Luckily there were interesting events to attend. One flyer advertised “A Forum on South Africa—Including the Film The Rising Tide,” with speakers such as David Ndaba, the nom de guerre for Dr. Sam Gulabe, the African National Congress’s representative to the United Nations. Boerner said he and Barack attended that forum, but not a mid-November speech by black Georgia state legislator Julian Bond. The two apartment mates often ate breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street, and they sometimes had dinner at nearby Empire Szechuan. Drugs were no part of the depressing scene at 142 W. 109th, but they would go drink beer at the venerable West End bar on Broadway or with Phil’s cousin Peregrine “Pern” Beckman, a Columbia sophomore, at his nearby apartment. To Pern, Phil’s friend seemed “diffident,” a “shy kid who spoke when spoken to” while “nursing a beer.”
Looming over their daily lives was how unlivable their dire apartment was, especially as winter closed in. They could let their sublease expire on December 7 and simply remain until fall exams concluded on December 23; given New York’s arcane housing code, they could receive no punishment for that brief time. They began searching without success for a place to live in January. Phil had family friends in Brooklyn Heights where he could stay, but they still had no solution for both of them when Phil left to spend Christmas with his parents at their home in London.
Columbia’s winter break extended from Christmas Eve until spring registration on January 20. Obama spent most of that time in Los Angeles, seeing Wahid Hamid and Paul Carpenter and encountering old friends like Alex McNear when he visited Occidental, whose winter term started two weeks before Columbia’s spring semester. Obama returned to New York on January 15 and slept on the floor of a friend named Ron on the Upper East Side while he again searched for an apartment. At registration, Barack ran into Pern, who gave him Phil’s number in Brooklyn, and when Barack called two nights later, he told Phil he had found only a $250-per-month one-person studio just south of 106th Street that he could soon move into as a sublet.
On Sunday afternoon, January 24, the day before Columbia’s spring classes began, Barack and Ron went to visit Phil where he was staying, at 11 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. They drank beer and ate bagels while watching the San Francisco 49ers defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 26–21 in Super Bowl XVI. On Monday Barack was again saddled with Columbia’s core courses and another semester of Spanish. That Friday night, Phil met up with Barack at Columbia; the two then headed downtown on the subway to rendezvous with Ron and his girlfriend at a Lower East Side bar before having dinner at the well-known Odessa restaurant on Avenue A, just across from Tompkins Square Park. Then Barack and Phil headed back to Morningside Heights, and Boerner spent the night on Obama’s floor rather than take the subway back to Brooklyn after midnight. The next Friday Barack and Phil ate an early Chinese dinner before taking the subway to Phil’s place and polishing off a bottle of wine while watching the New Jersey Nets play the Philadelphia 76ers. Barack still occasionally played pickup basketball in Columbia’s Dodge gym; a female graduate student years later remembered him playing pickup soccer on the lawn in front of Columbia’s imposing Butler Library.25
But Barack’s life during those early months of 1982 was radically different from his daily routine one year earlier. At Oxy, living with Hasan was an almost nonstop party with a band of close friends. Rallies, protests, and political events occurred almost weekly, and the days were filled with energetic debates and conversations in the Cooler. Now, in dreary Morningside Heights, Obama faced a daily schedule of core classes and perhaps a once-a-week meet-up with Phil to have dinner, drink beer, or watch a game. A quarter century later, Obama remembered that time as just “an intense period of study…. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” He started keeping a journal, less a diary than a descriptive collection of city scenes and characters that caught his eye. In retrospect, he believed it was an “extremely important” period “when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth,” one that left him “painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.” He had been “comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”
“It was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through,” Obama remembered, an “ascetic” and “hermetic existence … I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks,” and wrote in his journal. “It’s hard to say what exactly prompted” such a stark change from his attitude toward life both at Oxy and back in Hawaii, Obama told the journalist David Remnick. Yet he gained “a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before.”
Spring exams ended by the middle of May, and sometime soon after that, Obama lost both his studio apartment and his security deposit when the actual leaseholder informed him that his sublet was invalid. Thus sometime in early or mid-summer 1982, Barack moved in with Sohale Siddiqi in a two-bedroom apartment at 339 East 94th Street, just west of First Avenue. Siddiqi managed to score the lease on the $450-a-month sixth-floor walk-up by exaggerating his own income, and though Barack was now living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, their immediate neighborhood was anything but fashionable. Sohale recalled that it was “a scary street,” with a corner gas station “patrolled by this Doberman Pinscher with a beer bottle in his mouth.” Their own building was “a hovel … the hallways were dingy. Everything was beat up and gray and dimly lit. The front door didn’t lock completely.” Up in 6A, “you would enter through a kitchen, which would lead into a living room on one side and a bathroom on the other.” The wooden floors “were all warped … with big gaps between the planks.” One bedroom “was really a closet with a window.” A friendly footrace was used to determine who got the decent bedroom, and Obama, now a regular runner, won. As on 109th Street, “there was never hot water when you wanted it,” but in contrast the heat was always on, “so we used to have our windows wide open, just to cool down.” Outside Barack’s bedroom window was a fire escape, which Sohale said served as “our balcony.” All in all, it was just “a horrid place.”
Siddiqi also witnessed a “transformation” from the “fun-loving … easygoing” Obama he had met eighteen months earlier in South Pasadena to someone who was now “very serious and less lighthearted.” Yet Barack had a stereo and “a huge record collection. Bob Marley was big, Stevie Wonder … also plenty of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Talking Heads, and this group who I had never heard of before … he had at least twelve of their albums,” the Ohio Players. But once Barack arrived on East 94th Street, “I don’t think he bought any more albums … or even played the stereo much.” He did have “to remind me a few times to call him Barack” rather than Barry.
Sometime soon after Barack moved in with Sohale, his mother Ann and almost twelve-year-old sister Maya arrived in New York from Jakarta, where Ann still worked for the Ford Foundation. They too were struck by the change in the young man they called “Bar.” Maya later recalled that “he seemed more serious. He seemed more pensive. He was reading a great deal.” She believed “he had started taking himself very seriously” and often appeared to have “wrapped himself in his own solitude.” Obama later wrote that he took a summer job “clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side,” and he also described, in a patronizing manner, his mother’s insistence that they see Black Orpheus, a film she had loved as a high school senior twenty years earlier that was playing at a revival theater. Obama told a subsequent interviewer that during that visit “my mother used to tease me and call me Gandhi” because of his newly ascetic life, but Barack did not deny that he had become “deadly serious during those late college years … People would invite me to parties, and I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve got a revolution that has to take place.’ ”
Andy Roth, who had lived in Oakland after leaving Eagle Rock, moved to Manhattan in the late spring of 1982 and got an apartment on East 95th Street, hardly two blocks from Barack and Sohale. Siddiqi was nowhere near as political as Chandoo, nor as intellectually curious as the new Obama, but when Andy went for dinner at their apartment with several other Pakistanis, he remembered seeing “a portrait of Bhutto on the wall.”
The most significant new acquaintance that year was Mir Mahboob Mahmood, known to friends like Sohale, Wahid, and Hasan as “Beenu.” A 1981 graduate of Princeton University,