Autobiography of My Dead Brother

by Walter Dean Myers

  “How are you going to get a place of your own?” I asked. “You going to leave school and get a job?”

  “Look, Jesse, strictly between you and me, I got the word from some people uptown that they need a new wheel to deal the downtown blow,” he said. “They want to hook up with the Counts, but you know, I don’t know if the Counts are ready to deal on that level. I got to do what you’re doing, draw it all up in my head and see what I want to keep. Figure out what’s real and what I need to let burn. You know what I mean?”

  “Yo, you got to be jiving, right?” I asked. “That doesn’t even sound like you. All the time you talking about not doing drugs and how that stuff is sucking the life out of the hood, and now you’re radioing about dealing? What kind of crap is that?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “You’re not down with it, and I know Benny’s paranoid. Little Man saw me on the street the other day, and he was asking where he could cop a piece so I figure he’s in the street.”

  “Little Man’s a kid,” I said. “I thought you didn’t even want him in the Counts.”

  “I didn’t say I did,” Rise said. “All I’m saying is that I’m putting everything together, the same way you are with your little drawings, and figuring what I’m going to keep and what I’m going to throw away.”

  “Where do you think dealing is going to carry you?” I asked.

  “Yo, I guess I don’t know, Reverend Givens. Let me see. Let me see. Could it be down the road to hell and damnation? How about the fast lane to wrack and ruin? How about the easy way to get my picture done in chalk? Maybe you could tell the Man to let you slip under the tape and do the picture right. What you say, Reverend?”

  “Nothing you don’t know,” I said.

  “Look, Jesse, let me tell you what the deal be,” Rise said. “Everybody knows there are things out there that are righteous and things you need to leave alone, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “And some people are going to pick up the bad stuff and somebody is going to supply it, right?”

  “I’ve heard this before,” I said.

  “So does that mean it’s not true?” Rise asked. “Does it mean that it’s true but you can’t deal with it? Or does it just mean you want to close the book on me?”

  “All it means it that I’m, like, falling apart inside. I can’t figure out where all this is coming from. One day we’re talking the same talk and the next day it’s Greek and Russian, and I don’t understand squat.”

  “Yeah, well, one day we were blood brothers,” Rise said. “Now you sounding like brothers ain’t brothers and blood ain’t blood. What do I need to understand about that?”

  “Yo, Rise, you know, sometimes we’re not exactly seeing something but we know it’s there,” I said, forcing the words out, turning my eyes away from my friend. “But sooner or later you got to air it out before it gets really stink. You know what I mean?”

  “I hear you got some words in your mouth you need to get out,” Rise said.

  “Yeah. Right. So look, man. We’ve sat together—sometimes right here in this room—and talked about how foul drugs are. I remember you saying how they were bringing down life on the street and how you couldn’t show any props for dudes on the nod. Now you running a whole new game. What’s up with that?”

  “What you see changes,” Rise said. “I was seeing something different then than I do now. Just like all them dudes banging their veins in some hallway looking for a place to stick their needles. They weren’t born on the nod, so they must have woke up one morning seeing something different than they seen before.”

  “What do you see different?” I asked.

  “Me,” Rise answered, his head down. “One day I seen me standing in the cold by the side of the track waiting for my train to come. All I was getting was colder and colder and my train never did come. What I’m thinking now is that I need to get out of the cold.”

  “Not just getting paid?”

  “The paper go with the heat,” Rise said. “I don’t expect you to see it. You still waiting for that train to come. Deep in your heart you believe it’s on its way. Going to take you right on out of here to the good life, right? We used to talk about that good life. What we were going to do, how we were going to tip and style like we owned the world. You remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still believe in it, or you looking the other way?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But I know you used to say that drugs were heaping pain on people. That’s what you about? Heaping pain on people?”

  “Drugs is a pain you can handle, little brother,” Rise said. “That’s why people out there looking for them. That’s why they keep going back to them. It ain’t fly, but it’s real.”

  “I don’t know, Rise. I don’t know if everything you can touch is real.”

  “We’re family, man. You and me.” Rise tapped his chest and tapped mine. “When nobody digs your program, you turn to your family, to your brother. Ain’t that right?”

  “We’re still brothers,” I said. “I just have to wrap my mind around what’s going on.”

  “I’m checking out your heart, Jesse,” Rise said. “This is about real life, not about no dreams and stories. Real life, man. You can close your eyes and think about what you want to happen and what you want to see. But when you open your eyes, it’s still the same old streets and the same old hurts. That’s real life, and sooner or later you got to deal with it or walk away from it. I’m looking at you but I’m seeing me and feeling all warm, man. It’s about the peace.”

  “It’s about the peace,” I said.

  I packed my stuff up and said good-bye to Rise’s grandmother. When she smiled at me, I smiled back and felt a little foolish, because I didn’t know what her smile meant or why I was smiling. Rise walked me downstairs and kept saying that he was real glad I was doing his biography.

  “What did you think about Mason the other day?” I asked.

