2014 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist
The
N Train
by
William Boyle
The first porno magazine I ever
bought was called Black and Busty. One Wednesday after school, Andrew
Amato and Michael Marciano sent me into the Optimo on Bay Parkway with ten
dollars and told me to get Hustler or Barely Legal. I looked the
oldest, I was the tallest, and I was the only one in our sixth grade class who
shaved—that’s why the mission fell to me.
I entered the store with my head
down. I figured there was no way the lady behind the counter would sell a porno
to me, and I hoped I wouldn’t get arrested for trying. I imagined the
storeowner calling my mother and telling her I was a little pervert. I looked
outside and saw Michael and Andrew huddled around a fire hydrant. I browsed the
racks, picking up a copy of Psychology Today and pretending to read.
Finally, I inched over to the wall of dirty magazines and movies. They were out
in the open for anyone to see, and this Optimo had the best selection in the
neighborhood. I felt like I was going to puke. I closed my eyes, picked one,
and put it under my arm. I waited in line behind an old man buying scratch-offs
and Pall Malls. When it was my turn, I put the magazine on the counter, cover
down, and tried to avoid eye contact with the lady.
I paid. She brown-bagged the
magazine and handed it over. I walked outside and the guys surrounded me.
“What’d you get?” Andrew said.
Michael put out a hand to stop him.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he said.
Michael lived in a big house on
Eighty-Third Street. Grapevines hung from a trellis over the driveway and
tomato plants grew through wire cones in the garden. We went inside, and
Michael’s mother was sitting on the couch in the living room. She had a bag of
popcorn in her lap and candy wrappers were shoved into the cushions around her.
She was watching Love Connection. “Hello, boys,” she said without
looking at us. “We’ve got some cold cuts and semolina bread, if you want.”
We hustled past her.
Michael’s room was cavernous. Magic
Johnson posters were tacked to the walls. He had his own TV and Sega Genesis
and Nintendo systems. Comic books and VHS tapes were piled high in milk crates
overflowing from his closet. We kneeled around the bed like we were about to
pray, and I put the bag down between us. I figured Michael should be the one to
lead the way. But Andrew beat him to it. He grabbed the bag and shook out the
magazine. There it was. Black and Busty. Andrew picked it up and flipped
through the pages, as if the cover was a joke and the magazine would be full of
something else. Michael and Andrew put their heads down on the bed.
“What?” I
said.
“You owe us, Billy,” Andrew said.
“We all put in for this. Black and Busty?” He held open the centerfold
and looked at me like I’d just fingered his cat’s asshole.
“I picked with my eyes closed,” I
said. “I was lucky I got anything.”
Andrew threw the magazine at me. I
looked at it. I liked that the women were black. The only women I had ever seen
naked were in movies, and they were all white. I stuffed the magazine into my
backpack.
Michael went over to his stereo and
put in a cassette of Licensed to Ill. “Nigger porn,” he said. “Christ.”
…
I doubt that was the first time I’d
heard that word. I’m sure it had passed into my ears in songs and movies, but
the way Michael had used it was different. Old Italian men in the neighborhood
said things like tizzun and mulignan, but those words had
distance in them. This seemed vicious, powerful.
A couple of months later, when
school let out, my mother, stepfather, stepsister, and I drove to Florida. We
were headed for Disney World and Universal Studios. In Virginia, a black state
trooper pulled us over and gave us a ticket for going ten miles per hour over
the speed limit. “Dumb nigger cop,” I said, after he’d gone back to his
cruiser, and I felt tough. The word was thick in my mouth.
I taped everything back then. I had
a little handheld recorder and stacks of blank cassettes. I wanted to be a
writer, and I loved to tape my family and transcribe what they said and shape
stories around it. I had the tape going when the cop pulled us over, when I
said what I said. I found the tape buried in a filing cabinet when I was in
college and listened to it. It was strange to hear myself as a ten-year-old, my
voice full of Brooklyn, saying a word that I’d come to understand as hateful
and wrong. I smashed the tape and scattered the pieces in garbage cans around
the neighborhood.
…
When we got back from Orlando, I
fell into my summer routine. It was 1989, and the summer meant stickball and
stoopball. It meant daily trips to Jimmy’s Deli for Topps baseball cards,
Spaldeens, and quarter drinks. It meant listening to ballgames on the radio in
the front yard of our apartment building. It meant sitting on the high part of
the jungle gym in my grandparents’ backyard at dusk and thinking about what
it’d be like to have X-ray glasses, to be able to throw ninety, to be able to
kiss Alyssa Milano.
