The summer i was 13 my mother moved downtown to the Village. She had met a very unique , very incredible man and decided it was time to move in with him 2 years after my parents divorced. this man, David, became my stepfather. his house, his neighborhood, and his very unique way of life were all a brand new world for me. i had never met such an interesting and strong person before, besides my parents of course. he was once the lawyer for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he helped found a very successful photography gallery and his law firm has/had an art gallery in the front end of the office space called "The Work Space". He was one of those guys who helped form what Soho and the Village are like today. anybody familiar with advertising might take interest at the fact that he was the main lawyer for Jerry Della Femina and helped found what became MVBMS and is now Euro RSCG. he was the kind of character who wore a wrinkled and stained, yet astoundingly rare and expensive suit coupled with a pair of comfy sneakers and would confidently walk through any neighborhood without a concern to what could happen. he was self made man from Brooklyn who payed his way through Yale by doing things like working on a ship in it's engine room and was no stranger to all levels of society. he hardly ever slept and read philosophy in the early hours of the morning. he was nothing short of a genius and i miss him dearly. He died in 1997 suddenly of a heart aneurysm in a taxi with my mother, who loved him to distraction.
the townhouse he had bought during harder times in Greenwich Village's sordid past, was a historical landmark which he restored with friends by hand. He actually used tooth brushes to uncover 300 year old wood molding long since hidden by various tenants. There is actually a re-make of the living room in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that i sometimes visit, just to feel like i am home again. sometimes i even walk by the front of the actual building and sit on my old stoop. i can usually see my old bedroom because i lived on the ground floor and my windows were facing the front. there was an old fireplace in my bedroom and one in the kitchen so big i could stand in without ducking. the floors were ancient warped wood, the faucets were pearl inlaid and read "Chaud" and "Froid". everything in it was over 300 years old and the solid construction was a testament to how much care went into materials and craft back then, at least for the wealthy. the current owner is George Soros, the guy who bank rolled John Kerry's 2004 campaign and allegedly made 3 billion dollars last year. i knew back then that it was going to be a looong uphill battle for me to ever live like that again.
to visualize this place, picture the Age of Innocence and you won't be far off the target. the backyard was full of rare plants and a pond with giant goldfish (carp) in it. no joke. this is where my graffiti writing hood-rat ass lived for a bunch of formative years. i had rapidly gone from stomping cockroaches with my Fayva generic brand wanne-be sneakers uptown, to having my own floor in what was an aristocratic merchant's town mansion in the 18th century. apparently, the first house to be built on 11th street...ever.
A funny side story is that one morning when i was about 16 i was sitting in the ground floor kitchen eating cereal in my underwear, when all of a sudden Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon walked in. They were considering buying the place and nobody told me they would be passing through. it...was...awkward. like always, i digress.
the neighborhood was ultra funky and still had the relatively beatnik and creative feel to it left over from Dylan's days in the 60's and 70's. a far cry from the wash of wealth that it is under now. and for a 13 year old, the winding cobblestone streets and endless characters that strode those streets were a very informative, eye opening environment. up until that point i had only been familiar with the upper west side which, had a bit of a creative flavor, but was already kind of claimed by jewish, puerto rican, and dominican family mini hoods and was clearly moving into the early stages of gentrification. so this place was new and even more mixed up and exciting to me then uptown.
I brought with me a skateboard and a bmx bike to use in my exploration of my new hood. i had the whole of the summer of 1986 and its sweltering hot days to kill and a huge wild area of Manhattan to get familiar with. i do believe, in retrospect, that i was a lunatic. or at least fearless, because i went everywhere at any hour. on of the benefits of living in a huge, 5 story brownstone with hip parents on the third floor, was that i had my own floor, with my own entrance under the main stoop. i could come and go without notice at any time and i did just that. plus i was in between elementary school and high school, so my old friends, who all lived uptown were no longer in my life the way they used to be. so lets just say that i was bored unless i stayed active on my own.
that's about the time i discovered the basketball court on 6th avenue and 4th street. you know, the one that always has hundreds of people watching guys slam dunk on each other. its one of the most competitive and serious courts downtown, to this day. it's where you could find various Knicks playing, like Gerald Wilkins and Mark Jackson, playing violent street ball. at first i just watched in admiration. but as i became more comfortable and more bored with my new domain, i became emboldened to join the fray. i bought a red and black Michael Jordan ball and started dribbling it to the court everyday. i would run out and start shooting in between the games when the teams were being selected and the court was momentarily open. this went on for a few weeks until i think the regular guys started noticing me. i was clearly a neighborhood kid and i think that kind of thing gets respect and notice no matter what court you go to. plus my size at 13 was, lets say, petite so i was an unusually bold sight. my dr checkup that summer had me weighing in at a paltry 105 pounds and a mere 5 feet 0 inches. i was small even for my age, something that i think just added to my craziness then and later in life. i had something of a Napoleon complex, in retrospect.
so imagine what it looked like when these huge guys were playing around me. i remember one of them was particularly friendly and inclusive, Victor, started calling me Shorty Rock, and told me to play in the games. so i did. one thing i had practiced a lot at that age, was the long shot. i had this totally fucked up and weird one handed shot, but it seemed to have a pretty good rate of success. good enough that i would actually get passed the ball if i placed myself at the top out of reach of the larger guys. of course, if i didn't get rid of the ball immediately, or if i was stupid and tried to drive in, i would get my young skinny ass handed to me in front of the whole neighborhood. so my game was pretty formulaic, i'd get the ball and either set up an alley-oop for one of the stars, or i would chuck the ball with my one handed hail mary. when it missed, it was very upsetting for me, because clearly the large audience had all their eyes on the tiny young white kid in the middle of this crazy street ball game. my right to be there was ALWAYS questioned by the large mixed group of on-lookers, and probably some of the players who were less regular to the court wondered why the hell i was there. certainly, the time Gerald Wilkins rejected my shot so hard, the ball flew in the other direction so high that it nearly cleared the chicken fence enclosure to land on 3rd street. that was humiliating and i hated Mr. Wilkins for that. especially since i could care less about the Knicks and pro sports in general.
But when i made the shot, it was extra gravy. people clapped and hooted. players would smack my ass on the way back to defence (something i have never understood by the way, seems a bit weird for dudes who clearly don't approve of gayness to grab ass on each other so much in sports, but who am i to blow against the wind :). they would yell, "word up, Shorty Rock!". the other team would yell at each other to not give me the shot so easy. they would say things like "cover Shorty man!". so, i earned my keep through under-estimation. it was AWESOME. NYU students would stare in awe, players would point and laugh at each other. i think i brought the game into a different place for these guys, after all it was street ball, not organized ball. so anybody and everybody is technically allowed to play. but nobody besides the best and the craziest dared enter that court. so i was the under dog. the kid stuck in the neighborhood that hadn't made room for kids yet. i guess, i fell under the "craziest" category at that time of my life. i was clearly the local under dog. the kid stuck in the neighborhood that hadn't made room for kids yet. i would never dare do something like that now. i don't need the recognition, or the humiliation. and i am certainly no longer a bored kid in a new neighborhood.
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