My parents pinned all their hopes on me, their bright firstborn son. Though all my life, I had spent hours drawing with Dad in his studio, crammed with colorful canvasses, my parents insisted I take psychology courses in college. I didn’t want a sensible degree, I wanted to fulfill my father’s fantasies of artistic fame. Instead, I ended up a drunk university dropout, living at home. Dad burst into my room unannounced, catching me throwing a solo drink and draw party by myself.

“This is a waste of time. No one cares about your sketches,” Dad screamed, “Get a real job. They’re hiring at Duane Reade.”

“You’re just jealous,” I shouted back.

By 20, my parents had kicked me out of their house.
Angry and alone, I escaped to the old Astroland, where I had always been happiest with my father. I finagled an invite to the Mermaid Parade and a special VIP after party, to meet my best friend’s godfather for the first time, Sylvain Sylvain, bassist for famous vintage punk band The New York Dolls. Sipping whiskey from a Snapple bottle on the rumbling D train, the Cyclone shining in the distance, I felt like my real freak family would be waiting to take me in. Sylvain was in his 60s, the same age as my father and they were both artists. Yet, Syl had made it big on the stage, while Dad’s old paintings still hung dusty in his studio. I was ecstatic, imagining Syl would see right away that I was a hurt kid in need of a surrogate rock star father figure.

My best friend Meier and I spiked giant cups of lemonade with vodka and marched into an indoor club, velvet ropes strung up past fried clam counters, but Syl was nowhere in sight.

“He’s probably getting stoned with my mom in the manager’s room,” Meier explained.

Growing up, my parents only drank cheap Manischewitz on Hebrew holidays. Meier had been born in the Chelsea Hotel, where his mom had flings with famous rock ‘n’ rollers, a past that at the time I wished was my own. My mother and father had insisted on analyzing my childhood problems on the couch. We had strictly structured family dinners at 6 o’clock each night, a suffocating ritual recommended by all the eminent psychoanalysts. Yet, I kept a handle of Jim Beam behind my pillow. Without a diploma Dad approved of, I was drinking away the wide-eyed Jewish bookworm version of myself who had made muddy castles with him by the ocean’s edge. I secretly planned to search among the sequined, sandy crowds, hoping to find the spot where I’d been so close to my father as a child.

“Meier! My man!” A stocky guy in leather pants with long dyed black hair in a ponytail rushed over, hugging my friend. Sylvain had on dark leather pants and a matching vest. Syl’s skin was olive toned like my father’s, except Dad remained natural, letting his silver grey hair show.

“Who’s your buddy? You guys make music together?” Sylvain shook my hand. His raspy smoker’s voice reminded me of the lost world my dad had raised me in, old Spanish men flicking ash off their cigarillos as hydrants blasted jets of water into summer streets.

“No, we just drink together,” Meier laughed.

“I’m an artist too,” I blushed, lamely looking at my would-be mentor.

“Any drinking buddy of Meier’s is a drinking buddy of mine,” Syl grinned at me. “You guys want to get out of here? I hate these stuffy parties, I can give you a lift back to Manhattan.”

“That would be awesome,” I nodded before Meier could respond.

Meier sat in front and I piled into the back of Syl’s car. Syl drove fast with all the windows down under the elevated train tracks, subway cars squealing above us as he blasted old rock ‘n’ roll. I sucked up huge sips of my vodka lemonade, completely abandoning myself to fantasy. If I could only switch lives, I imagined I’d go on the road with the Dolls partying backstage with beautiful girls, living like a legend. I pretended I didn’t know Dad and instead moved in celebrity circles too lofty to extend to a painter’s co-op on the Lower East Side. I hadn’t been brought up in understaffed schools where hood classmates abused me, never lost my virginity too young or dropped out of college after getting in trouble with the police for alcohol, a legacy of failure that tugged at me, foreshadowing a future for myself I was desperate to escape. I was the son of a New York Doll.

“Do you guys need drugs? I can get you anything,” Syl offered.

“We want Shrooms,” Meier said.

“Anything but that,” Syl laughed.

We ended up getting pizza. Over pepperoni slices, Sylvain talked about music, a new clothing line he wanted to start, old drinking stories. I noticed Syl’s face in the fading light was a little fleshy, laugh lines zigzagging away from his lips. Like Coney Island, he was a creature of the past, fame slowly fading with the tide of fresh New York fables. I realized I had been living off salty ocean air and hollow hallucinations, sitting down for dinner at the wrong table. I had been staring at a distorted image of myself, as if in a funhouse mirror. My father had always worked steadily in his studio, raising a family, while continuing to follow his own creative passions. He had never been blinded by limelight, preferring to parent me with love. It could be fraught with anger, our shared unfulfilled dreams driving us to destroy, but underneath was an intense devotion to each other.
My artist/social worker dad and I ended up working things out in therapy. He could fix his client’s problems, and paint away his own, but the damage to our relationship was beyond diagnosis. We needed outside analysis. In a cramped office cluttered with art, my father admitted he had been jealous of my ambition.

“Don’t you think I have the same underlying grandiosity you do? Where do you think you got it?” Dad asked.

