Negrophobic? Negrofantastic! 5 Easy Pieces w/Darius James
Whoever said American intellectual life is dead, is probably just agreeing with us.
Trigger Warning: this is long and worth every single word of it. Read on.
He had crossed the line. In the way only Germans can.
“This is what I hear about you Black guys and white women…”
We’re in a van cruising around Berlin. I snatch his wallet. He’s a journalist who is interviewing OXBOW. As I start to leaf through his wallet I am muttering that if the interview was going to be this type of interview I was going to need to get paid for it.
Moving to the cash section of his billfold about a dozen postage stamp-sized clippings fell out and into my hand. Unexpected enough that everyone in the van looked, since I now held in my hand 12 newspaper pics of a variety of male celebrities.
Christian Slater. Brad Pitt. Rob Lowe. James Franco. And eight more who I recognized but could not name.
If it was for the haircuts and this is how you communicate with your stylist, wouldn’t three or four have been enough? Well, you know, sometimes you stumble into a nest of so much strange that it’s best to say nothing. So it was in silence that I packed the pics into his wallet and handed it back to him.
“Out.” The van pulled up to a curb. Not for the photos. Very much for the weird race theory.
Later, undeterred he called me.
“Do you know Darius?”
Based on the first name alone? No.
“Darius James?” I had not. “You need to meet him. I will take you to meet him.”
This, adhering to Teutonic type, was not a request. This was a golden ticket for a German journo/armchair anthropologist: to get two African-Americans out of their native habitat…so that watching from the safety of his cafe stool, he could plumb the mysteries of negritude.
I stayed with a group of friends in the Jacob Riis housing project on Avenue D. They were heroin addicts with responsible jobs. School teachers. Wall Street types. CBS interns. Lab researchers.
I’m not sure whether or not this happened. I never asked the journo. I am sure though that in the full-flown spirit of gemütlichkeit, I discovered, beyond a scintilla of doubt, that I needed to have known Darius. We shadowed each other so closely it was a miracle we hadn’t met before this cafe in Berlin. His books? That's Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude, as well as Negrophobia: An Urban Parable, are great.
So, a FIVE EASY PIECES. Five questions, five answers. None (sort of) about what the person is noted for. Enjoy.
[ONE] How did you find being married, and then how did your divorce unfold?
DARIUS: I’ve only had one serious discussion with the ex since separating in ‘97. It was unproductive at best. I generally don't say things in public about people I’ve personally been involved with unless I’ve said it first to their face. Maybe this is my moment of hypocrisy.
As disappointing as the marriage was, we were both responsible for its demise. The legal grounds she filed for divorce were nonsensical. Abandonment. She said to me, “If you don’t have next month’s rent, I’m going to leave you”. And I replied, “If that’s how you feel, I think you should leave.” I had a presentation at an Austrian university in the fall so I added that I was moving to Berlin.
Then she shoved me out of our apartment.
In retrospect, I got away clean. There were no children involved so no child support. She once claimed an accountant told her she made more money than I did the year we separated so no alimony. The fact I’ve had no direct dealings with her in over 20 years is my idea of heaven. I’m happy to be free.
How love is practiced is delusional; freighted, as it is, with misconceptions of the ‘self’, the ‘beloved’ and the sentiments of a Taylor Swift song. It's a chemical imbalance. In my experience, getting high is similar to ‘falling in love’--an initial rush of nirvanic bliss, a crescendo of passion and then it all flatlines into an inexplicable numbness (if you’re lucky). So I don’t trust those first feelings of ‘love’. It feels too much like acid. ‘Love’, in this culture, is about property, possession and power. Empty shit.
To be honest, I initially got involved with the ex to avoid heroin addiction. I lived on the Lower Eastside for many years. This was in the ‘80s. I didn’t have a stable job or an apartment (and didn't particularly want either). I had a number of friends and couch surfed.
At one point, I stayed with a group of friends in the Jacob Riis housing project on Avenue D. They were heroin addicts with responsible jobs. School teachers. Wall Street types. CBS interns. Lab researchers. Me? I read tarot cards at Vasac’s Horseshoe bar for beer and cigarette money. Individually, my friends went through roughly $100 worth of heroin a night. Ten bags. Seven hundred dollars a week. I couldn’t afford it so I didn’t fuck with it. I drank.
I have to be clear. My friends were substantial and brilliant people, not the social rejects seen in ‘60’s cop shows (like Burt Reynolds ‘roughing up’ a hysterical hype-head into puking withdrawal). One friend is the daughter of a founding member of the ‘60s feminist movement.
She is also a writer of breath-taking ability. Another is the son of a dermatologist who made breakthroughs in skin-discoveries. He is a very prolific writer/poet/warrior of encyclopedic knowledge and considerable depth. He’s also a carpenter like Jesus but with a Luciferian streak.
