah, and water
was watah. To this European stew we added the Southern ten-
dency to cut off the endings of some words—runnin’, skippin’,
jumpin’—a habit that came northward with many blacks dur-
ing the Great Migration. We also turned our ts into ds, as in
“Lemme get fiddy cents.” The latest and most powerful influ-
ence was Puerto Rican. Within the Spanish-speaking world,
Puerto Ricans were notorious for their lazy rs, just as New
Yorkers were, so the fit was perfect. Whenever someone said
mira, the Spanish term for look, it came out media.
Although Spanish separated the native speakers from those
of us who picked it up on the playground, the presence of the
7

large Puerto Rican population had the opposite effect for me,
narrowing the racial rift between others and myself.Their var-
ious hues of tan and brown made my looks seem a matter of
degree rather than of kind, filling in the spectrum of color sep-
arating most of the black kids from me. It helped that I was not
entirely pale. My hair was as dark as that of anyone around. If
studied closely, my eyes betrayed brown shades around the in-
terior of the iris, fanning out to green, but from afar they
looked no lighter than those of a lot of the kids. My skin tone
ranged from white to brownish depending on the time of year.
For all these reasons, I perceived skin color in particular and
race in general as something mutable, something that could
change with the seasons or with an extended trip back to
Puerto Rico. In this I was no different from scholars two cen-
turies earlier who described “blackness” as a universal freckle
that would fade with time spent in the North or darken over
the course of generations in Africa.
While I may have been oblivious to race as a toddler, I cer-
tainly recognized gender differences. More than anything else,
I prayed for the baby to be a girl. As it turned out, I got my
wish.
8

inner city—in the projects of 1969, no less? The short answer
is that we had no money. My mother liked to joke that she had
to “lie up” about our income to get food stamps. My father
worked part-time in an art supply store; my mother was a
graduate student at Empire State College. Despite our family’s
economic circumstances, we enjoyed a degree of choice about
where to live. My parents could have moved to a white,
working-class neighborhood in the outer boroughs or in New
Jersey, for example. Our neighbors, by contrast, were largely
unwelcome elsewhere for reasons of race and financial status.
It was this modicum of choice, not skin color per se, that ulti-
mately distinguished us from our neighbors.
The long answer of how we ended up there lay in the same
tabloid paper that my mother scanned each morning with her
Bustello coffee, searching for news of local murders and rapes
of the day before. It was through an advertisement in the Daily
News that we all ended up living in the Masaryk Towers com-
plex just south of Avenue D in Manhattan. In 1968, my parents
How did I, the child of two white artists, end up living in the
tw
o
T
ra
je
c
to
rie
s

were living a few blocks north of the projects, in a tenement
apartment that had been broken into so many times they had
to chain their black-and-white television to the radiator. But
that didn’t protect them from one particular burglar. By
chance, my mother was standing outside the building and
looked up to see him climb through her window from the fire
escape. She ran to the corner and called the police, who ar-
rived just as the crook came downstairs, his arms piled up with
whatever he thought he could sell. The cops threw him up
against the wall, then took him down to the Tombs, where they
held suspects to be arraigned. It turned out that the guy was a
junkie with seven prior arrests, but he still managed to plea-
bargain the charges from attempted robbery down to loiter-
ing. The judge gave him two weeks at Riker’s Island—two
days, apparently, for each prior.
Jonesing from a lack of drugs and facing the prospect of go-
ing cold turkey for two weeks in jail, he vented his anger at my
mother as the bailiff dragged him out of the courtroom.
“Lady,” he said, running his shackled hands through his stringy
blond hair, “when I get out, I’m going to get you.” He wiped
his runny nose onto the hair of his thick, tattooed arm and
added: “I know where you live, so I’m going to find you, and
then I’m going to kill you.” He spoke these menacing words
eloquently, as if he were preaching.
Whenever asked why we ended up in Masaryk Towers, my
mother would tell this story, describing every detail of the
burglar’s appearance, tone, and demeanor. Even when I was
just a few years old, I could sense her guilt at having moved the
H o n k y T r a j e c t o r i e s

family to an unsafe neighborhood—and perhaps for having
taken an apartment slot from some more deserving family. She
told this story to reassure herself that the family had no choice
and had to act quickly, even if that wasn’t 100 percent true.
As the family lore goes, my parents had been talking about
renovating a loft in Soho. They had one already picked out, a
3,000-square-foot walkup in an iron-clad building on Spring
Street. The loft was selling for a few thousand dollars, since it
was completely raw space, but even that was beyond my par-
ents’ means. They might have been able to borrow the down
payment from my mother’s parents, but they certainly never
would have qualified for a loan for the repairs necessary to
make it livable. Besides, my grandparents shared an ideology
against overt financial transfers to family members. My grand-
father used to joke with my sister that he would buy her a car
when she graduated from college, any model she wanted.This
raised her suspicions, so she asked, “What about Dalton; will
you buy him a car, too?”
“No,” he answered. “I might still be alive when his comes
due, but I won’t be by the time you finish school.”
At this my sister crossed her arms and pouted, upset at his
calculations and at the fact that he planned on dying. As it turns
out, he wouldn’t have had to make good on a promise to me,
either; shortly before I finished college he died in a freak golf-
ing accident in which a friend ran him over with a cart.
My grandparents’ relative wealth served an indirect—but
important—role for my sister and me growing up: We had a
security blanket in the event of a major catastrophe. Needless
1 1

to say, this was another important but silent way in which my
family differed from others in the neighborhood.
In retrospect, I’m sure my parents could have bought the
loft had they really wanted to, but for some reason they didn’t.
Maybe they were averse to the risk involved, or to the work
that the renovation would have required at a time when they
wanted to focus on their careers; maybe it was something
more insidious, a form of inertia that prevents people from
moving up the class ladder. Whenever I asked either parent, I
got the same story about the menacing burglar and the need to
move quickly. Each used to tell this story in a strange tone
falling somewhere between giddiness and sarcasm, sounding
wistful and defensive, like a boxer who missed his only chance
at a title fight.They spoke of it as if it were someone else’s life.
Whatever the reason, the choice had been made, and its
consequences cascaded over the rest of my childhood. It
meant the difference between living in a good school district
and living in a bad one, between having our own rooms and
sharing a bunk bed, between having a study for my mother’s
writing career and her working out of a closet, between having
and not having a painting space for my father. Such seemingly
small decisions can make the difference between rich and
poor, but scientists will never be able to capture their effects
in statistics.Today that loft is worth millions, and my sister and
I make a sport out of grumbling at our parents over the missed
opportunity.
Instead of renovating the postindustrial space, they an-
swered an advertisement in the Daily News soliciting applica-
H o n k y T r a j e c t o r i e s

tions for a newly minted, federally supported housing com-
plex not far from their tenement. They went to look at the
place. The entire stretch of Avenue D from Fourteenth Street
to well below Houston Street—almost a mile long—was
lined with projects. Every few blocks the brown-bricked
dwellings changed in name and only slightly in style.The Jacob
Riis houses melted into the Lillian Walds and then the Bernard
Baruchs, names that held little meaning for most of the resi-
dents of these complexes. One structure might be a story or
two taller than the adjacent one or have bricks a shade darker,
but otherwise the buildings looked exactly alike, and they re-
mained the same over the course of decades. Man landed on
the moon, the oil shock of 1973 came and went, business cy-
cles rolled by, but nothing about the projects gave any sign of
societal or economic change. There was never any new con-
struction or renovation. And since the buildings were brick,
there was never even a new coat of paint. The projects consti-
tuted a static monument to the social policy of their time.
Each group of buildings took up two or three city blocks.
One cluster of houses was aligned parallel to Avenue D; the
next set of buildings pointed its corners outward toward the
street. My father said he liked the atmosphere; the brown
building patterns reminded him of his multilayered acrylic
paintings. By contrast, my mother’s spirits were sagging. Just a
few years earlier, when she had moved to New York from
Pennsylvania, people had planted flowers in boxes on their
window ledges all across the Lower East Side. The bright col-
ors and odor of petunias had attracted her like a hummingbird.
1 3

The “flower box movement” had been the most urban manifes-
tation of 1960s flower power, but by the end of the decade all
that remained were broken pieces of clay pots on the ledges of
the Avenue D tenements. I don’t know why the flowers didn’t
keep—maybe because the residents had more important
struggles to worry about, bigger battles to fight.
When my parents arrived at Masaryk Towers to apply for
housing, they were told the new complex was different from
the other projects in the area. Masaryk Towers represented
an attempt to integrate the working class with the non-
working class through a New York State Housing and Com-
munity Renewal program called Mitchell-Lama.The housing
complex had its own security force, was funded by its own
government grant, and was managed by a nonprofit corpora-
tion instead of the city, all of which my mother found en-
couraging. Little did she know the security guards would not
do much to stop the violence in our buildings—cops getting
shot in the elevator, hostages being taken in the pharmacy,
girls getting raped in the stairwell. After all, even though
Masaryk had certain amenities, it was sandwiched between
two city-managed projects in much worse condition. At the
time my mother was impressed with the layout. The six
buildings surrounded a central courtyard area and housed
several thousand people—a population rivaling that of the
coal-mining town she had grown up in, compressed into the
square footage of two city blocks. The courtyard held three
small playgrounds, roughly divided by age appropriateness,
as well as trees and grass and wildlife ranging from the trop-
H o n k y T r a j e c t o r i e s

ical—huge cockroaches and water bugs—to the temperate,
in the form of thick-furred squirrels. It was springtime; the
trees were lush with white blossoms, and the grass was
thick. To my mother the grass seemed greener than any she
had ever seen; but maybe that was only in contrast to the
hot, glass-littered concrete that covered the rest of the
neighborhood.
“It’s just like Penn State,” Ellen said, nostalgic for her col-
lege as she tugged on my father’s arm. She had selected her
university based on how pretty it was, and now she would do
the same for her family’s residence.
Once inside the buildings, however, my father balked,
thinking the clean lines and low ceilings of the cookie-cutter
apartments the urban equivalent of some tract-housing devel-
opment on Long Island. To him, being an artist in New York
meant living in a prewar walkup, a railroad apartment with
cracked plaster, layers of lead paint, and a leaky faucet. Moving
into one of these towering buildings was in his mind like mov-
ing out of the city; the place was too bourgeois for him, too
suburban. But it was this very sense of country living within
the city limits that appealed to my mother. They landed an
apartment on the top, twenty-first floor—the “ghetto pent-
house,” my sister and I later called it, unaware of the tasteless-
ness of our moniker.We could see the hills of New Jersey from
one window, the farthest reaches of Queens from the other,
and enjoyed a river-to-river view of the Manhattan skyline. If
we didn’t look straight down at the burned-out, boarded-up
slums and the periodic fires that produced them, we could
1 5

imagine that we lived in a middle-class high-rise in the heart of
New York City.
So in 1968 my father and mother moved in, toting their
scanty load of furniture and personal belongings in a friend’s
van. I was born the following year. Shortly after that, I almost
died. At three weeks of age, I contracted spinal meningitis, a
rare infection that inflames the lining of the brain and spinal
cord.The disease manifested itself on perhaps the worst day of
the year: the Fourth of July, which not only is a major holiday,
leaving hospitals staffed by skeleton crews, but also falls just
two weeks after the new crop of medical residents has rotated
in. I spent my first Independence Day being prodded and
poked and spinal-tapped by amateurish hands. I was put on an
antibiotic IV, but nothing seemed to work. I was getting sicker
and sicker, suffering from backbreaking convulsions by the
hour and passing stool the crumbly texture of dried-out clay.
My weight dropped precipitously.
“The antibiotics are obviously not working!” my mother
screamed at the resident who was tending to me.
“Don’t worry, madam,” said the resident. “The results of the
spinal tap will be back shortly. Don’t you worry now.”
Ellen knew better, having worked in a hospital microbiol-
ogy lab. The spinal fluid would sit in the in-box for the entire
holiday weekend, and I would be dead by the time it was cul-
tured. So she broke into the lab. Sure enough, it was com-
pletely empty. She didn’t turn on the lights for fear of being
discovered. She ran the assay herself and scribbled the results
on a notepad. I wonder what would have happened had my
H o n k y T r a j e c t o r i e s

mother not been white. No one questioned her as she rushed
around the hallways—but a frantic black or Hispanic woman
might have drawn greater scrutiny.
The results of my mother’s test showed that I was suffering
from a rare type of infection that was unresponsive to the
medication they had been giving me, which treated only the
common strain. My mother sent the results up under separate
cover, then rushed in to find the doctor calmly changing his
prescription. “You see,” he told her, “I told you there was noth-
ing to worry about, madam. I see here that we need to switch
to a gram-negative antibiotic.”
Still, I got worse before I got better.
“Why don’t you consider adopting Alfonso here?” the doc-
tor suggested on one of my worse days. Alfonso was a healthy
Puerto Rican infant whose mother had abandoned him to the
hospital ward. Ellen didn’t appreciate the suggestion that I was
dying; she rushed at the well-meaning doctor with clenched
teeth and fists before my father restrained her. But my parents
grew to like Alfonso, with his hoarse voice and black hair that
stood straight up, and as I rallied they even discussed the topic
of adopting him—as a brother, not a replacement for me, they
were always quick to add.
As it turned out, my parents never had to face that issue. A
month later I got a clean bill of health from a neurologist, who
tossed me around like a football to test my Moro reflex.When
I splayed my arms out, flailing in mid-air, he made his diagno-
sis: “No detectable brain damage, he’s good to go.” Still, I was
frail and needy, and my parents had their hands full when I
1 7

came home. They continued to visit Alfonso for a little while,
but taking care of a convalescing baby entailed so much work
and lack of sleep that they scrapped any notion of adopting an-
other child. My parents eventually lost track of Alfonso; he
disappeared into the world of foster care. I sometimes wonder
what became of my almost-brother, with a tinge of guilt over
the random good fortune of my recovery.
After my stint in the hospital, we paid a summer visit to my
grandparents in Pennsylvania, stopping at the Woodstock festi-
val on our way back. By the time I finally arrived in our neigh-
borhood for good, the fifteen-year-old Oldsmobile we had
been given by my mother’s parents was shot. It overheated
twice on the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we rolled into town
with steam seeping from under the hood and profanities spew-
ing from my father’s lips. We cruised past the rows of blighted
buildings that lined Avenue D, their fire escapes hanging like
sculpture. Flocks of pet pigeons circled overhead, and a skinny
teenager was climbing the Houston Street traffic pole to re-
trieve a pair of basketball sneakers that had been hanging there
like a piñata for over a year. He snagged the sneakers and shim-
mied down the pole, the shoes dangling from his teeth; his
Afro hairstyle made his head look extraterrestrially huge from
a distance. Little did I know it, but I was about to spend my
first year as a white minority, a honky in a community of color.
It was the beginning of my life and the end of the 1960s.
1 8

poverty was primarily an aesthetic problem. If we could just
spruce things up a bit, we’d all have more hope; we might even
become middle class. But by 1968 every surface in our neigh-
borhood was covered with graffiti. Big Cyrillic-looking letters
proclaimed DKA (Damien Kicks Ass) or asked SWN (Say What
Nigger?). If a critic got to the letters they might have “Toy”
scribbled over them, the ultimate dis of a tag. The text was
judged not only on content but also on the style in which it
was drawn and, perhaps most important, on its location. If it
were tagged somewhere hard to get to, it was unlikely a rival
would be able to tag over it. Under the overhang of the
Williamsburg Bridge was one particularly daring spot. Even
the walls of the projects eighteen stories off the ground dis-
played the occasional tag, when someone was inventive and
fearless enough to rig up a way of dangling out the window
and scrolling over the brown or yellow bricks that made up
our world. Perhaps because they were the most visible marker
of urban blight, graffiti scrawlings, more than crime or drugs
The flower box movement had embodied the notion that
th
ree
D
o
w
n
w
a
rd
M
o
b
ility

or family breakup, were what embarrassed me when I brought
friends home from other areas of the city. It was four-color, in-
your-face poverty.
Anything that passed through our neighborhood got cov-
ered in graffiti, especially the buses that connected us to the
rest of Manhattan. Every vehicle on the M14 line was awash in
paint and markers, alternately bright and fading, spelling out
messages of identity that were only legible to those in the
know. Each tag was a warning or a welcome, encoded with
special messages that we read daily, as we might editorials. To
the passengers who boarded over in the numbered avenues on
the West Side, the overinflated letters that arched and swelled
across the corrugated metal sides of the buses must have
seemed like gibberish; the only message they carried was a
warning to stay out of the “bad” neighborhood.
Then there were the colorful murals dedicated to overdose
victims. “Te amo José,” read the biggest and brightest painting,
which depicted a big syringe dripping blood and José with a
goatee on his chin and a halo about his head—half devil, half
angel. Out of respect no one ever tagged over the murals; they
were the only surfaces in the neighborhood that weren’t cov-
ered in the chaos of magic markers and spray paint.
The M14 bus started at Delancey Street and headed
straight north, passing all the projects on its way to the Con
Edison plant that marked the border of the Lower East Side at
Fourteenth Street. The electric utility was the most exotic
structure that any of us had encountered, so it was fitting that
it sat at Fourteenth Street, on the upper lip of the neighbor-
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

hood, intimating things unknown that lay west and north of
it. The power plant occupied a series of city blocks and con-
sisted of strange-looking coils that seemed like props from a
Frankenstein movie. Though we kids looked studiously for
some sign of electricity being produced, the huge capacitors
and transformers made no sound, gave no hint of any activity.
Workmen never seemed to enter or leave the huge com-
pound; there didn’t even seem to be entrances. The only sign
of life was the smoke that puffed from the triumvirate of
chimneys that crowned the main building. Those primitive
plumes of steam seemed incongruous next to the compli-
cated electrical devices at street level. I spent years trying to
detect patterns in the white vapor, marking when it streamed
out continuously, when it formed distinct little cloudlike
balls, and when the beast was entirely breathless. But if there
was some message in the utility’s smoke signals, I could not
decipher its language. In its impersonal operation, the Con
Edison plant provided a too-perfect metaphor for the institu-
tions of society that both ran our community and demarcated
it from the rest of the world.
Across from the Avenue D projects stood another manifes-
tation of poverty: the slums. It was as if some social scientist
had constructed a very crude experiment, randomly assigning
people with low socioeconomic status to live on one side of
the street or the other. But the project/slum experiment
would have yielded no conclusions, for those who lived in the
projects were no better off than those who lived in the run-
down apartments across the street. We were all on food
2 1

stamps; some of us were on welfare; others worked. It made
no difference. There was no particular stigma to living in the
projects as compared to right next door to them.
While the projects cast an oppressive shadow over Avenue
D, the tenements brimmed over with street life.Though many
of them were condemned or boarded up, often burned down
for insurance money by the landlords themselves, almost
every building that still functioned as a residence—and even
some that did not—enjoyed an active storefront. Men sat in
front of these bodegas and restaurants playing dominos, while
children ran to and fro in front of them, their mothers sitting
on the hoods of cars or rocking infants on their hips. When it
was hot, locals would open the fire hydrants so kids could take
turns ducking into the forceful stream. Back then the fire de-
partment had not issued caps that allowed for moderate water
flows, so the city fought a constant battle with overheated res-
idents. Every so often a fireman showed up and turned off the
water, but it would only stay off for half an hour or so; then
someone with the special wrench would open the flow again.
Kids seemed to roam freely, but in reality everyone
watched everyone else’s children; there was a degree of
community-based social control that would not have been ob-
vious to the casual observer. The same can be said for the traf-
fic. Drivers seemed to disobey most parking restrictions, mo-
toring freely up and down the avenue, following their own
logic much as the children did; yet traffic jams were hardly
ever a problem. Men washed their cars with buckets of soapy
water that came from the same gushing hydrants the kids
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

played in. Others kept all four doors and the trunk open to
blast salsa music to the whole block. During summer the en-
tire neighborhood seemed to be partying all the time. In win-
ter it went dormant and receded into the apartments, which
served as spores to preserve social relations until the next
spring.
When viewed over a longer historical trajectory, it might
not be so surprising that my parents ended up raising their
family where they did. Each took a different route to arrive at
Columbia Street in 1968. My mother’s ancestors had once
passed through this very same neighborhood, long before
there were any projects or flower boxes. These Hungarian im-
migrants rolled cigars for a living until one of them saved up
enough money to leave the Lower East Side for Susquehanna
County, Pennsylvania. Whenever someone asked my mother
how her family ended up there, she merely said, “That’s where
the horse died.” It served as an explanation, but in actuality she
had no idea why her grandparents settled in Carbondale, a
small coal-mining town in the northeastern part of the state.
For my mother’s family there was no such thing as class, but
they did harbor some primordial notion of race. To them the
world was divided into two racial categories: Jewish and other.
Each small town in the Alleghenies was typically home to two
Jewish families, the doctor’s and the dry-goods shopkeeper’s.
Converging two by two at one or another’s home to play
bridge or mahjong, the members of this diaspora felt comfort-
able enough among themselves to brag about their children or
tell ribald jokes about Jesus and Moses playing golf. Among
2 3

the goyim, however, they merely nodded politely and tried to
go relatively unnoticed. During World War II my grandfather
tried to enlist in the infantry but was turned down because he
was deaf in one ear, so instead he practiced dentistry for the
army. He and my grandmother also took in a German refugee
who had been orphaned in the Holocaust.
Martin, the German kid, was as confused as a Jewish five-
year-old could be. When Hitler’s voice came across the BBC,
he’d stand up and salute like a well-trained SS officer. My
mother’s brother would instruct, “No, Hitler bad,” and spit on
the ground, then look skyward and declare: “Roosevelt good.”
To no avail.When he wasn’t yelling “Heil Hitler” or waking up
from nightmares, Martin was eating. He ate as if the food
would be taken away from him at any moment. Evidently I ate
the same way, since each time I gulped down food that was
meant to be chewed I was called “Martin” and scolded for my
manners. My grandparents and mother described his method
of eating to me many times: He would crane his sinewy neck
over the table and lift the plate to his lips, shoveling as fast as
he could with a hand cupped to form a human backhoe.
After several months Martin finally got permanent place-
ment with a couple who had no children of their own. My
mother and grandparents were relieved to see him go, though
they would never have admitted this to anyone outside their
Jewish circle. Among other Jews they could laugh about Martin
and his pro-Nazi sympathies, but among their non-Jewish neigh-
bors they would never allow it to be spoken of. Even those of
my mother’s more secular generation were less open with the
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

Poles and Italians who populated the coal-mining towns than
with each other. It didn’t matter how much money anyone had;
all that mattered was whether they were Jewish or goy.
In the mid-1950s my mother went off to Penn State and was
greeted in her crinoline and poodle skirt by President Eisen-
hower, whose brother was the university president. Everyone
signed in and out of the dormitories and obeyed the weekday
eight o’clock curfew. Feet were kept on the floor at all times in
the dormitory parlor rooms, and all the boys and girls kissed
goodnight in unison at the end of their Friday or Saturday
night dates when the chimes struck one a.m.
But by the time Ellen left Penn State the 1960s had begun.
There was no need for the tradition of dormitory panty raids;
couples were shacking up off campus, and gays were coming
out of the closet. However, the few blacks who attended the
university still kept to themselves; after all, the state of Penn-
sylvania ranked among the highest in Ku Klux Klan member-
ship. When students organized a picket to protest a local bar-
bershop’s refusal to serve black customers, only whites
marched, my mother among them.The protest succeeded and
made the news, drawing some CORE organizers to town. At
that time Jews and blacks were allies in the “cause,” so the na-
tionwide group drafted my mother to head up its new campus
branch. A week later boxes and boxes of leaflets arrived at her
dorm room. But she had more intellectual sympathy than
grassroots energy, so the cartons sat gathering dust.
After graduation she moved first to Philadelphia and then to
New York City’s Greenwich Village. There she picked up
2 5

where she had left off in college, joining a civil rights group in
the hope of gathering material for her writing career. In the
summer of 1964 she attended a training seminar sponsored by
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It
was held in the dingy basement of a large, Moorish-style build-
ing that resembled a Masonic shrine, deep in the heart of
Brooklyn. My mother and about three others were placed in a
line for their indoctrination. In the darkened room, veteran
lunch-counter integrators played the role of Southern bigots
in order to train the new recruits in the art of passive resis-
tance. First one of the leaders warned them against wearing
ties or jewelry, yanking on their earrings and neckties for em-
phasis. Then my mother and the other neophytes were handed
placards and told to march in a circle while the trainers ha-
rassed them. Some people really got into their roles—espe-
cially the black members.
“Get the fuck out of our county, you goddamn nigger
lover!” screamed one black man.
“Do you like niggers?” my mother remembers being yelled
at. “I bet you like to fuck niggers with those big tits of yours!”
Unnerved, my mother was about to call it quits, but within
moments the veterans had broken roles and stood around
smoking cigarettes, congratulating each other on their respec-
tive performances.When the rush of fear had finally dissipated
and she had caught her breath, my mother volunteered for her
first Freedom Ride.
Initially my mother’s integrated carload didn’t encounter
much resistance as they made their way through Virginia. Her
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

main worry was how much weight she was putting on; the
protesters were eating about eight meals a day. Most of the
restaurant staff made them wait a while and didn’t smile or
make eye contact, but they served them food just the same.
The protesters never got poisoned, as they were warned might
happen. Only once did they encounter strong resistance, sit-
ting in a North Carolina diner for several hours as the propri-
etor and his staff ignored them. As time elapsed, a crowd gath-
ered outside, mostly men, wielding bottles and clubs. My
mother was scared for the first time since the training session.
Finally, just as the sun was setting, gigantic state troopers
made taller by imposing hats and boots stormed into the es-
tablishment. One of them announced, “You’re not welcome
here.” He signaled to the rest of the troopers, who dragged the
members of the group out one after another. As my mother
tells the story with a laugh, she was so relieved to leave the
restaurant that she went even more limp than she had been
trained to. The Freedom Riders weren’t charged but were in-
formally exiled from the county.That night, as they were leav-
ing in their borrowed car, tired, hungry, and grumpy, a fleet of
vehicles pulled up beside them on the highway. In the moon-
light, my mother could see the glint of rifles and shotguns
sticking out of cracked-open windows. One car rammed into
them, trying to run them off the road and into the tobacco
fields, but they kept going. When they finally drove across the
county line, the swarm of cars fell off their tail one by one, like
a fighter plane squadron on an aborted attack mission.
That ended my mother’s career as a civil rights activist.
2 7

Next she served a stint as a medical volunteer in Haiti. There
she got her first taste of how it felt to be a white minority. In
the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, she worked
for one of the richest men in the world, Dr. Larremar Mellon
of the Pittsburgh steel family. Mellon had once been a playboy
who wore a top hat and puffed on a long ivory cigarette
holder. However, after meeting Albert Schweitzer, he gave up
his hedonistic life and, at the age of forty-five, went to medical
school. He and his wife later founded the Hôpital Albert
Schweitzer, which tried to meet the medical needs of the pop-
ulation of Port-au-Prince.
My mother had studied for two years at Jefferson Medical
School in Philadelphia as a nondegree “special” student, since
women were not yet eligible for medical degrees there. She fi-
nally gave up her efforts to become a doctor, but the training
served her well in Haiti.There she ran the lab, culturing all the
blood and other samples taken from malnourished patients
who showed signs of infection. She would read the culture and
dispense the appropriate antibiotic. Most of the diseases were
caused by E. coli, since people drank, cooked, and washed with
the same water supply they used as a latrine.
Though Haiti was one of the most class-conscious nations in
the Western Hemisphere, the concept was lost on my mother.
While there she met many of the local elite, including Jacques
Saint-Bris, who sold her a painting for five dollars. A few years
later he was “discovered” and gained worldwide renown for his
application of classical European techniques to the depiction
of local voodoo culture. By that time the painting my mother
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

had bought, a brightly colored abstract that resembled a pea-
cock if it resembled anything, had ballooned in value to the
point that it was by far the most precious thing my parents
owned—the only instance in which they were able to cash in
on some of their cultural capital. The painting sat in the dark-
ness of a closet getting a water stain, while the voodoo dolls
from the Port-au-Prince Iron Market stood proudly like face-
less soldiers on the edges of our bookshelves.
After returning from the Caribbean, my mother spent the
rest of the 1960s wandering the streets of New York in search
of inspiration for her short stories, oblivious to the social and
physical dangers that lurked around her. She wore the flowery
dresses popular at the time, her curly black hair braided into
long pigtails that frayed like twine. She had the same oval face
and long features she would bequeath to her children, and she
wore round eyeglasses that slipped a third of the way down her
nose until their momentum was stopped by a Semitic bump on
an otherwise aquiline feature. They hung there sort of ele-
gantly, and her big, dark eyes peered over their upper rims, so
that she always looked as if she were reading something, even
while walking or talking. Often she wore mismatched socks
underneath her sandals. She didn’t need any drugs to keep up
with the quirkiness of the time; her mind generated enough
random disturbances on its own. Once she glimpsed a sign
over the top of her glasses and thought it read, “Dancing Men
Above.” She stopped, excited at the prospect of a free show.
But the sign read “Danger Men Above,” which she realized only
after her neck had cramped up from craning skyward.
2 9

My mother’s misreading of signs was not limited to text.
Frequently she got quite involved with men before they would
confess to her that they were gay. Many of these ersatz ro-
mances evolved into lifelong friendships, with my mother of-
ten playing the part of stand-in fiancée for the benefit of a gay
friend’s unsuspecting parents. She was as oblivious to sexual
orientation as she was to class and status; these concepts sim-
ply didn’t register with her.
By contrast, my father, Steve, was steeped in class but had
no concept of race. He perceived subtle distinctions in manner
and style and drew from them the finest class gradations. But
on the subject of race and out-groups, he was as oblivious as
Ellen was walking the streets of New York. His mother came
from an old New England family that traced its roots back
through Roger Williams and Miles Standish to the Mayflower,
though no one would guess as much from her constant stream
of profanities. She made a career of flaunting class lines. Her
real name was Hazel Hatch, but she forbade anyone to call her
that. Instead she went by Tiz. As soon as Prohibition took ef-
fect, she started drinking and smoking and cursing. When the
Daughters of the American Revolution asked her to sign on,
she told them they weren’t good enough for her, that she could
be a member of the Colonial Dames, who had descended not
just from soldiers of the Revolution but from officers in that
war. Of course, when the Colonial Dames came calling, she
told them to go to hell. She married a philandering Irish busi-
ness executive. Always independent, she worked during her
two pregnancies and while raising her children, never retiring
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

until she became terminally ill. She spent much of her married
life in one of the oldest houses in the state of Connecticut, but
she died impoverished in a trailer park.
Steve’s father, Walter, was a social climber who had moved
to the Northeast from Ohio. He had smooth skin, stunningly
high cheekbones, and a full head of hair until the day he
dropped dead from a heart attack. A vice president at Burling-
ton Mills, he was one of the first persons to commute daily be-
tween Connecticut and New York City, making it easier to
conceal his extramarital arrangements. Often he would call in
from the city, telling his family that he would be working late
and staying at his pied-à-terre. They knew better and resented
him for it. Late one night he was driving along the Connecti-
cut Turnpike when a drunken hobo stepped out in front of his
car. He struck the man and instantly killed him. It was a clash
of classes. Walter, who had spent his entire life cultivating his
taste in clothes, books, and women, plowed into a man who
had none of the above and not a cent to his name.This incident
always came to mind first whenever I thought of my grandfa-
ther—perhaps because it intrigued me that he actually killed
someone, or perhaps because I wondered how he got away
with it.
Although my grandfather had gotten to his position without
the benefit of much formal schooling—a feat that was still
possible in his generation—he was obsessed with education.
He sent my father to prep schools in Boston and New York,
where young Steve suffered from a case of acne so severe that
a family friend wanted to cite him in a dermatology textbook
3 1

he authored. Whenever he talked about his teenage complex-
ion or the experimental surgery he underwent to sandblast his
face, my father would rub the scar tissue that resulted, talking
about the experience like a tough war veteran who was proud
just to have survived the whole ordeal.
Though he was a star football player for Brown and Nichols
Academy, his acne separated him from the rest of the prep-
school boys. Maybe this explains why he broke ranks with his
classmates, most of whom enrolled in the elite colleges of the
Northeast, to study painting at Lawrence College, a small lib-
eral arts school in Appleton, Wisconsin. When Steve was a ju-
nior there, his father was forced from his position at Burling-
ton Mills in the type of hostile takeover that would not
become commonplace for another quarter-century. My
grandfather took it as an opportunity to go into business for
himself. He started a series of companies that sold products
such as vertical blinds; but these goods, like the corporate raid
that had made him an entrepreneur in the first place, were
ahead of their time. His businesses went under, and his family
lost its landmark 1664 home. Steve had to drop out of college
for lack of funds.
Every family that experiences a socioeconomic setback
must come up with its own narrative of why it happened; ours
was “Too far ahead of his time.” We worked on this rationale,
this excuse, telling and retelling Walter’s story to hone its de-
tails and to forgive ourselves for being guilty of that ultimate
sin in American society: downward mobility.
When he ran out of money for school, Steve went to New
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

York to make it as an abstract painter, following in the foot-
steps of his heroes, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
He loved bebop and had a well-worn copy of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road, but I could never imagine him as a beatnik, and he
denies ever having dressed or acted the part. In New York he
worked at many low-wage jobs, ranging from stock boy at a
paint supply store to “assembly-line” artist to canvas remover.
The last job entailed removing canvases from frames and peel-
ing away the first, painted layer of canvas. These oil paintings
were meticulously hand-brushed by South Koreans. The
painters worked for pennies in their devastated postwar econ-
omy. Perhaps because they knew their works were destined for
the United States, they primarily depicted American GIs. As
seen by the Korean artists, the soldiers had huge, round eyes;
some were crying equally huge, round tears, which splashed
onto their combat boots as they stared longingly at the viewer
with homesickness. My father’s job for eight hours a day was
to shear off these paintings in order to reveal the clean, virgin
canvas underneath. Evidently art could be imported duty-
free, while raw canvas and frames could not. It was cheaper for
the distributor to waste a whole layer of canvas and oil paints,
along with the labor of these Korean workers, than to pay the
import taxes for the blank canvas and frame. This was my fa-
ther’s first lesson on the value of art and artists in the modern
economy. Before that job ended, he sneaked a small GI por-
trait home under his jacket. Vince, as it was captioned, hung in
the hallway of our apartment for many years, reminding us of
a different kind of poverty from the one we saw around us.
3 3