“I need to learn from you, not feel like we’re in a competition. Me being ambitious doesn’t mean I’m abandoning you,” I said.

“I know that now,” he admitted.

Over months of group sessions, I found out my love for Dad had been under construction, it was never completely crushed. Like the broken down boardwalk, we rebuilt our bond, slowly, piece by piece.

Royal Young just completed his debut memoir "Fame Shark." Follow him at Twitter.com/RoyalYoung.

In Yiddish I call my grandmother “Babbi”. She was born on Pitt and Houston Street in 1932. Her Lower East Side was an Eastern European Shtetl transplant; a small Jewish village. By the time she was born, the Depression was hitting hard. Her grandfather owned a dairy store on Stanton and Rivington, her father a butchery down the street. Exchanging cheeses, eggs and meats for fruits, vegetables and other necessities, got them through hard times.

She couldn’t understand when my bohemian parents decided to buy an old tenement on Eldridge Street between Delancey and Rivington in the 80s with some of their struggling friends. My Babbi worked hard to get out of that neighborhood, becoming a governess at fifteen, struggling through college and finally getting a PhD in child psychology. My dad insisted it was the best business investment of his artist’s career—that one day the Lower East Side would be gentrified and our building worth millions.

My Lower East Side was vibrant with pastel graffiti murals, hydrants blasting jets of water into the streets when it was hot, old Puerto Rican men arguing over Domino games, shoes dangling from street lamps, street walkers in pink spandex, junkies collapsed in pools of cheap liquor. As a child, I thrived on it. The constant energy of New York’s downtown jolted me alive making me feel even more that I lived on an edgy, enchanted Island.

Growing up a middle class white Jew in the Puerto Rican, Dominican and African American dominated Lower East Side of the early 90s was confusing. It gave my childhood an air of displacement. My parents made do, integrating the challenging neighborhood into their lives, hoping like all pioneers that one day their investment would pay off.

My dad picked up garbage, weaving it into his papier-mâché masks. My mom always had her keys in hand a block before she reached our front door for safety and practiced Spanish at the bodegas and restaurants where my early breakfasts were eggs over easy, bacon and home fries orange from Sofrito all for $3.00.

To support his family and his artwork, my dad worked as a social worker at FROSTED a residence on Houston and Allen streets for people who were AIDS and HIV positive. Over dinner he regaled my younger brother and I with stories about his clients tearing up their rooms while on crack and trying to finagle subway tokens from social workers to exchange for drugs.

My Kindergarten playground was a hot bed of AIDS urban legends. One had it that a man went around putting AIDS infected needles in the coin return slots in payphones, another that he left them upturned on movie theatre seats. Instead of being frightened by my surroundings, I was spurred on in my ambitions to seek out a better life than I knew my poverty stricken friends would have.

I made friends easily, but always felt like I was on the verge of being disowned by them for my better circumstances. My best friend in Kindergarten, Eduardo was shocked when my mom took us to eat in a restaurant after school across from Tompkins Square Park.

“You mean I can tell her what I want and she brings it?” He asked, open mouthed, pointing at the waitress.

“Duh.” I replied.

“Two Orange sodas.” He blurted grinning, half unsure whether his request would be granted. Eating out for him was McDonalds, Burger King or other cheap fast food. Eduardo was delighted with waitresses, but there were times he would break my toys in anger not because I had hurt him, but because I had them and he didn’t.

Like my grandmother, I wanted a better life than the Lower East Side could offer. First I majored in visual art at LaGuardia high school on the Upper West Side, and then went to a remote clothing optional liberal arts college in Vermont where I was bored out of my mind—missing the thrum of the city.

By the time I got home the Lower East Side yet again had a changed face. Post 9/11 New Yorkers were fascinated by a neighborhood on the edge of Ground Zero, caught up in its cheap, rough, down and out chic.

Bistros and boutiques lined the streets where I had cautiously trick or treated on long ago Halloweens. Musician Moby’s Teany Café had $5.00 espressos and marked up Vintage Dior sparkled from store windows. The Pentecostal Church on my parents’ street no longer threw block parties in the summer where they blasted Bachata all day and sold arroz con habichuelas with fat chicharones on the side. Drunken frat boys from Idaho wandered the streets and bored trust fund babies spent their time smoking cigarettes outside atmospheric wine bars.

I was surprised, nostalgic and not able to afford anything in the Lower East Side that was such a dysfunctional childhood backdrop. My parents still lived in their tenement, shopping at the Whole Foods on Houston, comfortable that their investment had in fact paid off. I moved to Brooklyn, where I took solace in Bushwick—a ghetto still thriving despite gentrification. It felt like home.

“I don’t belong here anymore.” I said sadly, as my Babbi parked off Kenmare, outside the French restaurant, smells of escargot and red wine wafting towards us through the rolled down car windows. “Zaest Frin an alta shtudt macht a naya shtudt,” she said, patting my knee comfortingly and translating from Yiddish: “From an old city, we make a new one.”

Royal Young was born and fled the Lower East Side. He now resides in Brooklyn making rap music and is a regular contributor to Pomp & Circumstance magazine. He can be reached at myspace.com/therealroyalyoung