We met at Rick Van Valkenburg’s Neither/Nor Studio/Store on E.6th St and Avenue C, drawn together by John Farris, who organized and managed its reading series. John, who was eventually named Poet Laureate of the Lower Eastside, had deep roots in the Black Arts Movement. He’s a poet of transcendent vision but largely unknown because of suspicions about his involvement with the Malcolm X assassination. Not without cause, a lot folks involved in the movement back in the day were paranoid as fuck. We read our shit at Neither/Nor and retired to the Horseshoe afterward. This was my life on the Lower East Side. Read, write and get drunk. I published my first piece in the Village Voice based on this experience.
I knew a lot of people I had in common with Basquiat…We were at the same parties, chasing the same hippie-dippie parkie chicks, but took no notice of each other (this, of course, was before Warhol’s crowd drove him mad).
Eventually, I was awarded some money in a class-action lawsuit filed against the US government for wire-tapping my phone in high school. So I bought a round-trip ticket to Italy with it and stayed a few months. The night before my flight, a friend offered a nostril full of heroin at the bar. Why not?
I snorted and it was instant Nirvana. Deprivation-tank Zen. Warm, salt-water submersion. All worries, all anxieties, vanished. I soon discovered, however, with each use of heroin, that feeling does not return again.
I landed in Milan, knowing only two words: Eroina and Cocaina.
The next night in Turin, in a bar built within the walls of a castle along the River Po, I was secretly handed a packet of cocaine by a beautiful, candy-colored brown woman from Somalia. To my surprise, due, I suppose, to my limited grasp of the local tongue, Turin’s eroina and cocaina rivaled its popularity in E-Ville. Within weeks, I was chasing dragon’s tails and getting head in the parking lot of the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista; home of the Holy Shroud of Turin. By the end of my stay, chasing dragons through the poppy fields had become a twice-weekly ritual.
Back in New York, delusive thinking had taken over. My attitude toward heroin was slovenly. Snorting a line was as casual as accepting a joint. It also changed my behavior in ways I didn’t like. Simultaneously, I was planning to ‘rescue’ the woman I was involved with from her life in Turin (she had mentioned she might be pregnant before I boarded my flight back to JFK). I was scheming ways to scrounge money for the both of us to live in Mexico for a couple of years. She could dry out and I could write. Maybe raise a child. But then she answered my letter.
She wrote: “I love you but I love heroin more….”
Arrivederci, baby...
I was determined to marry the first heroin-free woman I met. Unfortunately, I did. Dove in head first with eyes closed. Frozen lake. Ouch. The irony? Since her devastating reply, my Italian lover, during my Berlin years, proved herself a supportive, protective and authentic friend.
[TWO] I'm surprised, given all of our common New York touchstones -- Kathy Acker...who appeared on an OXBOW record pretty close to the time she died...Baraka...who was an asshole to me as well...your work with SNL’s Mr. Mike while I was delivering food to Warhol and Belushi...Dennis Cooper being a sage judge of our respective talents, I'm digressing here, that we didn't meet until Berlin. How'd you manage to hang for as long as you did in Berlin when you did?
DARIUS: We met in Berlin in the early 2000s. It was after an OXBOW gig at a club in the city’s former commie sector. The club was somewhere in the vicinity of Oranienburger Straße--the street with the renovated synagogue and the parade of Russian hookers stepping out the backs of huge cargo trucks. You were hired to correct a terrible decision Flynt Publications had made staffing Code magazine. You sent an email announcing your appearance.
I don’t remember a journalist. At the club, you came off stage, we chatted for a while, mostly about your potential book deal, but I had to take off. I had done a reading earlier and I went to do another. I remember because after the second reading I had a rendezvous with a French-Peruvian woman I met in the Slumberland bar a few days before. She was called “The Little Devil” . It was a name given to her by her Capoeira crew because of her fighting style’s trickery. And she had a horned cherub stamped on the left cheek of her crisp, ginger-brown ass. This is why I remember the night so well.
Why we hadn’t met before Berlin I have no idea. I suspect because you knew how to hustle and kept a gig. And I, on the other hand, was a bum. We traveled in different circles, though we had people in common. It's not unusual. During my early years, I knew a lot of people I had in common with Basquiat yet we never met. We were at the same parties, chasing the same hippie-dippie parkie chicks, but took no notice of each other (this, of course, was before Warhol’s crowd drove him mad).
I was tight with Kathy Acker for many years. I consider her my literary godmother. I loved her. She handled language, gender, identity and time like a free-jazz musician. She made a beautiful raucous noise. Chasing out the demons. She was a mathematician, just like them. She introduced me to E. Ville literati. We talked about writing a book together on Vodou. Then the soul-draining ex was in the picture and she died. We met shortly before she moved to England. She asked me to pack her apartment and wait there until the shippers arrived. We met for meals once a week or so and I read her cards. Why our relationship fell apart is a story too ridiculous to tell.
After splitting from the ex, I’d wanted to cut ties with the U.S. This was a dream I carried since teenhood. I chose Germany. I was welcomed there and I have a large circle of friends throughout Europe. That circle made it a lot easier to survive. Americans normally associate Germany with its unfortunate 12-year-period in history but forget it's also the birthplace of Marxism. The other guy who said sharing was a good idea. I liked that fact. In Berlin, I was treated as an American first and Black second. Germans have their stupid racist shit but I found they are generally polite, literate and civil. The experience was refreshing.
