Poly Styrene Was My #1 Hero

I was a punk rock kid in the early Eighties, when MTV was very new, and punk fashion was something you made up as you went along. The clothes and the music were counter-culture. And every kid who was into it was asserting their outcast status. Even outcasts need heroes - especially fifteen-year-old outcasts.

Today I got news that my #1 hero, Poly Styrene of the band X-ray Spex, died yesterday of breast cancer. She was 53.

My close friends in high school and I loved her. I mean, we truly loved her. Her band had one album, Germfree Adolescents, and a few singles, and we knew them all. I have them all. Some in duplicate, on neon-colored vinyl. Her lyrics were clever, poetic, wise beyond her years, and so very clear. She was political. She was a biracial brown girl, shrieking and singing, and pogo dancing, in crazy new wave outfits. With braces on her teeth. Another girl in the band played saxophone. They rocked. I loved them more than I can say.

I have to include a video for those of you who didn't know her. The song is "Identity". YouTube is loaded with brilliant footage of Xray Spex. Thank You YouTube.

The media has gotten wind of Poly's death and you can find plenty of press clippings out there.

What I can contribute is this:

Poly Styrene was the face and voice of so many of us, who were disenfranchised and angry and insecure. She made us brave. The power of her conviction earned her idol status in my world. I was in my first band when I was fifteen. We played CBGBs, The Pyramid, Danceteria. I couldn't sing like Poly, but I played a steady bass and we were cuter than hell. I kept it up, through college and beyond, and would have made a career out of it had we not grown tired of the industry disclaimer, "You guys are hard to categorize". I guess I will always be hard to categorize. Like Poly Styrene. I am so grateful to have found her, and to have been able to share her music and spirit with friends, and at DJ gigs, and here.

I wonder who my girls will trust, when they're fifteen and hating their parents.

James Baldwin Speaks

I'm reading the collection, James Baldwin - The Cross of Redemption (uncollected writings). It includes essays, speeches, profiles, reviews and letters from the 1940's to the '80's. I borrowed it from the library and the 14-day loan is not gonna cut it. This book is on fire. James Baldwin was so unbelievably smart. His novels are beautiful. His essays are spellbinding. I am enthralled.

The speech excerpt below is stuck in my brain; it's from an appearance Baldwin made before a House Select Subcommittee in New York. He spoke in support of a proposed bill to establish a national commission on "Negro History and Culture." He makes several brilliant points. In this snippet, Baldwin  defends his position on how and why the stories of American History, as taught in schools, should be revised in order to break patterns of stereotyping and subjugation of the black population.

The year is 1969:

"If we are going to build a multicultural society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you, and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me, and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it. Am I making sense to you?"



Now, the year is 2011:

It's Spring Break. It's raining, both of my kids are fighting colds. I haven't done much writing this week. But I am reading. Always reading. And James Baldwin is keeping me sane from the grave.

Forty-two years of talking about our multicultural society and I'm thinking that we still have a lot to learn about each other. The text books have come a long way since 1969, but I worry that kids still read history like I did when I was ten, like it's long done gone.

Are we learning? Or are we sitting quietly, complacent, hopeful that time alone will melt that bitterness?
I wish folks would stop being coy and delicate about race.
I'm looking for some progress here.

Natural History

I live in a stone house on a mountain. It's a small mountain, forty minutes north of midtown Manhattan. The wildlife in these parts is still running free. We see deer on our road almost daily. Bunnies frolic in our front yard after dark. Wild turkeys flaunt their gangly broods up and down my driveway, in broad daylight. Hawks circle overhead, and coyotes roam the neighbor's meadow at dusk. Down the mountain, on any side, you might call it Suburbia. Some stretches are less quaint than others. Scenic vistas, car dealerships, antique shops and sports bars, and a mammoth shopping mall are all within a few minutes drive.

My favorite part is the dirt. Especially at this time of year, the smell of wet dirt in the  morning is invigorating, and comforting. The birds have returned from their southern sojourn, the daffodils are in full flower, and the woods behind our house have that telltale chartreuse fuzz at the tips. Spring is popping.

