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R E C E N T L Y
Confabulation crisis Is Time brain-dead? Our tchotchkes, ourselves Hearsay rules L.A.'s battle of the books BROWSE THE |
From crackhead to literary star
THE WRITER KURT VONNEGUT HAILS AS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . BY MATTHEW FLAMM He used to have the key to Grand Central Terminal -- or rather, a couple of them, including one that could open doors on the trains. So it is not surprising that as Lee Stringer walks through the newly refurbished Beaux Arts landmark, where chandeliers glitter on polished tile and the renovated ceiling glows aquamarine through the late afternoon, he feels proprietary about the improvements. "I like the new look," he says only half-jokingly as he glances around his former home. "I like that they're fixing my old place up." It is in some ways a fixed-up New York as well that Stringer is visiting, which may be why the author of "Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street" (Seven Stories Press) seems a different shade from his surroundings, like a digitized film star in a beer commercial. The world this onetime crackhead brings with him is the New York of the 1980s, particularly those parts of it that people couldn't wait to forget. The sweet irony of it is that Stringer has come into his own in the '90s with a vengeance: Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote the introduction to his book, will also host his book party. The New York Times Book Review has weighed in with a rave, and CNN has filmed him for a Headline News piece. Meanwhile, Zaro's Bread Basket at Grand Central reminds Stringer of the time a "no-neck, no forehead" cop chased him from the bakery and then cuffed his wrists so tightly he lost feeling in two fingers for a year. Not all Stringer's memories are unhappy ones, though. In keeping with the reader-friendly spirit of his book, which the author calls "a memoir of the '80s, written from underneath Grand Central" -- and not, God forbid, a book about "the homeless" -- he gives a tour of the terminal that's so intimate it seems surreal. "Here," Stringer says, leading me down a flight of steps near the Oyster Bar, "I'll show you where I used to sleep." We come out on Track 109, where a commuter train is sitting with its doors closed, the last passengers straggling down the otherwise deserted platform. We're heading in the opposite direction, but as Stringer must have learned long ago, nobody pays attention when you're minding your own business. "I lived five, six years in the crawl space under here," he says as we walk. For most of that time, it was pretty much a clean well-lighted place: Trusted by the workers, he had a key to the employees' bathroom, where he could wash up in the morning; a key to open the trains, so he could collect discarded cans (redeeming them later for drug money); and a light to read by. Occasionally, the African fellow who lived in the next platform would come by to borrow a book; Stringer's library of castoffs included Tennessee Williams' collected stories (nicely "off the cuff and casual" in their style, he says), Ibsen's plays ("too manipulative") and Larry McMurtry's "Texasville" ("I only got halfway through it -- too flat for me"). It wasn't a half bad life, by the sound of it. One night, cops chasing a suspect stumbled onto Stringer kicked back in his cubbyhole, sipping a beer, eating a snack and reading. Looking up at the surprised faces, he asked -- in all seriousness -- "Can I get you something?" "It was a nicer place to be homeless," the 47-year-old Stringer says of New York in the mid-'80s, when the city more or less tolerated street people. "And the homeless were nicer." As such, "Grand Central Winter" contains surprisingly entertaining vignettes, as the author is blessed with a light touch as well as empathy for his fellow down and out. You can imagine his characters -- hookers and junkies and people who've fallen just off the edge -- in a lyrical, neo-realist Disney film about New York. "It's a humongous act of denial of who we are," Stringer says of the city's campaign to clear away the homeless, a policy he believes is bound up with racial issues and a determination "to get rid of the patient" if the patient won't be cured. Stringer's own downward spiral from marketing executive with a drinking problem to full-fledged crackhead followed a characteristically '80s pattern. As he describes it in his book, a series of setbacks culminating in the tragic death of his brother, Wayne, in 1984, had him hitting the bottle hard. Then a drinking buddy showed up one night with a little "something" for Stringer's hangover. "I cannot feel the heat of the smoke as it goes down," he writes of his first hit off a crack pipe. "But I can taste it ... The taste of success, love, orgasm, omnipotence, immortality, and winning the lottery all rolled into one." Nine months later Stringer was evicted from his studio apartment; he writes that he walked out the door feeling elated. "Off to the freedom of the streets! I tell myself. Off to whatever happens next." "I never entertained the notion of quitting," Stringer says of his crack habit. We have walked outside, where -- self-confessed compulsive that he is -- he can smoke his Lucky Strikes down to roach size. "I figured this was the way I go out." It would be a dozen years before the author hit bottom and enrolled in rehab. But along the way, he also found his vocation. The discovery began the night he dug a pencil out from his crawl-space clutter, because he needed something to push the screen in his stem from one end to the other (necessary for smoking the pipe's residue). Stringer held onto the pencil for future maintenance. Then one night when he had nothing to smoke, he found an old composition notebook and -- with Tennessee Williams as a model -- started a story about a troubled friendship. The next thing he knew, he says in his book, "I'm scribbling like a maniac; heart pumping, adrenaline rushing, hands trembling ... It's just like taking a hit." Street News accepted the story, and before long he was a regular contributor to the homeless people's paper, then a columnist and editor. Stringer eventually found himself spending nights on the office couch -- pretending, in the morning, that he'd been the first one there. The Ninth Avenue loft became his de facto home from 1992 until the paper lost the space a couple of years ago. The paper would soon do him an even greater service: A book contract came his way after Dan Simon, then an editor at Four Walls Eight Windows, saw one of his "Ask Homey" columns. Stringer had a three-day party with the first third of his advance. It was one of his last benders. Weaning himself of crack, he soon learned, included moments as ecstatic as those he experienced getting hooked -- a kind of counterbalance to the degradations he suffered in between. And there seems to have been no end to those: As he leads me across midtown, Stringer points out where he was thrown to the ground by cops, where he was ripped off by dealers. He only grows visibly angry, though, when he recalls his worst encounters with the police. Sober for the last year and a half, the author has moved on. Ironically enough, though, he's in the grip of a new addiction: writing. Stringer now lives with his mother in Westchester, works as a teacher's aide and spends his spare hours writing a novel. "Writing is redemption," he says. "No matter how I acted beaming up, if I could do something on the page ..."
Matthew Flamm is a New York writer.
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