Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (4 page)

I was eighteen and a half years old when I earned my diploma from night school, which officially allowed me to graduate from De Witt Clinton. But I had no aspirations, no hope for the future.

My best friend, Jimmy Underdue, the Big Do, and I would stand outside an appliance store and watch the large console TVs in the window. On the screen were all of these ads about joining the military. We saw guys marching and running, but what really impressed us was that they showed them at a mess table eating oranges. We went, “Wow, free fruit. That’s great. We need to get into this, man.”

We went to a recruiting office, where a uniformed man was stunned that anybody was actually walking in to enlist during the height of the Vietnam War. He looked at us like we were insane. He said we had to take an aptitude test first.

“Let me give you the first ten answers,” he offered, obviously not wanting to lose these two fools, no matter how dumb we may be.

But just as he was about to tell us the answers, his superior showed up. “Sorry, can’t do it now,” he told us.

“You guys joining up?” asked his boss, not quite believing his own eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re comin’ in.”

We took the test and handed it to him. As he marked it, he kept looking up at us.

“Nobody fails this test,” he said. “But both of you did.”

That wasn’t going to stop him or us, though.

“Why don’t you come back,” he suggested, “and we’ll figure something out.”

I guess we had nothing better to do, because we did go back. There was a different recruiter in the office.

“You joining up?” he asked, just as surprised as the first recruiters. “First, you’ll have to take this test.”

“Ah, forget it.” We left.

Later, Jimmy did enlist in the Marines. He was sent over to Vietnam in the summer of 1967. Private First Class Underdue was a radioman with an eight-man scout patrol when a helicopter dropped him onto a hill overlooking the Co Bi Thanh Tan Valley north of Phu Bai in South Vietnam on the morning of January 2, 1968. His patrol noticed a few North Vietnamese soldiers nearby, but the Vietnamese disappeared into the high grass.

As soon as night fell, under cover of a grenade barrage and heavy machine gunfire, a dozen or so enemy soldiers rushed the Americans. Most of Jimmy’s comrades were hit immediately. Jimmy spotted an injured soldier nearby and rolled toward him. The action may have saved his life because, as he rolled, a bullet only grazed his temple.

The patrol leader yelled for whoever was left to get out the best they could. “I moved away from him,” Jimmy remembered, “and as I did, a grenade blast killed him.”

The only two survivors were Jimmy and another black private, James Brown from Louisiana. They crawled down the hill and through the jungle and hid in a bomb crater. With US helicopters flying overhead, Jimmy tried to attract their attention by taking off his green woolen undershirt and waving it. “One chopper landed briefly, and I thought they had spotted us. But they took off again.” The jungle canopy was too thick for them to be seen.

Safety was at a US base called Camp Evans (strange that the name Evans would later play such a part in my own life). But neither man had a compass. If they ran into the enemy, they would be killed or, perhaps worse, captured. They heard artillery firing in the distance and, during the night, attempted to follow the sound they hoped would signal the location of the camp.

“It was raining and I was cold and scared,” Jimmy later told reporters. “We had no water and hadn’t eaten for two days. I had a terrible ache from my head wound. The most we stopped was for a minute to catch our breath. We couldn’t forget six of our buddies had died.”

Around noon of the following day they spotted soldiers moving along the crest of a hill, but they could not tell if they were friendly or enemy. For hours they stayed where they were. Finally, they decided to ford a stream—and came face to face with the point man of a Marine patrol. Just as nervous and wary as the tired men, for a moment the Marine considered firing on them. Luckily, he did not. Underdue and Brown were rescued. Jimmy received a Purple Heart.

When he came back to the States, Jimmy was not in good shape. While in Nam he got into smoking marijuana and doing heroin, and he brought his drug problem back with him. He was also quieter and wouldn’t talk much about what had happened over there. As if what he had been through was not enough, after he came home he got married and fathered a child who was autistic. Raising an autistic child is difficult now; it was near impossible then because no one knew how to handle that condition. When we would meet, Jimmy was obviously not the same guy I had known. He was always depressed. Seeing him was tough.

