Autobiography of My Dead Brother

by Walter Dean Myers

  When Sidney came by and sat on the stoop with us, even the guys who talked about not wanting to hang with cops wanted to see what he had to say.

  “These were professionals,” Sidney said. “Nothing to do with gangs.”

  “What did it have to do with?” C.J. asked.

  “We suspect drugs,” Sidney said, shaking his head. “What else? Half of what goes on around here is about drugs, isn’t it?”

  Sidney split, and I told C.J. what Rise had said about dealing.

  “You still hanging with him?” C.J. asked. “Because a lot of this mess is getting heavy. You start talking about Mason being in jail and Rise dealing—that’s heavy.”

  “He’s thinking about dealing,” I said. “He’s not dealing yet.”

  “You need to know what’s going down,” C.J. said.

  “Why do I have to know right now?”

  “Because … man.” C.J. shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m just so sick of all these drive-by shootings, the drugs, and all these games we’re playing. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” I said.

  It turned out that I didn’t have to call Rise. He called me. He asked me if I wanted to meet some “swinging” people.

  “Like who?” I asked. “Like some Spanish chicks I know,” he said. “You down with meeting some new people? Maybe you can draw them or something.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What? You scared?”

  “No,” I lied.

  The place I was supposed to meet Rise was across from where the old Audubon Ballroom used to be. That’s where Malcolm X was killed, and that was what I was thinking when I got off the bus.

  Chapter 11

  “You the book-writing man?”

  I nodded. The accent could have been Jamaican—I wasn’t sure. What I was sure of was I didn’t want to be in the Ras Uhuru Social Haven. The dim room was painted a hospital green. On the walls were pictures of Bob Marley and Haile Selassie. But it was the scent that overwhelmed me. It was a sickening competition between the burning incense sticks placed along the walls and the aerosol sprays that were supposed to remind you of some spring scene.

  Two guys sat at a table near the door playing dominoes. The table leg had a scabbard taped to it, and the machete it held was half out. I made a mental note not to say anything bad about that table.

  The guy who had met me at the door was very black, and blade thin. When he smiled—no, he didn’t smile—when he showed his teeth, he reminded me of a program I had seen on Animal Kingdomwhen a lion had caught some animal and was looking him over before settling down to dinner. His eyes were no more than narrow slits, and what should have been the white parts looked more yellow than white.

  He took me to a back room, where I found Rise having his nails done by a pretty brown-skinned woman. She looked to be about my mother’s age.

  “You bring the book?” Rise asked.

  I said yes and nodded at the lady doing his nails as I laid my portfolio case on the table. The woman watched me and, when she saw some of the pictures I had inked, turned her head so she could see them better.

  “What’s that?” Rise turned the portfolio around to see a picture I had drawn of us playing the Junior Gauchos. Rise had been the star of the team up to then, and Gun had just been another player. But that game the Junior Gauchos were supposed to beat us easily, and they were doing it until the last few minutes, when Gun went crazy. He was throwing up shots from the outside and they were all falling. Rise was our big rebounder, and he kept getting the ball and passing to Gun and we came within one point of upsetting the Gauchos.

  “I remember that game,” Rise said. “That’s when I realized my destiny. All I had to do was to step up and get it. If I had stepped up a few minutes earlier, we would have whipped the Gauchos. I learned something from that day.”

  “You did these pictures?” the woman asked, looking at me.

  “Yeah, he did them,” Rise said. “My man here is writing my autobiography. I’m living the life and he writing it down like I tell him.”

  “You’re a good little artist,” the woman said.

  She inspected Rise’s nails and then started putting her files and polish and stuff in her bag. Rise took a bill out of his shirt pocket and gave it to her. She smiled, put the money in her bra, and left.

  “So I guess the Devils or whatever they be calling themselves won’t be coming around our hood anymore,” Rise said, inspecting his nails. The way he did it, putting his fingers out and spreading them under the light, was supposed to impress me. I knew that.

  “I heard one of them was killed,” I said.

  “When you play the big game, you pay the big price,” Rise said. “But I didn’t have a choice. I can’t let people think they can show disrespect in my hood. You know what I mean?”

  “You did the drive-by?”

  “I dropped the word,” Rise said. “Let’s go over some more of your pictures. You see how the girl who was doing my nails was checking out the drawings? That’s the thing you got to be about. You got to get the ink on the paper or else you ain’t been here. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t believe Rise. You could hear his style on any rap jam and even get down with the gangsta lean he was fronting. It made me a little mad, but I was still nervous about being in the place as he started looking at my drawings.

  “What’s this picture?”

  “That’s the time you and me and Calvin went down to Atlantic City with Calvin’s parents—”

  “Snap! And Calvin stood on the boardwalk and said he could see Africa and we believed him!” When Rise laughed, he looked young again. I hadn’t noticed that he didn’t look young anymore.

  “I went to school and told the teacher I had been to Africa over the weekend. You know me, I had to build it up a little. I didn’t just see Africa—I ran down I had beento Africa.”

