At much the same time that his work at CCNY ended, in mid-May 1985, Barack’s relationship with Genevieve deteriorated seriously. Genevieve wrote a brief poem entitled “Where’s the Beef?” invoking a famous 1984 political aphorism. That same day she told her closest friend at PS 133, “I just wanted to chop his dick off,” and the next day, she recorded in her journal, “I called him a prick.” Years later she had no idea what had made her so “aggressively angry at him” or why her feelings had been “so vicious.” That weekend, however, they once again partied with the Pakistanis, but less than two weeks later, Genevieve wrote in her journal about “Barack leaving my life—at least as far as lovers go. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines.”
Once again, Genevieve’s own issues were front and center, as she acknowledged, after rereading her journal entries, “how consistently I mention having been drunk and how many times I’ve said I was giving up pot.” Yet “from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things, and he’d let go and ‘fall in love’ with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc., is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say.”
But within just a few days, on Genevieve’s birthday, June 7, Barack gave her a huge philodendron. Even so, a few days later, Genevieve composed another deeply critical poem about him:
You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act,
but clothes don’t make a man,
and I know you just coverin’ a whole lot of pain and confusion.
You think you got it taken care of,
but I’m tellin’ you bro, you don’t.
You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act.
A week later, Genevieve wrote a letter to a friend that she never sent. Only one week of school remained, and “I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive this year: it has been horrendous.” She was continuing to debate whether to teach again in 1985–86, but she was happy at 481 Warren Street, where “I’m making a home for myself. I had wanted to live with Barack—we were lovers for a year—but the relationship as far as steadiness goes has dropped away. The fact that he’s 23 put us in very different places, and I was demanding more than he could give. So I just quietly stopped asking, and it all fell away. We are friends and feel close, and suddenly I find that it’s not me who’s the confused, needy person in a relationship.”59
By the second week of June 1985, Barack Obama was unemployed again, and he had broken up with the woman with whom he had had the closest and most intimate relationship of his entire life. He was also living alone in an unfurnished apartment that Genevieve described as “creepy and very dark” under “very sketchy” circumstances that left Barack visibly nervous the few times Genevieve ever visited him there.
But his NYPIRG experience at CCNY had not extinguished Barack’s desire to pursue some different kind of organizing, and with time on his hands, he spent a good amount of it at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of 40th Street. “I started casting a wide net to see if there were jobs available doing grass roots organizing all across the country,” he later recounted. As Obama remembered it, he felt “a hunger for some sort of meaning in my life. I wanted to be part of something larger,” something “larger than myself,” indeed something less “ ‘vanilla’ ” than NYPIRG. One resource he carefully perused was the June issue of Community Jobs. “I wrote to every organization” that advertised, and one résumé and cover letter he put in the mail some time in mid-June was addressed to Gerald Kellman, Director, Calumet Community Religious Conference, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628.
Jerry Kellman remembered receiving Obama’s résumé, seeing his surname and Hawaiian background, and asking his Japanese American wife April whether “Obama” might be Japanese. “Sure, it could be,” she replied. Within a day or so Jerry telephoned Barack in New York, and early in that conversation, it was clear that Obama was African American—just what Jerry’s ad, and his DCP leadership, hoped to find. Jerry’s father lived on the Upper West Side, and Jerry was already scheduled to visit him two weeks later. He told Barack they should talk in person in Manhattan.
Barack was ecstatic and nervous about his upcoming meeting with Kellman. “He was very much keyed up about it,” Genevieve remembered, “with a very strong sense of wanting to impress and be found suitable … but also a great deal of angst about how the future of his entire life hinged on this meeting.” There was the deep attraction of a real community organizing job, but also, visible yet unspoken, was a strong desire to break free from the weekly pattern of “partying” with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad. “He felt trapped by the Pakistanis and their expectations that he would continue to party with them,” Genevieve realized. Barack “had zero drive to substance use from within himself. It was just an ‘If I don’t, they’ll think I’m stuck up’ ” fear on his part. “He was only doing it so as not to rub it in their face that they were still doing the same-old same-old and he wasn’t interested.” That problem did not present itself when the group gathered at Beenu Mahmood’s apartment on Riverside Drive, or when Wahid attended, but otherwise the weekend cocaine parties extended right up through the spring and summer of 1985—“nonstop—without a doubt—continuous,” Genevieve replied when asked about that time. “It’s uppity to decline because you’re being superior, and he just didn’t want to.” She believed Barack “was very uncomfortable with what he felt was incredibly deep division between where they were going and how they chose to conduct themselves…. If he had been capable of hurting their feelings and being disloyal, he would have stopped engaging” in the weekend gatherings, but he was not, so the prospect of having to leave New York for an organizing job elsewhere held out a promise of freeing him from the bonds of a friendship he could not bring himself to break but very much wanted to sunder. “He mostly wanted to get away from the Pakistanis,” Genevieve believed, for “the restrictions the Pakistanis put on his sense of expanded identity and hopes for the future” had become too much.
Hasan Chandoo sensed much the same thing, especially come that spring and early summer of 1985. Barack “had a tough life in New York. No money, hard work,” and in private he had begun to lecture Hasan about how his profligate use of pot and cocaine was part and parcel of a criminal drug economy that was doing untold damage to black young men and black neighborhoods. “He’s telling me as a friend, ‘Stay away from this shit’ ” and become “more disciplined,” Hasan recalled. “I listened to him” and “I was taken by his maturity,” but “I didn’t stop completely.”
Just before the July 4 holiday, Keith Patchel returned to 350 West 48th Street from Stockholm. Keith was eight months into the sort of lifestyle change Barack was advocating to Hasan, and as a result “I wasn’t there very much” since “I was going to a lot of meetings.” Apartment 4E was “such a casual, come and go kind of place” that “there were endless occasions when I wouldn’t see my roommates for days at a time, especially” given the apartment’s layout. “I do remember somebody being there” when Keith returned, “somebody in a Hawaiian shirt,” but “we could both be living there and not see each other for days at a time.” Only after being told who that had been did Keith come to the realization that “I do have a recollection of meeting Barack.”
Sometime soon after the July 4 holiday, Jerry Kellman arrived in Manhattan and met Obama at a coffee shop for a good two hours. “The whole purpose of this interview