Steve continued his mother’s class rebellion. He spent most
of his days painting, trading work with other artists, and study-
ing the Racing Form. He shared a small, inexpensive studio in
Chinatown with a couple of artists, one of whom—to my fas-
cination and delight—painted only triangles. My father’s
clothes and hands were always splattered with paint, which
embarrassed me to no end whenever he picked me up from
school or a friend’s house. Anytime he got some extra money
he hopped the A-train to Aqueduct Racetrack—which he
called the “horsie zoo” to trick my sister and me into coming
along when it was his turn to take care of us. He spent hours
studying the odds on the huge tote board, scribbling numbers
onto a notepad or banging them into a plastic calculator. As he
handicapped each race, he rubbed the yellowed scar tissue on
his cheeks, the fossilized record of his prep school suffering.
Partly because of these unchanging calluses, the signs of age al-
ways seemed missing from his body. He never grayed much
over the course of his life. He had a benign balding spot on the
top of his head that always stayed the size of a half-dollar, never
growing in area or severity. He seemed to lose fat and gain
muscle over the course of his adult life. He was as oblivious to
his own age as he was to the flow of bettors around him: old
Jewish men chewing on cigar stubs, young Rastafarians with
two-foot-high hair smoking spliffs, Chinese retirees hocking
lugies onto the ticket-littered floor. All he saw were the num-
bers in the Racing Form. His obliviousness was the opposite of
my mother’s: whereas she was prone to see things that weren’t
there, he was likely not to notice things that were. Both adap-
H o n k y D o w n w a r d M o b i l i t y

tations would serve them well in the inner city, where my
mother maintained a vigilant and healthy dose of paranoia and
where my father often had to step over unconscious junkies
splayed out in the street or ignore bleating sirens as he walked
my sister and me to and from school each day.
3 5

all sounds.Then we learn which are not words and which have
meaning to the people around us. Likewise, for my sister and
me, the first step in our socialization was being taught that we
weren’t black. Like a couple of boot camp trainees, we had
first to be stripped of any illusions we harbored of being like
the other kids, then be built back up in whiteness.
My sister Alexandra started getting the message as early as
age two. She and I attended nursery school courtesy of the
federally subsidized Head Start program. One of the Great
Society initiatives that seemed to parallel our lives, Head
Start was the result of a decade of research showing that the
educational deficits poor kids faced in high school could be
traced back to their preschool years—that is, to the time
when they were with their parents at home. Never mind what
this implied about certain people’s parenting practices; the
answer was to provide poor kids with day care where they
would get at least one nutritious meal a day and be exposed to
educational toys. Head Start even had a government-
Learning race is like learning a language. First we try mouthing
fo
u
r
R
a
c
e
L
e
s
s
o
n
s

mandated commencement day to get us accustomed to the
idea of graduating so it wouldn’t seem strange by the time we
reached high school.We had to make our own caps and gowns
out of crepe paper.
Despite the nominal separation of church and state, our lo-
cal program first met in the basement of a local church before
moving to the community center of the Bernard Baruch
houses on the other side of Columbia Street. Likewise, our
Head Start celebrated all Christian holidays. Each December
Santa Claus came bounding in with a bag of presents and a se-
ries of “Ho! Ho! Hos!” so enthusiastic and deep in tone that
they scared us and shook the cubbyholes where we stored our
things each morning.Then he would sit down and balance each
kid on his knee as if he were the ventriloquist and we the
wooden dummies.
“And have you been a naughty girl or a nice girl?” he asked
my sister when her turn came one particular year.
“I want a Big Wheel,” she responded, her manner as re-
hearsed as Santa’s.
It didn’t matter what they asked for; everyone got dolls.
The boys got boy dolls, and the girls got girl dolls. In line
with the consciousness of the times, the teachers had made
sure that the dolls were ethnically appropriate. The other
kids’ dolls looked like black versions of Ken and Barbie, while
my sister ended up with the only white doll in her class. All
the figures were generic knockoffs, probably bought from a
street vendor in Chinatown; in fact, the black dolls looked ex-
actly like the white one, but with a coat of brown paint on
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

their bodies and hair. Nonetheless, when the other kids saw
that Alexandra had a real Barbie, they stampeded her, begging,
pleading, and demanding that she trade with them. She
clutched the doll to her chest as girls and even boys tried to
pry it from her.
“Black is beautiful!” the teachers screamed over the din of
crying and yelling.
“We want Barbie!” the kids yelled back in unison.
Finally, one kid pulled hard at the white doll’s legs and
broke the toy in half. Evidently satisfied that she had secured at
least a piece of Barbie, she scurried off to a corner to dress up
the half-doll. Eventually my sister got the other half back and
willingly traded her white doll for one in the black style. She
was content. All she wanted was a doll with long hair that she
could comb.
At some point that same week, our grandparents called to
wish us a Happy Chanukah. My sister recounted the Barbie
events to my grandmother, who, in turn, told her the story of
King Solomon and the baby. “Two women each said that the
baby was hers,” she explained slowly, enunciating each syllable
to my sister who, at that stage in her development, paid eager
attention to anything involving babies. “King Solomon told
them that he would cut the baby in half and then each could
have part of it.” She explained that one of the women broke
down crying, offering the baby to the other woman. “ ‘You are
the true mother,’ the King told this one,” Grandma recounted
as our grandfather breathed not quite silently on the other
phone extension, as was his custom.
3 9

“Do you know how he knew?” Grandma then asked, trying
to pry the moral of the story out of Alexandra. “What would
you say if King Solomon said that to you about your baby?”
“I would take the top half,” my sister explained. “So I could
brush her hair.”
In the family annals, my sister’s answer to the King Solomon
question was what got told and retold; the issue of black
beauty, the other kids’ desperation for the white doll, and the
idea that a “real” Barbie could only be white was left for the
parents of the other children to sort out. It wasn’t our prob-
lem; after all, we were the color of Barbie.
The next year everyone got black dolls whether they liked
it or not. And since they had long hair, my sister was happy.
By the time she was six years old, Alexandra had tired of
combing and brushing and wanted to do more advanced hair
things. All her friends now had cornrows, and my sister
begged my mother to braid some for her, too. Alexandra’s best
friend, Adoonie, lived in the building across from ours in the
complex. She and my sister spent hours envying each other’s
hair. Adoonie wanted blonde locks that looked like Farrah
Fawcett’s, while my sister wanted the cornrows that made
Adoonie fit in with the rest of the kids in the playground. My
sister got particularly jealous each month when Adoonie and
her mother unbraided and cleaned her cornrows with witch
hazel, then rebraided them so neatly that they looked like rows
of stitches on some machine-knitted sweater. The whole pro-
cedure took hours, and since Adoonie was an only child she
and her mother could spend an entire leisurely day on the en-
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

deavor. It was pure mother-daughter time, something Alexan-
dra craved in the face of her competition with me for parental
attention.
“Please, can you do my hair like Doonie’s?” she’d plead with
our mother every so often, trying to braid her own hair to
demonstrate the technique. “Please, please, please!” My
mother, who couldn’t draw, knit, or cornrow a straight line,
told Alexandra that her hair type wouldn’t work for that style
but was beautiful in its own right.
“I don’t care; I want my hair like Doonie’s—like every-
body’s,” Alexandra pouted. Ellen wiped the tears from her face
and spent a good portion of the next hour brushing my sister’s
hair in the mirror. After a couple more episodes like this one,
Alexandra finally let go of the dream of cornrows. But the next
year the movie 10 came out, making Bo Derek famous. At first
all the little girls thought Bo Derek, with her cornrowed hair
and tropical tan, must be black.They wanted to grow their own
cornrows longer so that they, like Bo Derek, could have the
best of both worlds: long hair and tight braids along their scalp.
Then one of the older girls told the group that Bo Derek
was actually white, a revelation that left the younger ones feel-
ing confused, hurt, and betrayed. My sister, however, was joy-
ous; now she, too, could have the cornrows she had, up till
then, been denied because of her race. When she brought
home this piece of information, our mother had no choice but
to relent and braid Alexandra’s hair as best she could, putting
in black, red, and orange African beads as my sister requested.
It was all to no avail. The braids frayed, and the beads didn’t
4 1

stand out against her chestnut hair; rather, they looked like
colored gnats or lice that had infested her scalp. My sister was
not entirely satisfied with my mother’s effort, but she wanted
to show Adoonie nonetheless, so she rushed out to the play-
ground to find her.
“Yo, excuse me, miss,” an older girl said and laughed,
“someone left some twine on your head.”
“Is that some cornrows?” another asked, stopping from her
jump-rope counting game. “Looks more like wheat to me.”
“Oh, snap,” added a third, cracking up.
Alexandra started crying and ran back into the pitted brick
building. When Adoonie found her upstairs, she tried to con-
sole her. “My mother will do your braids for you if you like.”
She stroked my sister’s head as she spoke softly to her. “Won’t
that be nice, wouldn’t you like that?”
“Forget it,” Alexandra said as she unwound the cornrows,
which had already started to unbraid themselves as if they, too,
didn’t like how the experiment had turned out. “I don’t want
the stupid cornrows. They’re stupid.” At this comment,
Adoonie cried and ran off. From then on Alexandra only
wanted long blonde hair, straight as could be, taking comfort
in the cultural value of her whiteness.
It didn’t take more than one or two messages like this to
drive home the meaning of race to my sister. Race was not
something mutable, like a freckle or a hairstyle; it defined who
looked like whom, who was allowed to be in the group—and
who wasn’t. But for Alexandra and me, race was turned
inside-out. Notwithstanding the Barbie incident, the corn-
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

rows, and the images we saw on television, we had no idea that
we belonged to the majority group, the privileged one. We
merely thought we didn’t belong.
That began to change for me when I started at the local
public school, across Pitt Street on the other side of the hous-
ing complex. By then I had learned that I was white and other
people around me weren’t, but I had yet to understand what
that difference meant. I had yet to learn the privileges that at-
tended whiteness. One month in public school would fix that.
On the first day of classes that fall, the principal called my
mother and me into his office. “Mrs. Cone-ly,” he said in a
heavy Puerto Rican accent, “can I speak with you for a mo-
ment?” The school was Public School 4, the Mini School,
named for its diminutive size. However, the moniker reflected
nothing about the size of the classes. There were only three,
each of them overcrowded with about forty students.
“We do not have a class for your son,” the principal told my
mother, looking down and smiling at me; I remember staring,
transfixed, at his snakeskin boots, feeling as if they might
slither around the floor of his office if I took my eyes off them.
“You see,” he continued, “there is the black and Puerto Ri-
can classes.” The words Puerto Rican stood out from the rest;
they seemed to spring naturally from his mouth, whereas the
English words dropped out like stillborns. “And then there
is the Chinese class . . . ,” he trailed off, as if he regretted the
Chinese class. “There have been many Chinese that come here
now.” They were coming from an ever-expanding Chinatown,
which had crept into the other side of the school district.
4 3

My mother didn’t quite follow him. She wondered whether
the fact that the principal did not speak English too well meant
I would learn Spanish in this school. I remember only his at-
tire, every detail of it. Over his snakeskin boots he wore a
beige polyester suit and matching tie. The jacket had many
buttons, so that it looked more like a shirt than the upper half
of a suit.
“So, which class do you prefer?” he asked, fingering one of
the buttons.
It now dawned on my mother that school desegregation did
not necessarily mean classroom desegregation. She still had
not answered the principal, who now took it upon himself to
explain further. “You see,” he added, “there is no white class.”
He now reclined, crossed his arms, and smiled, content that he
had finally gotten his point across.
“I suppose we’ll take the black class,” she said, trying to
guess which one my father would have chosen. In this instance,
the choices our race gave us were made quite explicit—by a
government institution, no less.
I found myself in a crowded classroom with paint peeling
from the walls and plaster falling from the ceiling.The teacher
was a black woman with a slender frame but a booming voice.
She normally taught fourth or fifth grade and wasn’t too happy
about being stuck with us first-graders. She paced across the
front of the room, intermittently drawing on the blackboard
to illustrate what she was saying. Sometimes she would write
out big words, forgetting that most of us could not read much
more than the alphabet or words like “cat.” When not drawing
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

on the board, she compulsively brushed chalk residue off her
hands and dress. Nevertheless, as each day wore on the layer of
chalk dust covering her got progressively deeper, giving her
skin a ghost-like quality, as if she were fading away—along
with our attention—during the afternoon hours.
As if to compensate for her weakening skin tone and our
waning concentration, she grew stricter by the hour. In the
mornings we could get away with whispering or fidgeting in
our seats. But by one p.m., any peep or audible rustle meant a
whack across the knuckles with a yardstick. For everybody but
me, that is.
“Yo, your momma been on welfare so long,” my classmate
Earl whispered to me, “her face’s on food stamps.” He gave a
low five to the boy seated in front of him, checking first to see
that the teacher was still turned toward the blackboard. How-
ever, he did not take account of the fact that her hearing im-
proved after the lunch hour.
“Up here right now, Earl,” she said. She stood akimbo, fists
balled up.
Earl marched up slowly, staring at his sneakers, face down
and Afro up, as if it offered protection. It didn’t. She took his
hands and whacked them three times with the thin edge of the
ruler. I felt myself leap off the seat with each whack, as if the
ruler were a lever and I were sitting on the other end of it. My
spine and head stayed still, but the rest of me moved upward.
Then I started to blink, and my cheeks began to twitch. Earl
did not flinch or yelp in the least.
He turned around and walked back to his desk with a
4 5

stoicism that exceeded his age. When he passed by my seat on
the way back to his place, I stared down as he had in the pres-
ence of the teacher, unable to look him in the eyes. I remem-
ber catching a glimpse of his bloodied knuckles, where his
brown skin had parted to reveal the scarlet flesh underneath. I
fantasized about being beaten myself, digging the graphite tip
of my number-two pencil into my skin. Then I released the
pressure, trying to share the sense of relief I imagined Earl felt
after his punishment was over. At lunch Earl asked if he could
sit next to me. I nodded. Still looking down, I tensed up and
twitched, waiting for his blow. It never came. He offered me
his Tater Tots. As if he could read my mind, he said, “Aw, she’s
alright; don’t worry about her.”
Over the weeks, every kid received this form of corporal
punishment, boys and girls alike. Some kids, Earl among
them, suffered the ruler’s blows so often that their knuckles
scabbed and then scarred over into rough keloid skin. I was the
only one who escaped the yardstick—and not, I knew even at
the time, because I was particularly well behaved. Everyone
involved, teacher and students, took it for granted that a black
teacher would never cross the racial line to strike a white stu-
dent. The other kids never resented me for this; on the con-
trary, they were quite cheerful toward me. I even tried to get
into fights in that school, fights I knew I would lose; I wanted
to feel the relief of being struck. But Earl, one of the largest
kids in the school, took it upon himself to protect me. By the
end of my first term there, my mother noticed that I was
twitching and blinking compulsively—not just during class-
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

room hours, and not just from the image of the yardstick strik-
ing Earl’s knuckles. There was something else bothering me.
Each day I came home from school trembling and immediately
ran to the bathroom to relieve myself. My mother also noticed
that my Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear and even some of my
Toughskin jeans were urine-stained. She asked me why I didn’t
go to the bathroom at school.
“If you go to the bathroom,” I said, nodding my head to em-
phasize the seriousness of what I was saying, “they cut off your
pee-pee.”
“No, they don’t cut off your pee-pee,” she answered,
stroking my head as it jerked repeatedly to the side in one of
my many new tics.
“Yes,” I nodded exuberantly, quite sure of what I was saying,
appearing almost happy at the horrible possibility I was de-
scribing. Only when I was deeply engrossed in or completely
certain of something did my tics disappear. “If you go to the
bathroom, they cut off your pee-pee.” I now said it as if I were
exasperated at having to explain something so obvious. This
was the first time that I used the term they to describe the col-
lective other, the same they who would commit countless
crimes throughout my childhood but a different they from
those who made the rules for school, set policy on busing, and
decided how much rent we paid or how many food stamps we
received.
Wanting to get to the bottom of my tics and my reluctance
to use the restroom at school, my mother made an appoint-
ment with the principal. This time his clothing had changed
4 7

dramatically. He wore the same gray snakeskin boots, but over
them hung not a friendly beige suit but rather a black, urbane
one with a matching silk shirt. His tie, which bore a picture of
Bugs Bunny, stood in sharp contrast to the gangsterish shirt
and jacket. He sat on the edge of his desk, one foot swinging
back and forth slowly, as if he were trying to hypnotize my
mother. His head motion added to this effect. He nodded
rhythmically, as if he were checking out her body. She was
wearing her favorite denim jacket with mother-of-pearl but-
tons, though she could not fasten them across her ample chest.
She had sewn a Navajo bead design on the back to force some
strange truce between cowboys and Indians in her clothing.
“Does the teacher hit Dalton?” she asked. She had already
asked me, and I had said no—but I twitched when I answered
the question.
“Oh, no,” he answered. “In fact,” he added, “Dalton is the
only student that is not hit.”
Bingo! thought my mother, realizing I had told her the truth.
“That must be it,” she said to the principal. “That’s why he’s
twitching.”
“So you want him to receive physical discipline as well,
then?” the principal asked, as if this were the logical conclusion
to their conversation. His boots had stopped moving and were
now clamped against the side of his desk for balance as he
leaned toward her.
“No, no,” she said, pushing her glasses back up her nose, as
was her habit. She asked whether something could be done to
prevent the other kids from being struck.
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

“No, Mrs. Cone-ly,” he explained in a tone that was simulta-
neously sympathetic and exasperated. He explained that the
other parents had requested that their children be physically
disciplined. “We knew that white parents spoil their kids,” he
said, “so she doesn’t strike Dalton.”
The Puerto Rican class had a Puerto Rican teacher who also
hit the students, so the solution that the principal and my
mother worked out was to switch me to the Chinese class.The
teacher there did not use corporal punishment. Though grow-
ing rapidly, the local Asian population was still comparatively
small, so the class had the added benefit of having fewer stu-
dents than the others. I transferred in during the first week of
the spring semester. Half the lessons were taught in English,
the other half in Chinese. I liked the friendly dynamics of the
class and felt challenged by my language handicap. My linguis-
tic disadvantage compensated for the fact that by some error, I
had been switched from my first-grade class into kindergarten.
“When I call out your name, stand up,” the teacher said dur-
ing roll call on my first day. “If you have an American name, to-
morrow I will tell you your name in Chinese. If you have a
Chinese name, tomorrow I will tell you your name in En-
glish.” I was excited by the prospect of being renamed and
merging into the group, of which I was the only non–ethni-
cally Chinese member. The next morning the instructor came
in and started the roll call again. This time she read off two
names for everyone.
“John,” she said. “Jiang. Jaili, Julie.” Then she got to me.
“Dalton,” she said. “Dalton,” she repeated.
4 9

I was crushed. She announced that she could not find a
translation for my name. Of course, at the time I didn’t know
that none of these name pairs were actual translations, that
there was no straightforward way to convert names from a
tonal, character-based language to English. Nonetheless, to
make me feel better she said my name once again in the sec-
ond tone, so that it went up in pitch in the latter syllable. She
made the entire class repeat it in her Cantonese accent. They
did. Instead of feeling better, though, I felt singled out by this
attention.
To make matters worse, the next day we went through our
birthdays. I found out that everyone else had been born in the
year of the dog, 1970, while I—the ostensible first-grader
among them—was born in the year of the rooster, 1969. The
kids chuckled to themselves, but their laughter did not
wound me the way the snaps of some of the black kids had.
This, I would later realize, captured the essential difference
between race and ethnicity. It would have seemed absurd if
the black teacher had tried to integrate me into that class.
Racial groupings were about domination and struggles for
power; what’s more, race barriers were taken as both natural
and insurmountable.
But in the Chinese class, eventually I began to feel I was
part of the student community. My Chinese language skills im-
proved, and my black hair grew longer and straighter—as if I
were unconsciously trying to assimilate—so that by the end of
the first month my mother confessed she could not pick me
out instantly when she came to walk me home from school.
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

While life was for the most part more comfortable for me in
the Chinese class, I made no real friends there, no one that I
saw after school. Most of the kids lived west of the school, on
the other side of the district, and were picked up promptly at
three o’clock by their grandparents, who generally spoke no
English and shepherded them home by their wrists. I must have
already started to segregate myself culturally, since it never
even crossed my mind to invite any of the kids home with me
after school. At the same time, I had lost touch with most of my
friends from the black class, who lived scattered among the
housing projects and tenements of my neighborhood.
After I switched classes my tics gradually disappeared, and I
no longer held my urine all day. My mother asked me if I was,
in fact, going to the bathroom at school. “Yes,” I responded.
“Now they no cut off your pee-pee.” My diction had taken on a
Chinese rhythm. She laughed, relieved that I had resolved my
fears. But soon afterward she read a very disturbing story in
the Daily News. “Castrator Caught,” the headline read. The
story went on to explain how several students had lost their
genitals in the P.S. 4 bathroom. An angry crowd had finally ap-
prehended this child molester and beat him to death on De-
lancey Street. I had been right all along.
My parents decided that enough was enough. When the se-
mester ended I was once again yanked from my class, this time
bound for another school altogether. That didn’t work out ei-
ther. But then my mother learned from a friend that the Board
of Education did not require much in the way of proof of one’s
address to verify a child’s school district. She could tell them
5 1

she lived in the Empire State Building and, as long as she could
get mail there and respond to immunization notices, lice
alerts, and other school correspondence, no one would ever
be the wiser. It was even the case, she learned, that after Octo-
ber 1 she could switch my address back to the projects and,
since the school year would already be under way, the Board of
Education could not force me to return to my local school.
What’s more, once October rolled around, my adopted school
was legally required—thanks to the liberal New York State
courts—to send a bus to pick me up and take me home.
A small group of enterprising parents from the neighbor-
hood had enough crosstown contacts to take advantage of
these loopholes. They spent the first month of each academic
year carting their kids across town on the subway or the M14
bus to schools in well-endowed districts; once the October 1
deadline came, a yellow school bus would swoop into the
projects, rounding up the fortunate kids. Each year the dance
would begin anew. The schools that were inundated with us
“ghetto” kids didn’t mind the arrangement, since we took
funds with us wherever we went. Title I of the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act of 1965, one of the corner-
stones of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, provided federal
funds for students from economically distressed areas, be they
the dirt farms of eastern Kentucky or the dirt-colored build-
ings of the Lower East Side. Title I kids, as we were called,
benefited by getting better educations, while the schools
themselves won out financially.The losers in the arrangement
were the local schools, which lost not only funding but also
H o n k y R a c e L e s s o n s

the students whose parents enjoyed the most “social capital,”
that is, connections.
The they who made up these policies were, on the surface,
quite different in character from the they who stole car radios
or cut off the peckers of my classmates at the Mini School.The
Board of Education, the state welfare agency, and all the other
theys who set the rules of our lives seemed obsessed with laws
and regulations. They wrote them, implemented them, fol-
lowed them, and in some cases were actually composed of
them and nothing more. Beneath the surface, however, these
state behemoths were no different in nature from the spirits
who stole; they were just as arbitrary, random, and mysteri-
ous. One rule said you had to go to school where you lived;
another said that where you “lived” was your choice. One law
gave extra money to underfunded school districts; another
took it away and gave it to better-off districts. It seemed pos-
sible to get whatever you wanted as long as you knew the
magic words and when to say them. It was through such a spell
that I was propelled off the life trajectory shared by the other
neighborhood kids and catapulted into New York City’s middle
and upper classes. My life chances had just taken a turn for the
better, but my sense of the order of things—that is, the peck-
ing order of race and class—was about to be stood on its head.
By the time I left the Mini School I had learned what the
concept of race meant. I now knew that, based on the color of
my skin, I would be treated a certain way, whether that en-
tailed not getting rapped across the knuckles, not having a
name like everyone else, or not having the same kind of hair as
5 3

my best friend. Some kids got unique treatment for being
taller or heavier than everyone else, but being whiter than
everyone else was a different matter altogether. Teachers usu-
ally did a good job of ignoring the fact that one kid was shorter
than another or another was fatter, but it was they, not the
other students, who made my skin color an issue.The kids had
only picked up on the adult cues and then reinterpreted them.
Moreover, height, weight, and other physical characteristics
were relative states. But being white was constructed as a mat-
ter of kind, not degree. Either you were black, or you weren’t.
Some of the kids in my original first-grade class were
blancitos—lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans—but that didn’t
mean that they got rapped on the knuckles any softer than the
darker-skinned kids. Once you weren’t a blanco, it didn’t mat-
ter what your skin color was in P.S. 4.
At my new school, the name of the game was class. That
brought a whole new set of rules. And it would take me a
while to learn them.
5 4

hind it I was safe from the school castrator. I was safe from
muggers. I was safe from other kids. My fear of assault was as
constant as the bellowing of my lungs; I was only occasionally
aware of it, only when it had ceased to be breathing and turned
into panting.
My mother had instructed my sister and me over and over
again about what to do in certain emergency situations. This
preparing for the worst made me more afraid on a day-to-day
basis, but that was part of her plan. She had programmed us
with a series of computer-like algorithms. “Do whatever
someone with a gun says to do,” was one of her instructions,
“unless they tell you to get into a car. Never get into a car with
anyone. Run or scream.” Another stricture: “Always lock the
door. Never open it until you have a) asked who it is, b) looked
through the peephole, c) recognized who it is, or d) seen that
it’s the police.”
Not until I encountered people who grew up with unlocked
screen doors did I realize that not everyone lived most of their
The steel door to our apartment was my security blanket. Be-
fi
ve
F
e
a
r

waking hours behind a steel barricade. Not until I met people
who lived in one- or two-story homes did I realize that most
kids don’t worry about beer bottles raining down on their
heads from the balconies above, as I did on Friday and Saturday
nights.Taking out the garbage, I always opened the door to the
incinerator room with trepidation, terrified that someone
would pounce on me. When I picked up the laundry from the
washing machines in the basement, there was occasionally a
character lurking in the shadows—and not merely one from a
child’s imagination. In these instances I would scurry up the
stairs to the lobby and wait for the elevator there rather than
sit in the basement with the potential predator. Often I told
my mother about these shadowy figures, and she would sum-
mon the authorities to go down and inspect the scene; some-
times arrests were made. If an elevator stopped and I didn’t
like the look of the person inside I wouldn’t get on, feigning
that it was going in the wrong direction. But the place I feared
most of all was the stairwell—and with good reason, for more
than once someone was raped or mugged in there.
Whenever all the elevators were broken, I would have to
walk all twenty-one flights of that windowless cement hole.
On some floors the lights were out, and I would traverse a
story or two in complete blackness. Other times I would force
myself to confront my fear, choosing the stairwell instead of
the elevator for a flight or two. The gray, graffitied fire route
wove itself into my nightmares. I dreamed I was trapped in it;
I was fleeing something, my legs tiring with each passing mo-
ment, and there were no exits.
H o n k y F e a r

By early in my childhood I had cultivated a keen sense of
caution probably not unlike that developed by soldiers in the
bush.Walking down the street, I had an awareness of what was
going on around me that someone who grew up in the suburbs
would have had great difficulty acquiring. However, several
events kept my illusions of my own streetwiseness and security
in check.The first came when a family was robbed and killed a
few blocks from us. The assailants gained entry to the victims’
house by dressing up as policemen. That changed my mother’s
door-opening rule; I was now to keep the police waiting until
I had called the station to confirm that they had been sent over.
The second event happened to us and completely shattered
my sense of our apartment as a fortress. One weekend we
went to visit my grandparents and left the kitchen window
open. On the twenty-first floor this should not have been a
problem, the biggest risk being that rain might come through
the window. However, a cat burglar tied the fire hose to the
railing around the perimeter of the roof and swung into our
apartment. Once inside, he ignored the sticker my mother had
posted that read beware, we participate in operation iden-
tification, nypd and waltzed out the front door loaded down
with our belongings, which my mother had etched with a se-
cret code that the police could track in the case of an event
such as this one.The burglar must have made several trips, be-
cause he took our television, our radio, the silverware that my
parents had gotten as a wedding present, our plates and
glasses, even a couple of pieces of furniture.When we got back
from Pennsylvania, we saw the door ajar. My father made the
5 7

rest of us wait in the hallway while he tiptoed into the apart-
ment. He surveyed the damage, noticed the open kitchen win-
dow, slammed it shut, and locked it. My stairwell nightmares
were soon replaced by bad dreams about a robber floating
twenty-one stories above ground, hovering outside our win-
dow. In my dreams he looked like José, the overdose victim
portrayed on the Avenue D mural. He had the same goatee and
devilish smile.
Not much later the burglar struck again.We returned from
a trip to find the door once again ajar, this time with a trail of
blood leading over to the window, which we had closed and
locked. That, however, had not deterred this daredevil. He
used the same tactic as the first time, but on this occasion
crashed through the window glass like the star of an action
film. There wasn’t much left to steal, so he took the few bot-
tles of wine my father kept. We went to a friend’s home for a
few nights while my father slept in the apartment, hoping to
catch the robber and bean him with his Ted Williams baseball
bat, but the crook never returned.
My parents decided that the only thing we could do was to
install gates in the windows. Unfortunately, they ran in the
thousands of dollars, money that we didn’t have. The cheapest
alternatives, which cost several hundred dollars—most of our
savings—were black steel bars that were bolted into the win-
dow frame and could not be removed except by taking apart
the entire window jamb. From then on we lived in a prison-
like apartment unit, wriggling our hands through the bars
whenever we wanted to open or shut the window.
H o n k y F e a r