I did not feel the predominance of my racial identity in the course of my daily social interactions. I wasn’t constantly on guard. Obviously, the absence of coon-killin’ cops was a large part of it…
This point was driven home on my last visit. I hadn’t been back since 2012. Between visits, my life was pretty hellish. Without providing a lot of personal detail, let’s just say property-ownership is a pain in the ass. And my tenant (my sister and I inherited the house) was either light or not at all with his rent money for nearly a decade. Money I didn’t have was immediately sucked away by all sorts of niggling bullshit like federal and city taxes; utilities and house repairs; etc. I did not ask or want this kind of life.
DARIUS’ ADDED NOTE: Why did I put up with this if I found it so hateful? My sister. My sister never left home so she was stuck in this twisted co-dependent relationship with my father. And she is also autistic. But the public school system in the 60s classified her as “retarded”. She isn’t. My father and I argued about that shit all the time. Racist-ass school system said the same thing about me (no, I’m brain damaged from a car accident. I was written off as “retarded” in school yet I was reading at a college level by sixth grade. Fuck them crackas.) So I stayed after the funeral arrangement rather than leave her at the mercy of secondary family members I did not trust.
I was under extreme stress between those two visits. However, once I passed through the customs gate, all the stress cramped in my body vanished and I was completely relaxed. This caught me completely by surprise. Throughout my stay I did not feel the predominance of my racial identity in the course of my daily social interactions. I wasn’t constantly on guard. Obviously, the absence of coon-killin’ cops was a large part of it, but it made me realize just how much of an impact the racism of American society had on our subconscious lives.
To answer your question (and cut this short), I was able to hang on in Berlin for as long as I did, in addition to the monthly German-style ‘welfare checks’ (I was there on a work visa), I had a lot of support from my friends there.
As for my German, it's limited. I can handle myself in bars, restaurants and supermarkets; but, when it comes to coherent discussions about Empire by Hardt and Negri, no.
[THREE] After dealing with Harper Collins and my book on fighting I'm shocked that anyone else can make a living on books. How'd you make this happen?
DARIUS: I was surprised by the reception of my first book. I was paid a pittance. When it was first conceived, I just wanted to see if I could write an effective -- and funny -- piece of satire. I saw it as a ridiculous summer reading. What was important (and remains so) was learning my craft as a writer. Equally important to learning craft was the spiritual science of magic. I wanted to understand how magic functioned in writing. In the letters I exchanged with Kathy Acker, when we discussed writing the book on Vodou (I have her book by Maya Deren, scribbled with Kathy’s notes), she wrote “Writing is Magic”. And that’s a true statement.
The book was published. It received a lot of critical attention in academic circles. I gained a certain level of renown. What did I learn? At the end of the day, books are treated no differently than rolls of toilet paper in the marketplace. It’s a product. Worth isn’t based on quality of content but on sales. My cynicism about this was the thinking behind my second book. It proved my assessment of the publishing industry was correct. That was the thing about Berlin. It offered me opportunities I would have never been offered in the U.S.
Up until this year, all of my work as a writer since returning to the U.S. has come out of Europe. Despite the lack of financing, I continue writing and involve myself in assorted projects because it’s what gives shape and meaning to my life. Without it, I’d be in a bigger mess than the one I’m already in.
[FOUR] I was amused that Answer Me magazine made a Top 10 List of yours that I read somewhere. Goad did one of the FIVE EASY PIECES thing too and so I'll ask you what I asked him (and what I'll keep asking until I figure it out myself): caste or tribe?
DARIUS: Tribe. No question. Caste is generationally assigned before birth. Tribe, in the sense I see it, is a chosen extended family. It was because of the strength of the tribe I was able to survive on the Lower Eastside and Berlin for all those years
[FIVE] I feel, in lots of ways, both my body and my head preparing me for their eventual end. Given the recent passing of your father, how are you handling those very direct messages about an eventually Darius James-free world?
DARIUS: In my 30s, I decided when I turned 65, my solution for death and old age was living like a geriatric rock-n-roller. Curiously, now that I’m 67, that's kind of what’s happened. One significant friend I’ve cultivated in the last decade is a Haitian woman who is an electronic Vodou drummer. She’s done ritual drumming since the age of six. We gig out sometimes. My role within the troupe is “The Monk”. I sit on stage in a meditative Buddha pose; personifying her male, monk-like aspects. I also do psychedelics. I trip three or four days at a time, listening to alien voices. However, unlike my early acid-days, I approach psychedelics within a context of ritual and meditation. Set and setting. My studio is an altar. Drumming is a constant. Zafu strapped to a meditation bench. Candles and incense burn. Pop culture icons serve as Yantras. I become one with the altar. I encountered many selves. I am inside and out.
I am a child of the Ghedes. I am Death.
By the way, you do not need psychedelics to achieve this state of consciousness. Simply sit and tell your mind to shut the fuck up. Listen. There begins your journey.