My Own Private West Side Story:? What I Learned from Puerto Rican Outlaw Artist Miguel?Pinero

Although I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s new “West Side Story” movie, I saw the original when I was 10 and loved it. It didn’t surprise me, though, to read a couple of reviews of the remake by critics who resent its caricature of Puerto Rican people and culture, and feel outraged that 60 years after the Oscar-winning film opened, “the overwhelmingly White world of Hollywood,” is still stifling the voices and stories of “actual Puerto Ricans,” as Julio Ricardo Varela’s piece in The Washington Post complained.

This has me scratching my head and wondering what one actual Puerto Rican that I once knew — a Puerto Rican who was also an acclaimed playwright, poet and actor in multiple Hollywood films and TV shows, and who had his own life turned into a movie — would have said about this controversy.

Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because Miguel Pinero, author of the award-winning prison drama “Short Eyes,” and a driving force behind the Nuyorican Poets Café and Nuyorican Literary Movement, died of cirrhosis in 1985. At only 41, he succumbed to a stereotypically sex-, drugs- and crime-riddled mean-streets lifestyle that seemed to fuel his decidedly atypical creative life. “I have to keep doing bad to keep the writing good,” he once said.

Miguel Pinero. Photo by Alchetron.

The play that made him famous and a darling of New York’s theater elite is about what happens when a white child molester, a “short eyes” in prison slang, enters a population of mostly Black and brown inmates. Sixteen years after his death, “Pinero,” a biopic about his tumultuous life, came out, with Benjamin Bratt in the lead role.

Bumping into Stars

In the course of my unfamous life, I have found myself serendipitously bumping into stars every now and then — athletes, musicians, actors — but usually only momentarily rubbing shoulders or exchanging a few words. But with Pinero, the relationship was more than superficial. We even lived in the same house for a while in the mid-1970s, when his star was ascending.

I was a graduate student studying journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia by day and an aspiring singer/songwriter playing clubs by night. I lived in a sort of communal house with a few other people, including my dear friend Cheri, who worked as a probation officer.

One night Cheri came home from J.C. Dobbs, our favorite watering hole a few blocks away on South Street, looking dazed out on love potion №9. Turns out she’d met a Puerto Rican ex-con from Sing-Sing who was out after serving time for second-degree armed robbery. He was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York, and was in Philadelphia to work on a movie version of his award-winning play; also to experiment with the successful theater work with street kids that he’d begun in New York City. Cheri was a theater person, too, and devoted most of her time outside her day job to writing and performing in shows for children.

Miguel, or Mikey, as he was known among friends, combined the tough, grimy coarseness of the streets with the rarified aura of the world of letters. And he had an uncanny ability to smoothly navigate all the spaces in between. In the course of our friendship I watched him transition comfortably from conversations with street thugs to interviews with broadcasters and public officials on Sunday morning TV news shows. He was Cheri’s ideal and her kryptonite all rolled into one. And the relationship unfolded accordingly.

“I’m in love,” she said that night when she came home from the bar. Soon we had a new housemate, one we’d find slumped over on the living room couch some days in that strung-out, vacant-eyed junkie stupor. Other days he’d hold court in the same room with kids from the neighborhood street gang, keeping them in line like a lion tamer. At about 5-foot-six and maybe 140 pounds soaking wet, he was not a physically imposing figure, but he could be a scarily sinister presence and none of the street kids, even the bigger ones, would dare diss him.

On occasion I’d walk into my own home in the evening and find it buzzing like a bad-ass street carnival. Bikers, bangers and urban pirates stood crowded about, and then Mikey would take the floor and start spitting out rhymes about drugs and war and prison and injustice, alternating shouting and whispering in his hoarse, world-weary, Latin-tinged voice. Here's a sample

It was a cold misty rain

That fell on the city of Spokane

Where all the hos get high on boss cocaine

Now standing on the corner

Boasting about some pimps

The chumps, the back alleys and the thump

Was Flo…

Some have called him the link between the Beat poets of the ’50s and the rappers of the ’70s and ’80s. But we didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that mild-mannered, middle-class, law-abiding, part-time hippie me had slipped through some rabbit hole into a strange place inhabited by the unlikeliest of cohorts.