Thanks to their days on Seventh Street, when their televi-
sion was chained to the radiator, my parents were familiar with
being robbed. But this was the first time it had happened to
me. Crime and violence were not uncommon in our area, but
they always seemed to happen elsewhere and, I believed, could
be avoided, like the beer bottles falling from the sky. Even the
castrations at school didn’t feel like a personal threat; I merely
had to avoid the bathroom to avoid danger. But the prospect of
someone crashing through our twenty-first-floor window was
frightening on another level. It meant I was not even safe in my
own bed, not even behind our locked double-steel front door.
In short, there was nothing I could do to escape risk. Only in
retrospect did I realize that break-ins were not a common oc-
currence for most families in America and that having bars on
the windows was not normal.
But in our case it was necessary. After we installed the bars,
my nightmares finally waned. I felt protected from the outside
world. I also felt safer playing indoors; prior to the window
guards, I had always been nervous whenever my friends and I
played catch or tackle football or tag in the house. I feared one
of us would hurl ourselves through the window or, more real-
istically, toss a ball or toy through the glass and kill a pedes-
trian all those stories below.
Often I hung on those black bars, my hands gripping them
so tightly that the cartilage of my knuckles shone white
through my skin, as I stared down at the other project kids
playing whiffle ball or ring-a-levio or manhunt. Manhunt was
my favorite project game, and I would cross the barrier of the
5 9

bars anytime to play.While kids could play caps or ring-a-levio
throughout the entire year, manhunt was reserved for the
hottest months. The game was simple. One person was se-
lected as the hunted. He got a fifteen-minute head start and
could hide anywhere in the housing complex. Soon afterward,
the several dozen or so boys would go out in search of the
hunted.The prey could not go into apartments but had to stay
in the public spaces such as hallways, alleys, and rooftops. If no
one found him the game could last all day.
After a year or two of playing manhunt I got quite skilled at
it. I enjoyed being hunted, outwitting kids several years older
than myself. In fact, I was only ever caught once, and that was
the last day I played. I was supposed to be cleaning up my
room. Instead I sneaked out of the apartment around the time I
knew manhunt would be commencing. I immediately volun-
teered for the role of the hunted, and when the game started I
took off to the project basements, which were linked into one
huge, dimly lit cavern. My strategy for that day was simple: I
hid in a dark corner of one of the less well-known rooms in the
basement, shimmying up the pipes and perching overhead,
careful not to touch the steam conduits that would have scalded
me. Several times I heard approaching footsteps and whispers
and held my breath, but for the most part this was a quite re-
laxing, even boring, tactic. It lacked the heart-pounding adren-
aline rush that came with an on-the-move strategy, where one
always stayed just a step ahead of the posse. I was so well hidden
that at one point that day I even took a nap, checking my watch
H o n k y F e a r

every so often as I waited for the five o’clock hour to approach,
signaling the end of the game and victory for me.
My mother spoiled my plans, however. Furious that I had
disobeyed her by sneaking out, she stormed into the central
area of the project, grabbed the first kid she saw and de-
manded to know where I was.
“I dunno,” responded Angel, who despite his name and his
timid answer was one of the tougher kids around. “We’re look-
ing for where he’s at, too.” She listened as he recounted the
rules of the game to her. Then he ran off and reported his en-
counter to some of the other kids. A group of them collected
around my mother, following her like a brood as she stalked
me—and trampled on the entire premise of the game. She
marched into the central security office and asked if she could
sit in front of the video monitors. Aided by her maternal in-
stincts, she watched as the images flickered across the screens,
one after another. Eventually she recognized my figure and
asked the guard to freeze on that shot. The guard explained to
my mother exactly where I had installed myself and how to get
there, and then she descended into the basement to retrieve
me, trailed by the manhunters, who were eager to watch me
get a whipping.
I wish she had hit me. I heard the sound of a whole bunch of
footsteps coming toward me. “Oh snap,” I remember hearing
one of the kids say. “Now he’s going to get it.” Somehow I
knew instantly that this was no mere pack of kids that had
come to win the game or even to beat me senseless. I could
6 1

feel my mother’s presence. I turned to see who was approach-
ing and made immediate eye contact with her.
“This instant,” she said, and nothing more.
The kids surrounding her were all shaking their hands
rapidly, our signal for someone getting busted. “Ooooh,” they
said as they made this gesture, which looked as if they were try-
ing to signal the spiciness of something they had just bitten into.
I hung down from one of the pipes and dropped to the
ground. My mother immediately grabbed me by the ear and
dragged me alongside her. Instead of weaving our way to our
own building in the underground passageways, she took the
first stairs she saw out of the basement and into the bright June
light. Kids followed, taunting me. “You lost, you lost to your
momma!” they yelled as she dragged me through the play-
grounds so that everyone could see.We passed the coach of my
little league baseball team, Las Piratas, who was sitting on the
bench, smoking his menthol cigarettes. Right then and there
she gave me my punishment: she wrapped her arms around me
and gave me a big kiss, overemphasizing the smacking sound of
her pucker. I ran home and cleaned up my room.The pleasure
of manhunt had been forever spoiled.
In retrospect, manhunt was not a strange game for us to be
playing. Unlike baseball or football, it taught us important
skills for life in the “ghetto.” It trained the hunted to evade both
criminals and the police, who in that neighborhood were
deemed equivalent. And it socialized the hunters to adopt a
posse mentality, one that would become institutionalized
among those who joined the local gang, the Junior Outlaws. It
H o n k y F e a r

may have been through this sense of group unity that my peers
achieved the sense of security that forever eluded me.
This is not to say that I didn’t try to integrate and hold my
own in the group. I studied karate with the express purpose of
becoming tough enough to feel secure. My father and I took
lessons from a black Muslim sensei named Rahim, formerly
Robert. He had worked in the Brooklyn shipyards when there
still was such a thing, scraping and painting the sides of huge
vessels. He spent some time in jail and smoked marijuana on a
daily basis. Robert became Rahim after taking up martial arts,
studying with a Muslim sensei who inspired a life change in his
pupil. Rahim quit his job, stopped smoking pot, and devoted
his life to the Koran, supporting himself in a haphazard, catch-
as-catch-can manner.
We were Rahim’s only white pupils, and I think he might
have had reservations about sharing his skills with us but
needed whatever work he could get. I encountered some cul-
tural confusion during our training; each time he bent down
to pray in the direction of Mecca I thought he was doing
something karate-related, perhaps a stretch of some sort. Fol-
lowing his lead, I got in the habit of laying out a towel before
each session, kneeling and bending until my forehead touched
the ground, and mumbling as if I were reciting some of the
Koran. Neither Rahim nor my father ever discouraged the
practice. It came in handy when Rahim took us to a tourna-
ment in a huge mosque and cultural center in Brooklyn. I was
overwhelmed from the moment I arrived; I had never seen
a ceiling so high. The strange calligraphy that lined each
6 3

entranceway and the low-relief designs that crawled up the
walls and columns like vines seemed to grow and breathe in
some mystical way. As Rahim escorted us into the mat-
covered arena, some people stared at us through narrowed
eyes as they noticed our whiteness. Everyone else was black;
there were not even any Puerto Ricans at this event.
Then the call to prayer came over the loudspeaker, and the
milling around ceased instantly; everyone fell into orderly
lines. This transformation impressed on me the power of Is-
lam—that a chaotic, seemingly menacing group of people
could suddenly organize themselves into perfect rows, like
schoolchildren more disciplined than any I had ever seen. Even
my anti-religious father fell into line, and we all bowed to
Mecca. The familiarity of this rite felt comforting, and once it
had taken place the aura of tension dissipated, replaced by a
sense of spirited competition. I won in the first round but lost
in the second of the single-elimination tournament, but that
was good enough. I had earned my yellow belt.
Though I had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, my
association with Rahim did not achieve the intended purpose
of making me feel safer and more secure in the neighborhood,
and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and
killed. Evidently, even a black belt did little against a gun; in
fact, it may have been a detriment. By the account of his
widow, Rahim had resisted a mugging, using his fighting ability
to fend off his attackers until one of them pulled out a pistol
and shot him. Somehow I imagined him dressed up in his
karate gi, being picked on because of his garb the way I was
H o n k y F e a r

when I wore my outfit down in the playground. Others who
knew him shook their heads and whispered to my father that
he had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range. For
once I listened quietly, discovering that I could learn more by
not asking anything than by opening my mouth. The implica-
tion was that this had been no random robbery but that Rahim
had been assassinated for a reason: drugs.
This was the first time violence had entered our lives in a
serious, personal way. I tried to envision Rahim lying motion-
less, dead, but I could keep him still in my mind only for as
long as I imagined he could hold his breath; after about a
minute he would spring up, gasping for air. I suppose they held
a memorial service for him in the same mosque where my fa-
ther and I had fought for our new belt colors, but we were
never invited; not having seen his corpse, I still could not quite
clothe Rahim in death. Eventually, I asked my father which
story about the killing he believed. He raised his eyebrows at
me, apparently shocked that I had heard the adult whispers go-
ing back and forth above my head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“There are some things that we will never know.” He rubbed
the scar tissue of his face and punched the plastic keys of his
calculator a little harder than normal. My father always said
more with his silences, his pauses, and the movement of his
fingers to his face than he did with his words. He communi-
cated the mystery and uncertainty of life in a way that my
mother never could.
I wanted to think that Rahim had been the victim of random
fate, of chaotic violence; however, this explanation seemed as
6 5

forced and restless as my image of his corpse itself. Somehow I
had already developed a keen sense that crime and violence in
our neighborhood were not random at all but followed certain
patterns. The great, dangerous they who committed crimes
were neither unthinking nor uncalculating. Why, for instance,
didn’t the cat burglar break into Kenny’s apartment down the
hall instead of ours? Was it because we were white?
This innate sense that a larger order undergirded all the
murders and stabbings and break-ins made them all the more
eerie, as if they followed the scripted steps of a ballroom
waltz. I wanted to believe Rahim’s widow’s version of events,
but I couldn’t. At the same time, it didn’t sit right with me that
his devotion to the Koran had been a sham, a lie to himself and
to us. It sickened me to realize that the most disciplined, up-
standing man I knew might have been involved in something
illicit. It was as if the ordered rows of worshippers at the
mosque had dissolved back into a noisy throng—that every-
thing, not just Rahim, contained within it its opposite. It didn’t
help that my father wouldn’t tell me definitively what had hap-
pened or that no one was ever prosecuted or even arrested for
the crime. This lack of resolution gave me my first unsettling
taste of powerlessness in the face of uncertainty. Rahim’s death
preyed on my sense of morality like a dark lesion. Before it,
there were lies and there was truth, but I always knew which
was which and figured others did as well. But in this case no
one would ever know what really happened; it was merely a
matter of what each individual chose to believe. There were
two truths, and there were none.
6 6

Rahim was murdered, but it might as well have been in Eu-
rope. It stood in Greenwich Village, an upscale neighborhood
but one with fewer luxuries than other, wealthier areas of
Manhattan. Doormen weren’t as ubiquitous there as in other
white areas of the island, and the buildings—mostly small
brownstones—did not look much different from many of the
tenements in my neighborhood. They were just in better con-
dition. It was as if the flower box movement had succeeded on
this side of town. Apartments the same size as those burned-
out slums on Avenue D sold for hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars apiece in the Village.
The kids there were predominantly white and, by New York
standards, middle class—but rich by the norms of the rest of
America. We had appropriated the address of one of my par-
ents’ artist friends to get me enrolled in P.S. 41, also known as
the Greenwich Village School. However, by the time my ad-
dress change had been recorded and duly processed by the
huge educational bureaucracy of New York City, the school
My new school, P.S. 41, was only a couple miles from where
six
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year had already started, so I was the new kid once again. To
make matters worse, I had been inexplicably jumped a grade,
up to third, so now I was younger than everyone else. I stum-
bled through the morning in a numb haze. Everyone was white
and dressed differently from what I was used to.The kids at the
Mini School always wore well-pressed clothes; even their vari-
ously hued denim pants had ironed creases down the front. I
was always the sloppiest kid at P.S. 4; but at P.S. 41, many
competed with me for that title. While I had always been
ashamed of my appearance at the Mini School, the wrinkle-
clad kids here exuded a confidence that seemed to belie their
attire. Also, both the students and the teachers talked differ-
ently—like the characters on television except more lazily,
without moving their mouths much.The kids spoke softly, as if
telling secrets to each other; at least, that’s how it felt to me on
the first day. The teachers also spoke softly; there was no
yelling on the part of adults here.
At lunch I spotted the two kids who had answered the most
questions during the morning session. In my first two years of
schooling, I had been socialized into thinking that kids who
showed off how much they knew were outcasts, nerds. At P.S.
4 I always avoided answering the teacher’s questions in class.
Moreover, I was terrified that the other kids might make some
causal connection between my performance and my being
spared the rod; they might conclude that I was “on the
teacher’s side.” Since these two kids had violated that norm, I
felt they would be more approachable, perhaps even glad to
have a new friend. I approached them with my tray of milk,
H o n k y L e a r n i n g C l a s s

potato puffs, sloppy joe, and pallid succotash—my standard
lunchroom fare for many years. They were talking about the
meaning of a big word and didn’t notice me. I stood above
them for a few long moments, turning pink with embarrass-
ment, then finally said: “Can I sit here?”
“I don’t know,” said one, a blond, tall kid. “Can he sit here?”
“I don’t know,” said the other one, who was shorter, thicker,
and darker, a squashed, brunette version of the blond kid. “Do
you know what antidisestablishmentarianism is?” he asked me.
Not even the meanest snap about how poor my momma
was had a fraction of the ego-slamming effect this question
had. It felt as if a door had been shut in my face. My first in-
stinct was to run and cry. My second was to yell at these two,
call them motherfuckers or something else they would have
been called back in my neighborhood. My third impulse was
to answer their question. I could, in fact, answer it, since they
had just been defining the word twenty seconds earlier when
they were oblivious to my presence.
“An-ti-dis-es-tab-lish-men-tar-i-an-ism,” I said carefully, as
if I were in a spelling bee, “means going against one’s own be-
liefs.” I changed their wording slightly in order to disguise the
fact that I was merely cribbing from their own definition. I
prayed that they wouldn’t ask me to elaborate or to use the
word in a sentence. I blinked—a vestigial twitch from my
first-grade days—and looked down at them. Both of their
mouths were agape. The blond-headed one slid over to make
room and silently beckoned me to join them.
They included me in their conversation, which ranged in
6 9

subject from making crystal radios to that year’s presidential
election. I knew nothing about crystal radios and not much
about the election either. Nevertheless, I hung in there, hiding
my ignorance by picking up conversational cues, all the while
trying to decipher the internal logic of the discussion so that I
could participate as well. I had learned this technique through
countless discussions of Happy Days back at my old school.
Though I tried my hardest, I couldn’t stay awake until 8 p.m.
each Tuesday night, when that show, the favorite of all the kids
at the Mini School, aired. So each Wednesday, I would sit qui-
etly during the first ten minutes of recess and work out the
previous night’s plot while listening to the others argue about
the show—which scene was funniest, which character’s antics
were most entertaining, and so on. Before long I would jump
in on one side of the debate or another. It didn’t matter which
one, as long as I was part of the argument, making reference to
past shows—which I also hadn’t seen—to bolster my posi-
tion.Those morning rituals were some of the few occasions on
which I felt part of the group; arguing always meant a loss of
self-consciousness on my part.
I fell back on those skills as Michael, the blond kid, argued
for Jimmy Carter, and Ozan, the dark-haired Turkish kid,
stumped for Gerald Ford. I listened, having only a vague no-
tion of who these figures were. I knew they were important
people, but my knowledge about anything political was lim-
ited. Such matters did not often get debated in our house.
Later that day, during afternoon recess, I capitalized on the
H o n k y L e a r n i n g C l a s s

knowledge I had gained at lunch and spoke at a schoolyard po-
litical rally that Michael and Ozan had organized.
Greenwich Village was, and still is, one of the most liberal
districts in the entire United States. All of the kids except
Ozan preferred Carter, no doubt mimicking their parents;
therefore I, too, jumped on the Democratic side. After
Michael spoke out in favor of Carter, I volunteered to second
him. I told the group how Carter would fix a number of things
ranging from inflation to Watergate, none of which I had even
heard of until lunchtime that day. The rush was intense: Not
only was I a part of the group, the group was me. During those
two minutes, I had shed the role of new kid.
Then Ozan spoke, and he was even more eloquent, as well-
spoken as a third grader could be. Whether because of his
rhetorical brilliance or because the other kids threw their sup-
port to whomever was the last person to speak, by the end of
his soliloquy Ford was clearly winning the P.S. 41 schoolyard.
Then something else happened that neither Ozan nor I could
have predicted. One of the girls in our class, whose father, she
informed us, was somehow connected to Jimmy Carter, of-
fered free Dunkin’ Donuts to anyone who voted for the Dem-
ocrat. She held open a box, and a stampede of kids left Ozan’s
symbolic soapbox to crowd around the doughnut box. I was
among them.
Ozan knew he had lost in the face of free doughnuts, but he
still kept yelling to the crowd. “You can’t say ‘I vote for
Carter,’ ” he shouted. “You can’t vote for Carter!” He was
7 1

barely audible over the din of “me toos” that surrounded the
doughnut girl. “The Twenty-sixth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution lowered the voting age to eighteen, but we can’t
vote for anyone; we can only root.You can’t vote; you can only
root,” he repeated desperately, as if so much hung on the dis-
tinction. He looked as though he might cry. I felt an inkling of
sympathy, but it did not override my joy at being on the right
side, with the in-group.
The girl heard him and laughed, “Free Dunkin’ Donuts to
anyone who ‘roots’ for Carter.” The kids shrieked with delight.
When everyone had gotten one and there were still a couple
left, she stopped and shooed away the kids who were begging
for seconds. “Ozan,” she called over to him. “I’ll give you one,
too. I’ll even give you two, if you just say that you like Carter.”
She paused. “You don’t even have to vote or root for him; just
say you like him.” Ozan looked down at the pieces of deep-
fried dough, glistening with glaze. I could see the longing in
his dark eyes. Everyone in the schoolyard was quiet, waiting to
see if he would sacrifice political principle for fast food.
“No,” he said at last. “I am for Ford because he is better;
keep your Dunkin’ Donuts.” Within a few seconds the last
couple had been accounted for, and the empty box blew across
the schoolyard. We were called back into class. When I went
home later that day, I kept thinking about Ozan’s last stand. I
had never seen such willpower in a third grader—or anyone
else for that matter, young or old, rich or poor.
This was a lesson not only about class but also about the sta-
tus of immigrants. Back in my neighborhood, it didn’t seem to
H o n k y L e a r n i n g C l a s s

make much difference whether someone’s family had been in
New York for a while or had just arrived from Puerto Rico or
the Dominican Republic. The local culture seemed to be in
constant dialogue with those Caribbean islands; we took His-
panic kids on their own terms, even absorbed some of their
language and customs. Ozan, by contrast, seemed to carry the
mark of foreignness with him through the halls of P.S. 41. It
wasn’t about race, for he appeared as white as anyone else. It
might have been about ethnicity, since his name certainly set
him off from the rest of us. But the major division between
Ozan and everyone else was of his own making: his political
opinions, almost as a rule, diverged from those of the rest of
class. I found myself swayed by his intelligence and eloquent
arguments on many occasions, but I resisted falling into his
camp since it would have meant ostracizing myself. Ozan
seemed able to handle that, but it was the last thing I wanted in
a class full of people who were white like me, only more so.
Only more so—this was the fact that had dislodged my iden-
tity that first dazed day at P.S. 41. Suddenly, being white was
no longer the marker that set me off from everybody else, that
defined who I was. Being a honky may have made me twitch
back at the Mini School, but it also gave me a certain freedom
to act however I wanted, since people’s reactions never re-
flected anything about me in particular but could always be
brushed off as a racial thing. For instance, despite their tradi-
tion of snapping on each other, most of the kids didn’t make a
big deal of my tics; maybe they thought that was how most
white people behaved. Only after this special status was gone
7 3

did I appreciate its benefits. It was like being a U.S. citizen
overseas—feeling intensely American, almost like a diplomat,
and yet more liberated than one would in the United States.
Now, at P.S. 41, I was just myself, with no racial line to protect
me and no people to represent.
When I got home after that first day in the Village, I rushed
upstairs, avoiding any of the kids from my old school who
might be hanging out on the benches or on the jungle gym. I
felt ashamed of the pleasure I had experienced that day at
school. P.S. 41 seemed like a far-off land, a place of sophistica-
tion and luxury. The classes were relatively small, and I didn’t
have to be wary of showing my knowledge. I had lots of catch-
ing up to do in the category of general learning.There were so
many things they knew about, not just crystal radios and poli-
tics but also physics and astronomy. And they knew lots of
words, words almost as big as antidisestablishmentarianism. I had
suddenly been awakened to how many things I didn’t know.
Every day I wrote down the list of words I had heard or saw
whose meaning I didn’t know.Then each night I would ask my
parents what they meant. I made a list of the state capitals,
taped it up on my wall, and memorized each one. Then I
moved on to the countries of the world and their capitals,
memorizing those too and pasting them up on the wall. I made
lists of everything. One night after Michael taught me what
square roots were, I stayed up past midnight, forgetting all
about Happy Days, and sat in my room with one of my father’s
calculators, making a list of the square root of every number
from one to a hundred. The next week I learned what prime
H o n k y L e a r n i n g C l a s s

numbers were and made a list of those. My walls were getting
full and my brain saturated. I stayed up each night trying to de-
tect mathematical patterns that had been previously unnoticed
in the string of prime numbers.
Then, one afternoon at Michael’s house, his father, who was
a professor of psychology at NYU, asked me how long it
would take me to get home if every five minutes I walked half
the remaining distance. I was baffled and amazed to realize that
when I had gone halfway home I’d be somewhere in the Russ-
ian section of Second Avenue, and that when I had gone
halfway again I would be standing outside the headquarters of
the New York City Hell’s Angels, until eventually I’d be stuck
somewhere right at the entrance to my building, practically
unable to move, even more immobile than the elderly resi-
dents who hobbled up to the glass-and-steel door and waited
for someone to open it for them. After Zeno’s paradox,
Michael’s dad went on to explain some of the properties of
zero to me, specifically that any number divided by zero was
infinity. This set me off on another obsession. I spent the next
few days drawing up a whole set of rules for dividing, multi-
plying, and combining infinity and zero.
I spent so much time on my geography and math fixations
that I did almost no schoolwork.The only problems that inter-
ested me were ones that weren’t already solved. I had not yet
learned that eight times nine was seventy-two, but I didn’t
care, because everybody already knew that. The time I was
supposed to be memorizing multiplication tables I spent trying
to break the four-color map rule. I had decided there was no
7 5

point in doing anything that was not original, that wasn’t big,
really big. My grades were mediocre, and my teacher consis-
tently claimed on my report card that I was not “performing
up to potential.” But I was not after her accolades; I sought ap-
proval from Michael and his father.
The dynamics between Michael and me reflected a type of
status hierarchy that simply did not exist at my old school in
either the black or Chinese class. At first I didn’t understand
why Michael was popular, since he was nerdier than most of
the other students. But I was beginning to realize that each stu-
dent possessed a sense of self-worth that translated into a cer-
tain position on the social ladder. Only much later did I realize
that school dynamics and one’s sense of self-worth could not
be isolated from family background. It was no coincidence, I
would learn, that the most popular kids tended to be those
whose parents were the richest or most powerful or held the
most prestigious jobs. In my old school there had been no such
hierarchy of which I was aware—probably because no one’s
parents were rich, powerful, or prestigious in any sense of the
word.There, each kid invented his own place in the social net-
work. The pecking order was, as best I could tell, determined
primarily by brute force, by who could beat up whom. Other
qualities mattered too, like athletic prowess, ability to snap,
and overall sense of humor.
Nobody at P.S. 4 possessed the class confidence that oozed
out of some of the kids at the Greenwich Village School. Only
by spending time with some of them after class, in their
homes, did I make a connection between the relative opulence
H o n k y L e a r n i n g C l a s s

of their residences, the profession, style, and grace of their
parents, and how they behaved and were treated by the other
kids at school. I was learning the language of class, the same
dialect that my father once spoke in Connecticut but had long
ago given up, like the mother tongue of an immigrant who
wishes to shed his past.
7 7

projects on the school bus each afternoon while most of my
classmates at P.S. 41 sauntered home through safe Greenwich
Village streets lined with brownstones, wrought-iron fences,
and functioning tree wells devoid of heroin needles or other
garbage. Michael and Ozan could decide on the spur of the
moment to go to the science fiction bookstore to flip through
paperbacks or try out the newest board game.When they went
across the street to get a slice at Ray’s Pizza after school, I felt
the power of class in a different way than I had the first time I
met them.This time there was no way I could be sneaky, pick-
ing up contextual cues to insinuate myself into their plans.
There was no magic word like antidisestablishmentarianism that
would gain me entry. The fact was that I had no money for
pizza—and even if I had, I had no choice but to board the yel-
low school bus that carted me home to the projects, from
which I had begun to feel estranged.
The bus rides served as my transitional period each day, the
time during which I took off one face and put on another. The
I was now a part-time, after-school honky, returning to the
seven
T
h
e
H
a
w
k

class consciousness I’d begun to acquire at P.S. 41 made me
feel extremely grateful for the advantages I had over my neigh-
bors back at home. I had never been aware of my privilege vis-
à-vis Earl and the other kids while I went to school with them.
It was only when I suffered on the losing side of class distinc-
tions across town that I began to reevaluate my situation
within my neighborhood. It was only then that I felt better
than those around me. It was a strange combination: I felt
humbly thankful for the opportunities I was enjoying at P.S. 41
yet simultaneously was developing a sense of superiority over
my old neighbors. This quiet feeling of snobbery was a way of
displacing my sense of class inadequacy onto people who I
now saw as even lower down on the ladder than me. The pro-
cess had begun my very first day at P.S. 41.Within a year it had
bloomed into full-scale class confusion.
“Yo, your momma’s like railroad tracks,” one of the other
commuter kids yelled at me on the bus ride home from school
one particular afternoon during fourth grade. “Everyone lays
her down.”
I wasn’t paying much attention and gave no response. I was
too busy thinking about Michael and Ozan eating at Ray’s
Pizza, discussing the Middle East or some other world hot
spot. Without even listening, I could predict the litany of
snaps, if not their actual order.There were only a few kids who
actually composed new ones off the tops of their heads. Every-
one else just recirculated jokes that had been in existence for
as long as we could remember.
“Your momma’s like a refrigerator,” the same person called
H o n k y T h e H a w k

out—more to everyone else than to me, though I was still the
reference point of the joke. “Everyone sticks their meat in.”
This time the snap registered more clearly in my head; the
kids had broken my daydream. Still, I didn’t respond. Now
others jumped in: “Your mother’s like the M14 bus. Fiddy cent
and hop on.” None of us knew anything about sex yet, except
that it was bad to have it be said that your mother partook of
it. It was just another subject for snapping, the same as poverty
or ugly sneakers. “Your mother’s like a doorknob,” a third per-
son added. “Everybody takes their turn.”
It was nothing personal against me; I just happened to be
the target of the day. It was as if we were all on a roulette
wheel, and sometimes my number came up. My role was to
duck and parry these snaps, counterpunching when possible,
and eventually everyone would break out laughing. But instead
of making the requisite tooth-sucking and hissing sounds that
implied I thought little of the jokes and dared them to offer
something better, I did nothing. Nor did I snap back about
their fathers being gay, the roaches in their apartments, or
what they ate for dinner. People seemed amazed that I didn’t
respond. After a while the tone of their voices changed, and
their snaps came out less like statements and more like ques-
tions, as if they were asking me for approval.They searched me
with hopeful eyes, wondering if I would bless their particular
snap with a response.
That day I learned the power of silence—that if used appro-
priately it was more potent than most things that could be said
in its place. It was also one of the tools used by the popular
8 1

kids at P.S. 41 and was itself not unrelated to class. In society
overall it may be that those who are in control have a larger
voice, the ability to fill up the newspapers and airwaves with
their opinions; but on the day-to-day level of the schoolyard it
was the less powerful who spoke more, clamoring to be heard
by the reserved, better-off kids, who seemed to quietly pass
judgment.
I looked forward to each Tuesday, when I didn’t have to take
the bus home and instead could amble down the Avenue of the
Americas with Michael and his friends on our way to a pre-
arranged sleepover at his house.We passed the gourmet shops,
where salmon and whitefish stared at me out of bulbous eyes
and the fresh vegetables tantalized me with colors I had never
seen anywhere else. My sense of what was exotic in food was
probably the reverse of the other P.S. 41 kids’. It amazed me
to glimpse oranges bursting with an orange color that I had oth-
erwise only seen in artificially flavored candy. Pineapples at the
Jefferson Market looked like those worn on the hats of ladies
in the cartoons. Pink grapefruit was really pink. In the Pioneer
Supermarket and the bodegas on the Lower East Side, all the
citrus fruits—be they lemons, oranges, or tangerines—were
the same yellowish color. My mother called the produce selec-
tion at Pioneer “used vegetables.” By contrast, the broccoli,
spinach, and lettuce at Balducci’s on Sixth Avenue were such a
bright green that they were almost enticing to my third-grade
palate.
When our teacher assigned us to go shopping with our par-
ents, write out a list of items by food group, and declare
H o n k y T h e H a w k

whether we thought they were nutritious, I had a hard time.
The little bodegas that dotted most corners in my neighbor-
hood seemed to display fresh offerings, but their papayas,
plantains, yuccas, and taro roots were not listed on the nutri-
tional posters that lined our classroom. I went with my father
to the Las Palmas Mercado with our month’s supply of food
stamps to buy some staples for the house. We purchased a
twenty-five pound bag of rice, the short-grained kind favored
in the Caribbean; that was easy enough to put on the starch
list. Then we picked up some raw sugarcane that my father
used to sweeten a vinegar barbecue sauce. I had no idea in
which group to place this item. During the summer, we kids
loved to chew on a piece of it and suck out the sweet juices,
but I also knew that the stalk was used in various recipes, so it
didn’t seem quite like candy.We also bought taro root as a side
dish. Not even my father was sure whether this went in the
vegetable or starch category.
Even the money we used to purchase our food was different
from the currency used in the Village. Ours was printed on
cheap paper and looked not unlike that from the board games
I played at Michael’s house. It had pictures of the Liberty Bell
on it instead of the presidents, and my father tore it out sheet
by sheet from little booklets, which made it seem as if we were
writing a check. There were even bills for fifty cents. Some-
times we got these small bills back as change; only if our
change was practically nothing did we receive actual currency.
The U.S. greenbacks my P.S. 41 friends carried captured my
eye like gold itself. And the corn, peas, and bright orange
8 3

carrots I ate at their houses seemed like the cuisine of another
country, the America that I knew only from television. I may
not have learned the essential food groups from my homework
assignment, but I did learn that not even food is immune to the
social dynamics of race and class.
At Michael’s house I got to—or, rather, had to—try new
foods that didn’t fit the two categories I was familiar with:
Caribbean cuisine and standard American fare. One Tuesday
evening, for instance, I had couscous. I was more fascinated
with the fact that the name repeated itself than I was with the
small, granular pasta itself. I fixated on the name, convinced
that any echoed word must be some sort of linguistic oddity. I
listened, enraptured, while Mrs. Holt explained that couscous
came from North Africa. Later that evening I snuck off to look
up the dish in their encyclopedia.
Everything in the Holts’ house smelled of instruction. All
our activities there had to be educational. Instead of allowing
us to play a board game, Michael’s mother had us invent one.
Instead of being given a radio to listen to, we were given one
to take apart and study. And when we wanted to know what
something meant, we were sent to the bookshelves to find
the appropriate reference book. My father had built book-
shelves that lined one wall in our apartment; in fact, other
kids in the building marveled at how many books we had,
though the number was one-third the Holts’ collection. My
parents’ books could easily be divided into their respective
camps. My mother had practically nothing but contemporary
fiction. Many of her editions had been bought at library fire
H o n k y T h e H a w k

sales and still had the plastic covering on them, along with a
stamp indicating that they once had been the property of the
Hamilton Fish Branch. Others were publishers’ remainders
with the covers torn off and “99 cents” written in marker on
the front page, now the de facto cover. My mother got to
read contemporary work when it had just left the realm of
contemporary, with about the same time lag that it took a
movie to make it from the theaters onto our black-and-white
television set. My father’s books were all nonfiction volumes
on art, jazz, wine, or horse racing. There was no order to the
shelves, so any time my mother wanted to find something
like her paperback edition of Wallflower at the Orgy, she had to
scan each row carefully, lest she miss it squeezed between a
huge photographic history of bebop and an instructional
guide to pace handicapping.
Our bookshelves were also lined with my mother’s
tchotchkes, which mocked the intellectual import of the books
themselves. A plastic Kool-Aid man sat with his legs hanging
off the edge of one shelf. Next to him stood Star Trek’s Captain
Kirk with his phaser drawn, pointing at a perfectly preserved
package of pink-coconut Hostess Sno-Balls that looked as plas-
tic as their wrapping. On the next shelf up a pink glass
flamingo whose base read “Greetings from Miami” stood
perched on one leg, separating Mr. Spock and a stuffed Porky
Pig, who seemed to be glaring at each other, ready to brawl.
Interspersed among all these plastic and rubber toys were
musty, handmade voodoo dolls that my mother had brought
back from Haiti.
8 5

My mother had also nailed hooks into the wooden shelves
and hung off them such items as a fake feather boa, an official
1970 census taker’s bag, and several polling signs that read
“Vote Here,” “Vote Aqui,” or words to the same effect in Asian
languages. Amid this potpourri, the books themselves lost any
intellectually intimidating sense they may have possessed and
instead blended into the mishmash of cultural products and
one-liners. Little did I know my own parents had plenty of the
trappings of class that Michael’s did; the signs were just hidden
by all the knickknacks. In fact, the ironic kitsch of the
menagerie itself was a form of cultural elitism.
The books in Michael’s house evinced a different feeling.
They smelled old and mildewy, and they were bound in
leather, which had its own odor. In short, they smelled like
something animate rather than something stamped out by a
machine.Whereas we had a one-volume New Columbia Encyclo-
pedia, they had a twenty-five-volume Britannica. My mother
read constantly, and her reading was experiential. Whenever
she read to me, the characters seemed to punch through the
plastic cover of the library edition and rise to life, as if my
mother had uttered an incantation. By contrast, at Michael’s
house reading was a means to an end, a way of finding some-
thing out. The words sat heavily in rows, as if still carrying the
weight of the lead that had been used to typeset them; though
the books were alive—they appeared to take a deep, labored
breath with every turn of the page—their contents were dead.
In fact, the entire house seemed like a museum. In addition to
a piano, the Holts had a harpsichord that Michael and his
H o n k y T h e H a w k

brother played with ease. The ceilings in their home were the
height of a cathedral and had exposed beams and a skylight,
contrasting with the eight-foot-high, smooth cement ceilings
that hung over my family like a heavy burden.
But for all these positive influences crammed into Michael’s
house, something there didn’t hold together. No one got angry
there, as they did at home when I would make my sister cry.
My father would come barreling down the hallway, mad that I
had interrupted his efforts to get some painting done, and
knock me across the room with a fist against my shoulder.
There was no corporal punishment at Michael’s house. Even
when he did something wrong, it all seemed play-acted.
“I poured the shampoo down the sink,” Michael confessed
one afternoon when we tried to concoct a special cleansing
material to get the marker stains off of our backpacks. Before
his mother could say anything, he would ask, “Am I grounded,
or is my allowance docked?” This act of honesty appeared
merely ritualistic to me, canned confession and punishment
delivered with the aura that pervades the criminal justice sys-
tem of an oppressive dictatorship where the outcome is always
prefigured. There was no secret pleasure in sneaking a swig of
soda or taking quarters from the laundry supply, and there was
no Jewish guilt to follow it. Michael was, in fact, Jewish, al-
though he and his family were blondish and followed none of
the stereotypical social norms associated with Jewish life.
Michael’s older brother Danny even got to smoke pot in the
house. When I asked his mother why she let him, she replied,
as if the answer were obvious: “He’s going to do what he wants
8 7

anyway; I’d rather it be in the relative safety of our home than
in some park with the police or junkies harassing him.”
Honesty and household morality were such a given that the
Holts could move on to a more ambitious agenda. They often
went to, spoke at, and even organized political rallies, and not
just in the P.S. 41 schoolyard. Since the Vietnam War was over
and the Equal Rights Amendment had gone down to defeat,
the cause du jour had become “No Nukes.” I trucked out to
Long Island with them and hundreds of thousands of other
white people to protest the opening of an atomic power plant
in Shoreham. I remember noticing the absence of any black,
Hispanic, or Asian people. In fact, the entire event was so anti-
thetical to my neighborhood’s aesthetic that I flushed with em-
barrassment imagining what my friends from the projects
would think.
Back in the projects gender differences were accentuated by
push-up bras on the women and tight Lee jeans on the men.
Here, by contrast, gender ebbed and flowed like the Brownian
movement of bacteria in a puddle. Men had long hair and wore
dresses and strings of beads, while women had hairy armpits
and legs. People tried to get high by sniffing the tailpipe of a
lavender-colored, gasohol-powered school bus. They played
bongo drums and danced naked, their thick, loose skin flap-
ping like garments. The decline of the hippie civilization was
evident; the clan of tie-dyed protesters had the feel of a dying
sect that could not recruit new members but had to enlarge its
numbers from within. The few kids in attendance held onto
their parents’ legs as they stood around chatting, and the
H o n k y T h e H a w k

youngest sucked on mothers’ milk, unperturbed by the half-
million or so souls who milled about them.
As we passed by, one of the nursing mothers spoke to us.
“How about a joint?” she asked. “Or some spare change?”
“I have no coinage or marijuana,” Mr. Holt replied, “but
here.” He reached into his wallet and gave the woman a dollar.
When others saw the flash of cash, they flocked to him as if he
were the gasohol bus—or the girl with the Dunkin’ Donuts. He
handed a crisp dollar to everyone until his wallet was empty.
I looked away from these panhandlers, who seemed fake to
me. Not even the poorest of souls from my neighborhood ever
begged. Even the drunks who hung around outside the bullet-
proofed liquor store on the corner of Pitt Street never asked
for change. Besides, in their whiteness these panhandlers
seemed like the privileged ones of society, not the needy. In my
life, which contrasted minority, poor home neighborhood with
rich, white school district, race and class had overlapped to
such a great extent that it was difficult for me to separate
poverty from dark skin color or to entertain the possibility of
impoverished whites. Furthermore, though I couldn’t pinpoint
why, it didn’t seem right to panhandle at a political rally. In fact,
the whole reason for this huge gathering seemed lost in the on-
the-ground interactions. Nuclear power in general and the
Shoreham plant in particular seemed incidental, like the wor-
thy charity benefited by a society dinner that everyone attends
in order to be seen, rather than out of commitment to the
cause. Since starting at P.S. 41, I had never been as happy to get
home to my neighborhood as I was after that “No Nukes” rally.
8 9