I loved it as a city kid, like I love it now. Our corner of the Bronx could almost pass for the suburbs, if caught from the right angle.  Our 21-story apartment building had a playground, and the playground was surrounded with a high forsythia hedgerow and little cherry trees. My mother, the biologist, made sure I knew the names of the plants, the birds, the butterflies. We had Field Guides to everything, and binoculars to match.

I thank my mother for teaching me to notice nature around me. And to see the different contributions that the plants and creatures make to our surroundings. I've spent most of my life crediting her, and her naturalist/herbalist father, with my appreciation of the natural world. I have that connection with her still, as we compare notes in each other's gardens.

So I was startled to discover that my father's grandmother was an avid gardener. A fact I learned from an old family photo that I recently discovered. A middle-aged black woman, in house dress and apron, in a vast Victorian-era garden behind the little Massachusetts house I know to be her own. The photo must be from the Twenties or Thirties, and the garden is lush, and layered with mature plantings, obviously the product of many years of diligent work.

I had never seen a house-proud American black woman in her own beautiful garden, from any time period.

I'm sure there must be some images out there. But what comes to mind of course is slave imagery, sharecropping imagery, and some farming imagery from modern times. Where is the disconnect?

My father loved his garden. He called it a yard, but it was an acre around his house on Long Island. He carefully designed and maintained the landscape, and enjoyed raking the sea of leaves that dropped every fall. He planted a gorgeous cut leaf maple in honor of Duke Ellington's birthday one year. And marveled at the full six-foot height of the junipers, which were smaller than four-year-old me when he put them in.

Most of my friends would rather not touch dirt. Or bugs. I suspect it has more to do with having grown up in the city than with any race-related phenomenon. But I can't help but question whether a wall came down as blacks moved north, separating us from "our agricultural past".

I relish the quiet work of gardening. It's an active connection to my American Indian heritage, and my grandfather the herbalist, and  my father with his rake, and my great-grandmother in her Massachusetts garden, and the countless unknown ancestors' connections to the land.

In these lean, green times, I hope to see more of us getting down in the dirt.

chapter/ Number One

He was Number One. He told me, rather nonchalantly, over the phone.  

“I have some interesting news: it seems I’ve been voted Best Radio News Personality,” he said, in his signature, velvet monotone.  Daddy was the late-night voice of 1010-WINS Radio: You Give Us Twenty-Two Minutes, We’ll Give You The World. Perfected for broadcast and permanently imprinted on his off-air persona, his meter and tone captured a controlled balance of enthusiasm, authority, and calm. His evening shift ran from 6:30pm to 2:30am, Wednesdays through Sundays, so if you lived in the New York tri-state area in the 1970’s and 80’s, commuted to the suburbs or outer boroughs, rode in taxis after dark, or relied on the repetitive rhythms of news radio for late-night companionship, then my father’s voice anchored your evenings. 

When he won, I was fifteen years old, a full-fledged anti-establishmentarian punk rock kid. Fifteen, living in New York City, suffering the way middle-class American teenagers suffer: I was pissed at the world, powerless against my oppressors, victimized by the ills of our capitalist society. Distrusting anyone in authority. I wanted to hate my parents. That was the norm among my friends, most of whom lived in restrictive households, commandeered by teams of parental units whose power reigned supreme.  But my mother ruled our single-parent/only-child household with a Jell-o fist. As long as my grades didn’t slip, social deviance met no parental friction from her. While I complained long and loudly about the few rules she often threatened to enforce, I was truly grateful for my father’s open refusal to “interfere with whatever understandings” my mother and I had.

At fifteen, I was used to Daddy’s absence. As puberty encroached, our lives veered apart. We exchanged brief updates from time to time, but never went deep. His occasional invitations to dinner in the city confined our contact to the timeslot he usually reserved for copy revisions. If I played it right, he might get to know me. He might take an interest in what I had to say. Or we might just forfeit another fancy meal, pressed for time, short on answers. 

 “How’s school?”

“Fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Yes. It’s all right.”

“Are you still in that band?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what this hairdo is about?”

“I change my hair all the time.”

“It’s not very becoming. Is that supposed to be punk?”

“I guess.”

“Do you like that band The Sex Pistols?”

“They’re OK. They’re not my favorite.”

“I can’t believe your mother lets you listen to that garbage.”

