Willie Perdomo Comes Home

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It's attention, you know, it's attention of kind of being a native son and coming back and feeling like a stranger, but yet feeling like this is still your you know, your bodyo, this is still your your neighborhood.

From Uturo Media and PRX, It's Latino Usa. I'm Maria Nojosa. Today, Poet Willie Perdomo comes home for today's episode. I'm going to hand it over to producer Antonia City Huizel, Who's gonna take it from here? Here's Antonia.

In the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, New York City was undergoing a moment of intense change. It was the golden age of hip.

Hopes the world is Yours.

But it was also a time in which communities of black and brown New Yorkers were seeing the effects of both the crack epidemic and the decades long War on drugs. Steve Young reports on a new kind of cocaine called crack.

Last year, we had over two thousand homicides here in New York City. That's an average of five or six homicides.

Okay, this is the East Harlem that Willie Pedlomo tries to wrangle with in his newest book of poetry, The Crazy Bunch. Since the nineteen nineties, Willie has been known as a poet, former, and writer with a special interest in the sounds and sights of the city he grew up in.

And it's going to be like two church boys talking loud on the train, praising the Lord in a spanglish hip hop speak.

Better guess on.

That's WILLI on Deaf Poetry Jam back in two thousand and one. His most recent book focuses on a weekend in the lives of a group of young men growing up in Harlem, some of them based on characters from Willy's own adolescence.

Basically, this is all my neighborhood.

But most of really, most of the book takes place in you know what do we are?

One twenty?

Yeah, we're right around you know where everything happens, basically where I grew up.

Along with producer say okay Vi though, Willie and I decided to take a walk through his old neighborhood to hear some of his work from his newest book and reflect on his teenage years growing up in Harlem, even the not so memorable spots. Does this block have a particular.

Significant But not really. I mean all these neighborhoods look different to me. Like this building right here is just you know, I would have never imagined a building like that would just go up, and this thing look like right now, it looks like a stencil.

Since the nineties, many people have left the neighborhood because of rapidly rising rents. Willie himself moved out to New Hampshire in twenty thirteen, and over the last several years, East Harlem has seen, like many parts of New York, an influx of developers, as evidenced by the shining new condo we're standing in front of.

It's way out of place.

It seems like an an namely alvoice, you know, But it seems like it's trying too hard too, you know. So so we're going this way.

So this is where I grew up on fifteen East one twenty second Street. The whole world really existed.

On this street. This is where I learned how to play cards. This is where I saw my first gun. This was everything. This is where I started thinking about becoming a poet. And this is where I wrote some of where Nickel kassa. Di'm on my good old fashioned Olympia electric typewriter that I was my only Christmas gift for nineteen eighty five. And you can hear me at like two or three o'clock in the morning or you hear like like like I thing like like that's all you hear.

That's all you hear. You know.

So in the back we played stickball and then this building came up and it had a nice basketball court. They called this nineteen ninety. Now they call it the Smiley. I think they call it like it has a whole new, fancy, gentrified name. Now the Smiley's.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

So now eventually, what happens in the young brother's life, really you grew up here, if you know, if that's your trajectory, we're not gonna say for all young brothers, is that basically you make your way from the stoop and you make your way to the corner, and in the corner is where you start letting all your lessons you know about man, I'm not sure, if it's the same now, But it was like that back then.

You know, we can go left here and then come back up.

And this is the corner.

No, I'll tell you the corner we're about to walk up in the corn This is one of the hottest corners. In fact, you know that Lou Reed song where he says when he's going looking for the man, this is where he is up one hund twenty thirty.

Electus is around there looking for his man, for his connect.

Maating for my man.

So this is where everything was everything. There was a Cuban man named Julio who had a video.

Game shop in this little store coming up here, but you know this would be filled with people who just lived in the neighborhood and kids and all that. You know, there was there was commerce, there was traffic, there was music, there were babies being born, and it seemed like such an electric place, so electric that I could see it coming out the train station on the summer night.

I could see this block shimmering. Basically, That's what the way it felt like. But maybe because I was so excited to come back. You know why is that?

Well, because the closest thing you knew to family was here.

The Crazy Bunch is the story of one tragic and life changing summer weekend, told through the eyes of a crew of friends, and it's modeled off of the memories and stories will he grew up with. His work is reflective of Harlem culture and the figures and places that made it what it is, an attempt in some ways to preserve a place and time that no longer exists. I read that you said that even though the buildings are the same when you come here, the faces are completely different, completely.

Yeah. I mean there's something ghostly to that, right, right, You're used.

To seeing certain folks on certain corners, or sitting on a stoop, or being in front of a store in the store walking down the avenue, and those kind of

Actually, can we read the first.

Poem yeah, So this is the It's called in the face of what you remember, And the title was taken from a from a Lanxon Hughes poem and the first stanza in the poem was the first that came to

But only one of us succeeded to some of that.

