McSweeney’s Goes to Harlem
I just got a hold of this 2001 Harlem Book Fair clip from C-SPAN. My bit starts at roughly the 36:30 mark. Ron Dellums is compelling, as are others before and after me. Considering the focus of this blog and my life, let’s just talk about me.
This book fair took place nine years ago this month on 125th Street, where I drank vodka from a brown paper bag while awaiting various shots at getting my memoir attention. Wanda — a Newark lawyer friend who represented me throughout the uneven, very exciting early McSweeney’s days — had a bunch of her writers on the scene. She became pissed at me after I got one of her writers (not saying who, not here) wasted.
A shitload of people attended that festival, thousands across both days of the event.
Before a crowd of maybe 400, predominantly black, I read inadvertently read a graphic passage about, um, let’s call it interracial cunnilingus. It’s hard to say whether the material actually ended up in Ghetto Celebrity. Despite the certainty with which I talked to C-SPAN’s reporter, there was only hard copy. No book. I read from pages that are now long, long gone.
Book fair organizers may have given me a literal hook. I don’t recall. But after that brief reading, a young woman overheard some unrelated scatological conversation being guided by me. “So, you’re that guy,” she said.” Explain, I asked. And she said her mother had heard a young man read an over-the-top sexual excerpt from a true story and that the experience was unnerving and inappropriate. Her mother said the crowd was beside itself.
“But I kinda liked it,” the mom told her daughter.
Yes!
My son Wyatt was just weeks old when the C-SPAN footage was captured. (Thankfully, sans pornographic storytelling.) That explains the drinking. I cut loose pretty well in the days following my second son’s birth. It was a reaction to having reigned in my act in at the end of my ex-wife’s pregnancy. (Huge fight in Brooklyn, if memory serves, when Amy basically forbade me from attending an Alkaholiks show around the time of her due date. She had a good clue how that particularly movie ended, and the pregnancy had been difficult.)
What stands out most is the youth of me. God. Only nine years have passed. Yet I feel decades older.
The marriage. My daughter. The books. They all have aged me. (Especially the books.) And while I might not be as cute, I’m still out there rockin’. Right now I’m holed up, writing a script with Neille. The sledding is hard, the results undeniable.
I might be old, but I ain’t dead. And a nigga got the words to prove it.
Good night, Harlem. Thanks for having me.