Meanwhile, Michael and his parents were starting to won-
der why I never invited him over to my house.They knew that
I lived in a rough neighborhood and that it was dangerous for
me to go home after dark, which was why I slept over once or
twice a week. But they didn’t understand why I never re-
turned the gesture. The reason was twofold. First, I was
ashamed of my neighborhood; second, I was embarrassed
about Michael.Though he knew so many things, he was rather
helpless in other ways. He still put on all his shirts and coats by
laying them out across a flat surface, like his bed, and then
crouching over to slip an arm through each sleeve before flip-
ping the garment over his head. He also walked strangely,
bouncing up and down with each step. I watched his heels
carefully, trying to determine whether they actually touched
the ground when he glided across the concrete. Everyone at
home would snap all over him; they’d take one look at his long
hair and call us gay. I simply couldn’t be seen with him. The
poor folks of my neighborhood had a certain wisdom, a cer-
tain street cachet that Michael and the others at school would
never attain.
After a while, my own mother joined the chorus by asking
why I never had Michael over on Thursday night, her desig-
nated kids’ night, when she made pizza and let us each invite
someone to stay over. Since I had transferred schools, I hadn’t
had anyone over to spend the night. I merely sat and growled
as my sister and her friend enjoyed themselves, smearing
tomato sauce on each other, playing house, or just giggling
over nothing at all.
H o n k y T h e H a w k

“Why don’t you have your friend Michael come over this
week?” she asked me on more than one occasion.
“Because,” I always answered.
“Because why?” Our conversation had the rehearsed rhythm
of a knock-knock joke.
“Because I don’t want to, all right?” I shot back like a poison
dart. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“Is it because you’re embarrassed of our house?” she asked.
“Tell me, is there anything I can do to make it okay?”
I just sulked. It wasn’t the apartment that I was ashamed of
so much as the area that surrounded it. I wished I could have
put up a board on the bottom half of all of our windows in or-
der to block out the view of the immediate ten-block area,
with its tenement fires and pigeon flocks. Often I would stare
out the window, holding one hand up to shield my eye from
the urban blight around us, looking only at our beautiful view
of the Manhattan skyline. Then there was the walk from the
bus stop to my front door. I normally crawled through the
back fence, stepping over the broken glass, used syringes, and
condoms that littered the space between the cluster of build-
ings and the junior high school behind them.There was no way
that I could expose Michael to that.
I was also learning that the rules of class authority weren’t
as simple as they first appeared. When I imagined taking
Michael out of the Village and bringing him to Avenue D, the
entire dynamic got twisted up like an Escher bottle; there was
no definite inside or outside anymore. I saw that poor people
could wield authority over the nonpoor in certain face-to-
9 1

face, local interactions, as a sort of consolation prize for the
dominance the latter group exercised in the society as a
whole. The fear that most whites experienced at night, walk-
ing alone on an empty street or alongside a minority pedes-
trian, formed part of these just deserts. As a white boy in the
neighborhood, I already occupied a precarious enough social
position; I didn’t want to completely erode my legitimacy by
traipsing home with Michael, someone who embodied liberal,
middle-class values better than anyone else I knew.
But at last I gave in and invited Michael to come over the
following week. Starting that day, I took the front way home
from the bus stop, walking through the main entrance to the
project even though it was out of my way. I picked up litter on
each trip and scanned the area for eyesores that should and
could be avoided. Empty malt liquor bottles appeared human-
sized. Wrappers blew across my path like huge tumbleweeds,
and I saw graffiti that I had never noticed before. Taking the
front route home would avoid the most graffiti-ridden walls
but expose Michael to more of the local kids hanging out in
the playground. It also meant more steps with his heels not
touching the ground and his long hair flapping up and down. I
had never faced such a double-embarrassment bind before.
My anti-litter efforts were for naught. When Michael and I
got off the bus that afternoon, it was clear the area around my
house did not receive high priority from the New York City
Department of Sanitation, even though we lived only two
blocks from one of its main terminals. An entire fleet of
garbage trucks sat parked right underneath the Williamsburg
H o n k y T h e H a w k

Bridge, yet there had been no scheduled pickup that week.
Black bags of garbage were stacked against the walls of all of
the buildings, their contents bursting out into the streets. Not
thinking about the fact that the Sanitation Department should
have given us the same pick-up service that Greenwich Village
received, I suddenly got angrier at all my neighbors than I had
ever been. It was their fault that this place was a mess, I de-
cided. And then, as if it were the next logical step, I concluded
that it was even their fault that they were poor. I decided I
would never be poor when I grew up.
As if beckoned by my angry thoughts, in that moment a
hawk descended into the housing complex. I have a clearer
memory of this scene than of the time when the SWAT team
came to free hostages from the local pharmacy or when blue-
uniformed policemen flooded the projects after a cop was shot
in the elevator of the next building. Perhaps I remember it so
well because Michael’s presence had heightened my senses, my
entire consciousness of my surroundings.
“Media, mommy, águila!” one little kid said as he tugged on
his mother’s hand, calling the bird an eagle. I remember her
shooing away his chubby hand and checking her long red fin-
gernails for damage; but then she, too, got caught up in the
spectacle of the majestic bird that had entered our lives.
“No, no,” she corrected her son. “El azor.”
Soon everybody in the central courtyard area noticed the
creature; people even watched from windows as the hawk
plucked the carcass of a turkey out of one of the Hefty trash
bags lined up against the Dumpster.As far as I could remember,
9 3

it was the first time that everyone in the projects was silent at
the same time. No one moved as the bird flapped its long wings
for balance, wrestling the turkey out of the bag.The only prob-
lem was that after that day, lots of people left out half-eaten
pork roasts, chickens, and anything else they thought would at-
tract the huge bird of prey back to Avenue D. Meanwhile, I saw
this as my opportunity. “Quick,” I said as I tugged on Michael’s
arm, trying to take advantage of the distraction to sneak him up
to my apartment unnoticed. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” he resisted my pull. “Look at that.” He had not been
staring at the hawk at all but was, in fact, facing a different di-
rection, staring at another mound of garbage—a pile of bro-
ken old stereos and electronic parts. Before I could rope him
in and guide him home, he had escaped to the heap of transis-
tors and capacitors and was kneeling as he rummaged through
the components. “We can make a radio out of this stuff,” he
cried out in joy. “Or even a transmitter!”
Some other kids came over. “Yo, you know how to do elec-
tronics?” Sean, the biggest one in the group, asked Michael.
“Yeah, we do.” I interjected. We had recently given up coin
collecting for electronics. Michael’s parents had bought him a
150-in-1 project kit from Radio Shack, and on our Tuesday af-
ternoons we had built a series of chirping machines and crystal
radios and even a crude calculator. He was better at it than I
was. On the days I didn’t sleep over his house, I sat up working
out possible circuits on paper, but without the kit, I couldn’t
test them, and they usually failed the next Tuesday. I had never
thought to salvage any of the many carcasses of televisions, ra-
H o n k y T h e H a w k

dios and other electrically-powered wares that littered my
streets.
“Can you make me a laser?” Sean asked, still looking at
Michael.
“Yes,” I promised. “We can make you a laser . . . ”
“No,” Michael cut off my efforts at assimilation with the
truth. “We don’t have the capabilities to construct a laser.”
“Yo,” Sean spat out of a twisted-up mouth. “Why you got to
lie, punk?” He slapped at my head with a force that was some-
where between playful and violent.
“That’s awright, man,” he said to Michael. “Thanks anyways.”
I strained muscles in my face that I didn’t know I had in or-
der to hold back my tears. Michael had outdone me in my own
neighborhood.
9 5

Thursday nights throughout fourth and fifth grades. I had swal-
lowed my embarrassment over the laser interaction with Sean
and grew less and less ashamed of my surroundings. I still
faced the problem of money, however. Class I could fake to
some extent, like I did with antidisestablishmentarianism, but
money there was no finessing. Each Tuesday I swallowed my
hungry fast-food cravings when Michael and I and whomever
else he had invited promenaded around the Village, entertain-
ing ourselves for a while before going to his house. Michael
suggested that we all get a slice at Ray’s, then walk down to the
doughnut shop for some of those delicacies that had helped in-
sure Jimmy Carter’s schoolyard victory. When Michael saw
that I wasn’t eating at Ray’s, he held out his slice and offered,
“Do you want to try some?”
“No, I’m not hungry,” I said, though I could barely stand to
look on as they competed to see who could stretch the cheese
the longest from the pizza to his mouth. My family wasn’t so
poor that my parents couldn’t have given me a dollar or two a
After the day of the hawk, Michael slept over fairly regularly on
eig
h
t
G
e
ttin
g
P
a
id

week for snacks.The main reason I had no cash was philosoph-
ical: my parents simply didn’t believe in spending money on
junk food. Even in my own neighborhood, where I already
knew I was better off than most of my peers, I felt I was the
only one who couldn’t participate in the ritual of consump-
tion. The other kids always seemed to have money for an icie
when the one-eyed man rolled into the area with his wooden
cart and big block of ice. All the children would whip folded
dollar bills out of their sneakers or dig up some change from
secret pockets in their sundresses. I always stood and watched
as the old street hawker scraped up a coneful, asking each cus-
tomer in Spanish which sabor, which flavor, he or she wanted.
One day the ice-cream truck rolled up Rivington Street with
its siren song of refreshment, and I could resist no longer. I
ripped out the emergency transportation money my mother
had taped under the insole of my sneaker. With that creased,
sweaty dollar bill I purchased a large soft-serve cone dipped in
rainbow sprinkles.
The next week, on my Tuesday afternoon with Michael, I
lifted the insole of my other shoe and removed the mugging
money my mother had placed there, a ten-dollar bill that I
was supposed to hand over politely to satisfy an assailant. I
spent two bucks on pizza and soda and divided the change
among my two shoes: seven dollars for the mugger, one dollar
to replace the emergency bus fare I had torn out the week be-
fore. I did this as surreptitiously as I could, as to not catch the
notice of the others. Then we stopped by the science fiction
shop, and I spent the remaining eight dollars on a stack of
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

comic books, rationalizing that I could give them to a mugger
instead of the money.
I grew addicted to purchasing. I had never realized how em-
powering it felt to spend money. Free monetary exchange was
so liberating—until the cash ran out. Then I cracked. It was a
school holiday, and a bunch of neighborhood kids and I were in
the local combination candy store–luncheonette. I was reading
comic books at the rack, having discovered that there existed
an infinite number of comic books that I needed to own—far
more than eight dollars’ worth. Suddenly, the free exchange of
goods seemed oppressive. I became overwhelmed by the vol-
ume of things for sale. And they just kept coming. I would
never be able to keep up with all the material goods that could
be purchased and consumed.
Earl and the other Mini School kids were busy loading up on
sugar. They bought Mike and Ikes. They got Now and Laters.
They even purchased a type of candy that was pure sugar, fla-
vored vaguely to resemble various fruits and packaged in straws;
they sucked this powder up into their mouths as if snorting co-
caine orally. Even better were the bags of this processed sugar,
sold with a spoon that itself was made of solid sugar. I could re-
sist all these temptations, but chocolate I could not. Reggie Bar,
a new product named after Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson, had
just hit the market. It consisted of a blob of chocolate and nuts
that looked like it was just shot out of a machine and had gelled
instantly into whatever random shape. I had to have one. While
the cashiers were ringing up the other kids, I rushed out the
door, a stolen comic book and two Reggie Bars in hand.
9 9

I ate my candy greedily in the playground, reading the Silver
Surfer comic while the other kids inhaled their sugar. The
group of us then rode the glucose wave, running around the
complex madly, playing ring-a-levio and tag and terrorizing
younger children by taking their Big Wheels for joy rides.
Within an hour my head throbbed, and I crawled off to my
house. There I found my mother reclining on the burlap sofa,
watching television with a wet washcloth on her head. She
must have had a migraine herself. Phil Donahue was on the
screen, ranting about something, as I came up to her and com-
plained that I had a headache.
The guilt I felt over having stolen from the nice couple who
ran the store matched the pain in my head; in fact, in that mo-
ment it seemed to be the cause of the pressure that I felt
against my temples. My mother must have seen something in
my eyes, or maybe she simply noticed the comic book I was
clutching, but she immediately questioned me through the
haze of her own headache.
“You had candy, didn’t you?” she asked.
I nodded. I only wanted sympathy, no matter what I had
to admit.
“You spent your emergency shoe money, didn’t you?” she
asked, her voice dropping in tone and becoming sterner. I
nodded again. Evidently her powers of maternal ESP ended
there, since she didn’t ask me any more questions. “You’ll have
to work off the money,” she said.Then she laid me down on the
carpeted floor, wetting a washcloth for me and feeding me a
generic Tylenol with a glass of water. We lay there, watching
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

from Phil on through the evening news. My headache was still
there. By now I was convinced that I had to confess everything
in order to gain relief.
“That’s not all,” I said, as if our conversation of a couple
hours before were continuing uninterrupted. “I—I . . . ” Un-
able to get out the words, I started crying. Suddenly I was
flooded with the images of the proprietors’ faces, looking at
me through baggy eyes like dogs in a pound. They must have
been shy of fifty years old at the time, but they were gray-
haired and seemed ancient to me.The image of them led me to
dwell on the old men who sat along Delancey Street a few
blocks west, selling shoelaces. I remembered how my mother
said that was how they made their living, one shoelace at a
time. Then I remembered her pointing out to me an old
woman buying cat food in the supermarket. She bent over and
whispered in my ear, “She probably doesn’t have cats.”
“How do you know she doesn’t have cats?” I had responded,
a little too loudly. Luckily the woman in question was almost
deaf or faked it by not reacting.
“Social Security isn’t enough for many old people,” she ex-
plained, again in a whisper, “so they can’t afford regular food.”
I had no idea what Social Security was at the time, but I did no-
tice a remarkable drop in the number of old people buying an-
imal food and selling shoelaces over the course of the next few
years. I assumed they were all dead. Only later did I learn that
Nixon had instituted a series of generous cost-of-living in-
creases in Social Security, lifting many seniors out of poverty.
I felt a sympathy for the elderly poor that I never had for
1 0 1

children my own age, and in my aching head that day my theft
was directly linked to the plight of the cat-food eaters and
shoelace salesmen.
“I stole from the luncheonette,” I finally sputtered. My
headache didn’t go away as I had thought it would. In fact, con-
fessing didn’t make me feel better at all.
“You stole?” my mother asked, as if she needed to hear it out
of her own mouth in order to believe it. “You stole from the
luncheonette? Our luncheonette?”
The clamp on my head seemed to ratchet tighter as I sensed
that my punishment was going to go beyond a simple, Michael
Holt–style penance such as grounding or extra chores. Sure
enough, my mother instructed, “Well you’re just going to have
to go down there, return it, and apologize to them.”
“I already ate it,” I said, confessing this additional sin in the
hopes that the lack of physical evidence might thwart her plan.
“What was it?” she asked.
“A Reggie Bar,” I explained. “Okay, two.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
“No,” I wailed, trying to wriggle out of the grip she had on
my wrist. “They’re gone,” I remember saying. “There’s nothing
to return.”
“Then you’ll have to give them back the money.”
“I don’t have any money,” I shot back, strangely satisfied at
my ability to come up with one excuse after another.
“I’m going to lend you the money.” Her grip got tighter. I
could feel the arteries in my wrist, pulsing out of sync with the
ones that throbbed in my head.
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

“I don’t wanna go,” I said, still trying to twist away. My hand
was turning purple and puffy; it felt as if someone were taking
my blood pressure.
She let my arm drop, but I knew I had no choice. The mes-
merizing command of her gaze was more forceful than her
grip had been. She marched me out of the apartment and
down to the luncheonette. In the elevator, she dug through her
purse, asking me how much candy bars cost. “Thirty cents
each!” she exclaimed upon learning. After going through the
entire contents of her bag, rummaging through crumpled
Kleenexes and melted, fused Lifesavers, she found a quarter
and enough nickels to pay the proprietors without having to
break a bill.
When we arrived my mother pushed me up to the register
like a stage mother urging her child to perform. Behind the
counter stood the woman, whom somehow I preferred deal-
ing with over her husband. I unfurled my fist to reveal the sil-
ver coins and dropped them onto the spiked, black rubber mat
that sat on the counter next to the cash register. I still could
not look into the woman’s eyes, staring instead at the faded
blue numbers tattooed on the inside of her arm. Some of the
coins were so dirty and sweaty that they remained stuck to my
palm, and I had to shake them off before the full sixty cents had
been presented for acceptance.Then I felt my mother’s hand at
my back again. This time she pricked me with her fingernails.
“Dalton has something to tell you,” she said when I still
hadn’t spoken.
“Um . . . ,” I said. I knew I was supposed to confess my
1 0 3

crime, but my mother and I had not negotiated exactly what I
would say. “Um . . . I stoled something from you.” Now I no
longer even looked at the tattoo but rather stared straight
down at the ground. “I stoled two things.”
“I see,” she said in her Yiddish accent. “You know, you could
go to jail for vat you did.”
I didn’t say anything. I thought only of the comic book,
which I had not yet confessed to stealing.
“Tell me vy I should not have you in jail?” she asked. “Vat
have you learned from this?”
“I learned that . . . ,” I started to say, as if beginning to re-
cite the Pledge of Allegiance. It felt as though I were spouting
off multiplication tables or state capitals, something I was sup-
posed to know by rote. Suddenly it didn’t feel like I had
learned anything at all—except, perhaps, that I could just as
easily have lied about the Reggie Bars as I had about the comic
book. In that moment my desire to repent evaporated, and I
grew resentful that this woman and my mother had taken such
a heavy tone and Socratic approach with me. They were
merely trying to coax out the goodness at my moral core, but
the actual truth was that I was continuing to lie—at least, I
was withholding information. I had stolen an item even more
valuable than the candy—and was getting away with it. This is
what I learned.
“Let me tell you a story,” the woman said. I was praying that
none of the Piratas baseball players would walk in and see me
there with my mother, actually talking to the luncheonette
lady everyone ridiculed.
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

“When I was a young girl in Germany in the concentration
camp”—and as her tone of voice changed I perked up and lis-
tened, sensing that, lie or no lie, now I might really learn
something—“my family and I were being marched off to the
gas chambers.” She paused. I had heard about the Nazis before,
both in school and from my mother in connection with Mar-
tin, the German foster child who had lived with her family for
several months. “I was only a young girl of twelve,” she contin-
ued, “but we had all heard about the showers and ovens, so we
knew we were going to die.”
I couldn’t stand still; it felt as if something would drop on
my head if I stayed in one place. I wanted to escape but knew I
had no choice but to stay and listen. I fidgeted and rocked back
and forth on my feet, dreading the story but also fascinated by
it, as if it were a dead animal I had found in the gutter and was
poking with a stick. I was both disturbed and enthralled by its
ugliness.
“I had nothing to lose, so I ran up to one of the guards,” she
continued. “I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘We all have
to die some time, and it may be sooner for me than for you,
but at least I’ll be able to face my Jewish God when that time
comes.What about you? Can you face your God?’ ”
My eyes met hers, just as she had met the gaze of the guard.
Her big blue irises had a liquid glaze over them. “Do you know
vat he did?” she asked me. “Do you know vat this guard did?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. The Socratic part of this lesson
was over. “He pulled me out of the line and saved my life.
Everyone else in my family was killed. All my brothers and
1 0 5

sisters and my parents, too.” Now she was crying, as was I. “But
I spoke up for my beliefs, and God spared me.” Then she
turned to my mother. “It is because of this, I say, you have to
raise them Jewish. You’re raising him Jewish?” she asked, the
upward lilt returning to her voice.
I was glad that the moral spotlights of her eyes were off me
and on my mother. I reran her story in my mind as she spoke
to my mother about the importance of keeping the Jewish
faith alive. “Why?” I asked suddenly. I had worked through the
story and arrived at what I thought were its logical implica-
tions: namely, that being Jewish generally led to execution.
“Does she want us all to get killed?”
My mother gasped and grabbed me by the ear, twisting the
cartilage, yanking me toward the door. “I apologize,” she said
to the woman as I wailed. “I’m so sorry. Please forgive us.”
When we got home, my mother locked me in my room
for the rest of the evening. The next day she revealed my
punishment. To work off the money I had taken from my
shoe and the cost of the Reggie Bars, I would perform a se-
ries of household chores. For three weeks I vacuumed the
carpet, scrubbed the bathroom, and did the laundry in the
basement. This paid off eight dollars, and I was forgiven the
difference. Strangely enough, I was thrilled to have earned
my own money, and I asked my parents if I could work for
money all the time. We negotiated a list of chores and fees
ranging from twenty-five cents for vacuuming the floor once
a week to two dollars for doing the family laundry. I had the
potential to earn about three dollars and fifty cents per
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

week. From then on, this is how I spent my Friday nights.
Three-fifty was just enough money to let me buy a snack in
the Village on Tuesday afternoon, with a little left over for
when I was hanging out with the local kids. My theft had
worked out for the best. Instead of repeating it, I was chan-
neled into the world of work.
But, like the ice-cream cone that had started my run of il-
licit purchases, the money I earned at home only served to
whet my financial appetite. I could now hang out with Michael
at Ray’s Pizza and be part of the group, but I soon developed
new needs that required even more money. So one day in fifth
grade I walked into Candy Kisses, a store that stood around
the corner from P.S. 41. Candy Kisses was nothing like the
luncheonette, whose rack of treats flanked the register, sand-
wiched by newspapers on one side and a paltry selection of
cigars on the other. Candy Kisses had none of the brand-name
items I knew and craved: no SweeTarts or Hot Tamales, no
Gobstoppers or Jawbreakers. The store didn’t offer candy so
much as confections. It sold hunks of chocolate individually
wrapped in clear plastic with pink bows, even chocolate in a
white color that amazed me. There were hard candies shaped
like flowers, lips, or ducklings. The store even carried marzi-
pan, which baffled and intimidated me.
Usually I just browsed there during my lunch hour. The
prices at Candy Kisses were beyond the reach of my three-fifty
budget; only the kids who got ten-dollar allowances bought
from this purveyor. But on this particular occasion, I hung
around after all the other kids had filtered out, returning to
1 0 7

school with their delicacies. I asked the proprietor whether he
needed any help. He hired me to work during my lunch hour,
stacking boxes and keeping an eye on the droves of kids to
make sure they weren’t stealing anything. He paid me five dol-
lars a week and gave me an employee discount on all items in
the store. Soon he bestowed a raise upon me, and my com-
bined weekly income from home and the labor market broke
into the double digits. I thought I finally made enough money
to rank among the leaders in disposable income in my class.
Then I heard that the Dunkin’ Donuts girl and a couple of oth-
ers had gotten raises as well in the inflation-ridden era of the
late 1970s. Their allowances now stood at twenty dollars a
week. I would never be able to keep up, it seemed.
Soon after that my mother received a telephone call from
my principal, who had gotten wind of my lunch-hour employ-
ment. “Isn’t it terrible?” he asked my mother rhetorically. “Us-
ing child labor during school hours. I’m sure you weren’t
aware of this; that’s why I wanted to bring it to your attention.
I’ve contacted the establishment and warned them that they
better terminate his employment or face prosecution.”
“Mmm hmm,” she replied as she swallowed a piece of Go-
diva chocolate I had brought her on payday. “Thank you for
your concern. Thank you very much.” She hung up the phone
and cursed the loss of her discounted chocolate.
If I had already learned about class distinctions in my first
two years of commuting across town, now I was being taught
the contradictions and ironies of class mobility. Having been
taught not to steal by my mother and the luncheonette
H o n k y G e t t i n g P a i d

woman, I was now being told it was not okay to work for
money, either. The easiest solution, it seemed, might be to re-
turn to theft. But my mother, perhaps sensing my frustration,
told me she would find another job for me. Unlike most of our
neighbors, whose parents had little in the way of useful social
connections, my mother could make good on her promise.
Through one of her friends, she soon found me a job sweeping
out the Ukrainian meeting hall on Second Avenue.The pay for
one afternoon of work was the same as I made for the entire
week of lunch hours at Candy Kisses. But the glamour of white
chocolate was gone.
1 0 9

tion of New York to a white, upper-middle-class area, so did I
travel each summer with my family to white-as-could-be,
middle-class Pennsylvania. My sister and I went under duress.
We longed to spend the summers in New York, when the sprin-
klers in the playground were turned on and kids would come
streaming out of their stuffy apartments wearing bathing suits,
making beelines for the metallic mushroom spouting water in
the central courtyard. Instead, Alexandra and I had to swim in a
cold artesian lake. Even though I dreaded Pennsylvania, I knew
that going to the country was considered a luxury and that
there were even special programs like the Fresh Air Fund that
tried to give my neighbors a taste of it. So I never mentioned
this annual vacation to anyone in the projects and just disap-
peared quietly at the end of each June. Across town, however, I
played it up, knowing that leaving New York in summer was
part of the status game that went on at school. But I withheld
the fact that sometimes we stayed in a tent and other times we
lived in a small cottage that belonged to a friend of my mother.
Just as I commuted each school day from a poor, minority sec-
n
in
e
S
e
s
a
m
e
S
tre
e
t

Though this summer foray scored me some points in the
Village, there was nothing about our annual routine that I
dreaded more. For me, the end of June—just before we left
New York, but after school let out—was the only time I felt
whole. For a week or two I didn’t have to live a split life be-
tween school and home, and I could hang out with my neigh-
borhood peers and repair those friendships. By far the worst
part about going to Pennsylvania was that it forced me to quit
the Little League team I had worked so hard to earn a place
on. Las Piratas were one of the best teams in the Lower East
Side league, and securing a spot on the roster was no easy feat.
I never felt more a part of the community than I did with the
Piratas.
But every season without fail, just as my bat was heating up
and the bigger kids were starting to show me some respect,
my parents would yank me off the team and out of New York
City. After the first couple of years the coach caught on to the
pattern, knowing that I always left the team in the middle of
the season and missed the playoffs. So, despite my good batting
average, in 1980 he gave my starting outfield slot to Peaches, a
Puerto Rican kid who got his name from his rosy complexion.
I continued to play for the Piratas as a reserve, however, and so
stayed connected to some of the project kids with whom I no
longer attended school.
It didn’t even have to be organized play. One late-June af-
ternoon, before we were to leave for Pennsylvania, I caught
sight from my room of a Spalding baseball game taking shape
down below, in the glass-littered Hamilton Fish Park behind
H o n k y S e s a m e S t r e e t

our building. It looked as if the game was about to start, so in-
stead of waiting for the unreliable elevators I raced down the
entire twenty-one flights of stairs. I crawled through the fence
that separated the project from the park, but the game had al-
ready begun. “Yo,” I said when I got to the cement baseball di-
amond. “Lemme sub in?” I spoke differently here from how I
did across town. “I got a glove,” I added as an enticement.
Many of the kids could not afford gloves, so they either played
at a disadvantage with bare hands or borrowed one from
someone on the other team. Mitts flying through the air from
the lender to the borrower or vice versa always marked the
end of each inning. With me in the game, one more kid could
play with a glove.
“Get the fuck out of here, honky,” said one of the captains,
Sean. Despite his Irish name, Sean was Puerto Rican. He com-
manded a lot of respect in the neighborhood, for two reasons.
First, he was about four inches taller than most of us, had filled
out into a muscular frame, and did not hesitate to throw his
weight around, against, or on top of us. The other factor that
legitimated his leadership was that he had been on television.
In fact, he was on TV practically every day, as part of the final
credits for Sesame Street, riding a horse along with Big Bird as
the numbers and letters that had sponsored that day’s show
scrolled over his tan, bare back. He had filmed this bit a few
years earlier and received ninety-nine dollars for his appear-
ance, or so he said. Ninety-nine dollars made him the richest
kid in the group, in addition to the biggest.
Just as I was about to slink off, the kid who was the captain
1 1 3

of the other team piped up in my defense. “He’s good,” said
Angel, who knew me from the Piratas. “We’ll take him on our
team.” That day I played well, smacking the rubber ball over
the rightfield fence twice for home runs that helped our vic-
tory. Afterward I asked James, the kid on the other team who
used my mitt, for my glove back.
“No,” he said. “I’m keeping it.”
“Say what?” I asked.
“It’s my glove,” he repeated. He was a very thin, dark-
skinned kid who towered over everyone, even Sean.
“That’s cold,” said Peaches, my Piratas replacement.
“Come on, man.” I said, reaching out with my hand. I sized
up my chances in a fight. Though James was tall, he was all
bones and joints and looked as if his knees and elbows were
tree knots.
“Come on what?” James asked rhetorically. He held his chin
up, and his chest barreled out in a gesture of challenge. Nor-
mally adversaries would strut around in this position, jamming
their chests into each other, but given our height disparity, the
breast of his sweaty tank top was stuffed in my face. Typically,
each provocateur would pin back his arms, since any contact
with the hands would mean that a fight had actually begun, and
the truth was that usually no one really wanted to fight at all.
Most of these confrontations ended peacefully, if not amicably;
friends would intervene, and the parties usually walked away
cussing at each other, turning back with a threat after every
other step.
In this case, however, my choice became clear: I could avoid
H o n k y S e s a m e S t r e e t

a fight but forfeit my glove, or I could attack James and hope to
win. I had no idea what chance I stood in such a confrontation.
I had not gotten into a fight in the neighborhood for a couple
of years, not since the day I wore my karate outfit down to the
playground despite my mother’s warning.
James held the glove aloft, his outstretched arm well be-
yond my reach. I tried to yank it down when chaos descended.
I found myself pulled away from James, my arms twisted more
than halfway out of their sockets as if I were the Barbie doll be-
ing fought over at Head Start years earlier. My chin banged
against an elbow as someone crushed my throat with the full
might of his biceps.Then, just as I was trying to remember the
move Rahim had taught me to get out of this hold, I felt the
coolness of a blade up against my neck. In contrast to the hot
fleshiness that gripped me and my own balmy skin, the stain-
less steel of the knife felt unmistakable. While the rest of us
had been tossing our mitts to each other between innings,
Sean and a couple of other Junior Outlaws had been showing
off their new switchblades, competing to see who could arm
himself the quickest.
Even James seemed shocked at the turn of events. “Damn!”
he said, the arm that held the mitt in question falling limp at
his side.
“Should I slice the honky?” Sean asked.
I squirmed like an animal being readied for butchering—
mute, uncomfortable, and not quite aware enough to be
terrified.
“Should I cut him?”
1 1 5

Angel was nowhere to be seen. In fact, everyone was eerily
quiet as Sean laughed, his cackle sounding like that of a listener
scared by a ghost story. It dawned on me that no one, least of
all me, was quite sure what was going on or exactly what
Sean’s intentions were. Much to my own amazement, I was
not particularly scared. Instead I took in the whole scene—the
surprise on everyone’s face, their rapt attention—with the
same curiosity Sean must have experienced as he looked
around. It almost felt as if we were a team, a vaudeville act,
rather than perpetrator and victim. Then, as if I had suddenly
woken up from what I thought had been a dream only to dis-
cover that I was caught in another layer of nightmare, I realized
that I was in a potentially dangerous situation. There was ab-
solutely nothing I could do. I was not strong enough to wriggle
free and I could barely speak for want of air, so I could not bar-
gain with my aggressor. All I could do was try to restrain the
crushing force of his forearm on my trachea by wrapping both
hands around his wrist bone and pulling with all my strength,
as if I were attempting a chin-up. As I struggled, there was a si-
lence like that which descended when the hawk flew into the
housing complex.This quietude scared me more than anything
else, for something must have truly been amiss for that snap-
ping, hollering bunch to fall mute.
I felt Sean press the blade harder against my neck, seem-
ingly needing to push things one step further to get a rise out
of the group. “Check it out, y’all,” he said as he stood more
erect, lifting me with him, onto my tiptoes. He swung me
from left to right and back again, making me dance like a mar-
H o n k y S e s a m e S t r e e t

ionette. On top of the coat of dried-out sweat from the game,
I now had a filmy layer of nervous perspiration; oilier and
more viscous, it acted as my only defense against the knife,
causing the blade to slide around. It was as if I were getting my
first, raw shave, my red throat feeling more like it had been
sunburned than sliced.
Finally, as I danced around on my tiptoes, Sean got the re-
sponse he was looking for: chuckles from the crowd. Peaches
spoke up first. “Mira, Sean, you are the baddest nigger around,”
he said.
“He real scared,” Tito added. I might as well not have been
present; they spoke matter-of-factly, as if everything had al-
ready gone down. At first this apparent disregard of my exis-
tence made me more fearful than had the silence that preceded
it. But after the initial drop in my stomach, I realized this was
the other kids’ way of managing the crisis. My pleading with
Sean would only have provoked him, made it more of a show
in which he had to press the knife tighter and tighter against
my neck in order to build up to some climactic event—one
that could only have been bad news for me. Tito and Peaches,
by speaking as if the situation and I were long over, as if every-
thing were fact and not contingency, were tacking a premature
denouement onto the scene, one that would lead to my immi-
nent release.
Still, Sean did not let go. Only a few seconds later, when he
heard a siren go by on Houston Street, did he drop me from
his grasp. “Damn,” he said when he heard the police car speed
by. “Five-O.”
1 1 7

