STORIES

My father, the late New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, was a champion of New York City and its citizens.

He leveled the powerful and helped the powerless. He wrote defining stories on JFK being shot. He was the only reporter in the ballroom when Malcolm X was killed. Breslin tackled Bobby Kennedy‘s assassin and wrote a heartbreaking account. Breslin broke the biggest stories from John Lennon being shot to Son of Sam.

Breslin said: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

The AIDS Monument’s stories include stories about rage. In one of his columns that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, titled “The Gay Life and Death Go Hand-in-Hand,” he focused on a single man, David Camacho, to humanize the AIDS epidemic, which was widely misunderstood at the time:

Camacho was a young, handsome, bright guy who had the guts to be out about his disease.  He had two good weeks in July and then the fever returned, and he was back in the hospital for half of late August. He got out again and returned to the street, the date this time doesn’t count. By now, he measured nothing
around him — weeks, month, day, night, summer heat, fall chill, the color of the sky, the sound of the street, clothes, music, lights, wealth – dwindled meaning.”

David put on a sweater and an army field jacket and went downstairs. He waved into the open doorway of a clothing store and the two women at the counter, smiled and called out to him. Then he went down the front steps and into Eighth Street. David was fighting for his life.

My father called him on one of his last days:

“And then I called David up on Friday to check on a couple of things and he answered the phone with a dull voice.

“‘You’re not laughing,’ I said.

“‘No, I just got off the phone with the doctor. He told me the test results came back and he thinks the cancer has spread to the lungs. I just got off the phone with him.’

“I said nothing.

“David said, ‘I’m trying to keep myself together by washing the windows.'”

Breslin said nothing.

David succumbed to AIDS shortly after the column.

My father met Nick Dante, one of the creators of A Chorus Line and the subject of my father‘s column in your AIDS Monument STORIES. My father said, “Just listen … all you have to do is listen” as Nick spoke….

“I grew up in the ’40s a Puerto Rican kid on 125th St. and Broadway and obviously gay. No one would hang out with me. I was terrified to go out where anybody would see me. My greatest fear was to walk with my mother and father and have somebody whistle at me.”

My father always said, “In my time, in my city, it all starts with the shoe leather, with the climbing stairs for work. You can tell how you do it in your feet. If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it. You write it in scenes with dialogue, and then somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinion.”

My father taught me that each day there should be a word or a gesture that would cause someone else to smile over the life about them. His contempt was reserved for those who would not attempt this.

He wrote for 50 years and 5,000 newspaper columns. Forty-Second Street and Third Avenue in New York City is named “Jimmy Breslin Way.” Say hello if your wander by.