  “Yeah, I remember that too,” I said. “Look, Rise, you talking about drive-bys and people getting—you know—don’t that freak you out, man?”

  Rise leaned back in his chair. “Truthfully?” he asked. “Yeah, it do. I don’t, like, stay up nights and whatnot, but like I know that if I can ride the pony long enough, I can make it to where I want to be. You know what I mean?”

  “Who are those guys outside?”

  “You don’t want to know them,” Rise said. “You don’t want to talk to them too tough. They’re all mechanics. If something is wrong, they know how to fix it, make it right. That’s all you need to know. They giving me the downtown area. From 147th to 141st. That’s all mine now.”

  My mind was going blank. The whole thing was too heavy for me. I couldn’t even think straight, but Rise wanted to keep going over the pictures as if him “dropping the word” for a drive-by wasn’t any big thing. If it wasn’t big to him, it was sure big to me. Most of the drawings were just sketches, and he was telling me that I should finish them. I told him we had to decide which ones we wanted to use.

  “I’ll get with you later on that,” he said. “You just keep doing the pictures. Yeah, and don’t be repeating anything I said to you. You got that?”

  “I got it.”

  A knock came on the door and a heavyset man stuck his head in and told Rise that Tania wanted to see him. Rise told him to send her in.

  “I want you to meet this girl,” he said to me. “She’s sweet, but I can’t deal with her. You got an old lady?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You can have Tania,” Rise said.

  Tania came in. She was about my age but dressed like maybe she was older so I couldn’t tell. And she was as fine as she wanted to be and knew it. Rise introduced us, and she looked me up and down like she was thinking of buying me or something. Rise got up, closed my portfolio, and asked me to bring him some finished pictures.

  “Color and everything,” he said. “When can you have them done? Next week?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” he sai
d. “I’ll see you next week. Tania’s going with you. Y’all be nice to each other. I got some work to do.”

  Tania started to protest, and Rise held his hand up in front of her face and she stopped in the middle of her sentence.

  Me and Tania left—went through the murky part of the club and out into the cool evening air.

  “So where we going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You ain’t nothing but a kid, right?” she asked, smiling.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Fourteen,” she said, running her hands down the front of her jeans, “but I got it going on, baby. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You guess so? You got to say it. Say, ‘Tania, you got it going on!’”

  “You got it going on!”

  “Look at you, all embarrassed and everything,” she said. “You want to go get something to eat?” I said yes.

  Tania was crazy cute. She had almond-shaped eyes and looked at you from the corners of them as if she knew more than she was saying. Her face was pretty when she was talking, but when she smiled, it just warmed up the distance between us. I was answering her smile with a stupid grin of my own and I knew she was about twenty hundred years older than me in some ways. She didn’t just have it going on, she had it just about finished.

  She had some money, a lot in fact, and we went to a Chinese restaurant between 155th and 154th. We sat in a booth, and the waitress, who knew Tania, came over and asked her if she wanted her shrimps and fries. Tania said yes. I ordered vegetable fried rice.

  “So what do you do?” she asked.

  “Mostly draw,” I said.

  “Those your pictures?”

  I was glad to open the portfolio and show her the pictures. She called over the waitress.

  “Jesse, this is Connie. Connie, this is Jesse. Connie has a regular name and a Chinese name. Her Chinese name is Kang-Ni, which I think is cool, but she don’t like it because it’s Chinese.”

  “Who did the pictures?” Connie asked.

  “Jesse did. He’s doing a story about Rise or something.”

  “His autobiography,” I said.

  Connie looked the pictures over and then told me to put them up so I wouldn’t get anything on them. She said I should sell them.

  The food came, and Tania told me that if I was ever uptight for something to eat, I could come here and Connie would fix me up.

  “We used to go to school together,” Tania said. “I don’t go to school anymore.”

  “How come?”

  “‘Cause it’s not happening,” Tania said. “You know, you go to school and they try to teach you stuff, and then you come out and you find that all you going to be doing is what your daddy did if you’re a boy and what your mama did if you’re a girl. My mama ain’t never did diddly, and I’m going down that same road, so I might as well keep it real. You know what I mean?”

  “You just can’t wake up one morning and make a decision about your whole life,” I said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “Yeah, I do. You look around and tell me what you see.” Tania had a grain of rice on her chin. “Connie was always talking about how she was going to be a doctor. Now she says she’s probably going to be working right here next to her mama. That’s the way it goes, man.”

  “That’s a hard way to look at things,” I said.

  “I’m not saying that school is just all the way wack, but you got to figure out what you got to work with. It’s got its place and everything. But if all you’re going to do is hang in the hood, it don’t mean nothing. All they doing on my block is halfway surviving, sometimes thriving, but mostly jiving. You ain’t but a kid, but I know you can get next to that.”

  “So what you doing? You jiving or thriving?” I asked.

  “I’m just doing that one-day-at-a-time shuffle.” Tania suddenly teared up and we got quiet. She had been looking right at me, but now she looked away. I didn’t feel like eating anymore.

