City Kid by Nelson George Read Free Book Online Page B

smell of gasoline from cans in the shed, and the sounds of kids running in the distance.
    Back in Brownsville I bragged about my lost virginity to all the brothers on the basketball court. While it gave me some respect, it had still happened down South (everybody “got some” down South). When was I gonna have a Brownsville girlfriend? That’s when Cynthia came into my life. She was a butterscotch fourteen-year-old cutie known around the Tilden projects for her shiny black bangs and neon-blue coat. To the amazement of many suitors, she picked me to be her first boyfriend.
    One day Frankie, a Puerto Rican buddy of mine who lived on the third floor of 315, arranged a meeting between Cynthia and me at a nearby school yard. By the time we’d walked the three blocks home we were holding hands. Because she lived in 305 and I across the parking lot at 315, we could sit in our kitchens looking at each other as we talked on the phone. My first relationship made me giddy and proud, like I had some heretofore unknown value. My self-esteem skyrocketed, but my confidence was neither deep nor strong.
    You see, my boys greeted my first romance with snickers. After a touch football game a couple of guys said they’d been walking with her in the rain. “So,” one kid I never did like said, “I had to pull out my rubbers.” To the delight of everybody but me, he pulled out a pack of Trojans. In retrospect, I think he did it as much to show everyone he had some as to humiliate me. But this incident, plus the constant barrage of my friends’ cherry-popping tales, caused me to blow it with Cynthia.
    One afternoon I found myself miraculously alone for a few hours in 6C. I got Cynthia to come over. I pulled the curtains shut in the living room, screwed in the red lightbulb Ma used for parties, and put on an Al Green record. I laid down the law: “We need to start having sex.” Cynthia’s exit line from my den of seduction was devastating: “I thought you were different.”
    Only after the fact did I realize that Cynthia had approached me precisely because she perceived me to be a nice, cute, nice, book-reading boy, and not one of the wannabe fly guys that filled the Ville. I was probably what Cynthia wanted, and, if I’d just been who I was for her, good things would have come my way eventually. Yet in Brownsville circa 1973 (and to this day), it was hard to embrace non-Super Fly aspirations. So, like the sad dude in the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her,” I sat by the kitchen window watching for signs of Cynthia, trying to figure out how to balance what the local culture demanded versus who I was.

A THEATER ON PITKIN AVENUE
    Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville was a thriving commercial shopping strip that had been pioneered by the Jewish merchants to serve the Hebrew families that had once populated the neighborhood. When I was a little boy many of the stores still bore Jewish names, and even the more generic-sounding businesses (Thom McAn’s, Wool-worth’s, East New York Savings Bank) were largely run by folks with Jewish surnames. But by the midsixties stores began to close, as their old clients split for other Brooklyn neighborhoods like Canarsie, to the suburbs of Long Island, or to the hurricane corridors of Florida. Often they were fleeing my family and the others like us who were turning Brownsville black. The bonds blacks and Jews had shared during the glory days of the civil rights movement broke down in neighborhoods like Brownsville where Semite merchant and black customer now eyed each other with mutual suspicion.
    Sometimes blacks, Puerto Ricans, or Arabs took over the stores. More often, however, these places either shut down or were burned down, leaving holes on Pitkin that wouldn’t get filled for decades. You couldn’t totally blame them. Heroin had turned rough streets mean. Purse snatching, shoplifting, muggings, and armed robbery abounded in and