“Five-O,” everyone yelled in response. The police siren was
far away and obviously not headed in our direction, as the
Doppler shift—the rise and fall in its tone—revealed. It faded
off toward the West Side, never coming close to our makeshift
baseball diamond. Though never any real threat, the squad car
had given Sean his out, a socially acceptable reason to let me
go, an excuse for having drawn his weapon but not having
drawn blood. He and the other Junior Outlaws flipped up the
collars on their windbreakers in some sort of appropriation of
1950s gang behavior. They wore these outer layers despite the
humid June weather. As the rest scattered Sean folded up his
knife, displaying a lot less ease and agility than he had in draw-
ing the weapon. Before racing off with the other kids he
turned and winked at me, as if it were the end of that day’s
episode of Sesame Street. Then he, too, crawled through the
hole in the fence and was gone.
I sat where he had dropped me from his grip, my palms
bloody from having broken my fall. I stared at the flesh of my
hands. The teeniest stones had wedged themselves into my
skin, along with slivers of brown, green, and clear glass. My
palms sported a perfect imprint of the surface on which they
had landed, mirrored the imperfections in the gravel-based ce-
ment that had seemed so smooth from afar. Like the park sur-
face itself, my palms glittered as the afternoon sun bounced off
them. Sitting there, on the verge of tears, all I felt was sorry
for myself. Only later would I realize that, given the racial ge-
ography of my childhood, it is surprising how little actual vio-
lence I encountered. I can’t imagine that a black kid growing
H o n k y S e s a m e S t r e e t

up in a poor white neighborhood would have gotten off so
lightly.
I vowed never to play pickup ball in Hamilton Fish Park
again. I was being separated—or separating myself—from my
neighbors one game at a time: first manhunt, now baseball. So
maybe it was fitting that I never got my glove back from James.
I was never happier to be leaving for the summer than I was
that afternoon, sitting there on the pitted cement. Only in ret-
rospect did I realize that this episode with Sean was the best
thing that could have happened to me. Had I been accepted by
the group, had I become a gang member—first a Junior Out-
law, then a full-fledged Outlaw—perhaps all the commuting
to school and summers in Pennsylvania would have made little
difference, and my life chances might not have been that much
better than those of the people around me. I’ll never know
whether it was my mother’s protectiveness, my expectations
and aspirations, or simply my race that spared me from a
worse fate. I will never know the true cause and effect in the
trajectory of my life. And maybe it is better that way. I can be-
lieve what I want to believe.This is the privilege of the middle
and upper classes in America—the right to make up the rea-
sons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own
narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us.
1 1 9

enough to my grandparents’ house that we could do our laun-
dry and take showers there; after that one of my mother’s few
Jewish friends from her childhood in Carbondale lent us his
cottage. We made our annual jaunts by packing everything we
owned into the fifteen-year-old automobile we had received as
a hand-me-down from my mother’s parents. We would ride
the huge black Oldsmobile luxury sedan through the Pocono
Mountains, my sister and I splayed out across the blue silk car
seats. We used to pretend we were riding a cruise ship, our
fantasy aided by the glug-glug of the old Diet Pepsi bottles we
kept filled with water for when the engine overheated. We
fooled around with the lighted vanity mirrors, which whis-
pered messages of class from a bygone era.We played with the
electric windows and gazed into the glow of the dashboard as
if it were the comforting hearth of a country fireplace.
In the late 1970s, northeastern Pennsylvania was already
awash in department-store overstock, irregulars, and factory
seconds of some of the world’s best off-the-rack clothing
Those first summers in Pennsylvania we camped out near
ten
W
e
lc
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brands. The region had evolved into a center for factory out-
lets, to which busloads of retirees and bargain-hunters flocked
from all across the mid-Atlantic. It was a historical accident that
the twelve miles of Route 6 between Carbondale and Scranton
had developed into one of the first of the seemingly endless
chains of strip malls that today litter the American landscape.
While the great coal mining era of the United States wound
slowly down in the wake of World War II, in Carbondale it
ground to a sudden halt in 1959. That year the main mine col-
lapsed, killing a dozen miners; their bodies remain trapped to
this day in the veins of anthracite that run beneath the town.
Meanwhile, a mine fire had been alternately raging and smol-
dering since the 1940s, its heat causing flowers to bloom in
winter. In 1972, a local entrepreneur with federal “urban
blight” financing finally put it out by filling the major caverns
of the mine with dirt and rocks pushed in from neighboring
land. In the process he peeled off the topsoil, inaugurating a
new epoch of strip mining. This method of coal retrieval took
a quick and heavy toll on the land, and after the stretch be-
tween Carbondale and Scranton had been taken for all the fos-
sil fuel it was worth, malls and plastic-shelled stores cropped
up there like weeds in a slag heap. And such was the local—
quite tangible—transformation from industrial to postindus-
trial economy—that is, from manufacturing to service, from
production to consumption, from local to global.
As we drove along Route 6 one year, I asked my parents
what the area produced to get all these stores in return. “I
mean, all these cars,” I said, waving toward a new car lot. A
H o n k y W e l c o m e t o A m e r i c a

glint of afternoon light jumped from one new automobile to
the next as we drove by them, as if some solar finger were indi-
vidually blessing each new Chevrolet and its cash-back rebate
or low-interest financing plan. “They don’t come from here.”
“What do you mean?” my father asked, turning quickly to
make eye contact for a split second. His brow was wrinkled,
his expression almost worried, as if what I was driving at upset
him too, and he wanted to avoid the whole subject. But finally
he shrugged and admitted, “Yeah, the cars come from Detroit
or Japan.”
My mother jumped in, sensing an underlying insult to her
home community, her insecurities and sensitivities keying up
with charge as if the ends of her frizzy hair were picking up
something in the air. “They pay for their cars like anyone else,”
she said.
I leaned forward, draping myself over the back of the front
seat, poking my head into the adult section. “They are getting
the cars from somewhere, and they are getting all these
clothes from somewhere; so what are they producing here that
gets shipped out?”
“Retail,” she said hurriedly, as if she sensed the tenuousness
of her logic and wanted to get it out before it crumbled. “All
these retail stores.”
“Yeah,” I insisted. “But they didn’t make the things that sell
here, so that’s a loss too.”
“They make metal grates and gas masks,” she countered,
seeming more worried than before, worried that if she herself
could not figure out what sustained the local economy, it
1 2 3

might collapse in that very moment. “And agriculture,” she
added, excited that she had thought of something else. “Corn
and milk and cattle—”
I was about to interrupt her, shout that no quantity of gas
masks or metal grates or ears of corn could pay for all the stuff
that lined the highway, but my father jumped in first. “Ma-
nure!” he cried. “Night crawlers! Dirt!” he added to her litany.
My sister was laughing now at the idea of selling dirt. But it
was true; when we turned off Route 6 and headed on the
backroads to the cottage, we always passed several signs adver-
tising these products.
Even my mother got into the spirit, yelling out, “Babies!
White babies!”
“That’s right,” my father smiled, as if she had reminded him
of some fundamental axiom. Poor women got several thou-
sand dollars to give up their newborns to rich city folk or to
carry someone else’s fertilized egg.
“Who’d want to buy the retards up here?” I said, hissing
through my teeth. I slouched back in my seat, pouting, uncon-
vinced that the region was paying off its trade deficit in fleshy
pink babies.
“You’re just so smug and superior, and I can’t stand it!” my
mother snapped, in a tone quite different from that she’d used
a few moments earlier. “The people up here are good people
who work for their money, and you are just such a—a—an
ass,” she said.This epithet shocked the entire family, most of all
my mother herself. She almost never used profanity, and this
was as close as she could get.
H o n k y W e l c o m e t o A m e r i c a

That summer’s ride was more interesting than most, but
once we arrived at the cottage my sister and I were bored to
no end, pining to be back in the city. Not only were we bored,
we were scared. The sign marking the entrance to the Com-
monwealth of Pennsylvania from neighboring New Jersey
read, “Welcome to Pennsylvania: Where America Starts.” My
sister and I could not help but be intimidated by this America,
with its single-family homes, aluminum siding, U.S. flags, and
front-yard statues of Negro jockeys.We had no idea how to re-
act when people we didn’t know waved to us as they cruised
by in their shiny cars.We didn’t know what to say when some-
one on the dirt road that ran behind our cottage asked how we
were doing. Such friendliness was not part of our America.
Given that this was her homeland, my mother had a per-
sonal stake in making my sister and me feel comfortable, so
she encouraged us to assimilate into the local culture. At first
she coaxed us into playing with the few other kids who lived
nearby—one family in particular had children our age. Our
friendship lasted only one afternoon, however, before we were
exiled from that household on account of all the profanity we
employed as part of our normal speech. We knew never to
swear at anyone directly, but using cuss words in a sentence
had seemed completely acceptable to us.The father of the two
kids dropped us back at our cottage, apologizing the whole
while to my mother, as if his refusal to expose his children to
such language reflected some failing or cultural limitation on
his part. After he left, my mother asked what bad words
Alexandra and I had used, but neither of us could remember
1 2 5

anything remarkable we had said and merely shrugged our
shoulders. My father bothered the neighbors, too, with the
loud reggae music he played in the cottage as he spray-painted
his abstract forms onto canvas.
“Can you turn that down please?” my mother would ask him
often, knowing that the car dealer who lived in the house next
to ours would be too polite to ask my father himself.
“No, I cannot turn it fucking down,” he would yell back in
the ritualized exchange, before adding, “Dub it, mon!”
My mother would flinch, and my father would wink at me.
We liked our music loud, as our neighbors did back on Av-
enue D. There we couldn’t compete, however. Boom-box ra-
dios had just hit the market, and an arms race of sorts had de-
veloped in the projects. The neighborhood would just be
starting to erupt with bass riffs as we left town each summer.
Residents—men and teenage boys, primarily—were getting
progressively bigger radios with more and more features, try-
ing to outdo each other in the battle for control of the air-
space. Even on the twenty-first floor, massive sub-woofers
used to rattle our windows whenever someone walked by
with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” or Anita Ward’s
“Ring My Bell” cranked up to maximum volume. Some
people even bought portable systems with built-in record
players, essentially carrying an entire stereo unit on their
shoulder. The ability to sustain the weight of these enormous
boxes became part of the competition. The silver behemoth
and the music emanating from it announced to everyone
around that, despite poverty and powerlessness, “Yo, I am
H o n k y W e l c o m e t o A m e r i c a

here.You hear?” In northeastern Pennsylvania, by contrast, no
one carried radios anywhere.
My mother’s efforts at rural assimilation were not limited
to turning down the volume of my father’s music. After we
failed to hit it off with the kids across the road, she made
Alexandra attend a sleepover birthday party for the daughter
of one of her old high school friends. At first Alexandra en-
joyed herself, awed by the suburban splendor of the recreation
room, with its deep-pile wall-to-wall carpeting and full bar.
The birthday girl’s father fixed everyone Shirley Temples with
umbrellas and plastic-looking maraschino cherries, and the
kids played pinball and Twister and baked Rice Krispie treats.
When Alexandra went to the bathroom she was amazed at the
bright blue splendor of the quilted toilet paper and the match-
ing hue of the chlorine eddies that appeared each time she
flushed the toilet.
Everything was going fine until it was time to hunker down
for the night. All the girls formed a circle with their sleeping
bags and told ghost stories. The first was about a girl whose
head wasn’t really attached to her body; the second was about
Bigfoot; and the third told of a girl who strayed from her
campsite and got lost in the woods. Owls hooted and wild an-
imals growled, frightening the little girl.
“Then he appeared,” the storyteller explained. “The huge
nigger stumbled forward with a squirrel in one hand whose
head he’d bitten off.”
Alexandra thought she had misheard, but the tale contin-
ued: “The nigger took one look at the little girl and reached
1 2 7

out with his claws to eat her.” She spoke not with racial hatred
but in the same tone with which the previous storyteller had
described Bigfoot, as if blacks were fairy-tale characters. My
sister’s mind flashed to images of her dark-skinned friends
back in New York and she considered speaking up, but instead
she swallowed the dryness in her throat and tried to will her-
self to sleep for the night.
As Alexandra retold the story, she felt most ashamed of her-
self for having made a mental connection between the fictional
“nigger” of the woods and her friends back in New York.Those
friends used the term themselves, even called each other nig-
gers, but they spoke the word with a sarcastic bite that negated
its content. At any rate, the word never seemed dirty until we
heard it used in the white Pennsylvania suburbs. Here, racism
was expressed but apparently not thought much about; by
contrast, I often reflected, on Avenue D it was often thought
about but never spoken of—at least not directly to us.
Not too long after the sleepover, Alexandra had to attend
summer school in Carbondale, where all but a handful of resi-
dents were Italian or Irish. She had enrolled in the world his-
tory course to make up for a class she had failed back in New
York. “China,” the teacher announced the first day of class, fol-
lowing the state-imposed curriculum, “China has one billion
people,” he said. “You know what that means?” Alexandra
shook her head along with all the other kids in the class. The
instructor continued, “That means two billion armpits and one
billion assholes. On to the next country . . . ” He sped this
H o n k y W e l c o m e t o A m e r i c a

way across the globe before arriving safely back in Europe.
“Everybody originates from Europe,” he said. “No matter what
anyone else says, man started in Europe, not Africa.” He waved
his arm over the class. “Is anyone’s family not from Europe?” he
asked, as if the issue had been settled. Then, as further evi-
dence, he added: “One time I had a little spicky in this class. I
thought, ‘There goes my theory.’ But then,” he said, as his eyes
lit up, “I realized that spics are from Spain, and that’s Europe.”
My sister and I couldn’t believe that a Hispanic had actually
lived up here, but we felt sorry for whomever it was.
While Alexandra suffered through summer school, I was
sent to the local Boy Scout camp. Since I didn’t belong to a lo-
cal troop, I was always assigned to the hodgepodge unit for un-
affiliated campers. We learned to tie knots and lash together
poles, swam, and practiced CPR. I had by then cultivated a
love of credentials and earned as many merit badges as I could
each summer. I had collected enough to make the rank of Ea-
gle Scout but, with no scoutmaster in New York or anywhere
else, had no one to confer the title upon me.
This particular summer I was assigned to a troop of men-
tally disabled kids and, much to my surprise, had a great time
with them. The disabled kids were entirely unselfconscious;
we sat around each other’s tents, talking and farting. They did
not laugh or sneer at each other’s gas, but would break wind in
the middle of a sentence and continue unperturbed. No one
snapped on anyone else, and I could feel tension fall off my
shoulders like molted skin.
1 2 9

All was well until Sunday rolled around. After morning for-
mation, the scoutmaster announced that we would be hiking
to a local church. I panicked. I had never been to church be-
fore, and I figured that once there I would have to do things I
didn’t know how to do—like pray. I needed to escape. At the
age of ten I had already developed a streak of Jewish self-
loathing.With my Irish last name I passed just fine, and I had no
desire to admit my ethnicity to anyone in rural Pennsylvania—
even the disabled kids in my troop, who surely did not harbor
any racial or ethnic prejudices. But in this instance I figured it
came down to a choice between admitting my Semitic origins
and being exposed in church when I didn’t pray correctly.
Suddenly I was angry with my parents for not having prop-
erly introduced me to this world of the spirit. In particular, I
couldn’t understand why my father never explained anything
about his religious background to me, information that would
have come in handy that Sunday morning. Anytime I had asked
my father what he was in terms of religious identity, he merely
answered: “I believe in the Giants and the Form.” We even used
to call his Racing Form “the Bible,” since he pored over it like a
scholar studying a sacred text. When I pressed him he admit-
ted that he was Lutheran, though he would not or could not
elaborate on what this meant. His own father had hated orga-
nized religion, as had his father before him. Steve took partic-
ular relish in telling how his paternal grandfather had told a
priest to go to hell after the church forbade him from burying
his wife, who had died during childbirth, with the stillborn in-
fant, since the latter had not been baptized. He immediately
H o n k y W e l c o m e t o A m e r i c a

converted to the Lutheran faith of his late Dutch wife and
passed this religion on to the surviving members of the next
generation.
I had no choice but to opt out of the trek to the local
church. Instead of telling the scoutmaster himself, I ap-
proached his assistant, who had a beard and long hair and often
wore a tie-dyed shirt. I had never known anyone who dressed
like him, though I had seen such individuals at the anti-nuclear
rally I had attended. Somehow I had internalized a cultural vo-
cabulary that told me that his attire meant he would be more
understanding of my religious inexperience than the neatly
pressed head scoutmaster would.
“Excuse me,” I said to him, as he was busy teasing out the
snarls in his red beard with the comb from his Swiss army
knife. “I can’t go to church today.”
“God doesn’t care how you look, as long as you show up,”
he said, a smile detectable underneath his furry visage.
“But I’m—I’m not Catholic,” I stuttered.
“That’s all right,” he answered swiftly and with a knowing
glance that implied empathy. “This is a Methodist church.”
I didn’t think he understood my statement, so I repeated it.
He, in turn, reiterated the denomination of the church we
would be attending. I had no idea what Methodist meant, but I
clued in to the fact that I had made some grave error in my use
of terms. Only after I got home from camp did I find out I had
conflated Catholicism in particular with Christianity in gen-
eral. As a result of this misstatement, I had to march down the
dirt road to the Methodist church with the rest of the disabled
1 3 1

troop. I stood when everyone else stood, sat when they sat,
mumbled along during the prayers, said “amen” occasionally,
and tried to stay awake when the preacher spoke at length.
There was nothing to it. Marching home, I felt I had learned an
important new skill that should have earned a merit badge. In
that moment, freshly blessed in my Boy Scout fatigues, I felt
more like an American than ever before.
1 3 2

high school. The children at Intermediate School 70—the
O. Henry School—were a mix of all races and classes.They in-
cluded the privileged kids from P.S. 41, who now trekked one
neighborhood northward, along with black and Hispanic stu-
dents from the West Side projects and those of us who bused in
from other parts of the city. Given how integrated it was, this
school seemingly had the potential to sew the two halves of my
life together. Little did I realize that putting many races in the
same school did not necessarily result in integration. Aca-
demic tracking reproduced, to some extent, the larger soci-
ety’s hierarchy of race and class. Moreover, those of us who
were poor sat inside, eating our federally subsidized hot
lunches, while the Village kids went out to the local shops for
food. These institutional forces only abetted the natural ten-
dency of preteens to fall into cliques. And at I.S. 70, clique was
short for race-class grouping.
There was no school bus for junior high; those of us coming
from far away took public transportation. My neighbors and I
After returning from Pennsylvania that year, I started junior
eleven
N
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o
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io

took the M14 bus, riding from one end of the line to the other.
The irony was that I.S. 70 was as rough as the schools in my
own neighborhood, largely because it sat next to Charles
Evans Hughes High School, a remedial facility for dropouts
and students with behavioral problems. Consequently, the I.S.
70 cliques fell into two overall groups: those who became ap-
prentices of the Hughes hoodlums, and those who became
their victims. At one point during my tenure there, a teacher
was stabbed in the back when he tried to break up a fight be-
tween two twelve-year-olds. His name, ironically, was Mr.
Sward—pronounced like the weapon.
With a few notable exceptions—Mr. Sward included—the
teachers were as tough and merciless as the student body.They
ran the school like a prison. We were locked inside the build-
ing for the entire day, except at lunch. Even with the school
sealed off from the outer world, many teachers forbade stu-
dents from exiting their rooms once the bell rang. The most
drastic restraint of all was imposed in the cafeteria, which was
closed off during each lunch period and left under the com-
mand of the thick-browed science teacher, Mr. Baumann. He
stood against the green-tiled wall with a heavy microphone
that transmitted his voice to every corner of the huge room.
He used this microphone for more than just talking, however.
“Yo,” he yelled at me one day when I was flinging mashed
sweet potatoes at my new friend Marcus. “You in the blue shirt,
come ’ere. And you, too,” he added, pointing to Marcus. Mar-
cus was black and lived in Harlem. He didn’t fit in any particu-
lar clique, since hardly any other students commuted from his
H o n k y N o S o a p R a d i o

faraway neighborhood. Marcus was the only person who ever
referred to me as “nigga.” Every time he applied the word to me
I relished the sound of it, as I might savor an exotic delicacy.
This word, more than any other cultural term or practice, con-
tinued to separate me from my neighbors back home. They all
referred to each other by this term, whereas I substituted the
word man, as in, “Yo, what’s up, man?” Several times the n-word
perched on the edge of my tongue like a diver, ready to leap off.
I so desperately wanted to say it. Even many light-skinned
Puerto Ricans used the term freely.What would happen if I just
casually slipped it in there once? I wondered, playing out the
possible scenarios in my head.The more I thought about it, the
more I convinced myself that the ability to utter the word nigga
was the ultimate gulf between my neighbors and me. Even with
Marcus I had never uttered the word.
When Mr. Baumann singled Marcus and me out, we had no
choice but to stand against the wall with the other students
who had erred in some way. We were to spend the rest of our
lunch period standing there silently. But Marcus suffered an
additional punishment—Mr. Baumann rapped him over the
head with the microphone when we arrived at the front of the
lunchroom. He conked many kids on the skull with his instru-
ment of oration, leaving a trail of bumps that even the most in-
experienced phrenologist could read.What the bumps spelled
out was racism; for he never struck me or Michael Holt or
even the Turkish Ozan Gurel across our still-hardening cranial
plates. He only beaned the black and Hispanic kids.
Afros had gone out of fashion, replaced by close-cropped
1 3 5

hairstyles that left black students with little natural protection
from Mr. Baumann’s blows. After Marcus was attacked, he and
I were made to stand for the rest of the period, the bump on
his head swelling with each passing minute. This event pro-
pelled Michael into his latest and greatest political crusade: to
get Mr. Baumann disciplined.
“We will stand up to him,” he told Marcus, whose tears had
by then dried, leaving dirty streaks down his face. I remember
being surprised at Michael’s use of “we,” since he had never
been hit over the head or even made to stand up along the
wall.The issue of race never came up when Michael convinced
Marcus to go with him to talk to Principal Witty, but the cam-
paign succeeded: Mr. Baumann was taken off the lunchroom
detail, and the bruisings stopped. However, as far as I know he
was never disciplined for his actions.
I tried my best to avoid the violence of the school, be it
from teachers or fellow students, but I did get into a couple
fights of my own making. The first was with none other than
my buddy Marcus. Sadly, it all started with a joke.
“Two people were in the bathtub when one said to the
other, ‘Pass the soap,’ ” a white kid told Marcus and me. “The
other said, ‘No soap, radio.’ ” Marcus and the other kid roared
with laughter. I laughed too, though after they did and in a
higher pitch. As soon as I did, the two of them whipped their
heads around to me.
“Why are you laughing?” Marcus asked me.
“Because of the joke.”
H o n k y N o S o a p R a d i o

“What joke?” the other kid interjected.
“The joke,” I repeated.
“What’s so funny about it?” Marcus asked, his fists on his hips.
“There’s no joke.Why’s it funny?” the other kid said in rapid
succession.
I had only laughed because they had. But I couldn’t admit
that to them, so I quickly invented a punch line. “The second
person in the bathtub said ‘No soap’ and was going to pass him
the radio instead,” I explained.
“Say what?”
“And anyone who uses a radio in the bathtub,” I continued,
“is going to electrocute themselves, so he’s an idiot. And that’s
why it’s funny.”
Marcus’s face twisted up in disgust as if he had just sucked
on a lemon. “What?” he and the white kid uttered in unison.
“Okay,” I said, revising my interpretation. “It’s funny be-
cause you said there were two guys in the bathtub, so that
makes them fags.”
“I said two people,” the white kid instructed, spit flying into
my face as he spelled out the word for me. “P-E-O-P-L-E!”
Someone else told me this joke the following week, and I
laughed again; when confronted about the source of the hilar-
ity, I changed my strategy. “Come on, you know,” I said, giving
the person who had told the joke a conspiratorial elbow
nudge.That didn’t work either, and they stomped off laughing.
I spent days trying to figure out the essence of the joke. I
looked up each word in the dictionary—soap, radio, even no—
1 3 7

trying to determine if there were multiple meanings that
could generate the humor. I finally designed an experiment to
figure it out once and for all: I told the joke to my sister. After
the punch line, she stood there silently. I observed her as if I
were dressed in a white lab coat and holding a stopwatch.
“Why aren’t you laughing?” I asked finally.
“Because that’s the oldest joke in the book,” she said. “Don’t
tell me you laughed at it?”
“No, I—”
“You’re not supposed to laugh,” she explained in a sympa-
thetic tone. “That’s the joke; everybody who knows not to
laugh laughs at the person who does.”
I became obsessed with this fundamentally different type of
dis. No soap radio seemed to embody the spirit of junior high
school. It was all about centers and peripheries, conformity
and deviance, in-groups and out-groups. Since cliques gener-
ally fell along race and class lines, I felt particularly stung by
Marcus’s alliance with the white kid from Greenwich Village.
I had by then come to the realization that the your momma
snaps so popular in my neighborhood were not really intended
to hurt me or the person against whom they were directed; on
the contrary, they served to bring everyone together. If some-
one said my mother was so stupid that she tried to alphabetize
M&Ms or that I was so poor that I lived on Avenue E, the imag-
inary street that would have lain the next block over from Av-
enue D, I laughed along with everyone else and even gave high
fives for particularly good snaps. I got into the rhythm, shout-
ing back that his mother was like the library: open to the pub-
H o n k y N o S o a p R a d i o

lic. The no soap radio joke was different. It was not direct and
up front with its humor, not sporting; it was instead about
ganging up on someone behind his back, making a person look
stupid rather than calling him so.
I carefully planned how I would react the next time this
joke was told in front of me. I rehearsed acting blasé, saying
“Ha, ha,” in a deadpan voice, even adding “How droll” for sar-
casm. Finally, a month later, I got my chance. Marcus told the
joke to someone during drama class, which was held backstage
of the main auditorium. It was May already, and the air was
dripping with humidity and with anticipation of summer vaca-
tion.The space was dusty and smelled of mildew and antiques,
an odor more appropriate for a condemned Broadway theater
than a junior high school. Sealed off from the rest of the
world, the room functioned as a self-contained ecosystem, the
air thick and sticky, like a muddy fog.
I was sitting next to Marcus, waiting for the tardy teacher
to show up. Both of us were sucking on red lollipops we had
bought during our lunch hour. The dank air coated our lol-
lipops as we waved them through the air to punctuate our
snaps on each other. “Your momma’s so ugly,” Marcus said as
he jabbed the air in front of my face with his sucker, “Bigfoot
takes pictures of her.”
I laughed and volleyed back. “Your momma’s so poor, I
went to her house and her mat said ‘Wel—’ ”
“Oh yeah, well—,” he started to say.
I was on the best roll of my life, rattling off one snap after
another off in an unselfconscious rhythm that I had never
1 3 9

before possessed. “Your momma’s so hairy, she look like she
got Buckwheat in a headlock.”
Marcus was growing frustrated, sucking his lollipop so hard
that his cheeks hollowed out completely, and I could discern
the outline of the spherical candy inside. He stuttered, starting
to fire back, but instead turned to the white girl who was sit-
ting behind him. “Two guys were in the bathtub—,” he
started. This was my chance to make him look stupid by not
laughing, but I couldn’t contain my energy or the anger left
over from the times I had been the butt of the joke. I grabbed
Marcus by his t-shirt, ripping it a bit where the elastic neck
met the main body of the garment. “Very funny!” I screamed
into his shocked face. His lollipop fell out of his mouth, and I
tugged at the ripped collar of his t-shirt. We spun each other
around as if we were on the teacup ride at an amusement park,
pushing through the heavy curtain that separated the class-
room area from the stage.The rest of the class followed.We let
go of each other, and I exploded in an involuntary fit, my arms
flailing against Marcus’s face. One of these epileptic punches
landed on his jaw, stunning him for a moment. He quickly re-
covered, however, and threw a hook that caught the tip of my
nose. Blood flowed down and off my face. A cheer erupted
from the rest of the class. I punched back, cracking Marcus’s
close-shaven head with the white of my knuckles. Then I
landed a straight punch that smushed his flat nose even flatter
into his face. His blood flowed, too, cascading over his lips and
onto his shirt.
I felt myself gaining control of the situation as I pummeled
H o n k y N o S o a p R a d i o

Marcus, who collapsed in a pile of limbs.The class was roaring,
and I started crying, not for myself but for Marcus. Some white
kids came up to me, slapping me on the back in congratulation.
I was still bawling when I bent over to look at Marcus, who had
not shed a tear and remained stoic while lying crumpled on the
dusty floor. I reached out to try and help him up just as the
teacher entered on the scene.When she saw me standing there
covered in blood, my hand extended, she yanked me by the ear
and took me to the assistant principal’s office, where I was sus-
pended for the first time. Then sixth grade ended, and Marcus
and I never spoke to each other again.
1 4 1

70, at home our family’s economic situation was improving.
My mother had sold her first novel, Soho Madonna. Her manu-
script had floundered for years with the title Slum Goddess, but
when she moved the setting a few blocks west to the up-and-
coming Soho district and made the family upwardly mobile in-
stead of economically stagnant, the manuscript sold. In 1980 it
became the first paperback ever reviewed in the New York Times,
getting a rave.
Shortly after it was released, Alexandra came home from
school crying. “Why didn’t you put me on the cover instead of
Ashley?” she asked my mother, who didn’t understand what
my sister was talking about.
“What, sweetie?” she asked, stroking Alexandra’s hair as she
had when the cornrows hadn’t worked out a few years earlier.
“You put Ashley on the cover of your book,” my sister
sobbed. My mother had played no part in the cover design and
didn’t know who this Ashley was. But after some deciphering,
she figured out that Alexandra was upset because one of her
While things may have been getting worse for me socially at I.S.
tw
elve
M
o
v
in
g
O
n
U
p

classmates had been hired to model for the cover illustration
of the Soho mother and her children. Such are the coinci-
dences one may encounter when attending public school in
Manhattan.
My sister had tested into a magnet school in Chinatown. Af-
ter my experience at the Mini School, my parents hadn’t even
considered sending her there and immediately enrolled her at
P.S. 124, the Yung Wing Elementary School. There Alexandra
took classes with a mix of whites, Asians, and other minority
students. Her classmates included the child star of Kramer vs.
Kramer and a renowned piano prodigy who spoke five lan-
guages. She never seemed to experience the type of angst
about bringing richer friends over to our house that I’d suf-
fered with Michael. Her friends—some of whom were being
raised on completely macrobiotic diets—loved the pizzas that
my mother let us make. One girl who was forbidden to watch
television at home invariably stayed up all night enjoying the
late shows with my mother. Another, whose parents did not
believe in meals and mealtimes but preferred “grazing” in-
stead, used to beg my mother for a couple of slices of white
bread to cure her insomnia.
Only once did Alexandra feel the sense of shame that I
seemed to experience regularly. One night Bosi, one of the
wealthiest girls from her class, slept over. They needed hair
clips with artificial feathers to do themselves up in the correct
grade-school style of that time, so my mother took them both
to a trinket store on Rivington Street. Rivington Street was at
that time the main channel of heroin imports into the United
H o n k y M o v i n g O n U p

States; something like 80 percent of the nation’s supply passed
through Rivington Street. A lot of it was consumed right there
as well. The street, a block or two from our house, formed
one-third of a worldwide drug circuit, the other two points
being the Golden Triangle, a poppy-growing region centered
in Burma, and Thailand, where the drugs were shipped en
route to Rivington Street.
The girls bought the hair implements and were just exiting
the store when gunfire erupted. My mother pushed Bosi and
my sister face down onto the lugie-ridden pavement.They got
back safely, but my sister remained uncharacteristically quiet
for the rest of the evening. Bosi never came over again.
That incident aside, Alexandra seemed as confident as I was
insecure, as charming as I was awkward. She had birthday par-
ties where practically everyone from her class showed up. Al-
most everyone wanted a turn to sleep over, and almost every-
one got one—except Ashley, who never made the list after
appearing on the cover of my mother’s novel.
Soho Madonna also caused friction between my sister and
her teacher. Each student had received an assignment to bring
in a book from home and read a section of it to the entire class.
My sister chose our mother’s book. The teacher, Ms. Edelson,
opened to a random page and instructed Alexandra to start
there. She did, reading a section where Jobina, the protago-
nist, suspected that her artist husband, Mack, was cheating on
her: “There seemed to be no way to check. But what if you could weigh
the balls? What if there were some way you could weigh the balls to see
if they were empty or full—”
1 4 5

Alexandra got no further. She didn’t get a chance to narrate
how Jobina established baseline testicle measurements by flat-
tering Mack on his manliness until he agreed to place his scro-
tum on her Weight Watchers scale; how she charted the change
in their mass after sex; how she confirmed her suspicions with
scientific data. After reading three short sentences, Alexandra
was yanked from the front of the room, screamed at by Ms.
Edelson, and ushered into the principal’s office along with the
“smut.” She was about to be suspended when my mother
roared into the office and explained that the “smut” was her
own book. New York Times review in hand, Ellen declared that if
the teacher or the principal ever made Alexandra feel bad
about herself or her mother’s work again, she would file a
complaint with the Board of Education.
Despite excellent press, Soho Madonna failed to make us
rich. But that didn’t stop my parents from celebrating. Ellen
bought leather coats for herself and my father. She gave my sis-
ter and me each twenty dollars to take to the 69-cent store.
Best of all, she took us all on a trip to Colombia. She had
enough money to pay for the airfare but not much more, so we
packed our suitcases full of food. My sister and I ate in the ho-
tel room in Cartagena, using a heating coil to cook powdered
Lipton soups and canned baked beans. Meanwhile, my parents
attended the all-you-can-eat buffets at the hotel, filling their
pockets with what they could to bring back to us. Since we had
packed few clothes, we pretty much wore the t-shirts we got
free from the hotel upon our arrival.The sun was so hot that it
burned us through the thin layer of cotton. Alexandra and I
H o n k y M o v i n g O n U p

swooned with heat fatigue and hunger as we pressed our faces
up to the glass of the air-conditioned hotel dining room,
watching my father help himself to his third omelet of the
morning as the serving girls giggled.
In another effort to save money, my mother opted for an
out-of-date copy of Fodor’s guide to Colombia. For the most
part it worked just fine. But once, while trying to get to a
restaurant listed in the guide, we found ourselves waved off in
frantic pantomime by the locals. The restaurant was long de-
funct, replaced by a booby-trapped coca-leaf field in the
decade or so since the publication of the guidebook. These in-
cidents notwithstanding, we had a great trip. It was the first
time my sister and I had traveled outside the United States. It
was the first time I saw real mountains; the ridges of the Andes
seemed to slope downward as steeply and jaggedly as the price
chart for a crashing stock market, right to the edge of the sea
and almost into it, as if they were marching into the ocean
peak by peak.
We were also fascinated and disturbed by the local poverty.
The Colombian villagers seemed to endure a material hard-
ship much harsher than anything we had witnessed in New
York City; only the homeless veterans who begged on the sub-
way, those with oozing sores or missing limbs, seemed to offer
a comparison. The sight of Colombian children with flies eat-
ing at their eyes and blind old ladies who seemed to shrivel up
right before us brought waves of sickness to my stomach. I
kept telling myself that at least it was warm here, at least they
didn’t have to worry about freezing to death as some of the
1 4 7

