sat me down and asked me what I was going to do now. “I don’t know,” I said, but I had a few ideas. The previous Christmas I’d visited my sisters in New York, and afterward I wrote Frannie: “I like N.Y. and I am going to live there when I start living.… God, I wish I were there. It is the most fascinating town in the world.…”
My mother said it was important for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and my father offered to pay for my education to learn a trade. Since the only thing I had ever done except sports that anyone had praised me for was acting, I told them, “Why don’t I go to New York and try to be an actor?”
9
AS I GOT OUT OF the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to my sister’s apartment in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1943, I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everybody dead.
I cherish my memories of those first few days of freedom in New York, especially my sense of liberation from not having to submit to any authority, and knowing that I could go anyplace and do anything at any time. No more uniforms, no more formations, no more bugles, no more extended-order drills, no more parades, curfews or masters. I had hated school, and now I was free.
One night I went to Washington Square and got drunk for the first time. I fell asleep on the sidewalk and nobody bothered me. When I had to piss, I got up and relieved myself behind a bush. No one said I couldn’t. It was ecstasy sleeping on the sidewalk of Washington Square, realizing I had no commitments to anything or anyone. If I didn’t feel like going to bed, I didn’t. In those first weeks I formed the sleeping patterns of a lifetime: stay up till past midnight, sleep till ten or eleven the next morning.
Once I stayed up all night at a party in Brooklyn and lookedout the window at a gray dawn at about six A.M . and watched the streets glow with the headlights of buses, cars and taxis. Then the sidewalks began to fill up with people carrying briefcases and scurrying to their offices. I thought, God, wouldn’t it be awful if I had to get up and go to work like that every day?
Frannie, who lived in an apartment near Patchin Place in the Village, invited me to move in with her. I got a job as an elevator operator at Best & Company department store, then worked as a waiter, a short-order cook, a sandwich man, and at other jobs that I don’t remember now.
One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from.
“New York,” he said.
“How did you get that Texas accent?” I asked.
“I was in the army.”
“But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?” I’m sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face.
“It was protective coloration,” he said, “because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan.” He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn’t broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer and the other man said he was Jimmy Baldwin.
Although Mailer, who was as yet unpublished, and I never became good friends, Jimmy Baldwin and I became close after that meeting in Hector’s Cafeteria. It was a special relationship, and one of its hallmarks was an absence of any sense of racial differences between us, something I have seldom experienced with other black friends. Neither of us ever felt we had to speak about race. Our relationship was simply that of two human beings with no barriers between us, and we could tell each other anything about ourselves with frankness. I was working at a dull job and so was he; he hadn’t written much yet and I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.
Unfortunately, Jimmy became one of the many friends I’ve loved since
My mother said it was important for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and my father offered to pay for my education to learn a trade. Since the only thing I had ever done except sports that anyone had praised me for was acting, I told them, “Why don’t I go to New York and try to be an actor?”
9
AS I GOT OUT OF the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to my sister’s apartment in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1943, I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everybody dead.
I cherish my memories of those first few days of freedom in New York, especially my sense of liberation from not having to submit to any authority, and knowing that I could go anyplace and do anything at any time. No more uniforms, no more formations, no more bugles, no more extended-order drills, no more parades, curfews or masters. I had hated school, and now I was free.
One night I went to Washington Square and got drunk for the first time. I fell asleep on the sidewalk and nobody bothered me. When I had to piss, I got up and relieved myself behind a bush. No one said I couldn’t. It was ecstasy sleeping on the sidewalk of Washington Square, realizing I had no commitments to anything or anyone. If I didn’t feel like going to bed, I didn’t. In those first weeks I formed the sleeping patterns of a lifetime: stay up till past midnight, sleep till ten or eleven the next morning.
Once I stayed up all night at a party in Brooklyn and lookedout the window at a gray dawn at about six A.M . and watched the streets glow with the headlights of buses, cars and taxis. Then the sidewalks began to fill up with people carrying briefcases and scurrying to their offices. I thought, God, wouldn’t it be awful if I had to get up and go to work like that every day?
Frannie, who lived in an apartment near Patchin Place in the Village, invited me to move in with her. I got a job as an elevator operator at Best & Company department store, then worked as a waiter, a short-order cook, a sandwich man, and at other jobs that I don’t remember now.
One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from.
“New York,” he said.
“How did you get that Texas accent?” I asked.
“I was in the army.”
“But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?” I’m sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face.
“It was protective coloration,” he said, “because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan.” He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn’t broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer and the other man said he was Jimmy Baldwin.
Although Mailer, who was as yet unpublished, and I never became good friends, Jimmy Baldwin and I became close after that meeting in Hector’s Cafeteria. It was a special relationship, and one of its hallmarks was an absence of any sense of racial differences between us, something I have seldom experienced with other black friends. Neither of us ever felt we had to speak about race. Our relationship was simply that of two human beings with no barriers between us, and we could tell each other anything about ourselves with frankness. I was working at a dull job and so was he; he hadn’t written much yet and I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.
Unfortunately, Jimmy became one of the many friends I’ve loved since
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