People always talk about the wasted lives of people in the ghetto. Nobody wanted to stay in the ghetto; everyone wanted to get out. Nobody wants to stay poor.

I grew up with Rodney Dawson in the projects, and he was so poor that his single-parent mother was never able to keep up the prescription for his glasses to correct his really bad eyesight. And because he could not afford new sneakers, whenever they got wet, you could hear them squeak. He would put newspapers in the bottom to keep down the noise. But at six-foot-five, he was still on the junior high basketball team. Without being able to see properly, his shooting was pretty bad, but he could block shots and sometimes dunk.

We had a full gym for a game against one of our main rivals. You could feel the tension in the air. Rodney was ready to take the jump ball to start the game, and his mom ran into the gym, screaming that her son was not going to be playing basketball on a Saturday. Maybe they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. A stunned gym watched his mother drag Rodney away. We didn’t see him for awhile, and finally he dropped out. He became a heavy drinker and was only in his twenties when he was stabbed to death in a bar fight.

There were friends of mine who died from heroin and many more from alcohol, no doubt about it. But I also had friends at Melrose who grew up and did well, became firefighters, had businesses, went to college. Some of them went to war for us too. We should never forget those from the ghetto who fought in Vietnam, including friends of mine like Jimmy Underdue and Willis “Butch” Reid, who came back damaged, or Stanley Jackson, who did not come back at all.

Stanley was huge; at fourteen years old he was well over six feet tall and 250 pounds. He was a man-child. His family was intact but even poorer than the rest of us, even poorer than Rodney Dawson’s. At one time his brother had to wear his mother’s dress because he had no clothes. That’s how poor they were. Hearing that the Army paid $96 a month and gave you free uniforms, he enlisted as a teenager. When he came back after his first tour in Nam, he sure did look great in his uniform.

“And we get all the fruit we want,” he said proudly. “We even have papaya.” I didn’t know what papaya was, but there was definitely something about the availability of fruit that brought in recruits from the ghetto.

He signed up for another tour, and when he came back he looked even better. I remember saying to him, “Stanley, those Cong will never get you. Those bullets will bounce off you, brother.” That was the last time I saw him.

One day I came home after work and saw his mother in the stairwell. She was inconsolable, beyond tears, pulled up in a fetal position. The story that went around was that Stanley and another soldier were sitting in a Jeep, passing a joint between them. A Vietnamese kid came up, saying, “American GI, American GI” and dropped a hand grenade in the Jeep. And that was that.

A couple months after the Big Do returned to the Bronx, I enlisted in the US Army Reserves, as a private in the 518th Maintenance Battalion at Fort Totten in Flushing. The enlistment would be for six years. But I never served. When the Army looked over the results of my physical examination—I was over six feet tall and just 115 pounds—they determined I was medically unfit and gave me an honorable discharge. Yep, I had even flunked a physical.

Then I found SEEK—Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge—a government-funded program with the City College of New York designed to prepare low-income students for college. The government would pay me $50 a week to go to class at a learning center off campus on the West Side. Leaving my career in grocery transportation at the Union Market was an easy decision.

Despite graduating high school, it was not until I went to SEEK that I read my first book—Dick Gregory’s autobiography,
Nigger
. That was SEEK’s plan of attack; get us interested in reading by appealing to our sense of Black Pride—and it worked. I could relate to Gregory, who grew up dirt poor and with an abusive father who was unfaithful to his mother. Yet he had overcome and become a famous comedian.

I have never forgotten a couple of the jokes in that book: Gregory walks into a segregated restaurant down South, and the white waitress tells him, “We don’t serve colored people here.” Gregory answered, “That’s all right, because I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.” Then a trio of rednecks walks in and says, “Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re going to do to you.” Said Gregory: “So I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken, and I kissed it.”

I had never been shy in school, but I certainly was not a class clown either. Gregory’s book planted the first seeds in my mind about becoming a comic.