A Shot at My 15 Minutes of Fame

One afternoon when Mikey and I were swigging beers in front of the house, we got to talking about his movie. “Why don’t you give me a part in it,” I asked him, totally in jest. But he took me seriously. Said he’d been thinking about creating a scene showing the kind of prison talent show they used to have sometimes at Sing-Sing. Maybe he could work me into it, he told me.

“Really?” I asked. “What crime would a gentle soul like me be in prison for?”

I never forgot his answer: “You’d be surprised,” he said. “The joint is full of guys like you — quiet, reserved, peaceful. And then one day, BOOM! Somebody’s layin’ dead on the floor in a pool of blood.” He went on to describe some gruesome scenes he’d witnessed in his days behind bars.

He also went on to write a scene for me in the movie. I was to play a character called Marty Custard, who’d sing a song in the prison talent show. He had me take a black and white photo at the drug store and used it to make me an ID badge I was to wear to gain entry to the set.

?? My ID badge for the set of “Short Eyes.” Photo by the author.

The “set,” as it turns out, was as gritty and real as any actual prison. “Short Eyes” was filmed on the 9th floor of 100 Centre Street in New York, the New York Criminal Court Building, its classic fa?ade now a famous backdrop for shows like the “Law and Order Series,” which would not premiere for another 15 years. Part of the building was in fact a jail for pretrial detainees — a holding area colloquially known as The Tombs. Mikey told me to be there at a designated date and time, with no wiggle room because of the tight production schedule.

My industrious homeboy Skip, a bartender and fellow singer/songwriter, suggested we compose an original tune for my performance. If we played our cards right, it could be our ticket to an Oscar for best song at the ’78 Academy Awards. So write a song we did. When we arrived that day at 100 Centre after the hour-and-a-half drive from Philly in my Volkswagen Beetle, I had my guitar in my hand and Skip at my side and was ready to introduce our tune to the world. It was called “Break It Down.”

But things quickly went south. We were turned away by a crew member on the ground floor of the building, because I neither had, nor could I afford, a key requirement: membership in SAG, the Screen Actors Guild. Not easily deterred, we scrambled up nine dark, dingy and long flights of stairs, thinking we’d be able to sneak in. But the door was locked. Game over…

Until we were able to get word to Mikey.

A Master of Emotional Intelligence

When he came to our rescue, it was the first time I saw him work his magic on multiple levels, with a diverse set of personalities and situations. He was a problem solver extraordinaire:

- First, he managed to get Skip and me onto the set without SAG cards.

- Next, he told us we’d need to go to Plan B with the song; the guitar was out, because the strings would not be allowed in a real prison for safety reasons, but the tune could still be sung a cappella.

- I couldn’t sing it, though, because of the SAG rule, so one of the actors would have to do it. That turned out to be the popular Tex-Mex singer, Freddy Fender, whose management had landed a part for him in the film.

- But that was problematic, too, because Freddie’s people wanted rights to the song; so did Curtis Mayfield and his publishing house; Curtis, of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions fame, was bankrolling “Short Eyes,” he had a major role in it, and planned to put out a soundtrack album, too. Miguel smoothed out all those rough spots and Freddie Fender sang the song in the movie, accompanied by actors playing inmates who banged out the beat on the back of empty cans. Skip and I got a song credit on the screen and kept the rights to our tune.

Mikey was always kind and generous to Skip and me. I found he had an immense empathy, never more evident than the time he found me sulking after work one day and insistently coaxed me to tell him what was wrong. I told him I’d been fired from my part-time job at the university that day, and I was devastated. It was the first and only time I’ve been fired in my life. I was outraged and upset because it was over “stupid, political stuff.”

He told me it would not be a barrier in my life, or even a speed bump. I objected that it just wasn’t fair. “It beez that way sometimes,” he responded, using one of his trademark phrases.

And now, some 45 years later, I wonder what Mikey would make of today’s Latin critics pointing out the unfairness of Steven Spielberg’s take on the depiction of Puerto Ricans in his vision of West Side Story. I imagine he’d say something like, “Spielberg gots to paint his picture with his eyes and I gots to paint my picture with mine. It’s all good. It just beez that way.”

Rest in peace, Mikey. You added some spice to my life, and some wisdom, too. I’m grateful.