New York homeless did. It didn’t help, though. I still felt as if a
hole were being eaten in the lining of my stomach. I rushed
past, trying not to look, imagining that I had on blinders like
some of the horses back at Aqueduct.
The biggest shock of all, however, was the prevalence of
guns. While we knew there were guns back home, we almost
never saw one.When a gun was shown—as when Bosi and my
sister had hit the pavement on Rivington Street or when a rob-
ber took hostages at the local drugstore—it was invariably
used. In this respect, life on the Lower East Side seemed to fol-
low the rules of stage drama. In Colombia, by contrast, huge
machine guns were everywhere. Government officers in mili-
tary garb wore them on their shoulders, with spare rounds of
ammo hung around their necks like leis. The soldiers’ fingers
sat on the triggers, and my sister and I could not escape the
feeling that gunfire was always imminent. But the threat of vi-
olence came from the state, not from the people themselves.
The Colombians seemed so calm and peaceful that I had
trouble imagining what would actually provoke the soldiers to
fire their weapons. We had heard stories of bandits in the
mountains, but the locals we encountered seemed to be the
most docile folks on earth. At the time it didn’t occur to me
that perhaps this was a matter of cause and effect, that the sub-
missiveness of the villagers might be a coping mechanism, the
result of years of state oppression.
Our short burst of luxurious living at the equator heralded
a general improvement in our financial situation. My father,
who only occasionally sold a piece of work despite rave re-
H o n k y M o v i n g O n U p

views from Tom Wolfe, among others, now took a part-time
job to support the family. Initially he served as a messenger for
Time magazine, hand-delivering the final page proofs from the
headquarters in New York to the printing plant in Chicago. He
got to spend one night a week living large on a corporate ac-
count and always brought my sister and me some airline
peanuts or a set of toy captain’s wings. My mother couldn’t be
assuaged so easily, however, and resented his weekly escape
from us. Soon this boondoggle ended, and he was offered a job
in the New York office for two long days a week, pasting up
page layouts. It always took him a third day to recover from the
double shift and the harsh chemical solvents involved in the
work, and he began to complain that he had no time for his
art, given his share of the child care and housework responsi-
bilities. He never gave up the weekly trip to the racetrack,
however. When his job ratcheted up to three days of long
hours and his mother was diagnosed with cancer, my father’s
free time disappeared altogether. He never got the chance to
capitalize on his critical acclaim in the art world and began to
fall into an alcohol-aided depression, which worsened when
his mother died. It took him a year or two to work through the
grieving process, but he continued to resent his day job until
the day he retired over twenty years later.
Looking back, I believe my father’s attitude toward work
marked our class position more than any other psychological
dynamic within the family. While other men in the neighbor-
hood might have felt down on themselves for not having a
job or not getting enough hours of work, my father had the
1 4 9

opposite reaction. As long as he had been a full-time artist who
got by on odd jobs, he was someone special, someone whose
position in life could not be captured by his income or occupa-
tion. But as soon as he slipped into regular work at a regular
job, he ceased to feel like an artist, one who existed outside
the socioeconomic structures of American society. He had be-
come what he despised, a workingman. Now he was simply
lower middle class—and downwardly mobile from his
corporate-class father to boot. There was no escaping it or
denying it, and he didn’t try to. It was the single biggest sacri-
fice he made for the family, one he sustained for twenty years
and for which he received little in the way of thanks.
My sister and I may not have appreciated the economic
transformation we were going through at the time, but we did
notice that some things changed when my father started work-
ing.They were not related to the extra income we enjoyed as a
family but rather to the in-kind payment that accompanied it.
Suddenly we had an unlimited supply of pens, pencils, and pa-
per. When I had to take drafting class at school, my father got
me a protractor, a professional compass, and a couple of other
instruments—all for free, courtesy of Time, Inc. No more did
we scrounge for half-used pens and pencils on the floor at
school or use the backsides of junk mail instead of notebooks.
I felt proud to open my knapsack at school, particularly since
everything had Time written all over it. And T-I-M-E spelled
respectability.
1 5 0

drifted apart from Michael almost from the day we started at
the new school; the following year he was accepted into
Hunter, one of the best public schools in the city, and left I.S.
70. Luckily, that semester I made a new friend. Jerome McGill
was black and commuted from my neighborhood. The first
year we never seemed to take the same bus to school, but dur-
ing seventh grade we got to know each other during our daily
ride on the M14. Looking back, it seems eerie that I became
friends with Jerome not too long after I had my fight with
Marcus. It was almost as if I had a certain slot in my life for a
black friend, which could be filled by only one individual at a
time—although I hope this was not the case, that it was
merely a coincidence.
Jerome lived a couple of blocks up on Avenue D, in a hous-
ing complex that was even more dangerous and much more
hopeless than ours. Few of the residents there worked at all.
Jerome smiled a lot. He smiled despite the fact that he’d lost
his dad early in his childhood. His father had been sunning
I had lost Marcus through my own belligerence. I had also
th
irteen
D
is
c
o
S
u
c
k
s

himself in a plastic lounge chair on the fire escape when one
leg of the foldout chaise got caught and tipped him over and
off as he tried to stand up. Jerome kept smiling even though
his mother worked all the time, even though he had to take
care of his younger sister Zuni, who was Alexandra’s age,
when he would rather have played stickball or stoop with the
rest of us, even though he had little money to spend on Reg-
gie Bars or Mike and Ike candies. In fact, Jerome never
stopped smiling.
He had straight white teeth with a slight overbite. He was
tall for his age but slim to the point of looking slightly mal-
nourished. His elbows protruded as if the bones were growing
so fast that the skin could not keep up. His bearing stood out
from the typical countenance in the neighborhood. Most
people walked with their shoulders stooped and their heads
down, as if nothing going on around them was interesting
enough to elicit their attention. Jerome, by contrast, always
walked as if he had somewhere to be, his head up, chin out, his
long limbs springing ahead as if they knew themselves where
that somewhere was. As he glided through the projects or
down Avenue D, he made eye contact with passersby. This,
too, set him apart from the rest of us, especially from me. On
the West Side I stared down every man, woman, or child who
crossed my path, but back in the neighborhood I looked down
or out of the corner of my eye. Eye contact on Avenue D
meant confrontation, and confrontation meant the potential
for violence, which I would be sure to receive rather than dole
out. Jerome’s gaze had quite the opposite effect, disarming
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

everyone in his path. He nodded to old ladies and aggressive
teenagers alike, as if he were the very glue that held the com-
munity together.
He certainly was the singular drop of Krazy Glue that kept
me connected to other kids after my tenure on Las Piratas had
ended. Often he coaxed me past the steel bars and down the
twenty-one flights of stairs to hang out on the benches with
the neighborhood kids, even Sean. One time, not too long af-
ter we had met, we were hanging out after school near his
house with some of the ex-Piratas when someone suggested
bus riding—that is, hopping onto the back of the M14 and rid-
ing it like an urban bucking bronco. The trick was to jump
onto the back bumper just as the bus turned off Avenue D and
headed toward the river before swinging around the projects
to come back down Delancey Street, ready for another jour-
ney northward and westward. There were seldom any passen-
gers on this final portion of the route; with no additional
weight and no stops, the bus driver could really take off, whip-
ping around the FDR Drive at speeds that must have come
close to the vehicle’s maximum. The velocity, the sharp turns,
and the fact that the bus came back around almost to the start-
ing point made this stretch the favorite among bus jockeys.
Clinton, the catcher for Las Piratas, grabbed hold of a ridge
of the corrugated metal that armored the outside of the bus
and was whisked away on his plastic banana-shaped skate-
board. At the same time, Sean hopped the bumper and grasped
the ridge of the Gloria Vanderbilt blue jeans advertisement
that was plastered on the back of the bus. As the bus sped off
1 5 3

he waved to Jerome and me, humping the picture of a
woman’s buttocks tightly clad in the designer jeans.
Jerome and I were supposed to take the next bus, which was
following close behind. But my mother had made me swear not
to ride the back of the buses. She had, as was her way, even
bribed me with a cash payment. In exchange for two dollars
and a trip to the 69-cent store, I had signed an affidavit stating
that I would never “ride on the outside of any bus or other mo-
tor vehicle in any manner or fashion, alone or in combination
with a skateboard, bicycle or other motor or non-motor vehi-
cle.” Though only ten at the time, I had already negotiated many
such contracts with my mother. For sums ranging from a quar-
ter to five dollars I had forsaken my right to lean over the sub-
way platform to check if the train was coming, to haggle with a
mugger, even to commit suicide. That last one had earned me a
full five-dollar note. It was easy money, since suicide was a con-
cept that was then well beyond my grasp, let alone my desire.
But I’d once threatened to kill myself if she didn’t let me go
over to the next project with some of the Piratas.
“Don’t ever say that!” my mother had scolded, in a tone
harsher than I had ever heard her use. Without even stopping
to explain, she cupped her hand over my mouth and nose and
held it there for what seemed like several minutes but must
have been only thirty or forty seconds. “You want to know
what death tastes like?” she asked, pressing the back of my head
into her other palm as I struggled for air. “This is a little bit of
death.This is what it’s like.”
Unlike my father, she never struck us, so this was the most
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

violent she had ever been with me. When she removed her
hand, air rushed into me seemingly beyond my control. My
head was spinning, as much from seeing a mother I didn’t rec-
ognize as from lack of oxygen. Finally, as the color came back
to both our faces, the mother I knew returned. “Promise me
that you will never kill yourself,” she said as softly as she
stroked my hair. Later that day she left out a contract for me to
sign. There was none of the negotiation that usually went on
between us, and at bedtime I found a five-dollar bill stuck un-
der my pillow. Nothing else was ever said.
As for my agreement to ride only on the inside of buses,
that was another story. She had repeated her warning—or,
rather, her legal dictum—every so often when she saw an-
other kid doing it. Earlier that week she had waved the con-
tract, or something that looked like it, in front of me as she re-
cited its contents by heart. I don’t know if she could sense
something in the works or if, perhaps, her warning actually
planted the suggestion in my head, but for whatever reason I
found myself standing on the corner with Jerome, poised to
hop the next bus, which sat waiting for the light to change. It
certainly had not been my idea, so I could not discount the
possibility of maternal ESP.
“Ready?” Jerome asked as the light changed to green. He
saw the hesitancy in my step and immediately came to a halt
himself. “You can’t?” he asked. I nodded. I braced myself for a
lecture on how not to be scared. Instead, Jerome’s own ESP
kicked in.
“Your mother?”
1 5 5

I nodded again. Jerome had spent enough time in our house
to know how things worked in our family.Without saying any-
thing else, he started walking toward the East River. I followed
silently as we circled the Baruch houses, trailing the black
stream of smoke left in the wake of the bus. Just as we rounded
the block and were coming up Delancey Street, he started
running. I ran, too. As breathless as when my mother had
cupped her hand over my mouth and nose, I followed him to
the corner where Sean and Clinton stood.
“Yo, what happened?” Sean asked.
I looked down, ashamed of having copped out, but Jerome
spoke up. “Yo,” he said. “We got busted.”
“Word?” Clinton asked.
“Yeah,” Jerome continued. “The driver was going to have us
arrested. That’s why we had to run here.” I had never seen
Jerome lie to anyone before. No one seemed to notice the fact
that the bus had pulled in too far ahead of us to make our story
believable.
Just as he saved what little face I had that afternoon, Jerome
brought my sister into the male fold. Whenever we played
touch football or whiffle ball in the playground area of the
project, he would pick my sister for his team. The other kids
would grumble about it, and I would wince and blush, my en-
tire face turning as red as my lips. But Jerome would override
any resentments with his huge smile and a wink.
Not only did Jerome repair my ties with Sean and the other
neighborhood kids, he was also my best friend at school. I re-
member one particular afternoon late in seventh grade when a
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

schoolwide assembly was convened in the auditorium to select
the music for an end-of-year party. Most of the black and His-
panic kids liked disco, while the white kids from the Village
liked rock, punk, or new wave. When word got around that
the selection of music was the purpose of the assembly, the
student body segregated into camps that were scaled-down
versions of the neighborhoods from which we came. All the
black and Hispanic kids sat on the left side of the room, while
the whites sat on the right. Lacking any strong musical opin-
ions—I only knew I liked my father’s reggae over my mother’s
country and western—I had no idea where to sit. I thought I
would literally be left standing in the aisle that divided disco
from rock. I saw Marcus sitting on the disco side, chatting with
some friends. There was a seat free next to him, but when he
made eye contact with me my stomach rose up into my throat
and my heart dropped into the space my stomach had occu-
pied. We had not spoken since our fight the year before. I was
about to leave the auditorium altogether and pass the period
sitting in the stall of one of the bathrooms when Jerome called
out, smiled, and patted the seat next to him, beckoning me to
join him on the disco side.
I sat down next to him and craned my neck, searching the
other side of the aisle for Ozan or some of the other kids I
knew. But the white kids were the bigger group, and there
were too many pale faces and too many shaggy mops of hair
obscuring facial features. Seeing the races separated out this
way, it struck me just how different the two groups at I.S. 70
were from one another. The white kids, like their hairdos,
1 5 7

were all carefully disheveled in style. Their Levi’s gathered at
the crotch and bunched into folds at the ankle where they met
their shoes.They wore loose-fitting t-shirts that hung out over
their pants.The shirts either were a solid color or advertised a
recent rock concert by the Who, Foreigner, or Boston. Some
wore denim jackets despite the mid-spring warmth; others
had on headbands, barrettes, or hair clips, though few wore
any sort of hat. The punks sported ripped t-shirts and pierced
various parts of their faces with safety pins. Their hair was
gelled up into spikes or shaved into Mohawks. By contrast, the
headbangers had the longest, most tangled hair of all, com-
pletely obscuring their faces.
These two subcultures were minorities among the white
majority, whose biggest musical preference was so-called clas-
sic rock. It had been about a decade since the breakup of the
Beatles and the deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Ja-
nis Joplin, but already the music of the Sixties and early Seven-
ties had been canonized. It was as if the world had started at
the time of our births and history had been compressed to fit
our short life spans. Nostalgia was the reigning ethos among
the Village kids; the world as they knew it seemingly had
peaked by 1970.
The darker side of the aisle shared none of this cultural
longing for the past.The Sugar Hill Gang had recently released
“Rapper’s Delight,” the commercial precursor to hip hop, and
public space back home seemed to spill over with musical arti-
facts thanks to the advent of boom boxes and the nonexistence
of Walkmans. Proto–break dancing had emerged in the play-
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

ground and on the streets. Exciting new sneaker and clothing
brands seemed to pop up daily for our consumer pleasure.We
were on the cusp of cultural renaissance. The theme of dress
was tight, striped, and labeled. T-shirts hugged the well-
defined pubescent musculature of the boys and the developing
breasts of the girls. Girls wore designer jeans that hugged
nascent hips, with stripes down the sides tracing their paths of
development. Shorts also had stripes down the sides of them,
often matching those on the accompanying shirts. Even tube
socks, pulled up tight so that they almost reached the knee,
proudly displayed three horizontal stripes across the top
end—the thicker the better. And on our side of the aisle, de-
signer labels served as status markers. A lot of the minority
girls wore Gloria Vanderbilt or Sergio Valente jeans, while the
boys had the trademarks of their favorite sneaker brands, such
as Converse or Adidas, splashed across their chests. Others
wore the same Izod Lacoste golf shirts that my grandparents
donned on the links.
Sitting among this group, I felt disheveled with the excep-
tion of my pseudo-Izod shirt, which I had constructed that
summer by sewing a stolen alligator over the Sears logo. I had
swiped the Izod badge from my grandparents’ house, where I
would sneak into the bedroom and rummage through the
clothing drawers in search of designer labels. All the clothes I
wore—right down to my underwear—were inherited from a
boy a couple years older than me whose family lived next door
to my grandparents. My mother used to joke that if the po-
lice ever found me unconscious after an accident they would
1 5 9

probably call the wrong family, since everything I wore had the
name Jeff Frey sewn into it. Most of this hand-me-down cloth-
ing came from Sears. I’d have preferred those clothes without
their logos, but Sears sewed its emblem into all its clothing. In-
stead of an Izod alligator on my breast, I had a dragon. Instead
of a little red or orange Levi’s tag on the back pocket of my
pants, I had a large brown plastic Toughskins label. My solution
to this problem was simple: I replaced the labels I didn’t like
with better ones, trading up from Sears to John Weitz or Izod
if I could find the right insignia on my grandparents’ clothes.
At first I only took tags that appeared to be loose or whose ab-
sence wouldn’t be noticed right away. But eventually I took to
ripping intact labels clear off their original garments so I could
graft them onto my own wardrobe. I was more worried about
being discovered wearing doctored designer labels than I was
about my skin color being an issue on the disco, minority side
of the aisle.
The assembly to select the music for the school party began,
and it got rowdy in a hurry. The assistant principal tried to so-
licit nominations for songs from the audience, but he was soon
drowned out by competing chants that had emerged from the
crowd. He was the strictest disciplinarian among the adminis-
trators, the same official who had suspended me for my fight
with Marcus, but he quickly lost control of the proceedings.
The white kids started in with the chant “Disco sucks!” It grew
louder with each utterance; when our side of the aisle tried to
retaliate with “Rock sucks!” it lacked the same ring.
“Okay, okay!” the assistant principal shouted over the loud-
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

speaker. “Let’s vote.” Everyone quieted down for a moment as
he appealed to democracy: “Everyone who wants disco, raise
your hand.”
Our side of the room lifted its arms. Many of the kids raised
two hands, trying to cast a double vote. Some stretched as tall
as they could, desperate to be noticed and have their prefer-
ence counted. Others actually stood up on their chairs, waving
their arms in the air. Then the assistant principal asked who
wanted rock. Despite the efforts of the minority kids to pro-
ject a show of force, the white kids won out by their sheer
numbers. Though ours was an integrated school, minorities
were still just that—minorities, outnumbered by the white
kids in the population. When the assistant principal declared
on his eyeball count that rock had won, the white kids erupted
back into their chant: “Disco sucks, disco sucks!”
Then someone from our side of the aisle defied the school-
wide ban on boom boxes and cranked Queen’s “Another One
Bites the Dust” to full volume. That song and those on
Madonna’s first album, which had just been released, were
about the only music that crossed the taste lines of race.
School security hustled through the milling crowd to find the
source of the mega bass; they seized the radio, but it took
them a moment or two to find the off switch. In the mean-
time, a blond kid from the rock side yelled over, “Hey, Queen
is white anyway, and they’re rock and roll!”
“Queen ain’t white!”
“Yeah, they are,” someone else from the other group
chimed in. “They’re even gay.”
1 6 1

“Queen ain’t no faggots!”
“Mm hmmm,” the blond kid replied. The level of tension
had risen, and I was sure that a fight would break out at any
moment. I wanted to signal that I was on the disco side despite
my light skin, since I was fairly confident that if it came to
fisticuffs disco would triumph despite its less numerous de-
fenders. This was the macho consolation prize of being op-
pressed: the reputation for toughness.The possibility of a rum-
ble felt different from the potential one-on-one confrontations
in which I had been involved. I was much less nervous now
than I had been when tangling with James for my glove or be-
ing held hostage by Sean. Being part of an army of sorts felt
protective in a way, even if the reality was that a rumble broke
down to hand-to-hand combat. I guess I assumed that if I were
in trouble in a rumble someone on my side would help me
out, because the strength and honor of the entire group would
be at stake.
I turned to Jerome for answers. Like most people on my
side of the aisle, I had always assumed that Queen was black.
Jerome shrugged his shoulders. Then someone else from our
group yelled, “He’s right. Queen is white; they’re from En-
gland.” The boy hung his head as he said this, as if he were ad-
mitting some horrible atrocity that his people had committed.
He was a ninth-grader and thus had authority, so his words dis-
sipated the primed-up, pugilistic energy of our side like a
knife slashing the tires of a sports car. Our confidence gave
way to a sense of cultural defeat, an unspoken presumption
that the white kids would always be right, even about things
H o n k y D i s c o S u c k s

we thought belonged to us. Our image of ourselves as makers
and beneficiaries of a cultural renaissance disappeared for the
time being.
The bell rang for the start of the next period. As we all filed
out, people were chanting “Rock and roll will never die!”
We had lost, but all I remember feeling was content. For
the first time I felt I could be who I wanted to be—albeit with
Jerome’s help. At the time I didn’t realize that Jerome was
more than just an aid in this process; he was the essential cata-
lyst, without whom I would have been just as lost as I had been
ever since my Mini School days. Only after I had lost Jerome
from my life would I fully realize what he meant to me.
1 6 3

more time together, alternating between playing video games
at the Twin Donut near I.S. 70 and trying to invent our own by
programming computers at the Radio Shack on Broadway.The
owner of the electronics franchise, which was situated about
halfway between school and home, thought it made good pub-
licity to have kids sitting in the store window clacking away at
the keys of his floor models. Several of us from Avenue D spent
our after-school hours there, writing our own versions of
Pong or an interactive, computerized version of Dungeons and
Dragons.
Now Jerome slept over every Thursday night, and we could
hang out as often as we liked, since he only lived a block
away—though if our session lasted until after dark my mother
made him wait for her to drive him home. Better still, she let
him sleep over on nights other than Thursday. We would stay
up as late as we could, designing new monsters for whatever
version of Dungeons and Dragons we were working on. He
drew the characters, and I wrote the accompanying text that
Over the course of seventh grade, Jerome and I spent more and
fo
u
rteen
A
d
d
ic
tio
n
s

explained the powers of whatever half-dragon, half-gnome he
had created. I was still an early-morning person, however, and
would inevitably fall asleep, drooling on my open book, while
Jerome stayed up chatting with my mother as she sipped her
Diet Pepsi, discussing whatever self-help gurus she had seen
on the talk shows that day.
Our friendship became strong enough that Jerome was the
first person with whom I ever jointly bought something. One
day after school we pooled our lunch money to buy a sweat-
shirt. A man with gray hair and a black goatee had been selling
clothes out of the back of a truck parked on the street that sep-
arated I.S. 70 from Charles Evans Hughes.The high school stu-
dents had already snapped up all the Adidas-brand shorts and
t-shirts. Since it was almost summer by then, with tempera-
tures over ninety degrees, sweatshirts were going cheap. To-
gether, Jerome and I had enough cash to buy one. It was a
Champion—soft, fuzzy, and thick, so plush that when I
pinched it I couldn’t feel my thumb and finger pressing against
each other. We were both entranced by what we had pur-
chased: quality. It was as if we had discovered the meaning of
an abstract concept like good, evil, or God. This was why cer-
tain sweatshirts cost more than others, I realized. At the same
time, I started to grasp the concept of poverty, as if my adoles-
cent logic required every idea to contain within it its dialecti-
cal opposite. I felt angry and deprived for never having known
what quality was. I also felt defeated in my efforts to catch up
with the Village kids. If I saved all my money to make up lost fi-
nancial ground, I had to forsake quality in my life. But if I
H o n k y A d d i c t i o n s

chose to recognize these subtle differences, to cultivate this
taste for the good life, which the Village kids took for granted,
then I would never better my financial lot.
Though I cursed my predicament, I also was thankful for
the opportunity to appreciate something new and better—
something like the sweatshirt. I reveled in the notion of up-
ward mobility, joyed by the idea that the present and future
generally made for a favorable contrast to the past.
Jerome seemed as astonished as I was by the purchase. He
ran his hyperextended palm up and down the garment, first
feeling all of the outer knit, then turning it inside out to feel
the contrast of the plush interior lining.Then he tugged on the
Champion label that was sewn—all four sides—into the col-
lar. It didn’t flap off, irritating the neck of the wearer, begging
to be torn away. Accompanying this label was a tiny “C” that
stuck out of the seam where the body of the shirt met the
waistband. I was disappointed to find such a small manifesta-
tion of the name brand, upset that the garment didn’t have a
more prominent declaration of its tony status. But soon I real-
ized I didn’t need one. Now I felt silly for all the label sewing I
had done over the past two summers and for all the time I’d
wasted worrying that someone would check the inside tags of
my shirts—a common practice in our school—to see if they
matched the insignia on the outside.
When Jerome and I had finished admiring the softness, the
thickness, and the ineffable qualities contained within the ar-
ticle of clothing, we made an arrangement to alternate who
got to wear it, switching it off each week at the Thursday night
1 6 7

sleepover. Soon, however, I sold Jerome my half of “quality” to
underwrite a more expensive habit: I had become addicted to
video games.
More specifically, I had become addicted to Defender,
which I played at the Twin Donut whenever possible. To sup-
port my habit I embezzled laundry quarters when I did the
weekly wash, skimping on the dryers. I returned the clothes
folded but damp, and soon our entire family wardrobe took on
the dank smell of mildew. Jerome was just as hooked on the
Twin Donut Defender machine as I was, but unlike me he ac-
tually improved his performance over time. Before long he
could play for more than an hour on a single quarter, while I
seemed stuck somewhere at the bottom of the learning curve
and had to keep plugging change into the machine.
I sold all my comic books, I sold my Dungeons and Dragons
books, and when I ran out of goods to hock I stepped up my il-
licit activity from embezzlement to naked theft. I stole my sis-
ter’s savings from her Hello Kitty bank. I took money almost
daily from each of my parents. My father kept his racetrack
cash in his top drawer, underneath rows of neatly folded socks.
He was somewhat careful with his finances, so I had to replace
a large-denomination bill with a smaller one so that the overall
number of notes and size of the wad remained the same. As
long as the same weight and thickness were there, it would
take him a while to discover that he was missing five or ten
dollars in his total.
Stealing from my mother was easy. Her purse teemed with
loose change, a canister of Mace, family photos, and year upon
H o n k y A d d i c t i o n s

year of receipts. Though Ellen carefully monitored the Diet
Pepsi supply, she had no idea how much cash she was holding at
any given time. I started by trolling the crevices of her purse,
fishing through the crumbled codeine tablets that she swal-
lowed when she had a migraine to locate change and crumpled
dollar bills. When I had cleaned out the bottom of her purse, I
moved on to her cash compartment. She unfailingly left it un-
zipped, various bills sticking out like the petals of an origami
flower. I plucked them one by one, then two by two.
Soon I was cutting school and convincing Jerome to do the
same, bribing him with quarters from my illicit supply. I ex-
plained that our records would be cleansed when we moved
on to high school anyway, so it didn’t matter what marks we
earned or what trouble we got ourselves into during these
lower grades. All that mattered was the Stuyvesant test, I told
him on several occasions. Though I had missed the entrance
cutoff for Hunter by a large margin, the next year we were to
take an admissions test to a triumvirate of selective high
schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Stu-
dents not lucky enough to get into one of those had to settle
for the local public high school or, if they could afford it, Cath-
olic school. The competition was especially tough since many
private-school kids took the exam, trying to save their parents
thousands of dollars of tuition by getting into an accelerated
public high school.
I had managed to avoid having my parents find out about my
poor grades by forging my father’s already illegible signature
on my report card and responding cheerily whenever they
1 6 9

asked me how my journalism or history class was going. I
never confessed that I had been demoted out of the academic
track and placed in the vocational curriculum. These classes
were populated predominantly by minority students, a fact to
which I failed to ascribe any importance at the time. Journal-
ism had been replaced by sewing, history by typing, and sci-
ence by wood shop.When I did manage to show up for school,
I spent my days crocheting, following patterns, typing make-
believe memos, and carving mini totem poles. There were
hardly any girls in my classes, despite their home economics
flavor. Instead the toughest kids in school, those who were des-
tined for Charles Evans Hughes High School across the street,
filled up these classes, which focused on life skills like darning
socks, knitting, and changing typewriter ribbons. Little did
the educational bureaucrats know that changing typewriter
ribbons would be entirely useless in the imminent computer
age.
I actually enjoyed school more now that I had given up on
it. Being in the lower track gave me a touch of coolness that I
had never experienced when I was among the Village kids,
reading poetry aloud in English class or running experiments
in chemistry lab. Michael, Ozan, and antidisestablishmentarian-
ism were ancient history; the two halves of my life, it seemed,
were finally being sewn back together.
One incident in particular made me feel as though I were
once again part of the community. One day when I had timed
my return from Twin Donut to coincide with the end of
school, I passed Sesame Street Sean sitting with some friends on
H o n k y A d d i c t i o n s

the back of one of the splintered green benches. He and the
other Outlaws had been cultivating their own, more costly ad-
dictions that academic year, spending more and more time on
the benches with a green or brown bottle dangled between
their legs, giving a chill to their thighs in between swigs.When
I passed Sean, I looked down and gripped the straps of my
book bag with both hands as if I were climbing a mountain and
it were my safety harness. Even though I had spent some time
with him since the knife incident, Jerome had always been
there, too. I felt the floor of my stomach open like a trapdoor
when Sean hopped off the back of his bench and followed me
from a few steps behind.
“Yo! Yo! My man,” the others yelled out to him, not quite in
unison. “Where you going, nigga?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sean waving them off
with a backhand motion. My heart leaped over a beat or two,
and I felt my legs twitch underneath me. The rest of the malt
liquor drinkers on the benches cackled and gave each other
high fives when they made the connection that Sean was fol-
lowing me. “He going to get hisself some honky money!” one
of them announced, confirming my suspicion. I could feel bile
creeping up into my throat.
We turned the corner, becoming invisible to the group. I
braced myself, flexing each muscle in my body as I continued
my stride, now walking more like a robot than a boy of eleven,
thinking the whole time: Do I still have my mugging money?
Down came Sean’s hand on my shoulder. “Yo, chill out,” he
said. Sean removed his hand and wiped his nose with the back
1 7 1

of it. He was trying to say something but only stuttered and
tapped the tip of one sneaker with the heel of the other. Finally
he got it out. “I heard you real good at D&D,” he said, using the
acronym for the role-playing game I had since given up.
“Jerome said you could teach me how to play?”
When I finally turned and looked at Sean face-on, he
seemed to have shrunk in size; either his verbal vulnerability
had shattered his Oz-like illusion of power, or I was catching
up to him after his early growth spurt. At any rate, I smiled and
muttered “sure” several times before scurrying upstairs.
Sean never pursued the D&D possibility again, and I was too
shy to bring it up. But whenever I look back on that encounter,
I am touched by his earnestness, by the fact that he asked to
play a child’s game of die-rolling and storytelling while his fin-
gers gripped an adult’s bottle of malt liquor. Dungeons and
Dragons was a game of violence, but the killing was imaginary;
we could start over when we made a mistake, a luxury we
lacked in real life. Fantasy games and violent video games were
very popular among the kids in my neighborhood and could
have served as a way for me to bond with my peers. I liked
Dungeons and Dragons in particular since all the action took
place in the mind; although the game involved fighting and
killing, it required no physical skills whatsoever, only verbal
and written ones.While violent fantasy games may be frowned
upon in middle-class suburbs, they may have some therapeutic
value in areas where real-life violence is not uncommon to
children. I’m sorry I never took Sean up on his request.
At the same time that Jerome was doing his best to reinte-
H o n k y A d d i c t i o n s

grate me into the neighborhood, I was dragging him down the
vocational track with me by repeatedly convincing him to cut
classes, promising that after we had scored 100,000 points on
Defender we would go to the library or Barnes and Noble and
read things that would be more educational than sewing class
anyway. In reality we only made it to the bookstore once, and
that time we read the updated Dungeons and Dragons mon-
ster manual.
My video game career ended when my mother caught me. I
was having one of my best Defender games ever, setting off
dozens of smart bombs while slicing down mutants of all types
with my high-tech laser guns. Then my mother dropped the
biggest smart bomb of all. She marched into Twin Donut and
grabbed me by the ear, just as she had that day after manhunt.
Jerome watched, aghast, as did all the Village kids, who were
busy buying their morning coffee and cigarettes.
“Hello, Ellen,” Jerome said to alert me to my mother’s pres-
ence, elbowing me at the same time. I couldn’t turn around,
since I was engaged in a fight with several high-speed attackers
over very mountainous terrain. Within two seconds, however,
I was being dragged off by the earlobe. “Go to school, Jerome,”
my mother said in a tone that I had never heard her use with
anyone other than my sister or myself. To me she said nothing.
I caught the eye of a blond, shaggy-haired kid who was
packing his newly purchased Marlboros, banging the
cellophane-covered box against the flesh of his wrist. He wore
a white concert t-shirt with black sleeves that stopped halfway
up his forearms. My eyes pleaded to his for understanding,
1 7 3

begging for sympathy and for merciful restraint when he in-
evitably reported this incident to others back at school. At first
his pale blue eyes seemed to offer such an assurance, but our
connection had the half-life of a subatomic particle that exists
for only a split second and only under artificial conditions. His
eyes became vacant and distant, making it all the more certain
that he would relish recounting the scene. He had a choice and
opted for the path that most twelve-year-olds would take.
A female classmate had also witnessed the scene as she
sipped a hot beverage that was probably more milk and sugar
than actual coffee. Her long black hair was always pulled back
into a ponytail, individual hairs popping out here and there
with the bent stiffness of loose wires in a bundle of cables.This
girl had rich parents and was even rich herself, having ap-
peared in a Dr. Pepper commercial.To top it all off, she had al-
ready developed breasts and hips, making her one of the most
popular girls in the school. When I played the incident over in
my head, I realized I had given the shaggy blond boy his
chance, his bonding fodder, so that he could make his move on
the Dr. Pepper girl.
Never letting go of my ear, my mother pulled me into the
Oldsmobile, which sat parked illegally in the bus stop in front
of the shop, idling with the door open. I said nothing as we
sped off. My mother was driving fast, which was quite unusual
for her, and not saying anything, which was almost unheard of.
She was so angry she actually ran a red light on Seventh Av-
enue. We headed east, away from school. I wondered why she
had told Jerome to go to school while we were going some-
H o n k y A d d i c t i o n s