I spent a lot of time with my
stepfather. He taught at P.S. 48 on Eighteenth Avenue and ran a day camp there
in late June and early July. I went with him almost every day and met kids that
were way different than the kids I went to school with at St. Mary’s. Most kids
at St. Mary’s were Italian. Or half-Italian like me. A few pure-bred Irish kids
stuck out. And there was one poor Pakistani boy who had the misfortune to share
a last name with the guy everyone wanted to bend over and buttfuck with a Scud
missile by 1991. But the kids at my stepfather’s camp were mostly black and
Chinese.
I played baseball, dodgeball,
basketball, tag, and ran relays with the kids at the camp. We spent our days in
the schoolyard and never cared if we left. We ate lunches out of coolers—peanut
butter and jelly, ham and cheese—and drank lemonade that one of the school
secretaries made. We forgot about video games. I got to be good friends with
this black kid that everyone called Hopper. One day, as I tried to drive past
him for a layup, he blocked my shot and said, “Get the fuck out of here,
nigger.” I cracked up.
On most weekends I went with my
father to New Jersey. It only took a half-hour or forty minutes to get to the
town where he lived with his new wife and his new kids, but we crossed three
bridges and it felt like a totally different place. My father and I didn’t have
much to say to each other. I barely felt like his son anymore. Stuck in traffic
on the Verrazano the following Friday, I told him about Hopper. I repeated what
Hopper had said to me after he’d blocked my shot. I laughed like it was the
funniest thing since that long piss scene in The Naked Gun.
“Never say that word,” my father
said. “It’s a bad word. Never say it.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s hateful.”
I wanted to believe him. I’d been
waiting to believe something he said my whole life.
…
Other things happened that summer.
The Mets traded Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell to the Phillies, and I stopped
caring about baseball. Paul’s Boutique came out. I went to see Batman,
Weekend at Bernie’s, The Abyss, and Ghostbusters II. I won
a contest for an essay about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who had died on the
Space Shuttle Challenger, and my mother took me to an awards ceremony in
downtown Brooklyn. We went out for brick oven pizza afterward.
But one thing happened that made
life immediately different: At the end of August, a week before my birthday, a
black kid named Yusuf Hawkins and three of his buddies got off the N train in
Bensonhurst. The wrong neighborhood. A group of white kids surrounded them,
waving bats. “What are you niggers doing here?” one of the white kids asked.
The next morning I woke up and went
to Jimmy’s Deli to get the Daily News for my grandparents. I saw the
headline: BLACK YOUTH KILLED BY WHITE MOB IN BENSONHURST. My first thoughts
were about the girl I had a crush on that summer, who lived right across from
where it had happened. I wondered what her bedroom looked like. Did she see
anything? What kind of stuffed animals did she have? What kind of nightgowns
hung in her closet? Did she have her own TV? Were there pictures on her wall?
But the Yusuf Hawkins story came to
mean more and more to me as the days went on. I stopped reading box scores and
started following the case. I kept a spiral notebook filled with things I’d
learned from the newspapers. Hawkins wasn’t much older than me, just a few
years. The guys who had ganged up on him were the brothers of kids I went to
school with. Reporters asked questions and people I knew said that these guys
weren’t killers or thugs, that they were the stand-up children of stand-up mothers
and fathers, that they were protecting the neighborhood.
In the weeks after, things got
messier and messier. Three hundred black demonstrators marched through the
neighborhood to chants of “Niggers, go home.” White hecklers held up
watermelons. They complained that the Feast Day of Saint Rosalia had been
ruined. I saw Hawkins’s mother and father on TV, and they looked like they
wanted to die.
At my birthday party, I asked an
older neighborhood friend what he thought.
“What was that kid really doing
in the neighborhood?” he said.
I told him what I’d read and seen on
TV, that Hawkins and his friends were there to see about a car.
“A car,” the guy said. “Sure.” He
paused. “Certain things you don’t do.”
“He wasn’t looking for trouble,” I
said.
“That’s what they say on the news.
You’ve got to think for yourself.” He leaned in close. “What was that kid really
doing in the neighborhood?”
…
Here were the facts: Keith Mondello
and Joey Fama and a bunch of their friends had heard that Mondello’s
ex-girlfriend was dating a black or Hispanic guy. They were outside of her
house waiting and ready to pounce on anyone with dark skin when Yusuf Hawkins
and some of his buddies came into the neighborhood to meet a guy about a used
car. The initial reports had ten to thirty white kids jumping these four black
kids. Ten to thirty. Three of the black kids got away, grazed by fists
and bullets, mostly unharmed. Hawkins got beaten with baseball bats and was
shot twice in the chest.