Babu turned up to extra status, the only one in the crew who had reduced Fame's window by a fifth. When the camera panned his kazal laced up rock the rocky scene of Beech Street, one could say we gave the black gasp and gossip body and bag of folk tale worth its morphology. That was the season we had reason to rock capes and wings, chains and rings. Some of us flew high than most, and tricks will hardly

Did you always know that you were going to be the storyteller of your group of friends?

No, I think that happened as a result of first listening, you know, and it's just kind of being an observer and then trying to relay what I had just seen to on paper, you know.

I think the.

Storytelling really came from my mother and just kind of in the living room, and she loved telling stories about things she saw seeing on TV, the old days at the palladium, hanging out to the break it dawn and then even after.

So she was always full of stories. But I think, you know, I grew up.

Around some really great storytellers, I think, and the storytelling process was a part of their bodies, you know.

So people were always talking.

That's why I like to walk and talk, you know, and so that that was part of it. I think storytelling kind of also gave me a way to access my imagination and a place was that was sometimes a little bit too real, you know, in a way that I could not process.

Well.

One thing's interesting about this poem is is I get the sentence that sort of the different people in your in your crew kind of like played roles and I'm wondering, like, even when this happened to the setting of of I mean, what year would you say this book this book?

It would me like in the nineties for sure.

And something that really needs to be emphasized is that the book is kind of a work of fiction for anything else, you know, And while it's based on some images and h and the language and the vernacular of its time, you know that that should be.

Emphasized, I think. But the idea of.

Living in a tribe, and in this particular instance, the tribe was for the most part, a male tribe, and so what I started noticing is that everyone had a strength.

There was kids could run fast, there were kids who were like Romeos, Romeos to the max. There were kids who could fight.

And it's weird to find yourself in that kind of dynamic and not have a single strength that you can point to, you know, except that you were like a bookish kid, right so that you were, by the fault, considered the smart kid. You know, Well, that's definitely a strength, I think so, but it wasn't considered one in that domain, you know. So when I became a poet, the beautiful thing about becoming a poet.

Is that I wasn't shamed.

As a result of being a poet, you know, and so everyone that I was hanging out with at the time really celebrated the fact that I was a poet.

You know.

That's the kind of role that started to develop, you know, and also being in that space where you're seeing things that someone else.

Might not be seen.

Right when you ask that question, do you have an example that comes to your mind?

So there's one time and the image comes up and I was standing on a corner and this man walks into le Bo that with a cactus on his head, you know, and I'm standing on the corner. I look and he just kind of scurries right into it, and I'm like, this is kind of an odd image.

Willie's poetry is thick with vivid imagery and confronts some of the harder aspects of growing up in East Harlem in the early nineteen nineties, including the violence he witnessed growing up. In a poem from his book called How It Went Down, Willy alludes to a shooting from his teenage years.

This is how it went Down.

A man walks into Kadaffi's with a cactus on his head. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's not. We called them Kadaffi, but his name was Domingo. We called him Kadaffi because he looked like Kadaffi. The cactus wanted three for ten. When you take shorts, you can only take as much as been took.

But when you're taken, then you need.

To start thinking about what they call in theirs and what you're calling yours. The car that suddenly pulls up is more delivery than package, more end stopped than ellipsis. The dreads sit there and perch there and chill there, and lamp there and chill there and rest there, still there word They don't move next to let the dreads know that nothing was happening, even though he just opened up. Pete says, I heard those cactuses never die. They say that getting shot is a scene study where all your

This is a book that deals with death and with trauma. Why write about these particular instances of violence and trauma.

Yeah, because there were a signature I think in my own coming of age. I think I've always wondered what the effect of seeing that kind of violence had on my generation now that we're all turning fifty, you know, and how is that showing up and our approach to living. You know, there are a generation of black and Puerto Rican men who are the age of fifty and over who are probably suffering from some sort of post trauma based on all the ravages of the drug war.

You know, when you say post trauma, stress or how did that manifest for you?

I think some of it was that, you know, it manifested it as a part of my silences. I think it manifested and my need to dream a little bit more, my need to escape a little bit more. It manifested clearly as a younger person. There's a level of self destructive behavior that's not the most healthiest. It could be anything from eating a big map to drinking too much run.

It shows up in your body.

It shows up in your sugar, It shows up in your cholesterol. It shows up in the way you perceive things. It shows up in the way you have arguments with folks, it shows up on the way you might get angry for no reason. So I think the manifestation is a multitude of the way you know and how it shows up. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you can kind of use

Creative Willie continues to write about Harlem and visits when he can. He's the recipient of a pen meond the Margins Award, and the author of several books of poetry, including his most recent, The Crazy Bunch.

This episode was produced by Sayer Givedo and edited by Sophie Palissa Ka. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau. The Latino USA team includes Andrea Lopezko Russado, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Daisy Contreres, Victoria Strada, Regnardo Leanos Junior, Patrisa Sulvan, and Elizabeth Lental Torres.

Our editorial directory.

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Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Our associate engineers our gabriel Le Biez and jj Carubin. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Zane Rubinos. I'm your host and executive producer Marieno Rosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on social media. Remember Montevayas and we'll see you on the next one.

Ciao.

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