City Kid by Nelson George

Author:Nelson George [George, Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780670020362
Google: Pzeu6x36vtsC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 4386518
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE WHITE LINES THAT BIND

The Pink Tea Cup is an anomaly, a soul food restaurant in the heart of the West Village that has survived for decades. When I first started eating there in the late seventies it was on Bleecker Street near Grove. I’d get an order of fish with greens and macaroni and cheese to go, and then carry the meal in a brown paper bag west toward the piers. These were the glory days of the gay liberation movement, so I kept my eyes to myself, not wanting to suggest to any of the friendly gentlemen who strolled its curvy streets that I wanted to hook up.

About a half block from the piers, where transvestites ruled and truck drivers snoozed, and blow jobs were the coin of the realm, I walked into a garage with my soul food feast. Sitting in the booth where drivers checked in before parking their cars was Nelson Elmer George. Throughout my college years and into my early twenties, I tried to bond with my father. My mother, who’d heard me whine and even cry about not having a father, reluctantly encouraged me, knowing it might help me become a man but worried I’d eventually be disappointed.

As I said earlier, my first really vivid recollection of my father is our weird trip to Harlem, where I got my first inkling of how, if not why, he got his hustle on. The irony was that I’d become something of a hustler myself, roaming the same nocturnal boulevards in search of money and fulfillment. The huge difference was that nothing I would do, or even seriously contemplate, would come close to crossing the line between the legal and illegal. To paraphrase Rakim, “I knew the ledge.”

One of the things that came out of my visits was an article in the Amsterdam News called an interview with Mr. C., and it was billed as the reflections of a small-time drug dealer, which it was. The article was a way I could justify hanging with Nelson Elmer to myself—I was finally getting something tangible out of him. It was a way for him to explain his life to me, which he very much wanted to do.

Apparently my father’s life changed in 1957, the year I was born. Unfortunately, the turning point in his life wasn’t my birth, it was his first visit to a Harlem after-hours club on 122nd Street called Cary’s. “It was in the basement of a building,” he told me. “I came with a friend who was known there. They were very careful to see if you had any weapons before they let you in. There was a bar section, and people were sitting and drinking and smoking reefer, which seemed to be the main feature of going to this type of place. I was always a fella out in the street as well as being a working man. So I became acquainted with all the ways people made their livelihood. I met all the hustlers and all the hustles.

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