Hush. I refuse to defend my mother to you. She is not the problem. I wait, hoping the silence will diffuse his strange bitterness. Watching him masterfully cut and chew, sip and swallow, finesse every move with the studied grace of a debutante, I choke on my own childish need for connection. 

Daddy was a private man. He rarely shared any details of his work, the celebrity interviews, or the fantastic events he covered as part of the job. His long-gone years in Colored Radio were a total mystery to me, only hinted at by my mother, who knew him then. His exclusive access to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as New York’s only black radio journalist, was part of his fragmented past. That black world, in which he had grown up, and subsequently discarded. 

He had ascended! Marriage to my mother marked the trailhead. The big job at WINS was the door to the kingdom, slamming shut behind him. The award must have been the final flag: he had reached the summit. His loyalty to the station, and his fierce adherence to every rule of propriety, had paid off. The sacrifices his parents made, to send him to Professional Children’s School, and the acting and modeling jobs that prepared him, and the very careful choices he made along the way, clinched his success. In an industry full of black stars he labeled “flashy, cornball disc jockeys”, he had few peers in the newsroom. No one he openly admired. He looked down on those who had failed to reach such heights, and held fast to his elite position on the mountaintop. 

I knew I should congratulate him on winning the award. This could be the start of a real connection. But where to begin?

“Did you win a little commemorative statue or something?” I asked.

“No. No statue. I’m sure the jerks at the station will make a big deal about it, in their own way. Make some sort of tacky plaque or something. But there is a prize attached to the award. It’s a trip. To London.  On the Concorde. You know, the supersonic transatlantic airliner.”

“Really?” I couldn’t see my father getting on a supersonic transatlantic airliner. Maybe in his youth, in the Army, when he had something to prove, or orders to follow. But the Daddy I knew was not looking for a thrill. His daily, round-trip drives between midtown and Southampton seemed to be all the adventure he could stand.

“I can’t say I’m looking forward to the flight. But I’ve always wanted to see Paris. They’re sending us to Paris and London. Linda is already boning up on her French.”  Linda.  Of course he would take Linda. Smart, soft-spoken, selfless, impossible-to-dislike Linda: his girlfriend of the day, and co-worker at the station. A promising young copywriter. 

“Sounds great. I’d love to go to Europe some day,” I mused, without a hint of rancor.

“Well, maybe you’ll do some study abroad in college… Is there something you’d  like me to bring back for you?”

“From England? Or France?”  I tried not to care. But there were a thousand things I would have brought back for myself, from either place. Records (vinyl) from London, clothing from Paris. But Dad wouldn’t have a clue about any of it. Country Club Chic was his idea of high style. I was the East Village to his Park Avenue.

“Come on. There must be something,” he pushed.

It was a set-up. If I fed him something real, he would forget. Or fumble. Or forbid it altogether. Like the football I asked for, when I was ten: No daughter of mine is going to grow up with quarterback shoulders.

“How about just something really different. Something I can’t get here.” I left the choosing to him, resigned to appreciate the gesture behind whatever token he delivered.

While he was gone, I imagined how much his loyal fans must have missed him. The women who sent him amorous notes, in care of the station, enclosing photos of themselves. My own late-night taxi rides, piled tight with friends going from nightclub to party, were mercifully free of my father’s live voiceover. But could anyone trust what the next day’s weather would bring? 

And what did Daddy bring back for me, from his grand trip abroad? A pair of stretchy, acrylic, unbearably ugly electric blue knee socks emblazoned with the Union Jack, which must have cost three pounds at the Heathrow duty-free shop. Ironically, they were a great complement to my non-conformist wardrobe. I wore them over threadbare black tights, with a gray plaid miniskirt and combat boots.  The socks presented a pop of color in an otherwise bleak palette, the flags boldly flying in a bright, tidy band across my calves. I also received Linda’s slightly used pair of nylon comfort slippers, compliments of the Concorde. Which crumpled and died, forgotten in the bottom of my sock drawer.

The radio station issued a limited number of coffee mugs, printed up like newspaper articles, with his name and NUMBER ONE filling the the headline. They were numbered. I have mug #92, here on my desk, filled with writing tools. A quiet reminder.