where else.The whites of her knuckles shone through her skin
as she gripped the steering wheel. After a few minutes I real-
ized I had left my knapsack behind in the rush of my forced
exit. I told my mother, who still didn’t say anything but merely
turned around with a great looping U-turn, the car coming
about like a huge galleon on Fourteenth Street. But by the
time we got back to Twin Donut a quarter of an hour later, the
bag was gone, lost to the city’s speedy pirates. Only when I had
returned to the car empty-handed did she say anything.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what?” I asked meekly.The words themselves formed
a snotty retort, but the tone made all the difference. I really
did want to clarify the question. Why? took me by surprise. I
might have expected how? or when? or what?—getting the facts
straight, determining exactly what I had done. By asking why,
she implied that she already knew everything I had been do-
ing—the stealing, the forgery, the cutting school.
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t lie,” I answered, happy that I could give a legalistic,
technical answer to the question. I had never actually been
asked anything that required a dishonest answer, so I truly
hadn’t fibbed. Not that I wouldn’t have had it been necessary.
“I don’t care if you fail out of school,” she said. “I don’t care
if you never graduate from wood shop”—her choice of classes
confirmed that she did, in fact, know everything—“I don’t
care if you never go to school again,” she said. “But you must
tell the truth.”
My mind flashed back to the still unconfessed-to comic-
1 7 5

book theft. “I’ll study a lot,” I offered. “I’ll make up all the
work. I promise.” She didn’t respond. “How much do I have to
pay?” I asked, resorting to our moral balance of trade. She still
said nothing, making me squirm in my seat. Desperate for
some sort of response, some resolution, I finally shot out:
“None of it matters anyway. As soon as I go to high school, I
start with a fresh record. Everything before doesn’t count.”
She turned to me, shaking. I didn’t know whether she
would cry or strike me. She did neither. When we got home,
she put me in my room and shut the door. I didn’t come out
until the next day, when I went straight to school without a
word to anyone in the house.
1 7 6

different than any other. As I waited for the M14 bus, I looked
for some sign, something in the air that would indicate or at
least imply that it had actually happened—that Jerome had
been critically wounded a few days before, only a few blocks
from where I boarded the bus every day. Everything was crisp.
The unseasonably warm weather that had accompanied the
Christmas break had disappeared, and the sky was a uniform
dark blue, an almost-faux color that belied the coldness of the
air.The roofs of the project apartments formed neat ruler-like
lines slicing into the sky. Nothing disrupted the stillness ex-
cept a flock of pet pigeons, which formed black ink dots across
the blue background as they circled above the Avenue D tene-
ments.
I paced the length of the bus stop with much more purpose
than a boy of twelve should have. My thoughts did not move
forward as much as trip over themselves like so many drum-
mers in an ill-prepared marching band.These awkward thoughts
were accompanied by another, more elegant one, woven
The first morning back to school in 1982 did not feel much
fi
fteen
S
y
m
m
e
try

like a secret gold strand into the loose twill of my mind. Even
after I had boarded the bus, I could not stop thinking how
grown up I was. I knew a gunshot victim. In fact, I was the
only kid at school who knew what had happened. Every other
time I had returned to I.S. 70 after a school holiday, I had
dreaded the journey as much as I dreaded the day that lay at
its terminus.This morning, I actually looked forward to attend-
ing O. Henry School; this time I had a tale to tell, something
no other kid—no matter how cool, how rich, how popular—
could match. At the same time, I felt horribly guilty about this
pleasure.
On the bus I told each kid who boarded about the incident,
using the weight of its seriousness to shield myself from the
usual litany of snaps and jokes about my old sneakers. The
truth was that I experienced a tiny burst of joy every time I got
to tell someone what had happened, followed by a wave of
panicky guilt, much as one savors the sweetness of a bite of ice
cream, then reels from the headache that ensues. By then I
considered Jerome my best friend, though I was probably not
alone. He was one of the most popular kids at I.S. 70, even
among the whites, just as he seemed to be loved by everyone
back in the projects. But when his accident happened, his
mother had chosen me and my family to receive the news first.
I was the Source; I was the Word. It didn’t matter that I was
the only white boy among the commuters.
“Stop foolin’,” I remember Matt imploring. His brown,
freckled grin stayed put, as if by smiling long enough he could
lighten up the situation by sheer force of will. Instead, his grin
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

took on a clownish, macabre air as he slowly realized that I was
in no way kidding.
“I ain’t jokin’,” I said, with more of a confident inner city
accent than usual. It was incomprehensible that Jerome could
have been shot; I don’t think it had actually happened in any of
our minds yet.To me Jerome was still the Defender champion,
the skinny kid with the big smile who my sister adored. He
wasn’t a gunshot victim, lying close to death.That was just the
hype, the talk. So it was no matter for me to score points off
his accident when people asked. It was so abstract, all it meant
for me that day was that for a few hours, I wasn’t the honky
anymore.
I told how it happened many times that day. “He was just
walking down Avenue D,” I would say. “And boom,” I added for
emphasis, before shifting tone and rhythm. “Actually”—I
would cough and correct myself each time for effect—“there
was no boom; there was no sound, no light, no nothing.” I
paused again. “Jerome fell face down onto the sidewalk. ‘Quit
foolin’,’ the person next to him said.” The story got better
each time I told it; later in the day it became “ ‘Quit foolin’,’
we said.” No one at that school lived on Avenue D except
Jerome, me, and a few others, so no one challenged my ac-
count. I described the exact location, detailing each boarded-
up building and its potential for housing snipers. “They think it
was a ricochet,” I added to wind up my tale, crossing my arms
in a gesture of self-satisfaction.
The truth was, I was nowhere in the vicinity when the bul-
let hit Jerome’s neck. I was home, sleeping. My mother never
1 7 9

let us out of our apartment on major holidays. Her usual para-
noia over safety reached its highest pitch on the Fourth of July,
Chinese New Year, and December 31. She would cook my sis-
ter and me whatever we wanted to eat, let us watch as much
television as we wanted, even allow us to drink soda on those
most dangerous nights of the year. Alexandra and I would guz-
zle down Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi, or some other forbidden
nectar as my mother quoted emergency-room mortality sta-
tistics to us.We rolled our eyes, feeling like refugees with care
packages in our detention center of an apartment, watching
from behind barred windows while the explosions of celebra-
tion went on all around us. Not until the days after major cele-
brations were we allowed outside to play; those dates my
mother considered some of the safest of the year, since they
found everyone at home nursing hangovers. To Alexandra and
me, July 5 was Independence Day, and the New Year didn’t
start until sunrise on January 1.
However, in 1982 the forces of violence proved too strong
for even my mother’s logic. We got the phone call from
Jerome’s mother, who asked if his sister Zuni could stay with
us for a while. My mother, who answered the call, started to
cry, which she rarely did. After returning the receiver to its
cradle, she kept thanking her nameless God that it hadn’t been
either Alexandra or me. She ran over to hug us and cried for a
while longer; my sister joined in, even though she and I had yet
to learn what was wrong. I didn’t say anything; my mind was
racing through all the people I loved, wondering who had
died. Finally she told us, and the roulette wheel in my mind
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

stopped spinning. I didn’t think anything; my brain was totally
numb in a way it never has been since.
Jerome couldn’t have visitors right away, so critical was his
condition. Not until a few days later, after that first day back at
school, did I go to Saint Vincent’s Hospital to see Jerome and
learn the reality of the situation. My family wouldn’t be able to
visit Jerome until later, so I went alone. Saint Vincent’s stood
just a couple of blocks south of Fourteenth Street, so the am-
bulance must have taken almost the exact route that the bus
traversed on our way to school. Since Jerome’s situation had
been an emergency, I went to the emergency room. All I found
there was a lone pregnant woman, who moaned in cadence
with the talk show that played overhead on an encaged televi-
sion set. I lingered and gawked for a moment before continu-
ing my search.
I finally found the front desk.The staff issued me a huge pass
the same green color as the security guards’ polyester blazers.
The awkward, Alice-in-Wonderland dimensions of the pass
served clearly to demarcate the visitors from those individuals
with official roles, making me feel all the more childish at a
time when I was gearing myself up to be as adult as possible. I
got out of the elevator at the eighth floor, pediatrics.The walls
were a faint yellow, decorated with exotic animals that would
never have survived in North America, let alone in New York
City. Zebras marked one door, cockatoos another, always in
twos, as if this were Noah’s Ark, saving all creatures great and
small from the flood. Jerome’s room, when I found it, was
marked by a pair of green alligators.
1 8 1

I pushed the door open tentatively. Inside, Jerome’s mother
sat holding his hand and crying. She was rocking back and
forth as if in the middle of a Jewish prayer, sitting up on a
plastic-covered green chair that had been extended to form a
bed. “My poor baby,” she said, repeating over and over: “My
baby’s paralyzed.” White sheets were twisted up into a rope-
like strand on the chaise. Jerome’s mother straddled the ot-
toman part of the seat as she patted his hand. Kids, most of
whom I didn’t recognize, stood around the two of them, not
saying much, seemingly mesmerized by her rocking and the
cadence of her voice. She didn’t really weep but rather whin-
nied and whined as if she were having a bad dream.
The walls of the hospital room were covered by beige wall-
paper that bore a repeating pattern of three clowns. One held
a pinwheel, another waved a magic wand, and the third
gripped a hoop through which a circus dog jumped. These pe-
diatric touches seemed absurd, mocking even. The room was
darkened, and in the dim light the clowns seemed almost to be
laughing at the predicament in front of them. In their two-
dimensional world, movement of limbs had never been an is-
sue.
“My poor baby,” Jerome’s mother said over and over.
I was feeling a bit dizzy. I had slipped into the darkness of
the room barely noticed, the way one might enter a Native
American sweat lodge after the ritual had already begun. Soon
after I arrived, two doctors strode into the room and asserted
control over the situation by flipping on the light without
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

warning, parting the group of kids around the bed, and taking
Jerome’s hand from his mother.
“I’m the surgeon,” the first doctor introduced himself to
Jerome, speaking loudly, the way people talk to foreigners.
“How are you feeling?” he asked in a heavy Southern drawl.
“Are you feeling okay?”
Jerome opened his eyelids—not in a heavy fashion, but
alertly, as if he had been called on by the teacher to answer a
question. “I’m fine,” he said.This answer didn’t halt the groans
from his mother’s lips; in fact, she got more upset the more in
control Jerome appeared.
“I’m going to check your respiration and heart rate,” said
the other doctor in a tone that only lovers and medical practi-
tioners use to announce what they are going to do before they
do it. Her badge said that she was a pediatrician, and her care-
ful manner seemed to have a calming effect on Jerome’s
mother. But just as she leaned over and was slipping the metal
sensor under Jerome’s hospital gown, a horrible voice came
over the intercom. “Code 99,” it said, so loudly that I couldn’t
imagine how any patient wouldn’t jump out of bed. Jerome
didn’t even seem to hear it. “Pediatrics code 99,” the voice
said. “Room 824. Code 99. Code 99.” The doctors rushed out
of the room so rapidly it seemed as though the wallpaper
clown had waved his magic wand and made them vanish. Out-
side the room, many white coats rushed past. Most were silent
save the squeak of their sneakers on the linoleum tiles. Follow-
ing the staff that had flown by came a technician dressed in
1 8 3

green pushing a big machine as another white-clad doctor
rubbed what looked like the lids of two pots together.
After this machine had passed, there followed a silence in
both the hallway and our room that lasted until Jerome’s
mother started up again. “My poor baby,” she said, much more
quietly now. Maybe she didn’t want to disturb the resuscita-
tion efforts that were going on down the hall; or maybe they
seemed to her an omen and jolted her anew into worry. “My
poor baby’s paralyzed.”
Jerome, for his part, sat propped up about 45 degrees by
the bed and a couple of pillows. He seemed strangely unper-
turbed by all that was going on around him. It was as if some-
one had stripped off all the features of his personality and got-
ten him down to the bare minimum. He seemed like his
essence, his most basic self, but at the same time completely
different, like a chair that is still recognizable as a chair even
though it has lost all four of its legs and its back. In this
stripped-down state he seemed calmer and wiser than all of us
around him. For me the whole scene was all too chaotic, too
confusing—in short, too much to handle. I felt as though I
were caught in the ether of one of my nightmares, running but
not running up the stairwell or afraid but calm as I hovered,
treading air outside our twenty-first-floor window. No one
spoke except Jerome’s mother, her phrase rolling over and
over, casting its hypnotic spell over the room: “My baby’s par-
alyzed . . . ”
I needed to feel the reality of the situation, to make sense of
it.The only way my twelve-year-old mind knew how to do this
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

was to focus on rational details, so I finally asked, “Is it from
the neck down or the waist down?”
My voice cracked when I said this. I seemed to have
snapped his mother’s litany, for she turned to me and said, in
the most dignified manner, “I do not think that is an appropri-
ate question at this time.” She said it with the intonation of a
question, an upward lilt at its end that made me feel even
worse for having asked. After her interjection the other visi-
tors, mostly teenagers, hissed and psss-chawed at me, echoing
her sentiments. Jerome, though still conscious, didn’t say any-
thing one way or another, and I slunk out of the room, my
usual discomfort at being the only white person in the crowd
magnified tenfold by the reaction to my comment. Or perhaps
my discomfort over their response was magnified tenfold by
the fact that I was white. Either way, the result was the same,
and I got out of there quick.
The next time I visited Jerome in the hospital, I tried to
make amends by not mentioning his condition. I only talked
about how lame school was. Unable to bear going alone, I
brought my mother and sister with me.They flitted around the
room, arranging bouquets and making small talk. My mother
taped his get-well cards and photos around the room at eye-
level so he could see them. Meanwhile, my sister hovered over
him like a hummingbird, dropping McDonald’s french fries
into his open mouth as if he were her baby nestling. I just sat in
the corner of the room the whole time, picking at a blemish on
my face until it bled, praying they wouldn’t ask him the same
thing I had.
1 8 5

At the end of the fall semester, a couple weeks before he
took the bullet, Jerome had turned over the Defender video
game machine at the Twin Donut on Fourteenth Street—that
is, he had racked up more than 99,999 points, thereby causing
the machine to reset itself to zero. He had told me about this
feat, the highest achievement in video gaming, shortly before I
heard the terrible news. I went to the Twin Donut, which I
hadn’t visited since my mother had dragged me out by the ear.
On the machine I saw his initials carved in silicon, listed
among the top ten scorers. I felt a pain in my stomach at the
sight of his initials and vowed never to play Defender again.
Back in the projects, Jerome’s absence and my inopportune
question about the extent of his paralysis had ruined all the
mending that had occurred between the community and me. I
reverted to taking the back route in and out of my building. In
fact, I regressed quite a bit in my sociability more generally,
since I was becoming ashamed of my appearance. It was as if
the gunshot that had wounded Jerome also signaled the start of
puberty for me. My entire body felt out of sorts, as if different
parts were growing at different speeds and I was left with the
task of reconciling the whole. I sprouted hair from every pos-
sible pore and spent increasing amounts of time in the bath-
room plucking, squeezing, and exfoliating. I now wore thick
glasses and started to develop a case of acne, though not as se-
vere as my father’s had been. With each new pimple or patch
of hair, I uncovered a whole new area of insecurity. Each time
I looked in the mirror—and at ages eleven and twelve there
were many such times—I saw my changing body as something
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

distinct from what I called myself. As a result I didn’t know
what “myself ” was anymore. Then my mind would skip like a
record needle to Jerome; I’d wonder what it must feel like to
go through puberty with a paralyzed shell of a body. Each time
I thought of his motionless form, I felt that same trapdoor
open up in my stomach as when Sean had followed me that day
after school.
After visiting Jerome a couple more times in the hospital, I
found I could no longer bear the pediatric ward, and being in
his presence disturbed me. I felt nauseous and dizzy when we
were making small talk. I was still a bit dazed over what had
happened to him, and this feeling synergized with the new in-
securities of adolescence to produce some very strange behav-
ior. I developed a full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder. I
forbade everyone from kissing me at all; only I could kiss
them, and I had to do it twice on each cheek, to protect them
from tragedies such as had befallen Jerome. If I messed up the
symmetry, I would say “Cancel, Cancel” and start over. If I
were kissed, the spell would be broken and something violent
might happen to my loved ones; as a result, after Jerome’s ac-
cident no one kissed me for quite some time. My family mem-
bers decided it would be easier to cooperate with my supersti-
tion than to try to reason me out of it.
“I’m in a hurry,” my father would say on his way to the race-
track. “Give me the Daily Double, quick.” I would turn his
stubbly, scarred cheek to one side and give him two quick
pecks. Then, with the control of a barber giving a shave, I
would swivel his chin and kiss the other side twice. My com-
1 8 7

pulsion didn’t stop with the Daily Double, however; soon the
kisses spread like brushfire to anything and everything in the
house. Animate or inanimate, I kissed it all. I crawled around
the stained green carpet on my hands and knees, kissing the
furniture and plants before leaving for school. I had to get up
earlier each day, since it now took twenty minutes to leave the
apartment. At school and on the bus I didn’t kiss anything, but
I had to keep everything symmetrical. If I bumped the edge of
my right foot on the leg of the desk, I had to bump the identi-
cal spot on my left foot, then the right again, then the left, so it
totaled two times on each side. When I ate anything it had to
be in fours—two bites on each side of my mouth. I spent my
lunch hour eating my lima beans or corn very slowly, counting
the number of remaining kernels or bits or kibbles when I got
close to the bottom of the bowl, so I could be sure to say “Can-
cel, Cancel” before eating the last four. I spent much of my
school day drowning in a bundle of tics and twitches not much
different from those I had while attending the black class at the
Mini School.
My mother sent me to a sliding-scale therapy clinic that
cost us five dollars a week. I must have been trying to recover
a sense of psychic control over my body while Jerome was go-
ing through real physical therapy. The sessions didn’t help,
however, largely because I hardly ever talked about Jerome or
his accident. I felt it would have been belittling to Jerome to
talk about him as an aspect of my clinical condition. After a
while the therapy ended, and my mother turned to more tra-
ditional methods—nailing a mezuzah up on our door jamb.
H o n k y S y m m e t r y

She convinced me to try and focus all my non-human kisses on
this religious icon, the first ever to grace our abode. Within a
couple of weeks I managed to rein myself in and keep my Daily
Doubles confined to the mezuzah and the people I loved, spar-
ing the furniture.
This obsession remains with me to this day. I still kiss my
loved ones twice on each side. I am never kissed back if I can
help it. I still do lots of things, ranging from exercise to swal-
lowing juice, in quiet sets of two or four. The need comes on
more strongly at some times than at others. Compared to
what befell Jerome, it is a small scar to carry through life.
Nonetheless, it is a very real remnant of the violence that beset
our neighborhood in the early 1980s.
1 8 9

only failed to protect me but actually put me in danger. I had
restarted karate for the first time since Rahim’s death; the class
met after school on Mondays and Wednesdays.The dojo was lo-
cated in the building where Raphael, one of my few remaining
friends at I.S. 70, lived. Raphael, who attended karate with
me, was a different type of Latino from those I had known pre-
viously, the first minority individual I had met who con-
founded the overlap of race and class. He was well off. His
mother was a Colombian citizen, his father a white American
with a ponytail. Though his parents were artists like my own,
they had made the wise investment choices that my parents
had forsaken. They lived in the up-and-coming Chelsea area,
just north of school, in a loft probably not too different from
the one my parents had considered in Soho years back.
Raphael was one of the largest kids in school but, like Jerome,
one of the most soft-spoken.
Karate class began at five o’clock, so Raphael and I spent
the interim two hours running around the neighborhood,
One afternoon, my need to do everything in sets of two not
sixteen
F
ire

playing board games, or chatting up his building’s elevator
operator, who told us how he’d killed men with his bare
hands during World War II. Raphael and I were the only
nonadults in the class, and he was the only non-white mem-
ber. There were no prayerful bowings to Mecca, no trips to
tournaments situated in faraway mosques. So despite being
the smallest person in the group, always matched up against a
much larger opponent, I wasn’t as nervous here as I had been
in the other class.
My symmetry tics did get in the way sometimes, making
my punches and kicks somewhat predictable. On the other
hand, the patterning of my movements meshed well with the
underlying philosophy of the tae kwon do and kendo styles we
were learning, and the counting provided a rhythm to my
katae and my freestyle fighting that had been lacking. The pat-
terns became increasingly complex, moving from twos to
fours to eights and sixteens and ultimately to thirty-twos,
with each movement doubled, once for each side of my body.
Also, this obsession with evenness made me a much better
left-handed chopper and puncher than I otherwise would have
been.
For the most part, the afternoons Raphael and I spent
awaiting karate class were unsupervised, with his parents away
at jobs or studios. They always had some delicious, rice-based
Colombian leftovers in their restaurant-style silver refrigera-
tor, along with a pitcher of Hawaiian Punch. In this after-
school cuisine, Raphael seemed to reflect his bicultural her-
itage in a way that I had never managed to balance in my
H o n k y F i r e

choices between my father’s WASPy Hellmann’s mayonnaise
and my mother’s Jewish Miracle Whip.
One day we decided to play “fireman, waterman,” a game
Raphael had invented. When he explained the rules to me, I
instantly requested to be fireman. It was my job to whip
matches off a pack, striking them in the same singular motion
with which I hurled them like burning spears at Raphael. His
job was to spray water on them and me with a mister that his
mother kept around for the house plants. I won—and won big.
I whipped matches off left and right, quite literally, looking
like some strange kind of martial artist as I chased him in my
karate outfit. A couple of times I stung the exposed portion of
his forearm with the smoldering ember, scoring points as he
retreated into his bedroom.
I pressed my attack onward as he climbed up into his loft
bed, where he could maintain a better defensive position. I was
aggressive with the matches, releasing frustration, gaining a
sense of freedom I hadn’t felt since Jerome’s accident. Raphael
was already hopping down from the loft bed when I threw a
second match in that direction. I knew I would miss him with
that shot, but that didn’t matter: I had to do each attack in dou-
bles. Several minutes later my ammo ran out, and we went to
his parents’ room at the other end of the loft to look for a fresh
book of matches. It was Raphael’s turn to play the role of fire-
man; he headed back toward the kitchen, while I filled up the
water bottle in the sink near his mother’s work space.
He ran back to me, screaming.
“Fire!” he yelled in a voice so loud that its volume obscured
1 9 3

his slight accent. He didn’t sound serious, but he didn’t quite
sound like he was kidding either.
“Fire!” he yelled again.
I laughed and squirted him with cold water.
“Fire!” he yelled, blinking from the mist. He ran back to-
ward his bedroom, and I followed him very slowly, still playing
the game and wary of being lured into a trap. Then I saw it.
Black, black smoke curled up, running along the old tin ceiling
as if it were caressing the fine craftsmanship. I walked a little
farther and saw that the whole back side of his apartment was
in flames.
“Fire!” he screamed again and again, I don’t know how
many times. I still said nothing and kept walking toward his
room, from which it all seemed to originate. I had never seen
such a big fire, not even at Boy Scout camp, where we con-
structed a huge, two-story bonfire to celebrate the end of the
summer. This was different. It was not something controlled.
As I neared the bedroom, I could feel the warmth of the
flame on the skin of my chest, which was exposed by the
loose-fitting gi.The fire had spread in a seemingly random pat-
tern, picking and choosing what it liked for tinder. Its selec-
tions were not always obvious ones. Against one wall rose a
multicolored sheet of flame, blue-red-orange. It took me a
second to make out the item underneath this gaseous rainbow:
Raphael’s backpack, readied for a father-son camping trip that
weekend, each of its component materials glowing in a differ-
ent part of the light spectrum. Next door, the kitchen coun-
tertop burned slowly, more ember than actual flame, looking
H o n k y F i r e

like some new type of indoor barbecue grilling device. A
white plastic stool had wilted in one corner, its four legs
melted down as if it had fainted from exhaustion. The round
seat flickered as it shriveled down to some essence of concen-
trated plastic, giving off much more inky smoke than would
seem possible from such a small, withered item.
“Fire!” I heard Raphael yell. He must have been running
past me, and quickly, since I made out the Doppler shift in his
voice. That always reminded me of the sirens speeding by
twenty-one flights below my bedroom window.
“Fire!” he screamed again, now in the hallway of his build-
ing. Before I was aware that any time had passed, the sweeping
motion of a huge adult male arm scooped me up. It felt as
though I were being yanked from the stage on the Gong Show.
The arm belonged to our karate teacher, who swung me
around with the same grace he used in class, planting me down
in the stairwell, just outside the threshold of the loft, beyond
the doorway that marked the entrance to the apartment.
“911!” he yelled as he rushed back inside with the fire extin-
guisher, dressed up in his white gi and black belt. The elevator
operator gave him a perfunctory salute and rang emergency
services from the phone in his prewar lift. Now that adults
were on the scene and things were actually happening, Raphael
stopped yelling, and we both stood peering into the loft, cran-
ing our necks to follow the sensei’s efforts while obeying his
implicit instructions to stay out. He seemed to be having some
trouble getting the fire extinguisher to work. Pathetically
short streams were squirting out intermittently from the tip of
1 9 5

the hose, landing just a few inches in front of the silver canis-
ter, accomplishing less than Raphael’s spray bottle would have.
After a moment or two he got it to flow properly, but it didn’t
make much difference. He was able to put out the backpack
and the countertop but not much else. Whenever the stream
hit a flaming object or section of the wall, plumes of white
smoke rose from the area, mingling with and soon overpower-
ing the black smoke that had preceded it. The white smoke
gave off the balmy feeling of steam, along with a strange
mélange of odors produced by the burning nylons and poly-
esters and plastic-like substances.
Not too much later the firemen arrived. They marched up
the stairs with big loping steps, as if their black rubber boots
had been made for fly-fishing and not firefighting. Their
business-as-usual air verged on boredom, as if we had roused
them from a nap at the station house for something that was
more inconvenience than emergency. They hooked up their
hoses to a water line in the hallway and then plodded into the
apartment, the beige, canvas-covered firehose tracing the path
along which I had pressed my assault on Raphael. One yelled
to another to cut on the water, and then gallons upon gallons
poured onto the flaming and smoldering objects. The entire
apartment and hallway filled up with steam of the same stale
flavor that emerges from manhole covers in the streets.
Soon we were all covered in beads of condensed water va-
por, each drop the distilled essence of what used to be
Raphael’s family’s belongings. I crawled up the stairs and hud-
dled in the dark at the next landing, tucking my head between
H o n k y F i r e

my knees and gripping them as tightly as I could, trying to pull
myself into the smallest ball possible, to fold myself out of exis-
tence. In this position I rocked back and forth on the top step.
Somehow word of the fire reached our parents, and the
next thing I noticed was my mother standing before me on the
stairwell. She reached to me as I had to Marcus after pummel-
ing him. I took her hand and she tugged me up. She yanked me
straight into a hug, which shocked me so much that I flinched
as she pulled me toward her. I pressed my cheek into her bo-
som, and she kissed my sooty hair, the first time I had been
kissed since the beginning of my obsessive-compulsive disor-
der. Her reaction did not fit into the punishment paradigm;
she merely appeared glad that I was safe and sound. Not an
iota of anger or judgment entered her expression or tone of
voice as she cooed to me that everything would be okay. Given
the seriousness of what had happened, this lack of castigation
overwhelmed me, and I started crying. I don’t know how long
I went on sobbing, but eventually she spoke.
“Tell them what happened,” she instructed, nodding to a
newly arrived set of fire officials, who wore clean, pressed uni-
forms and ties. They listened as I explained what we had done.
Raphael was nowhere to be seen; evidently they had already
questioned him separately. His father listened silently as the
city officials enunciated every syllable of each question. After
each thing I said, they jotted something down while simultane-
ously asking, “Then what happened?” A series of these questions
led me through the entire afternoon, until I wound up at that
very moment when we were standing there. I did not volunteer
1 9 7

my certainty that I knew exactly which match had caused the
fire—the one I threw after Raphael had jumped down from his
bed; the one I threw to make things symmetrical.
The whole time I was telling the story, I kept thinking that I
had financially ruined my parents; they, not me, would be held
accountable.Thinking this made me feel worse but also, in my
mind, justified my hedging about the truth. At the end of my
tale, Raphael’s father spoke. “Did Raphael light any matches?”
“Yes,” I said, truthfully; Raphael had lit one match to
demonstrate the arm motion to me. That match was certainly
not the cause of the fire, since he never threw it, but I knew
this would muddle the morality of the situation. I was right.
Raphael’s father went into the apartment and pulled Raphael
out by his blackened gi sleeve.
“You both lit matches, you are both equally responsible for
this mess,” he said.They were magic words. Raphael must have
felt the same sense of sole guilt that I did, since he didn’t
protest at all when his father issued this judgment. Perhaps he
blamed himself for having suggested the game in the first
place, or maybe he felt he’d failed as the waterman.
His father led us on a tour of the wreckage. The fire itself
didn’t seem to have done as much damage as the smoke and
water had. He pointed to various things that were destroyed,
frowning silently. But whenever he did speak, his statement
was upbeat. “Thank God it didn’t reach the other end of the
loft, where your mother’s paintings are,” he said at the start of
our walk-through, adding that, in one way, it was lucky the
sprinkler system hadn’t activated, since it would have ruined
H o n k y F i r e

her work. A few paces later he added, “Thank God it didn’t
spread to the other floors.”
He thanked God several more times until we reached
Raphael’s charred loft bed and his sleeping bag, which had
been readied for their weekend camping trip but now sat
shrunken into what looked like a charred, rolled-up newspa-
per. Pointing to this, he yelled, raising his voice above a New
Age monotone for the first time: “What if one of you had been
in there? What if one of you had been in there?”
He cried; then Raphael cried; I fidgeted and trembled, tap-
ping the floor in counts of two.
The fire department seemed to follow the same logic as
Raphael’s father, deciding that if we both had lit matches then
we were both to blame—and therefore no one was to blame.
They declared the fire an accident, and I received no state-
sanctioned reprimand; as a result of this ruling, the insurance
company had to pay up. My parents seemed relieved that I
hadn’t been found officially culpable, that Raphael’s parents
were not going to press us for money we didn’t have, that I
wouldn’t have to face proceedings that would have affected
my life chances, that I wouldn’t have legal scars that wouldn’t
be expunged from my file when I moved on to high school.
Their relief seemed to stitch with mine into one collective
web of familial guilt, preventing me from receiving punish-
ment. In private I explained to them that I knew I had caused
the actual fire, but they didn’t seem to care, as if the person
with the gun were no more to blame than the person who
dared him to shoot.
1 9 9

“You’ve learned more than we can teach you from this,” my
father said while squinting to make out the fine print in his
Racing Form. Then he looked up from his calculator and pile of
pens. “More than we can teach you,” he repeated. He went
back to his calculations, and that was all he ever said about the
incident.
For some time hence, I continued to be baffled by this logic,
by the fact that my worst crime brought me the least punish-
ment. This irony didn’t escape my sister either; whenever she
got into trouble after that, she invoked the memory of the fire.
“I can’t believe I’m in trouble for not cleaning my room!
You’re actually going to punish me when Dalton,” she would
say, uttering my name with a snide dip in tone, “Dalton can
burn down apartment buildings for nothing. It’s not fair! It’s
not fair!”
She was right. It wasn’t fair—and the unfairness went far
beyond matters of sibling rivalry. Even at the time of the event
I knew that had the fire not been in Chelsea but down the street
from our house in one of the row tenements that lined Avenue
D—or had I been of a different skin tone—the whole matter
might not have been settled so casually. In that case the fire it-
self would not have been lesson enough for me—at least, not
according to the police and fire departments. The fire taught
me one of the most subtle but powerful privileges of middle-
class status: the chance to work problems out informally, with-
out the interference of the authorities. Poor minorities get no
such allowances. But we were lucky—for Raphael’s family rep-
resented the right class and I the right race.
H o n k y F i r e