  There was a calendar on the wall with a pretty Chinese girl on it. Her hair was jet black and seemed to catch some of the red from her dress. The numbers on the calendar were printed in red and black, but it was a completely different red from the girl’s dress. The dress was a deep red, and you could see other colors in it too. The numbers were flat, just there.

  “So you want to make a picture of me?” Tania asked.

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll go to my house.” Tania put a ten-dollar bill on the table. “Right down the street.”

  Tania’s house was real bad. There was a guy sitting in the downstairs hall with a baseball bat leaning against the wall next to him. Tania called him Billy and said that he was there to keep the crackheads out. There was an elevator, but we walked up three flights to her apartment. She unhooked her keys from her belt and unlocked the door. Her place was neat and smelled a lot better than the hallway. From the hallway we had come into the kitchen. Over the stove there was a row of yellow porcelain jars with green trim. The first read FLOUR, then SUGAR, COFFEE, and TEA.

  Tania took my hand and led me into her room. There were pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the walls and a poster of her standing on the sidewalk with her dress blowing up.

  “You want me to take my clothes off so you can draw me?” Tania asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You going to hit on me?”

  “I thought I was just going to draw you,” I said, feeling mucho stupid.

  “That’s okay.” Tania looked in the mirror. “But if Rise asks me, I’m going to say we did it, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  My face was flushing and I was trying hard to keep cool. I kept telling myself that all I wanted to do was to draw Tania, but all kinds of images rushed through my head. I did want to draw Tania, but the way she talked, as if I could have done anything else, was messing with my mind.

  When I draw a picture, I’m not that interested in making it look exactly like what I’m drawing. My dad likes that—to see a picture and say something about how it looks almost like a photograph. But what I want is to draw a picture where I can see more about what I drew than just what it looks like. But with Tania I wanted the picture to look just like her so she would like it. I wanted her to like me, too.

  Tania sat on the bed, and I sat on one chair and used a straight-back chair for an easel. As I started to draw her, the first few lines, the curve of her eyebrows away from the bridge of her nose, were almost perfect. I knew I could do a good picture if I didn’t mess it up by getting into my “artist” thing. Sometimes I wanted people to see me being an artist and acting like an artist, and I would mess pictures up. But with Tania’s picture, the two of us in the room alone with no one to see us, I concentrated on the marks I was making on the paper. I was feeling it and it was feeling good.

  It seemed like a short time, but when I had finished, Tania said I had been drawing over a half hour.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  She looked at it for a while and then turned it so that it was next to her face as she looked into the mirror. “Can I have it?” she asked in a voice that sounded like a little kid’s. “Please.”

  “Sure, I did it for you.”

  She looked at me and then she kissed me, putting both of her arms around my neck. “You want me to do anything?” she said, making a gesture toward the bed.

  “No,” I said, mad at myself because I was scared.

  “I don’t think I can get boys like you to like me,” Tania said. “You want to be all good and everything, right?”

  “I like you.”

  “You don’t have to feel bad about that,” she said. “I don’t want to be like no Miss Skippy Skank, either. You going to go home and think about me sometime?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay if I tell Rise we did it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She walked me to the door. There was an old woman s
itting in the kitchen. Her face was a thousand wrinkles and old, but her eyes were hard. Tania spoke to her in Spanish. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the tone seemed sharp.

  She pushed me out the door with one hand and leaned against the wall. “You want to kiss me again?” she asked.

  I kissed her—or maybe she was doing most of the kissing, because her mouth was really busy. “I got a lot of business I take care of,” she said softly. “But if you don’t mind that, I could be your old lady. What you think?”

  “Fine,” I said, not really knowing what she meant about a lot of business.

  She smiled and stood in the doorway as I started down the stairs.

  Kissing Tania had been hot, and I couldn’t think about anything except how it felt to have her tongue in my mouth and her body against mine. My heart was still jumping as I got outside and saw that it was already dark.

  When I got upstairs, Mom asked me where I had been and I told her that I had been to see Rise and then stopped at a girl’s house.

  “What girl?”

  “I just met her,” I answered. “I drew a picture of her at her house.”

  “She had her clothes on?” Mom leaned her head over to one side and gave me a look.

  “Yeah. Is that all girls think about?” I asked. “Taking their clothes off if you draw them?”

  “I was just wondering,” she said, turning away. “Go wash up for supper.”

  I had had the Chinese food but I still had some room for supper. As I washed up, I thought about Rise and what he had said. He looked the same, but the way he was acting, even the way his voice sounded, it wasn’t the same Rise I had in my head. I wasn’t sure whether he was only acting different or if he was different, but I didn’t know how a person could be different. Not so suddenly, anyway.

  Chapter 12

  “The word on the street is that Rise is taking over the whole neighborhood.” I could tell C.J. was breathing hard, even over the telephone. “They say that the drug dealers from up in the Heights gave him the territory, and they were the ones that shot that dude on 145th and Convent.”