CHAPTER 35
I write a lot of this book-joint shit in Magic Johnson’s Starbucks on 125th Street in Harlem. Magic Johnson owns half the town up here. He used to be a poster child for AIDS. Now people are running around asking, Where can I get some of that AIDS that Magic has? It’s commercial-success AIDS! I want my own Starbucks! I want my own movie theater!
Across the street from Magic Johnson’s Starbucks is the old Hotel Theresa, which used to be the only luxury hotel in Manhattan open to black folks. Hotel Theresa is where Fidel Castro stays when he comes to New York City in the 1960s, to make the point that he doesn’t want to be downtown with all the white capitalist folks. Across the street is the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, where Bill Clinton has his offices ever since he left the White House.
Just like Fidel and Bill, I prefer uptown, too. I live in Harlem, with all the white people. There are more white people in Harlem now than there are in Vermont. Even though they buy apartments and town houses and condos uptown like no mortgage crisis is happening, you never hear them admit that they live in Harlem.
Where do you live?
“I live in Harlem Heights.” “Morningside Heights.” “Hamilton Heights.” All these heights. So they can look down on folks.
Where do you live?
“I live in North Manhattan.”
North Manhattan? What the hell is that?
How about that big old Harlem roach over there, what do you think of that? “Oh, that’s not a roach. That’s a water bug.” For the white people up here, the rats are raccoons, the silverfish are dachshunds, and the black people are their friends. There is some serious denial going on. They are floating down that river in Egypt.
White people moving into Harlem are crowding out the rats. It’s serious. Rats up here are big. They walk upright. They smoke cigarettes. Look at ’em wrong, they’ll get on your jock like werewolves. They’re huge, and they can climb buildings. They’re ninja rats.
Early on during my visits to the city from the West Coast, I find out all about New York rats. I come to Manhattan one time and Columbia Pictures puts me up in a Midtown hotel. They give me a big suite because we have a film deal in the works. I look out the window, and I see a big old ninja rat staring back at me. We’re twenty-five floors up, how did that rat get there?
I’m on the phone to the front desk, shouting, “Call the health department—there’s a rat up here!” At the same time, the ninja rat is on his phone, calling the police department. “There’s a black man up here in a giant hotel suite, he must be robbing the place!”
So a few years ago when I move to New York and find a space, it ain’t a suite at no Midtown hotel. I go uptown and rent a nice apartment in a Harlem brownstone. Only thing is, every time my landlord sees me on TV, he raises my rent. What’s that about, you profiteer a*shole? You didn’t care what I did before, when I wasn’t doing anything, why do you care now?
I know my history. Harlem begins as a real estate boondoggle. White developers build it. But they have too many apartments, and nobody to rent them. Then a recession comes. The only people who want the Harlem apartments are black people moving up from the South. I still see some graffiti in Harlem: LANDLORDS AREN’T LORDS OF THE LAND, they’re scum of the earth.
Harlem is where I meet the man who’ll become the next president of the United States. Across Lenox, I see Al Sharp-ton come out of Sylvia’s Restaurant with Barack Obama.
A week before this, I’m at Reverend Al’s birthday party. October 2007. Al Sharpton, who is related to Strom Thurmond through their great-great slaveholding grandfather. Ain’t America superb? Ain’t it the shit?
Al says the party is for his fifty-second birthday. Please. He’s fifty-two? Reverend Al’s hairdo is fifty-two years old. But I’m at his birthday party. He keeps calling this Asian girl “Lil’ Kim.” I think, Reverend Al’s gone insane. Why’s he calling this little Asian girl Lil’ Kim? That’s not Lil’ Kim!
She turns to me and smiles and I run away. Over to the other side of the party. But she follows me. I turn around, and I realize, holy shit, it is Lil’ Kim. Girl has had so much plastic surgery she turned Asian? Reverend Al laughs like a madman at my confusion.
“Paul Mooney!” Yelling across Lenox Avenue at me now, from in front of Sylvia’s. I walk on down the street like I don’t want to go over and say hello. Reverend Al’s going to dog me out for not recognizing Lil’ Kim-che. I know it.
“Paul Mooney!”
But then I realize it’s not Reverend Al calling me after all. It’s Barack Obama.
Barack Obama knows me? I’m floored. Or because I’m out on the street, I’m pavemented. Never met him before, never had any dealings with the man.
So I cross the street.
He’s just Senator Barack Obama then. Hasn’t won any primaries yet or nothing. But he’s announced, so he’s got a whole platoon of security with him and Reverend Al. He’s got Secret Service, FBI, CIA, National Guard, SWAT, he’s got Boy Scouts and Jesus Christ with him.
“Paul Mooney!” Obama says. “All the stars are out tonight.” He’s in a suit and looking like a GQ model.
Reverend Al stands there preening, like he’s so happy to put us two together, even though it is none of his doing.
“You going to the Apollo?” Al says.
Some event is happening at the landmark theater around the corner. I tell him no, I’m not going to the Apollo. Right then I don’t say I’m boycotting the place since Time Warner censored me there. Not the time or the place to get into that shit.
Obama puts out his hand to shake but I shake my head no at him.
“Don’t give me that white man’s handshake,” I say.
I hold out my fist. This is how you do it. He doesn’t know what to do at first. How to handle it.
On the campaign, people shake hands so much, they get maimed. The Republican wife lady, the pill popper, what’s her name? Cindy McCain. Broke her hand. Clinton and those people, they know not to wear any big rings. The public will crush their hands. Democracy.
Obama tightens his hand into a fist. He jabs the air, we miss. Finally, he gets it right. We bump fists. From then on, he’s unstoppable, a crazy fist-bumping Barack-and-roll candidate, doesn’t want any more crushed hands.
Half a year later, in summer 2008, during the election campaign, all hell breaks loose because Obama and Michelle fist bump and white people freak out. Suddenly, the two of them are terrorists. Bad enough his middle name, now he’s doing that jihadi fist jab.
I kept my head down over that shit. I didn’t want people to say, you taught Obama the fist bump, Mooney, now we got that Arizona Mr. Whiteman in the White House.
If I have to explain, I usually tell people I don’t shake hands because of germs, like that bald, strikebreaking, briefcase-carrying, game-show comic Howie Mandel. Totally germaphobic. He used to wear gloves to protect himself from microbes.
Germs ain’t it. Or they ain’t all of it. Know your history. Handshaking means, I don’t have a weapon in my hand. That’s how it started, to keep people from getting medieval on each other’s asses.
The hell with that. I don’t want nobody to know nothing about my shit. I don’t want them to know whether or not I got a weapon. People I run into sometimes, yeah, they need to think I got a ministiletto curled up inside my hand, that’s right, or a tiny Abraham Lincoln—killing-style derringer, or some pepper-spray shit, you know what I mean?
Fist bump, now. Don’t give me no white man’s handshake. Fist bump!