Not only does the government deprive low-income families
of the opportunity to take care of their own kids and their own
mistakes, it actively goes after them in the form of drug raids,
weapons sweeps, and other such policy initiatives. I learned
this a few years later, when one of my neighbors from Masaryk
was busted in a drug raid. Because he had recently turned
eighteen he was tried as an adult, and because of new manda-
tory minimum sentencing he was given twenty-five years of
hard time, while the average murderer serves five years. Marc,
the son of a Piratas coach, is still in prison to this day, his life
ticking away slowly, another type of victim of the war on
drugs. I remember Marc as the kid who used to pump me up
with confidence, telling me that because I batted left-handed I
had a chance to be like the greatest home-run sluggers of all
time. I remember the freckle that sat like an exotic accent on
his upper lip, just above his smile. And I remember how many
unpaid hours his father volunteered to run the team. The next
time Marc will be able to visit home or watch a Piratas game
or just slurp an icie, he will be in his forties. I, by contrast,
learned enough of a lesson from the fire itself.
2 0 1

afresh. Not long before Jerome was shot, I had taken a high
school admission test along with almost every other eighth
grader in New York. Shortly after the blaze at Raphael’s house,
I was relieved to learn I had made it into one of the three aca-
demic schools and would not have to remain at I.S. 70 for an-
other year.Thanks to standardized testing, my record of video-
game truancy and pyromania meant nothing.
I had made it into the second most selective school, the
Bronx High School of Science, which meant I faced a ninety-
minute commute each morning and afternoon. To me, it was
well worth taking three separate subway lines each way to es-
cape facing Raphael and the rest of I.S. 70 each day for an ad-
ditional year. My mother worried about such a long subway
commute through heavily crime-ridden sections of the Bronx.
She didn’t like that I would have to get up before dawn and re-
turn well after dark during much of the autumn and winter.
She quoted police statistics to me, claiming that the hours im-
mediately preceding sunup were the most dangerous of all. I
As I had originally anticipated, my whole life soon started
seven
teen
C
u
ltu
ra
l C
a
p
ita
l

escaped this fate, however. Since I had missed the cutoff for the
more competitive, Manhattan-based Stuyvesant High School
by only a single point, and since I came from a low-income
neighborhood, I qualified for a special summer school pro-
gram that would allow me to make up the exam deficit and at-
tend my first-choice school. This despite the fact that I hadn’t
actually attended school in our low-income neighborhood for
seven or so years by virtue of our fake address.
School wasn’t the only thing that was changing about my
life. We were moving, too. When our karate teacher, Rahim,
had been shot a few years earlier, my mother—unbeknownst
to the rest of the family—had put us on the waiting list for a
low-rent building on the west side of town.When Jerome was
shot, she redoubled her efforts to get the family out of the
neighborhood, which had just entered an epidemic of crack-
and heroin-related gun violence. Gunshots had by then re-
placed fire-engine sirens as the aural trademark of urban
blight. Historically speaking, the two sounds were not entirely
unrelated. Many of the burned-out buildings that had resulted
from landlord-arsonist collaboration during the 1970s now
served as heroin-shooting galleries or crack houses for the
new wave of urban ill.
Each charred tenement went through a cycle of ecological
and economic development. First, weeds sprouted amid the
wreckage. Then we younger kids explored and played in the
unsafe, condemned structures. Then squatters replaced us—
occasionally the same people who had been tenants of the
building before it had burned down. In the final wave of suc-
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

cession, some of these former residences turned into crack
houses in which people as burnt-out as the buildings them-
selves puffed on glass pipes full of the new drug.The rise of the
crack trade in the early 1980s had spawned a new wave of
neighborhood violence over profits. In fact, Jerome had been
shot from the charred hole that passed for a window on the
top floor of one of these former tenements.
“The old junkies never hurt anyone,” my mother said, pin-
ing for the days when heroin had dominated the local scene.
Giddily, she described how they fell asleep standing up, slowly
ratcheting to one side until they almost fell over. “They nod-
ded off on the bus, just like Weebles,” the popular 1970s toy.
“Then, just when you’d think they’d topple, snap, they would
jerk themselves up. It was actually exciting watching them,
wondering if they would fall over. It’s different now; it’s not
the same with crack . . . ”
Her voice trailed off. She was leading my sister and me on a
tour of low-income housing on Roosevelt Island, a small atoll
in the East River halfway between Queens and Manhattan.The
apartments had been reserved for low-income residents as
part of a tax deal cut by the development group, and Ellen had
put our name on that waiting list as well, determined to get us
out of the Lower East Side. My father, however, had no inter-
est in leaving Manhattan.
“I’m not going to live on a prison,” he had announced that
morning without looking up from his Racing Form or breaking
the rhythm of his constantly jiggling leg, which shook to the
reggae wailing from his prized boom box. “I’m not going to be
2 0 5

trapped in a white ghetto.” His hand gripped his pen tighter
and jerked it even more furiously as he squiggled red lines over
last-minute scratches from the race lineups, horses with
names like Onyxly or Sojourner’s Truth. He went off to bet on
maiden special weights, turf allowances, and $5,000 claimers,
while Alexandra and I marched off to Roosevelt Island with
our mother.
After Jerome was shot, my parents experienced acutely op-
posite reactions. While my mother’s obsession with safety and
her misgivings about our neighborhood reached a feverish
pitch, my father grew increasingly attached to the area. He had
learned how to project his fifty-yard stare like a lance, rivaling
that of any of the men who strutted down Rivington Street. In
fact, the boys who had started to come calling for my prepu-
bescent sister called him Charles Bronson and claimed they
would have visited more often if they hadn’t been so scared of
him. My father liked the pit bulls with spiked collars that
cropped up like mushrooms around the neighborhood, dogs
that displayed an ocular intensity to match that of their own-
ers. He reveled in the Caribbean music that flooded the streets
with the coming of the sticky summer weather. And he loved
telling Puerto Rican jokes to Puerto Ricans. When one of my
sister’s new friends came over, Steve asked him straightaway,
“Why can’t Puerto Ricans barbecue?” When the thirteen-
year-old chuckled nervously, claiming that he didn’t know, my
father responded: “Because the beans keep falling through the
grill.” The boy’s mouth dropped, but when he saw my father’s
face turn red with laughter, he could not help but bust out gig-
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

gling himself.The next time he visited, the two swapped jokes
about Jews, WASPs, and the Irish, while my mother yelled in
the background and my sister sat bored, twirling her hair into
curls around a newly painted fingernail. I just looked on with
envy, jealous of the kid, who interacted easily with my father,
and of my father, who conversed with the kid in a relaxed way
I never had.
“Words are meaning; words are truth!” my mother yelled in
an out-of-breath voice. “Words hurt as much as sticks and
stones.”
“What’s an Irish ten?” my father asked the kid, not even
pausing for effect, but instead answering his own question
with a giddiness he could not control: “A four with a six-
pack.”
The boy now gave my father a high five that wasn’t so high
as to hide it from my mother’s view. “Word, nigger,” said the
kid, bestowing the title I had longed for onto my New England
father.
“I heard that,” my mother yelled from the other room. “You
should never use the n-word. I don’t care if everyone does. It’s
not right.”
“Nigger, nigger, nigger!” my father yelled, giggling, his
Charles Bronsonesque mug breaking up into a pudgy, child-
like grin.
Jerome or no Jerome, Steve was having a good time and had
no intention of leaving the neighborhood. Alexandra and I
were on his side. We dragged our feet through the grass of
Roosevelt Island after we had disembarked from the tram that
2 0 7

served, at the time, as the only link between that small hunk of
rock and the larger one called Manhattan.
My mother cooed at every sight. “Look,” she said, pointing
to something I couldn’t make out with my two-year-old eye-
glasses. “A red-breasted robin!” She made it a point to remark
on every animal that crossed our paths during the tour, from
squirrels to chipmunks to blue jays. But there were no dogs al-
lowed, just as there were no cars. My father had been right
without even having seen the place. It felt like some sort of in-
stitution, a distant cousin to the Riker’s Island correctional fa-
cility up the river. But unlike Riker’s, Roosevelt Island gave off
a repressed, formal aura more like the United Nations, which
lay just across the river.
Luckily, we never had to face the prospect of arguing over
Roosevelt Island; our names came up for an apartment in the
West Village, at the very same address we had used to finesse
my entrance into grade school. When we went to visit West-
beth that spring, it seemed to me the reverse image of our own
building. Almost everyone was white, with a few black families
who played the role of minority that we had back in our neigh-
borhood. The apartment itself was a gigantic duplex. Standing
on its parquet floors, staring out the huge barless windows or
up at the twelve-foot-high ceilings, my sister and I felt small,
as if we had regressed in our growth curves. I couldn’t under-
stand why we should get all this and not the maintenance men
who were on their hands and knees during our visit, replacing
a section of floor that had warped from humidity and age.Why
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

us and not them, I couldn’t stop asking myself. I wondered
where they lived.
The answer, I learned, lay in the word artist. Westbeth,
funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Devel-
opment in conjunction with the National Endowment for the
Arts, provided subsidized housing for artists of all kinds. My
parents had made it past the internal review panel that evalu-
ated all applications when they came to the top of the waiting
list. First we had to be recommended by a current resident—
the man whose address we had used to get me into P.S. 41.
Then my parents had to provide letters of reference from em-
inent people in their respective fields, certifying that they
were indeed artists in whatever sense that word carried.
It all seemed so absurd. I had never taken art very seriously,
even though I had consumed a lot of it over the course of my
childhood. As soon as I was old enough my parents took me to
the galleries in Soho, keeping me on a harness and long leash
so they could yank me back whenever I rushed up to some col-
orful work, my fingernails extended like talons. During the
early 1970s conceptual art was coming into vogue, and several
pieces both baffled and inspired me. Once I saw an entire show
that consisted of pieces of ripped-up grocery cartons, each
one for sale at $500. On the long walk back to our apartment
I collected old pizza boxes and other sorts of cardboard, which
I used to set up a gallery at home. I tore them into what I con-
sidered to be interesting shapes and then taped these signed
works onto the walls of the bedroom my sister and I shared.
2 0 9

Then I invited my parents inside to browse and purchase these
items, which averaged around a nickel apiece.
Another time, after I had outgrown the leash, our parents
took Alexandra and me to a Vito Acconci opening. Acconci was
a performance artist who, during this particular show, had
himself installed under the floorboards of the gallery, where he
muttered “Fuck you” over and over. Alexandra and I thought it
was a looped tape, since his voice sounded exactly the same
each time. But he was there in person, supposedly masturbat-
ing while he repeated this mantra. For our part, we were
thrilled to hear those dirtiest of all curse words given the adult
legitimacy we projected onto the art world. “Fuck you, fuck
you, fuck you,” we said in robot-like voices to each other and
my parents. When my mother said we were not to speak that
way, we yelled back in unison, like a couple of striking work-
ers, “It’s art; it’s art; we’re allowed, ’cause it’s art!” My father
then joined in, repeating the words himself and laughing as my
mother begged him not to encourage us.
As an alternative, Ellen encouraged me to do my own per-
formance piece whenever we went gallery hopping. I had re-
cently learned from a friend how technicians induced tele-
phones to ring themselves when they wanted to test whether
they were working properly. So instead of running around the
galleries yelling “Fuck you,” I was sent off in search of the pay
phones. I would make them ring and then slip off, trying to re-
press my giggling.Then my parents and I would watch as some
black-clad patron or gallery official would answer the phone,
making funny faces when they only got a series of beeps and
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

then dead air. Even my mother snickered when people would
yell in all sorts of European accents, “Hullo? Hullo? Are you
there? Can you hear me?”
From this early indoctrination through many a “dumb-
painter” joke told by my father, I learned that art wasn’t some-
thing serious and lofty nor was it a scam, but rather something
in between. So it was difficult for me to understand why artists
had become an identifiable group, like the poor, who really de-
served help.
We finally moved in that summer, before I started high
school, just as the dynamics of delinquency and teenage preg-
nancy were about to start affecting my age cohort back on Av-
enue D. My father was the most resistant to the change of
scenery, agreeing to move only if we sublet the other apart-
ment under the table, just in case we wanted to move back at
some point in the future. When he walked through the
prospective new neighborhood, he sneered at the boutique
shops and the foofy little dogs.
While everything was still in boxes, my mother forced me
to knock on the door of the apartment across the hall “to make
friends” with the teenage boy who lived there. To my great re-
lief he wasn’t home, but I left my name and apartment number
with his mother, thinking that was the end of the matter. My
mother wasn’t satisfied. The next day I was pasting my scrib-
bled charts and diagrams up on the new wall over my desk
when my mother entered the room. “There’s a bunch of kids
hanging out downstairs in the courtyard,” she announced, in
the same tone she always used when she wanted me go down
2 1 1

and join in the Spalding baseball games of the ex-Piratas. “Why
don’t you—”
“Because I don’t want to,” I interrupted her. I had heard
their laughter and the music coming from their boom box. It
was techno-sounding white music that I didn’t recognize. But
when my mother left the room, I peered out the window and
recognized one of the guys in the group from I.S. 70.
After pacing my new room for a few more minutes, I went
downstairs. Kahlil, the kid I knew from school, was probably
Middle Eastern, with a brown tint to his skin that let him be-
long to the white group while still being a minority of sorts.
He was positioned at the center of this circle of teenagers.
They were all smoking cigarettes. In the projects almost no
one smoked cigarettes; it just wasn’t part of the youth culture.
The only things lit up were Phillies blunts full of marijuana.
Back there, malt liquor served the same social function that
cigarettes did here. I sidled up to the dozen or so smoking kids
and sat down on a concrete structure at the periphery of the
clique, not quite sure what to do with my hands since I had no
cigarette. I’m not sure whether anyone noticed I was there. A
tall, blond kid who looked like a young David Bowie was talk-
ing. He wore a white t-shirt with a green checkered button-
down shirt hanging loosely over it. He had rolled up its short
sleeves in perfect 1950s fashion, to go with his blow-dried
pompadour-styled coif.
“My mother says I’m supposed to call up this new guy who
moved in across the hall,” the Bowie lookalike said a few mo-
ments after I had arrived on the scene. My heart dropped; I
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

couldn’t say anything, let alone identify myself as the individ-
ual in question. The timing of his statement had been too per-
fect to be a coincidence; I froze, wondering whether he actu-
ally knew I was there.
“Who is he?” someone else asked.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the scrap of
paper I had left with his mother the previous day. “Danton
Connolly,” he read slowly, mispronouncing my name at every
syllable.
“Dalton Conley?” Kahlil asked. I felt my moment of entry
into the conversation approaching. It was going to be easier
than I had thought to introduce myself to the group.
“Yeah, could be, I guess,” the other kid said and slipped the
scrap back into his breast pocket. “Know ’im? Is he cool?”
He—and I—awaited a response. Kahlil thought for a mo-
ment. “He’s socially awkward,” he announced.
I didn’t know what to do. In the split second it took to re-
act, my mind formulated two choices. The first was to put on
ghetto-speak and confront Kahlil. “What the fuck you saying,
nigga?” I might interject as I popped up, chest barreled out-
ward, my face twisted up in disgust, ready to throw down. Af-
ter all, I felt more confident of my chances in a physical con-
frontation here than I ever had back on the Lower East Side.
All the same, Kahlil was quite a bit bigger than me, so I moved
on to the other choice, which came to me through the voice of
my father. His WASP wisdom would urge me to laugh loudly
and chime in: “Yes, indeed, I am quite socially awkward,”
thereby throwing the comment back onto Kahlil.
2 1 3

But I did neither. I slunk off my perch and shuffled quickly
upstairs, as I had several times from the splintered benches
back in the projects, hoping that Kahlil couldn’t recognize my
silhouette from behind.
It was the authoritative ring of his diagnosis—its serious,
almost sympathetic tone—that cut into me. Upstairs I paced
in circles like a dosed-up laboratory animal, wishing I were
back in our old neighborhood, where at least I had my skin
color to blame for not fitting in. After this encounter I settled
into the same old reclusive routine I had followed back on Av-
enue D. I began to think that moving to the new neighborhood
would do little for my social life, that my problem had not
been my skin at all but what it contained. It all added up, as far
as I was concerned. My sister and father had no problem relat-
ing to, and even dissing on, people of all creeds and colors. My
mother floated blissfully through life, unaware of how eccen-
tric she was with her mismatched socks and inside-out sweat-
shirts. She could strike up a conversation with anyone who
crossed her path. I decided the problem was not race, class, or
any other categorical factor; the problem was me. So I decided
to take action. In order to aid my social life, I ordered a series
of five subliminal cassettes produced by a hypnotist. I didn’t
care about the Quit Smoking Now, Stop Procrastinating, or Lose the
Weight tapes; I only wanted the last two: Cultivating a Winner’s
Attitude and, even more intriguing, How to Be Popular. When
they arrived I used my father’s boom box to dub them onto
blank cassettes and photocopied the accompanying documen-
tation. Then I returned the entire package within the ten-day
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

free trial period, writing “cancel” across the invoice and never
paying a cent of the $79.95.
As I lay in my bed with headphones on, the crashing waves
and sea gulls of the New Age music calmed me while the sub-
liminal message of How to Be Popular seeped into my brain. In
the documentation, the hypnotist claimed the tapes normally
started to show effects after six weeks of daily use. When
nothing changed in my life by the two-month mark, I didn’t
give up, but I began to worry that the hypnotic messages might
have been equipped with a special safeguard—an encoded
message telling those who had bootlegged the tapes that they
would always be losers and amount to nothing.
It seemed that nothing and no one could rescue me from
my social predicament, not even Jerome. He came to visit our
family the fall after I had started Stuyvesant, motoring around
in an electric wheelchair that he directed with one of his
hands.White plastic braces covered both his wrists, so I finally
knew the extent of his paralysis. It seemed as though he had
regained slight use of his hands but not much else. Jerome
made an extra effort to be nice to me, as if he remembered
my inappropriate question that day in the hospital room and
wanted to show that it was no big deal. But I still couldn’t
look him in the eye. I was too busy tracing the paths of my
shoelaces as they wove through the holes in my new basket-
ball sneakers.
I started to tell Jerome about how I was playing basketball
in an after-school league now, then caught myself with the re-
alization that he would never play ball of any kind. “You guys
2 1 5

any good?” he asked, gracefully rolling over the lump in the
conversation. “Won’t be long before I’m dunking,” he added
and smiled broadly. I hadn’t seen this smile since the last day
we hung out together before he was shot. I was overcome with
the memory and couldn’t meet his gaze. I started to cry
silently, gulping as if I were drinking something bitter. Jerome
kept talking as if nothing were happening.
“Zuni’s starting junior high now,” he said. “She says hello. So
does my mother.”
“Tell her I miss watching the shows with her,” Alexandra in-
terjected, before launching into the theme song for Good Times,
one of the sitcoms Zuni and my sister loved: “Keeping your head
above water, making a wave when you can . . . ”
Speaking over Alexandra’s crooning, my mother asked how
his recovery was going. He admitted it was going slowly. “But
now I use the wheelchair access on the M14 bus,” he added.
“At first I was too embarrassed, but now I don’t care.”
“Great,” my mother seemed like she was going to say some-
thing more, but Jerome continued.
“Yeah, now I can get around anywhere, pretty much.”
Jerome’s voice took on an excited air. “I’m thinking of moving
to California,” he said.While he spoke, he tilted his head to the
other side as if his huge smile weighed heavily on his neck, and
he needed to shift the burden.
“Temporary layoff!” my sister was still singing. She hopped
onto the arm of his wheelchair like an overly enthusiastic
lounge singer, balancing herself with one arm and gripping the
back of his chair for support. “Good times! Easy credit rip-off!”
H o n k y C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l

My mother and I cringed. “Alexandra!” my mother said.
“It’s alright,” Jerome smiled, raising his hand slowly to pat
my sister’s leg as best he could.
“I want to be an actor,” Jerome continued, smiling at my sis-
ter. “So why not live in L.A.?”
I thought he was kidding about moving and smiled through
my tears at my shoes; it was more of a grimace than a grin. My
sister stopped her warbling. “You in California?” she hooted
while I re-counted the eyelets on my sneakers. “You going to
be surfing, getting tan! Can I come?” Jerome laughed, along
with everyone in the family—everyone except me. I couldn’t
understand how my sister could talk about hitting the waves
and sunbathing with a quadriplegic black man, while my com-
ment in the hospital a few years earlier had offended everyone.
The rest of my family seemed to slide as smoothly across the
racial and disability divide as Jerome did across our parquet
floor in his motorized wheelchair. Smoothly, that is, until he
reached the gray cement stairwell that led to the second floor
of our duplex.
“You got another floor up there?” he asked, tilting his heavy
head upward.
I nodded.
“Def,” he said, using the word for “great” that was popular at
the time. “I looked for you guys back at Masaryk,” he added.
“How come you all moved here?”
My mother spoke before anyone else could get a word in.
“We moved here because of you.”
For the first time ever my entire family was silent.
2 1 7

building, trying to remain undetected after that first en-
counter with the clique in the courtyard. Moving into a white
enclave had done little to integrate me into local life. The new
location did pay off for me, however, by facilitating my school-
based social life. At Stuyvesant I became friends not with the
wealthy Greenwich Village kids but with those from the
working-class outer boroughs my parents had forsaken fifteen
years earlier. These kids commuted hours longer than I ever
did to get an education. Since I was now living in a nice neigh-
borhood not too far from school, my house became a popular
after-school destination. At Stuyvesant nerdiness seemed to
level most racial boundaries, and the friends I had crossed eth-
nic and national boundaries.
Though I enjoyed high school much more than I.S. 70, by
the end of it I, like Jerome, wanted to leave my family, West-
beth, New York City, and the entire East Coast. After graduat-
ing I left for the San Francisco Bay Area, where I attended the
University of California at Berkeley. After I filled out the dorm
I spent my high school years shuttling in and out of our new
Ep
ilo
g
u
e
E
p
ilo
g
u
e

application requesting a “party animal” for a roommate, my
mother laughed and gave me a t-shirt depicting Spuds
MacKenzie—the party dog from a Budweiser ad campaign—
as a going-away present. I streaked some of my dark hair
blond. I even bought a pink surfing t-shirt in order to fit in.
Berkeley would be the next in a series of new starts, cultural
reinventions of myself.
I arrived at the dorms—subliminal tapes in hand—after
twelve hours of flight and two airplane changes. My ears
crackled, recovering from rises and falls in cabin pressure, as I
wandered around the residential complex with bags hanging
off my torso and limbs. The dorms seemed a lot like the proj-
ects—they had the same youthful energy and devilishness
about them—except everyone was white. From the buildings
that surrounded the central quad, speakers propped up in win-
dows blasted music of bands I barely recognized. Back on Av-
enue D, I had generally heard pieces of song drift up the
twenty-one stories and into my room, mingling with police
sirens and honking horns as I scribbled away at my desk or
paced between the bookcase and the bunk beds. Now I was in
the middle of it, and guitar solos showered me from all sides as
I hauled my luggage to my assigned building.
As I walked the streets of Berkeley on my first day, I noticed
that this university town was run down in a different way than
New York. There were no buildings covered in graffiti or bags
of garbage spilling out onto the street, just political posters
peeling off the walls and lots of small-time consumer litter lin-
ing Telegraph Avenue, the main drag that led up to campus.
H o n k y E p i l o g u e

Hundreds of napkins and straws and scraps of food dotted the
sidewalk. It seemed as though everyone thought that dropping
one little cigarette butt or cellophane wrapper didn’t matter,
but it added up, making Telegraph dirtier than the Lower East
Side. I thought back to the day when I brought Michael home
for the first time, when disgust for my neighbors had risen in
my throat in tandem with the hawk’s descent. Only now did I
realize that they were no different from these middle-class
Californians.
I had never seen so much whiteness in one place. I had
never seen so much blondness anywhere. I whipped my head
back and forth to catch sight of passing girls, their hair pulled
back into ponytails by clips or bows or elastic bands covered in
crinkled velvet. They wore pastel shorts and very white t-
shirts. Some of the shirts had Greek letters on them.The girls’
legs were all lightly browned, as if by a rotisserie, and seasoned
with little blond hairs. On their feet they wore what looked
like shower sandals over white tube socks. When they walked
each step seemed strained; their hips stayed level as they plod-
ded across the smooth concrete, thigh muscles flexing visibly
with each step. No one—male or female—swooped and
dipped as they strolled; no side-to-side movement. Here
people walked; they didn’t strut.
At the same time Telegraph Avenue was decaying, it was
also springing to life. Most of the storefronts were made of
weather-worn wood, but every fourth one was a revitalized
establishment with a steel-and-plastic facade and a backlit fluo-
rescent sign for a national chain such as Mrs. Fields Cookies or
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Miller’s Outpost.The people flooding the streets were like the
stores themselves. Some were aging hippies or young
wannabes, while others kept their shirts neatly tucked into
ironed shorts. Tourists with cameras dangling off their wrists
perused the selection of t-shirts that proclaimed “Welcome to
Berzerkeley” or that depicted the chemical structure of LSD.
Colors seemed newer out here; even the air appeared clean,
crisp, and thin, as if I were watching television on a Sony Super
Trinitron. By contrast, the sooty humidity of New York had al-
ways reminded me I was in reality.
I couldn’t sleep that first night, so shortly before midnight I
hopped a clean, futuristic subway train down to MacArthur
Boulevard in Oakland, which my roommate had said was a
rough area. As I walked the poorly lit streets, I could feel my
mother watching me over the Rockies, keeping tabs on my
unsafe behavior. The Oakland neighborhood was lined with
single-family homes. Each yard had a chicken-wire fence sepa-
rating it from the next. I half expected to see a goat or a
rooster pop out from around the back of one of the houses.
The homes looked as if they had once been painted in bright
reds, blues, and yellows but had since faded from years of in-
tense sun exposure.These were the first nonbright colors I had
seen in the short time since I had arrived in the state of Cali-
fornia.
Out here the difference between rich and poor seemed to
be temporal more than spatial. The poor of today seemed to
live in the middle-class digs of yesteryear. There were hardly
any graffiti to speak of and no burned-out buildings, only the
H o n k y E p i l o g u e

occasional boarded-up house. The sparse tags that lined my
path were scribbled in regular penmanship, not the contorted
script of New York. And no one was hanging out in the streets,
sipping Colt 45 through a straw. I would have to learn a whole
new type of poverty out here, just as I would have to learn all
over again what being middle class meant.
Many of the Berkeley students moved out of the crowded
dorms and into these weather-worn Oakland houses after
their first year, mimicking on a smaller scale the process of
“gentrification” that was occurring all across urban America.
Back in New York, white people were pressing eastward dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s in some sort of backward Manifest
Destiny, pushing their way almost to the projects but not quite
reaching Avenue D. In the face of such gentrification, real es-
tate values rose, an advantage not for the people who lived
there but rather for the developers who pushed them out,
compressing the border between white and minority. By the
end of the 1990s, the Mini School—long since shut down—
had been converted into luxury apartment units.
However, the projects create a natural bulwark against the
spread of real estate development any further eastward.
Upper-middle-class white people may be able to crowd out
the corner bodegas and Puerto Rican social clubs, but they
cannot budge the mammoth buildings that make up Masaryk
or the Samuel Gompers houses. So there will come a time
when rich and poor will face off against each other, the poor
with their backs against the East River, Avenue D having be-
come the border, the no-man’s land of sorts. Manhattan al-
2 2 3

ready has the most unequal income distribution of any county
in the continental United States. It is also the most densely
populated locality. It only seems inevitable that it will be
here—if anywhere—that rich and poor will live next door to
each other. Neighborhood may come to mean less as an indica-
tor of class status, but at the same time, poverty may become
harsher by virtue of the fact that the poor will be confronted
by those who are well off—in their faces, in their neighbor-
hood—on a daily basis.
A walk down my old street shows other changes as well.
More Asian immigrants are moving in. The local bakery has
been replaced by a communications store that sells beepers
and cell phones and provides money transfer services to Latin
America. New York poverty has gone international, as many
people support families back in the Caribbean or Central
America. Some things are still essentially the same, however.
There is still a settlement house right next to my building.The
old supermarket my mother loved to complain about is still
there, now called Key Food. The luncheonette where I stole
the Reggie Bars continues to exist, but the Holocaust-
surviving proprietors are long gone. Most of all, there are still
no jobs there. Production had already left the inner city when
I was coming of age; now it is a distant memory, and there is
no hope for its return. The neighborhood and its institutions
may still act as stepping stones for some new immigrants, just
as they did for my mother’s ancestors a century before. How-
ever, for residents who have lived there for generations, stones
may have a different connotation—namely the red, brown,
H o n k y E p i l o g u e

and yellow bricks that serve to keep them back, away from the
American dream, to ghettoize and warehouse people of color
who don’t fit into the new America.
Jerome escaped those buildings, moving to California as he
said he would. He went to Los Angeles to make it as an actor
and landed the lead role in a PBS movie whose main character
was a quadriplegic. He now lives in Oregon. Michael also now
lives on the West Coast, in San Francisco, playing keyboards
for a rock band. I don’t know what became of Marcus or
Raphael. Ozan, I last heard, had gone to business school after
graduating from Harvard. Sesame Street Sean now works as a
night supervisor for a livery car company. Marc is still locked
up with many years to go.
My sister experienced some wild teenage days of mild
drugs and truancy, flunking out of high school for a time. But
she was surrounded by enough protective influences that her
teenage rebellion never gathered enough momentum to ruin
her life chances, as it had for Marc. Alexandra eventually fin-
ished high school, then college. During most of those years she
dated José Torres, Jr., son of the first boxing champion in
Puerto Rican history, and got to experience the lifestyle of the
Puerto Rican elite, including dinners with the island’s gover-
nor, its U.S. congressmen, and various movie stars. After they
broke up, Alexandra pursued a master’s degree in arts admin-
istration. She now runs Soho Rep, a small theater company in
New York City.
I myself now live a couple miles from where I grew up, in
the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, not too far from
2 2 5

Raphael’s family’s loft. I live there, in a booming real estate
market, because as a white, middle-class man, I have the
choice to live wherever I want in America—in any sort of eth-
nic enclave or in the whitest suburbs I can afford. I choose to
live in New York despite the fact that I work in Connecticut, at
Yale University. Traveling to an elite university a couple of
hours away reminds me of my daily jaunts across town to P.S.
41—except that now I have learned not to be as intimidated as
I was that first day in third grade.
I cannot help but see my two-hour commute as a metaphor
for the dynamics of race and class in America.When I speed up
the Merritt Parkway and feel a surge of acceleration in my gut,
I experience an unparalleled rush of freedom. I can go any-
where as long as I have some gas left in the tank. But if one
were to pull back and take an aerial view of the ebbs and flows
of traffic, the image would change dramatically. From a heli-
copter, traffic flows seems absurdly constrained and rhythmi-
cally patterned. Masses of cars lunge and recoil according to
some not-so-complicated algorithm. Pulling back even fur-
ther, we would notice that roads cover only a small portion of
the earth’s surface. From above, we don’t appear to have much
choice in where we are going, or how fast we can get there,
but that does not deny each driver’s experience of freedom
and agency. It’s the same with race and class.When I look back
on my life and that of my neighbors, I cannot say that it was
racism that got Jerome shot or that landed me in Stuyvesant or
that sent Marc to prison. Nor can I conclude definitively that it
was class that propelled me to the school district across town
H o n k y E p i l o g u e

or got me off the hook when I burned down Raphael’s apart-
ment. Maybe I happened to change lanes just in the nick of
time to avoid an accident; perhaps a traffic cop happened not
to see me when I pulled an illegal maneuver. But when I add
up all these particular experiences—as I have done in this
book—the invisible contours of inequality start to take form,
like the clogged traffic arteries of I-95.
My life, like anyone’s, is only a sample of one, hardly statis-
tically generalizable. But on my nonteaching days at Yale I run
mathematical models on my computer in pursuit of that statis-
tical certainty—trying to understand in some scientific way
the leitmotif of race and class that has dominated my life. I
have based the majority of my work on one particular inter-
view study. It is a survey given to more or less the same set of
5,000 families each year for the last three decades. In fact, this
data set and I are almost exactly the same age. So when I de-
velop a computer model to predict what conditions in 1969
led to educational success or economic security in the 1990s, I
am perhaps driven by the comforting feeling that the answers
to my own life and those of my neighbors are just one key-
stroke away. But of course, they never are. What’s gained in
story is lost in numbers.
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applied to this particular volume. I believe this is an especially
important task given my day job as social scientist.While Honky
is a work of nonfiction—a sociological one at that—to some
extent I am constructing a reality, as all memoirists are. In re-
creating the characters, scenes, and dialogue of Honky, I am a
captive of my own selective memories and those of my family
members and my former neighbors. As a consequence, Honky
does not meet the standards of evidence to which ethnogra-
phies are held; however, it has its compensating virtues. The
greatest of these is the depth of understanding attained when
one is more participant than observer—that is, when one
spends many consequential—even formative—years of one’s
life in a social setting, rather than swooping in from afar to
gather data for a time before going home to dinner and one’s
real life. Since Honky is based on lived experience, it is as much
about what is not understood as it is about what is grasped. It is
about the sense-making of children more than professionals. In
short, it is about literary truths, not scientific ones.
A
u
th
o
r’s
N
o
te
I want to take a moment to comment on the genre of memoir as
A
u
th
o
r’s N
o
te

A project like this would not have been possible without the
help of many institutions and individuals. I would like to ex-
press my gratitude to some of them. Starting with the big and
impersonal, I was fed, housed, and clothed by two academic
institutions while writing this book; they are the University of
California at Berkeley (specifically, the Robert Wood Johnson
Scholars in Health Policy Research Program) and Yale Univer-
sity (in particular, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies
and the Department of Sociology). While these institutions
were primarily funding me to do other work, I hope they are
satisfied that—in some small way—Honky contributes to their
mission, broadly conceived.
Many people—both formal and informal reviewers—read
drafts and provided helpful comments along the way; I am
grateful for these efforts, and the book is better for it.They in-
clude Tara Bahrampour; Nina Chaudry; Mitchell Duneier;
Sharon Hays; my spouse, Natalie Jeremijenko; Eric Klinen-
berg; my agent, Sydelle Kramer; Jonah Raskin; José Saldivar;
Jacqueline Stevens; and Mayer Vishner. At the University of
California Press, I am indebted to my editor, Naomi Schnei-
der, for supporting yet another of my projects and for her vi-
sion, which helped lead the project from proposal to manu-
script. I am also thankful to Larry Borowsky, the copy editor,
who challenged many of my assumptions, both literary and so-
ciological. I am particularly indebted to the production editor,
Jan Spauschus Johnson, who not only managed the project
from start to finish, but who also served as co–copy editor,
H o n k y A u t h o r ’ s N o t e

brainstormer, and all-around facilitator. Her contribution was
both technical and intellectual.
For the personal support I have received I am grateful to my
family of origin, who put up with endless questions ranging
from needling interviews to fact checks. Though you already
know their names from the text, I repeat them here: Alexan-
dra Conley, my sister; Ellen Alexander Conley, my mother;
Stephen Conley, my father; and Sylvia Alexander, my grand-
mother. I am also grateful to some individuals—particularly
mothers—from my old neighborhood, who patiently endured
my repeated queries. Finally, I want to thank my family of des-
tination, which, besides Natalie, is composed of E, my daugh-
ter, and Yo, my son.
2 3 1

Text: 12/16 Perpetua
Display: Arial, Frutiger, and Industria
Design: Steve Renick
Composition: Binghamton Valley Composition
Printing and binding: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

Preliminaries
Contents
Prologue
Black Babies
Trajectories
Downward Mobility
Race Lessons
Fear
Learning Class
The Hawk
Getting Paid
Sesame Street
Welcome to America
No Soap Radio
Moving On Up
Disco Sucks
Addictions
Symmetry
Fire
Cultural Capital
Epilogue
Author’s Note