On Christmas Eve, my mom would let us open one gift, and then we’d go to bed as early as possible in hopes that Christmas Day would come faster than most days. In the morning we’d have to wait until my parents woke up to open our gifts, so my brother and I would make as much noise as possible, and then we’d resort to poking and shaking them until they got out of bed. We’d tear open the gifts that we’d been waiting to open since we went shopping for them. There were always another one or two great presents we didn’t know about. My mom made sure to keep a few of our gifts a secret from us so we’d still have surprises on Christmas morning. Later in the day, my mom would take us to my uncle’s house, and we’d collect more gifts there. Those were our traditions.
My dad had a tradition of his own. He would buy himself a Hess toy truck every year and forbid us to touch it. I’m serious. My grown-up father would buy himself a toy, and he wouldn’t let us, his children, play with it. I always waited for him to go to work so I could have it to myself. But he always knew, so he started hiding it before he left. That made it into a game for me. I’d find it, play with it, and put it back before he got home. I played with it because . . . fuck him. It’s a toy. My right to play with it was certainly more important than his right to have something for himself, right?
After my parents separated, we stopped taking holidays seriously in my family. Thanksgiving was no exception. After my parents split, my mother, brother, and I have always found some place other than my mom’s apartment to be for Thanksgiving. It used to be my aunt Dorothy’s until she moved to Florida. Then it became my mother’s cousin’s not far from where we lived in Harlem. For a couple of years, I made a tradition with my high school best friend, Crystal, and we cooked together, but that died out as well. So I was back at my mom’s apartment. This meant a baked chicken, rice, and a weird peach cobbler with toast for a crust. This also meant that we three would each grab a plate whenever we felt like it; that we’d each take that plate to a separate room, usually in front of a TV; and that we’d each stay as far away from one another as you can stay in a two-bedroom apartment, my mom on her bed in the living room, my brother in his room, and me in mine. We never sat together to eat. Almost never have we eaten at the same time.
To understand how we got to this point, you have to understand a bit about New York real estate. Shit is expensive. My mom had to pay Dorothy eight hundred dollars a month for our small room with two twin beds. At first, Ahmed and I switched off sleeping with Mom. But eventually she decided I was too big to share a twin bed. I wasn’t too old. I was just too big. So I slept alone, and Ahmed and Mom shared a bed. Our worlds revolved around four hundred square feet. Ahmed and I did our homework in the same room, and we went to bed after fighting over Nintendo in the same room. We lived closer together than ever, and we grew further apart. Familiarity breeds contempt, and we got so we couldn’t stand one another.
We lived with my aunt Dorothy for two years before we moved into a studio apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building in West Harlem. We had an amazing view of Riverside Park, downtown Manhattan, and New Jersey. It was a subsidized-housing apartment building, which means that the government alleviated some of the housing cost, but the building was privately owned. The rent for our studio pie in the sky was probably around $1,200 when we moved in, but because of the government assistance, my mom paid around $350 a month. If we lived in the projects, we would’ve paid less.
My brother wanted us to move to the Lillian Wald projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He lobbied for it because all of his friends lived there. I disagreed, but I also understood. All of my friends lived there, too. I had a lot of super-fun times in the projects across the street from my junior high school. (I went to Junior High 22, usually screamed “TWENTY-TWO!!” while walking around the basketball courts with friends.) We would hang out all night in the park or the handball court in Baruch Houses across the street and were always bound to run into people we knew. But I was worried that if we actually lived in the projects my family would never get out. It’s not rare to see a family living in the same project neighborhood for three generations or even under the same project apartment roof for that long. I know of a couple that met when they were living in the same project building. They fell in love and got married but still lived in separate apartments on different floors with their own families because even together they didn’t make enough money to move out. Instead, they were both on a waiting list for their own project apartment. Most of my friends from the projects still live there today. I say this without judgment, as I know we were one missed rent payment away from being put out on our asses from our subsidized-housing apartment.
Anyway, the three of us still shared one room, but now we were sleeping in a bunk bed. Mom and Ahmed shared the bottom bunk, and I slept on the top. Apart from the bunk bed, we had a couch, a dresser, and a table with our TV and VCR and Super Nintendo on it. We had one chair that I’d sit in to do my homework and look out at the skyline.
There was no dinnertime. Ahmed and I mostly waited until my mom got home to eat. She’d either bring food or cook at around eight o’clock at night. We’d watch Jenny Jones at 11 p.m., and then we’d play Super Mario Kart. At midnight we’d watch the Empire State Building shut off its lights. (It doesn’t do that anymore. Now the lights stay on all night.) We lived like that for five long years. We didn’t have a bedtime; we didn’t even have a curfew. As long as my mom knew where we were, we could stay out all night if we wanted to, and we did. If we didn’t come home, it meant that whoever was home had more room to stretch out. We didn’t have rules or structure because we literally had no space for them. The only alone time we ever had was in the bathroom—and even that wasn’t completely private. We knew everything about one another. Ahmed and Alice knew when my period started (March 9, the day Notorious B.I.G. died. I don’t know why I needed to tell you that, but I did). They knew when I had my first kiss. And they knew when I had a horrible day at school and couldn’t stop crying in class. It was awful.
When I was sixteen, a two-bedroom apartment opened up in our building, and we were next on the waiting list. Alice, no stranger to sacrifices, gave Ahmed and me each a room, and put a daybed in the living room for herself. She didn’t want to make either of us share a room ever again. She said that we were teenagers and needed our own space. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to do that if I was in her position, but then again, she’s a saint and I’m (still) not.