  “Mason’s gone,” Rise said. “He’s like a dead man who don’t know he’s dead, and still trying to walk around with the people and wondering why nobody’s talking to him. He’s catching an attitude because he thinks people are ignoring him, when all that’s really wrong is that he’s gone. He’s a dead man sniffing around used-to-be. It’s cold, but there it is.”

  What I was thinking as I was heading home was maybe Rise wasn’t talking about Mason at all. Maybe he was talking about himself. Nothing that he had said before—about drugs killing the neighborhood and messing up people’s lives—was out of his head. It all had to be there somewhere.

  But I didn’t want to walk away from him. I didn’t want to put a name on it, to run it down to his face or walk around telling myself it was cool to turn my back on somebody I had cared for as much as I had for Rise. I told myself that if I did his autobiography right, if I did a really good job, maybe I could change him back to what I knew. Because the dude I knew would not have been dealing blow. I thought about him saying that dealing might lead to his portrait in chalk and me slipping under the police tape to put the chalk marker around his body. The thought was sadder than I wanted to carry, or even know about.

  Chapter 9

  I was tight with my folks in a way. I could say things to them, and they would try not to get too crazy about it even if they were nervous. But there were things they didn’t know about. It wasn’t as if they were stupid or anything—it was like their brains were in a different place than mine sometimes. When I was young and had a cold, all I wanted was for Mom to take care of me—make me some soft-boiled eggs and feel my forehead with the palm of her hand. That was all good, and I enjoyed it without thinking too much about it. Mom enjoyed it too. But now that I’m older, I don’t want her fussing over me, even when I’m sick, and she doesn’t see it because her head is in a different place, or maybe in the same place but at the wrong time.

  That’s how I felt about Rise. If Rise wasn’t doing well in school, I woul
d have spoke to it, said something to Mom, and we would have talked about it. But how are you going to tell your parents something like “Hey, I think my blood brother is going to get into some big-time crime but I don’t want you to say anything about it because it’s all heavier than we can deal with”?

  It was more complex, too. I had heard the whole rap about how we didn’t grow drugs around the way. We didn’t have no airplanes, so somebody had to bring them in and get them to the streets. All the needy veins ended at the fingertips—they didn’t stretch to South America, or Afghanistan, or anyplace else they were growing the stuff. The people bringing in drugs weren’t the kind of people you stood on the corner and pointed your finger at, either. They were the kind of people who shot you because it was easier than moving down the block.

  I drew a five-panel cartoon. In the first panel my character Spodi Roti, the Rasta Blasta, came in from school and told his mom that a crackhead jumped off the roof and his mom said, “That’s so cute.” In the next panel Spodi said he just found out the mailman was HIV positive and his mom asked him if his room was clean. In the third panel he asked her did she know if ammo from a .357 would fit a Kalishnakov, and his mom asked him if he could sing in it too. In the fourth panel Spodi says, “Sing in what?” and in the last panel his mom says, “Isn’t that Greek you’re speaking?”

  Busted over to C.J.’s house for our Cuban band gig. Benny was there, and he had two congas and a pile of shirts. The shirts were green with all this frilly stuff down the front that made them look more like blouses than men’s shirts.

  “Those are our outfits,” C.J. said. “So we look like a real band.”

  “Yo, Benny, I told you I don’t read music, right?”

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” Benny said. “Just get on the conga and follow the piano. The more we play together, the better we’re going to get. Check it out—I got my camera and I know this chick who’s going to take pictures and everything. This is going to be smoking.”

  We put on the shirts and a waistband that came up too high on me and went over to the party. It was at this girl’s house up on the hill, and it was cool except that her house was like something out of a magazine, it was so fine. Her father met us at the door and told us he wanted us to play for an hour and a half and then we could leave.

  Benny asked him where the money was, and he told Benny we would get the money before we left. I wasn’t worried that the guy didn’t have the money because the house was so special, and I was thinking more about playing the conga because I didn’t really know anything about that.

  There were a bunch of okey-dokes at this girl’s birthday party. All together there were about twenty-five kids and not one that I knew. I mentioned it to Benny as we set up.

  “They’re too classy for you, bro,” he whispered.

  They were, too. Only a few were black even though the people giving the party were dark-skinned. The rest were either white or Asian. I’m down with everybody, so that didn’t bother me, but I always thought that Cubans were mostly black.

  Benny introduced us as the Caballeros, which was cool, and this one guy started playing his conga but real low and real sweet, like he knew what he was doing. They were still giving us the fish eye as the rest of us started on the congas and the horns came in and didn’t sound too tough because nobody knew what we were supposed to be playing. Then C.J. came in on the piano and you could see them straighten up. C.J. was cooking from the get-go, and they were just standing there looking at us. Then the birthday girl’s father took her hand and started dancing, and the rest of them, the eight or nine who could dance a little, joined them.

  Okay, so we played for almost two hours. C.J. was sounding so good that he made me believe I could play.

  “Man, did you hear how that baby grand was sounding?” C.J. was saying on the way down the hill when the gig was over. “I need a new instrument.”