Also at SEEK, I came upon Langston Hughes, who wrote about black life in Harlem in a way that was honest and real without being harsh. His main character was the funny and folksy Simple. He wasn’t complicated; he was simple. I loved Hughes’s entertaining style and that Simple talked like we talked—and without apology. Simple said, “I ain’t ashamed of my race. I ain’t like that woman that bought a watermelon and had it wrapped before she carried it out of the store. I am what I am.”

I knew what I was, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be. Most of the kids I knew growing up were trying to beat the system, including me. Now, at SEEK, I was around kids who wanted to become part of the system so they could raise themselves up.

Around the same time, the push for Affirmative Action kicked in across America. There were always people trying to save us: What can we do for these poor Negroes? Being black worked for us, including me, and put us to work. I was given a job at Johns-Manville, a company that manufactured insulation. Fortunately, I didn’t work with the asbestos; I was in the mailroom. After a few months I became a “middle manager.” I had stationary printed that read: J. Carter Walker, Head of Mailroom, New York City. I was sleeping in the ghetto, but now I was working at 40th Street and 5th Avenue. Look out, world, here I come!

Donald Beckerman, an instructor at SEEK, asked me, “What do you want to do in life?”

I told him about my job at Johns-Manville. “I have my own stationery!” I said proudly.

He told me they called my position “middle manager” for a reason. I can spend my whole life in the middle—or I can do something I really love to do.

“No bullshit. What would you
really
love to do?” he asked.

At night, I’d sit in the park, chasing chicks, watching guys playing basketball, and listening to Frankie Crocker on the radio. Crocker was one of the coolest cats around, and every black person in New York tuned in to his show on WWRL. He was flashy and flamboyant. He would say of himself, “For there is no other like this soul brother—tall, tan, young, and fly. If I’m all you’ve got, I’m all you need.” His show would start with a woman saying, “Do it, Frankie! Do it to it!” He’d end with, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done my time, I’ve got to continue my prime. Frankie’s got to go.” Then a woman’s voice would be heard pleading: “Frankie, please don’t go!”

“Gotta go, baby. Time is up!”

I told Beckerman, “I’d love to be a disc jockey.” I thought my answer would end the discussion.

Instead, he said, “Okay, I know some people in radio.”

He took me to a station and asked his friend what I would need to do to get into radio. Was he serious? I wasn’t. But I couldn’t say no.

“It’s hard,” he admitted, “especially in your case, being from the ghetto.” He was referring to my accent, part New York, part black. “You’ll have to lose that if you want to be on the air.” I hesitated. He went on: “Or you can be an engineer and do all the stuff behind the scenes.”

That seemed easier, so I said, “Okay.”

“But you’ll need to get a first-class radio operator license.”

Geez, I thought, there is a complication every step of the way when you take this “career path.” I was ready to bail. But again Beckerman refused to let me. Not only did he know someone who ran a radio announcing and production school, the RCA Institutes, but he arranged to get me a grant to attend.

I left my job at Johns-Manville and went through the months and months of training. The exam for the first-class license was not easy, and lots of people wanted to have one. I failed three times.

With money getting tight, I needed to pick up another job. Somehow I passed the civil service test and landed work at the post office. They assigned me to a parcel post station, where each night I and another employee had to load a semi-truck with packages, from small, light ones to large, heavy ones. Along with the physical exertion, there was the mental strain. Today, they use computers and scanners to log in the packages. Back then we had to record each package by hand. I remembered those days in a joke I later used:

They have drug testing for employees of the post office. But there is one drug you will never hear about at the post
office:
speed.

We worked from midnight to eight in the morning. After a while I put a big couch in the back of one of the trucks and would try to get some sleep (during the day I was going to school at SEEK). That winter was brutally cold, and of course, there was no heat in the back of the truck. So my partner had the bright idea to build a small bonfire on the ramp into the truck! We were sure nice and warm while we were working. But then we left to take a break to get some food. The fire swooped into the truck and packages began burning up. The foreman ran out, yelling at us as we put out the flames. They suspended us for eight days.