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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was shoved into the back of a squad car while the mob pounded on the windows and screamed that I was a dead N*****r.

It was there that I had one of the most impactful police encounters of my life. It was at our 7^th grade dance and a few of us were playing basketball in our school playground on Houston Street when a large group of white teenagers attacked us and chased us up 6^th Avenue. We just made it around the corner and into our front entrance on Bleecker. Moments later the street was packed with a mob of 200+ screaming Italians from Little Italy. They said that we, the only three 12 year old black middle school students at Little Red, had just raped one of their cousins. They were pounding on the school door and screaming the N word and calling us rapists.

Then the cops arrived. They came in and tried to defuse the situation by bringing in two teenage Italians, who they addressed by their first names, to give us a chance to clear ourselves. We were lined up against the wall in the hallway where our accusers of course said, “Yeah, that’s them.”

One of the parents at the school then added, “it’s getting late. Just send the N*****s out so we can all go home.”

We screamed that we were students at the school, that there were four other white students in the playground with us when we were attacked (of course none of them were accused of anything) and we demanded to be able to call our parents. We were invisible and the only thing the cops said to us is, “You boys better calm down ‘till we get this sorted out.”

After another hour of screaming back and forth the police said they were escorting us out for our own protection. I was shoved into the back of a squad car while the mob pounded on the windows and screamed that I was a dead N*****r. The cops drove me to St. Marks and Avenue A, yanked me out of the back seat and gave me a crisp slap across the face, with the age old warnings of, “Don’t cause any more trouble,” and “We’ve got our eye on you, boy.”

I took a few more beatings from cops when I was in my teens, but by that point it was just something we all expected as a rite of passage before they sent us to an upstate penitentiary. My Dad drilled the message home every time he saw me: “You may be light-skinned, but that doesn’t matter. This system, this country, sees you as the enemy and wants to put you in a cage and keep you there.”

I was 14, sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park with a few friends when one of them asked, “Do you think we’ll live to see 40?” 

“No way,” we said. 

“Not unless we’re locked away for a few decades and then they let us back out.” 

That was our mentality. That was how we’d been programed. The sad news is, none of my friends from that day lived to see 30. I obviously did, and my kids have been laughing and playing right behind that very same park bench in the Tompkins Square playground since they took their first steps. So, what happened? What slowly turned things around for me? I’m not sure if it’s complicated, or actually sort of simple… 

Getting a great education was a huge part of it. After middle school, when the drugs, crime and violence in 1970s LES went to the next level, my Dad got me into an upstate boarding school that focused on helping at-risk inner-city youth… And while I was there, some of those kind and loving people showed up, just as Mrs. Mintz promised they would.

Then there was basketball. I started late, but gradually developed into a pretty decent player. Nowhere near good enough to make it onto my college D1 squad, but I did play on some powerhouse teams in NYC tournaments and had twenty years of amazing runs at my local Y. Even though I’ve been sidelined after hip surgery I still think about it every day and watching MJ’s The Last Dance has me missing it that much more.

Forgiveness played a major role too. I had to start with me because like all trauma victims I blamed myself. For years I replayed that day and for a long time I firmly believed it was my fault for not going home earlier. The twisted voice in my head said that if I hadn’t been showing off my toy guns to my friends I wouldn’t been attacked and my mom wouldn’t have checked out. After that I blamed myself for growing up in a smoke-filled haze and for years held nothing but anger and resentment in my heart.

Like I said at the opening, it took a while to get there, but after I forgave myself I worked on forgiving almost everyone else too. Definitely not the sick pedophile who tried to kill me, and I’m still working on letting go of my anger towards the guy who fed drugs to a 9 year old. The cops who started intimidating me and calling me the N word when I needed them most and beat my ass as a kid? That’s been a long and winding road and after all the murders of Black men and women at the hands of police officers it’s definitely reopened those old wounds. 

That said, life is complicated, convoluted and filled with irony. I was 29 when I got jumped by a group of Dominicans. They cracked me in the head with a bat, stabbed me and were about to finish me off when an off-duty cop pulled over and saved my life. He threw me in his car and brought me to the ER… and then he was gone. Never even got his name, but no way I’d be here if he hadn’t jumped in. Thank you, sir, whoever you are, and if by some strange twist of fate you’re reading this, I am forever grateful for what you did.

Beyond that, several of my LES brothers are now retired police officers. I know how hard they worked to do the right thing when they were on the job and how hard the job really is. Every September 10^th we meet up around 10PM and go down to the Port Authority command center at Ground Zero with boxes of coffee and donuts for the midnight to 8 shift. Then we head over to the 9/11 Memorial before raising glasses to the fallen heroes at O’Hara’s. Although it’s a sad and solemn night it’s one I’m always honored to be a part of.

True change within departments across the country can’t happen until officers stop fearing retribution for reporting the illegal activities of the “few bad apples.”

My last comments about law enforcement are these: Institutionalized racism is alive and breathing deep and we all need to do our part to help eradicate it. Marching against racism isn’t un-American, Black Lives Matter protesters aren’t criminals, but looters and vandals definitely are. Most cops are good people trying to do their best in often impossible and life-threatening situations, but cops who kill, abuse and wrongly convict innocent Black and Latino Americans are criminals too. I also believe they should receive longer prison sentences than civilians for dishonoring the badge and breaking their vow to serve and protect the innocent. Furthermore, one of the most critical steps towards holding these criminals with badges accountable is the end of the Blue Wall of Silence. True change within departments across the country can’t happen until officers stop fearing retribution for reporting the illegal activities of the “few bad apples.” 

That aside, although there’s been a few bumps along the way, I’m truly grateful for the journey and especially thankful for all the wonderful people who dedicated so much of their time and effort to help me get here. 

Wait! I forgot to mention books. They’ve been a big part of it too. Those childhood sessions with my mother never left me and I’ve been a voracious reader ever since. Mom and I actually came full circle, and in the end it was me reading and acting out scenes for her before she passed away.

As for the rest of it, I’ve gone down a few different career paths. From running restaurants and a Jazz club with my Dad in the 80’s and early 90s, followed by a six year stint as the worst stockbroker to ever pass the Series 7, to software and data sales. Fourteen years ago I landed an incredible job in the Commodity & Energy markets where I’ve been ever since, and I even do some writing in my spare time 😊

I was also very fortunate to have 3 amazing children after most of my baggage was dumped on the trash heap… And, as the saying goes, as much as we raise our kids, they raise us right back. I think my kids are doing a solid job with me, and as long as they keep laughing at my corny Dad jokes and opening my eyes to the magic all around us I’ll keep on being the happiest man in the world.

Last but far from least, I have to give a shoutout to the Lower East Side neighborhood where I lived for more than 50 years. I recently moved out, but when I look in the mirror I still see an LES kid smiling back at me. 

Like I said, I’m truly blessed to be here and I’m playing with house money.

Gratitude. Love. Peace. Kindness. Forgiveness. Stop the Hate. Black Lives Matter.