Three Kings — A Brooklyn Story
Here’s how I remember it: I’d heard the news on NPR as I drove to work, and it saddened me deeply. Brooklyn’s greatest poet since Walt Whitman was dead. As the radio played one of his recordings, I thought that, had they been contemporaries, he and Walt would have been good, good friends. They both understood that a city, particularly our city of Brooklyn, lives in the pain and hopes of its people. They both understood that scars were the layered evidence of struggle and that beauty could come in the form of a barbaric yawp, a howl of pain, a shout for truth made lyrical by cadence and aspiration.
As was my routine, after parking the car, I walked up to the bakery on Fifty-Ninth St. and Twentieth Avenue to get my morning bagel and coffee, then returned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, where I was a social studies teacher. In the halls, I said wassup to a few students and made my way up the stairs to the fourth floor and my first-period class. All the while, my head was on the loss.
The classroom was quiet when I arrived, everyone was still waking up for the day. I wasn’t supposed to let the kids eat at their desks, but I never enforced the rule. It was 7:30 AM, for God’s sake. I was eating, too.
The bell rang to begin another miraculous adventure in learning. The students barely moved but to shift their coffee and breakfast sammiches to the sides of their desks, making room for their notebooks. I stood up to begin the lesson, but before I did, I said that I wanted to take a minute and reflect on the loss I’d just learned about. I told them that the whole world, but more importantly Brooklyn in particular, had just lost one of its most talented sons. He was a poet from the street who wrote the truth, even when it hurt. I said he was one of my heroes.
A few of the kids actually started crying. Big Lisa, now a teacher herself, was sitting in the back row like the queen she’s always been. She was the first one to stand up when I raised my coffee cup and offered a toast to the fallen. A few other students stood up, too, and started giving one another street hugs and bumps. There was honest grieving. That surprised me. How the fuck did these sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids know Allen Ginsberg?
Then Elizabeth raised her own coffee cup and spoke for them.
“To Biggie,” she said.
The room rolled through with the response.
“Biggie!”
Goofy Upstate whiteboy that I was, I’d forgotten already that Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., had been shot only a few weeks earlier, on March 9, 1997, and in that moment, I realized something profound about how the actors change, but the play’s passion remains unchanged in my beautiful borough of Brooklyn.
I thought fleetingly about correcting them, calling their attention to MY hero, Ginsberg, the author of so many passionate poems from the beat years and beyond, but in a New York minute, I realized that Whitman would have loved them both, sang the song of them both, celebrated them both and that somewhere up there in creation’s perfect Grand Army Plaza, the three of them were rolling dice and spitting bars.
In my memory, at least, they’re still there — the Three Kings Brooklyn.
Walt Whitman: 3/26/1892 — Forever
Christopher Wallace: 3/9/1997 — Forever
Allen Ginsberg: 4/5/1997 — Forever
Brooklyn Forever, yo.
Michael Tallon is an independent writer currently living and writing in Antigua, Guatemala, where he moved in 2004 after leaving Brooklyn — at least physically. He is working on a nonfiction book detailing his experiences with a rare genetic disorder that nearly cost him his life in 2015. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Now go tell someone you love them.
