Free City Kid by Nelson George Page A

always being picked on in the Ville, felt freer to step outside the cultural boxes we then all lived in.
    While we were all grooving to the Temptations’ “Psychedelic Shack” and Al Green ballads, Dan started sporting a bandana, and he put a Jimi Hendrix poster over his bed. He was listening to “Purple Haze” back when no one around the way knew who Jimi was. No self-respecting black music head today wouldn’t anoint Hendrix a god, yet in the early seventies the conventional wisdom was that he played “white-boy music,” that Jimi had no relevance to “black is beautiful,” or to the funky grooves rocked at neighborhood house parties. Dan, however, stuck to his guns. Embracing Hendrix in a black ghetto circa the early seventies was raising your freak flag high. It was stating that you were an individual and didn’t give a damn who judged you.
    Still, the real shocker was yet to come. One afternoon Dan came up from the fifth floor and knocked on my door. It was after school, so I was working on my homework, glad to be distracted. We sat down in the living room, and I put on some 45s and listened as Dan told me he was a “gay,” which was a relatively new term in the lexicon of sexuality, but I quickly figured out what he meant.
    His tone was downcast and subdued, as if he knew this would change our relationship, but he didn’t shy away from the consequences. It was really brave of Dan to tell me this. I know that now. I didn’t then. My mind leaped back to all the times we’d hung out, to our years of friendship, and then forward to the present, fearing that for years Dan had been secretly lusting after me.
    Not long afterward, Gary’s family moved out of the Tilden projects, and Junior started dating a Jehovah’s Witness girl he’d later marry. Childhood was over. But Dan’s confession (or realization) took a natural evolution and pushed the ending into hyperdrive. I spoke to him after that afternoon, but not very often, and not for very long. I don’t know what happened to my comic book collection. I believe my mother did what mothers have always done and, at some point, tossed them out when I was at school. Even before that I had started giving them away, keeping a bare minimum, so that when they finally disappeared I didn’t really care enough to complain. All I know for sure is, as with Dan, one day I stopped hanging out with Captain America.

BK ’69
    On a humid summer day in 1969 I sat in the cafeteria of Brooklyn’s Alexander Hamilton High School as James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” flowed out of several transistor radios. I watched a girl with Afro puffs dance with a lanky dude in a red mesh tank top and Lee jeans. As Brown rapped, “Get uppa! Get on up! Get uppa! Get on up!” I sipped the last drop of milk from my pint carton and got up to go to my last class of the hot day.
    I wasn’t in summer school, but was participating in one of the lingering Great Society programs from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. It was called Model Cities, and it enabled “at-risk kids” (meaning someone black and young from the projects) to get paid a stipend for attending economic enrichment classes. Model Cities was on its last legs in the first term of Richard Nixon, doomed by GOP budget slashing and wasteful administrators, and, as the dancing in the cafeteria suggests, not everyone in the program was diligent about his scholarship.
    In its defense I offer this: That hot day helped change one black boy’s life for the better. In an airless, mostly empty classroom our instructor, a soul brother in his mid-twenties with a bushy Afro and a mustache to match, sat on the edge of his desk and held up the New York Post , the New York Times , and the Daily News . Back then the Post was a liberal newspaper with a great sports section, the Daily News was a tabloid with the best funny