  “How about the church’s piano?”

  “It’s so dull-sounding you want to bang it harder to try to get some life out of it,” C.J. said. “I asked my moms about getting an electronic keyboard. Some of them are super bad. She don’t believe in credit and so that’s out, and she won’t let me play in the band to make any money.”

  “You played today!”

  “Right, because she found out who I was playing for—that dude works downtown in one of those big Wall Street companies. He was in Ebony and stuff.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “She’s got her heart on me going to college, but that’s two years away. I think she hopes that I give up the music. Switch to something like accounting or business,” C.J. said. “You know what she would really dig?”

  “A preacher.”

  “You got it,” C.J. said. “Then she could go on and die and figure she did her job with me.”

  “We’re going to be the same way,” I said. “I mean, when we grow up and have kids and stuff, we’re going to be just like our folks, trying to tell them the right thing to do even when we don’t want to listen to what they want.”

  “I’m not having any kids,” C.J. said.

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “You’ll probably be one of these guys who have fifteen or sixteen kids.”

  I was feeling good and kind of light, but C.J. wasn’t in the mood for being light. He was thinking about something else, and I figured it was serious, so I didn’t push too hard.

  “C.J., you were together today,” I said. “You were great. Nobody could have pulled this thing off except you, man.”

  “As far as it went.” C.J. put his arm around me. “And as far as it goes, man. But we may just have to bust out of this joint.”

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  Chapter 10

  White Clara, Benny, Gun, and me were sitting on the stoop. White Clara was braiding Benny’s hair and going on about some guy named Brittle who had a gun.

  “Calvin said he had the gun stuck down in his pants, and they were so low his fly was touching the tops of his sneakers,” she said. “And he ain’t but like five or six or some ridiculous age.”

  “It was probably a cap gun,” Benny said. “Lot of kids got cap guns that look real. Guy pulled a stickup in a bank downtown with a cap gun. They arrested him and he still had the box it came in and the receipt because he was going to take it back after the stickup.”

  “Calvin said it wasn’t no cap gun,” White Clara said.

  I watched White Clara’s fingers flying through Benny’s hair. She wasn’t really white, but so light-skinned she might as well have been.

  “If a white cop sees you with a cap gun, he’s going to use it as an excuse to shoot you,” White Clara said.

  “If I was a cop and I saw you with a gun that looked real, I’d shoot your butt, too,” Benny said.

  “What this school bus coming down this street for?” White Clara asked, pointing toward the corner. “They got school buses for summer school?”

  I turned and saw the bus start down the street, then speed up.

  When the guys appeared at the window, all I could think was that they were some kind of ball team. Then I saw the do-rags and the glint of metal as they lifted their pieces over the bottoms of the school bus windows.

  “Drive-by!” White Clara screamed, and went over the side rail as the first bullets hit the steps.

  I panicked big-time and just closed my eyes and covered my head. Then I heard the bus squeal to a stop, and I thought the guys from inside were getting out and coming back after us. I opened my eyes and saw that the bus had stopped because a gypsy cab had pulled out in front of it.

  The cabdriver was yelling at the bus driver; then he must have seen the guns, because he ran back to his cab as the shots rang out.

  Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! That fast. Then the driver of the bus hit the front of the gypsy cab and pushed it out of the way and sped down the street.

  We looked around for White Clara and found her in the basement rubbing her hip.
<
br />   “Man, I’m shot!” Benny was holding his hand.

  I looked at it and saw that he had a hole in the palm of his hand between his forefinger and his thumb. I felt sick to my stomach.

  I sat down and took deep breaths so I wouldn’t throw up. The pain was getting to Benny, and White Clara was trying to keep him calm. In the street a crowd was beginning to gather around the gypsy cab. I didn’t want to look at Benny’s hand anymore, so when I saw Gun start over to the cab, I went with him. The driver was sitting outside the cab on the ground.

  He was a big man, with a heavy belly that was heaving as he breathed. His face looked distressed and his eyes were searching the crowd that gathered in front of him. He was in a bad way and he knew it.

  The whole thing depressed me. I went upstairs and lay across the bed and wanted to cry, but crying felt so stupid. This was real life, as Rise had said. And what the heck did that mean?

  The talk was that it was the Diablos, a gang from uptown, that had done the shooting. What I knew about them was that they took beatdowns to get into the gang and worse beatdowns if they tried to get out. The saying was that once you were a Diablo, you were in for life. It was the first shooting of the week.

  The second drive-by came two days later, and we heard about it in the usual way, a stream of police cars and emergency vehicles, sirens wailing, speeding through the hood, and turning up Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The first word was some wack garbage about terrorists, but then the cell phones started working and we got the news.

  Some Diablos had been shot up really bad, and at least one of them had been seriously injured and could die. Everybody was out on the street and guessing if this was a payback shooting. Calvin said that he thought it was the Haitians, because the gypsy driver had been Haitian. I didn’t think so, because they weren’t into gangs, just making a living.