Hawkins and his buddies had gotten
off the N train at Twentieth Avenue and Sixty-Fourth Street. They had stopped
for batteries, film, and candy at a grocery store before walking down the wrong
block at the wrong time. I remember wondering what they needed batteries and
film for. I guessed that one of them had a camera and that they wanted to snap
some pictures of the car they were going to see. It wasn’t Hawkins who was
going to buy the car—it was one of his friends. The guy they had talked to was
selling it for nine hundred bucks. When they crossed over to the schoolyard,
Hawkins and his friends were surrounded and confronted. Bats and handguns were
flashed. Though there was some doubt during the trial about who fired, Fama was
ultimately identified as the triggerman. Everyone scattered after Hawkins was
shot. White kids stashed guns and knives in cars, flung bats off into the
distance.
In an interview with The New York
Times, a woman named Mrs. Galarza recounted how she heard the gun go off
twice, went downstairs a few minutes later, and found Hawkins in the
schoolyard, shot and dying, a candy bar in his hand. Mrs. Galarza held Yusuf
Hawkins and said, “Come on, baby. You’ll be fine. Take small breaths. Just
relax. God’s with you.” The cops and ambulances didn’t arrive on the scene for
fifteen minutes. Hawkins was dead on arrival at Maimonides Hospital.
…
The story stayed in the news for a
long time. It brought us into a new decade. There were trials. Mondello got
five to sixteen years. He was acquitted of murder but convicted of rioting,
menacing, discrimination, and criminal possession of a weapon. Later, it was
reduced to four to twelve. He got out in 1998. Fama wound up getting convicted
of second degree murder by “acting with depraved indifference,” and he was
sentenced to thirty-two years to life. He was sent up to Clinton Correctional
Facility in Dannemora, New York and won’t be eligible for parole until 2022.
Other members of the gang were tried and received light sentences or were
acquitted. Al Sharpton got stabbed in Bensonhurst at a march to protest the
lenient sentencing; a drunk guy lunged out of the crowd and snapped a steak
knife at him. Street artist Gabriel Specter painted a mural of Yusuf Hawkins on
the side of a building on Verona Place in Bed-Stuy. Spike Lee dedicated Jungle
Fever to him, though Do the Right Thing—a film that was released two
months before Hawkins was killed—came a lot closer to getting at the larger
problem that led to his death.
…
I continued to keep a notebook about
the Hawkins case for a few years after the shooting. I started high school at
Xaverian in Bay Ridge in the fall of 1992, and one day, a few weeks before
midterms, I saw Joey Fama for President written in black marker above a
urinal in the boy’s bathroom on the second floor.
I put a picture of Yusuf Hawkins up
on my bedroom wall when I got home from school that day.
I was fourteen, and I knew what I
didn’t want to be. It shook me up to realize that, though we were meant to have
come a long way, we really hadn’t come very far at all. I saw the way that race
troubles had burned through history, and I felt afraid. If nothing was any
different now, what would happen in the future? How bad would it get?
…
I didn’t ever stop thinking about
Yusuf Hawkins. I’m tied to his death through my neighborhood. The streets are
haunted with his blood. What preceded his murder—those early exposures to
racist language and attitudes, my own part in it—encompassed the whole
experience. What followed, seeing how hate carried on, understanding that a
high school kid could write Joey Fama for President on a bathroom wall,
left me with a profound sense of grief. When I went to college and people asked
me where I was from, I said, “Bensonhurst,” and they nodded, able to make only
one association with the name. “Elliot Gould’s from there,” I’d say. “Out
for Justice and Angie were filmed on Eighteenth Avenue. I grew up in
the apartment where Gaspipe Casso used to live.” Soon after, I totally disowned
Bensonhurst. I took census maps as bible: We lived a block into Gravesend. Gravesend:
the name was poetry.
August marked twenty-five years since
Hawkins was killed. He would’ve turned forty-one on March 19th. Like Jordan
Davis and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, his life was stolen from him. And
ignorant people praise and protect Michael Dunn and George Zimmerman and Darren
Wilson just as they praised and protected the boys of Bensonhurst. At a
memorial for Hawkins in 1999, his father, Moses Stewart, said: “He died for
something I did. I’m the one who gave him his color. He was born black because
of me.”
I live in Oxford, Mississippi now.
The history of hate runs deep here, too. On February 16th of this year, a
noose was fastened around the neck of the James Meredith statue located near
the library on the University of Mississippi campus and an old Georgia state
flag (which features a prominent Confederate battle emblem) was draped on the
statue’s shoulders. Last summer, back in Coney Island, the statue of Jackie
Robinson and Pee Wee Reese outside MCU Park was defaced with racist slurs and
swastikas. Davis and Martin and Brown are Hawkins all over again, and it’s heartbreaking.
Hate thrives. All this evil just runs around, and you spend your whole life
learning about it.
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