The next day she wrote that “since I’ve known him, he has not yet developed a concrete sense of direction,” and in retrospect Genevieve remembered that Barack “came back from Hawaii definitely exuding impatience and frustration and dissatisfaction with the life he was leading.” She was increasingly stressed by her teaching and by the shared space at 640 2nd Street. In mid-March her unhappiness led Barack to remark, “You like to make trouble.” When that led to tears, Genevieve wrote that her own emotional insecurity “all relates back to my father, and his ‘abandonment’ of me and wanting desperately to have someone love me like a father.” But she also believed that “all of this insecurity” is “a product of the conversation” she and Barack had had “about living together,” coupled with all of the “distance on his part.” Before the end of March, Genevieve found a better apartment at 481 Warren Street #4A in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood.
Obama was still in touch with Oxy friends Phil Boerner and Andy Roth, and by early 1985 Andy was living with musician friend Keith Patchel in an informal sublet at 350 West 48th Street in Manhattan’s rough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Patchel had left for Sweden at the first of the year to work on a record with his friend Richard Lloyd, a member of the underground band Television, and in March Andy was headed to Managua, Nicaragua, for more than two months. Apartment 4E had been home to the grandparents of neighbor Nick Martakis, a friend of Television’s manager, and Keith and Andy simply paid Nick $200 or $250 a month in cash—“there was no lease” and “everything was on the down-low,” Keith explained. “Keith and I were expected to keep a low profile,” Andy remembered, and even incoming mail had to be addressed “c/o Martakis.” The building was “decrepit,” a step down even from Sohale’s apartment on East 94th Street, but it was relatively spacious. It was also a shorter subway trip to CCNY in West Harlem, and on Sunday, March 31, Barack moved in there, while continuing to spend each weekend at Genevieve’s Warren Street apartment in Brooklyn.
Two visitors whom Barack had met two years earlier in Jakarta—his mother Ann’s anthropologist friends Pete Vayda and Tim Jessup—came for dinner one weekend. Tim was Genevieve’s older stepbrother—the son of her stepfather, Phil Jessup. Barack did not say much to Genevieve about his NYPIRG work, and he never introduced her to any staff or students: “that compartmentalizing thing,” she later remarked. Genevieve continued to wrestle with her own issues, and in mid-April wrote in her journal, “I am making a commitment here and now to stop smoking pot. I must. Because I am debilitating myself.”
Genevieve’s ongoing anxieties about teaching were always close to the surface. One mid-April weekend Genevieve told Barack that the older teachers at PS 133 had said, “Just stick in there. Nobody has a good first year, and the pension’s really good.” That pension reference so offended Barack he almost yelled in response. “It just really set him off. I had never seen him so upset,” Genevieve recounted. “He was almost thumping the table he was so upset—the idea that you would sell out for security” made him “so angry.” The next weekend Genevieve and Barack walked from Boerum Hill into Brooklyn Heights, and by Sunday afternoon, he was “acting a tad hostile. When he talks of enjoying being alone, I wonder that he so regularly attends this weekend pattern of ours,” she recorded.57
On Wednesday, May 1, the CCNY chapter of NYPIRG held a demonstration at Broadway and 137th Street to protest the abysmal condition of that IRT #1 line station. This was part of NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign for better subway service across the city. The next day a noontime rally outside NAC drew attention to how the NYPIRG chapter, in tandem with CCNY’s student government, had gathered more than a thousand handwritten letters to members of Congress opposing the Reagan administration’s proposed budget cuts for Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans in the pending Higher Education Reauthorization Act.
That weekend Barack and Genevieve went to Hasan’s apartment on Saturday night and got “high on coke,” she recorded in her journal. On Sunday Barack sat around her Warren Street apartment reading the New York Times and watching basketball. As he left that evening, Barack “said he felt strained,” and then told Genevieve, “This apartment is alien to me,” a comment she found hurtful. “Barack is discovering the ennui of life being uneventful and unfulfilling and not knowing where to look for the source of it,” she wrote. In retrospect she thought he was “depressed” and “not really talking that much.” She sensed “a great deal of disappointment and more emotional involvement” with his NYPIRG job than at BI. Barack’s inability to distance himself from his job as he had at BI made him “significantly more troubled by what was going on at work.” Genevieve thought that “as long as he was still at BI and paying his dues,” Barack had believed that a community organizing job would “be the fulfillment of his dream” and gave him hope for the future after his self-imposed 365-day sentence was up. But “the disappointment with how his actual experience” at NYPIRG had played out was leaving him “very broody.”
Yet the CCNY students and NYPIRG staffers who worked most closely with Barack could not have been happier with him. On Tuesday, May 7, NYPIRG’s annual Lobby Day in Albany drew almost two hundred students from around the state, and the senate leader who previously had blocked passage of NYPIRG’s Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill told reporters, “I am convinced we will have an agreed-upon bill before the session ends.” The next afternoon CCNY’s NYPIRG chapter hosted a well-publicized community forum on federal budget cuts featuring Frances Fox Piven. CCNY’s classes ended one week later, on May 15, and the NYPIRG chapter held an end-of-semester pizza party in their Math Hut office.
Alison Kelley had interacted with Barack as much as anyone over the preceding three months, and Obama had encouraged her to overcome her shyness and learn new skills, accept an invitation to join a singing group, and run for a seat on NYPIRG’s state board. “He was relentless,” and he had “a huge impact,” even if he did not realize it. “He changed the vector of my life in so many ways,” Alison later recalled. Barack was also “constantly bringing stuff in for us to read,” including publications on South Africa. In return, “Every day I’d hound him because he smoked,” and Barack’s usual reply was “We all have flaws.” Nonetheless, “every single female had a crush on him” and “everyone thought he was cute,” but “he was just always warm and friendly … in a very professional way.”
At the end of the semester, “we begged him to stay. We loved him,” because “we all felt that he was the perfect person for our chapter, to meet our needs,” Alison recounted. But Barack was explicit that he would not return to CCNY for the fall semester nor stay with NYPIRG over the summer. “He talked about being frustrated, that he wasn’t moving fast enough,” Alison remembered. “It was so clear that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and he didn’t feel that he fit in anywhere.” Barack “was just deeply searching for his niche in the world … searching in terms of his own psyche.” He “seemed unsure of where he belonged” and “didn’t know where he was going.”
Eileen Hershenov “desperately wanted him to stay,” and her boss Chris Meyer remembered “having a conversation with Barack” after “Eileen put me up to trying to convince him to stay.” To Eileen it was clear that Barack “was interested in organizing but not this kind of organizing.” NYPIRG executive director Tom Wathen concluded that Barack viewed NYPIRG’s issues as “too vanilla,” and “we were disappointed, but not surprised” when he resigned at the end of CCNY’s spring semester.
NYPIRG’s top priority, the Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill, would be signed into law a year later by New York governor Mario Cuomo, but in Obama’s own subsequent references to his time at NYPIRG, he never once mentioned that signal achievement. The first time he described his experience, nine years later, he stated that “when I first got involved in organizing, in Harlem, I was out there because of liberal guilt, and I got disabused of that real quickly.” NYPIRG “sent me out into the middle of Harlem to try to get people involved in environmental and recycling issues,” but “the folks in Harlem weren’t all that interested … and I would guilt