Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  I was still trying to keep my relationship with Khayree and Nasir alive too, but even someone as socially clueless as I could tell that trying to bring the two families of kids together wasn’t a good idea. I tried it a couple of times, but they didn’t click. Khayree was too withdrawn, and Nasir too young and volatile. James invariably would find something to feel offended about and go off on one of his violent rages. Michael and Sabrina were decent and open to Khayree and Nasir, but they didn’t really connect with them.

  All this time, I was sending letters to organizations in Washington, D.C., trying to find a job that would take me back to issues like the Ethiopian famine, which had sparked my interest in Africa in the first place. Finally, I got a letter from an organization called Bread for the World—one of the groups, coincidentally, that had produced some of the pamphlets my Spanish teacher Ms. Kane had showed me back in high school—offering me a position as an intern with a yearly stipend of $8,000. Perfect.

  It meant, though, that I had to move back to Washington. I couldn’t just drop Khayree and Nasir, of course, so I leaned hard on my brother Luke to fill in for me. Luke had internalized our upbringing—and the “he ain’t heavy” ethic of Boys’ Town—his own way: He’d become a teacher at a high school in inner-city Philadelphia. It was perpetually hard work but incredibly rewarding because of the socioeconomic circumstances of the students, and it required a level of commitment to young people—a day-to-day, minute-to-minute commitment, sustained over years—that I couldn’t fathom. I was such a nomad, endlessly moving from one engagement to the next. Michael, James, and their family were the only exception to that rule, and even that was hard for me to sustain. Luke went deep. He’d grown into a big, handsome man with a biting and understated wit, whose sad, heavily shadowed eyes revealed the depth of his empathy for the suffering of others, an empathy that was much quieter than mine. I admired him tremendously, but that didn’t keep me from demanding that he pick up the pieces in my wake.

  I wheedled from Luke a promise to “take over” my relationship with Khayree and Nasir, to slip into my shoes as big brother. As soon as Luke mumbled his assent—what else could he do?—I was off like a shot. I loaded Michael, James, and Sabrina into the fleshmobile along with my favorite Archie Bunker chair, reading lamp, books, and clothes and raced down I-95 as fast as I could. I pulled up in front of the big blue-gray house on North Capitol and let the kids out.

  It was a little nerve-wracking to be back there again. Up on North Capitol, drug dealers openly hung out on the sidewalks, giving passers-by the stare down. Sursum Corda, the roughest housing project in the District, lay barely a quarter mile away, and the sounds of sirens from over there were constant, peppered with occasional gunshots. Luckily, I thought, the boys are too young to get in any kind of serious trouble; Michael wasn’t but twelve years old, and James ten. What worried me most was that North Capitol Street was a huge boulevard, with cars whizzing by at forty miles an hour. I could picture one of the kids running out into the street after a bouncing ball and getting smashed. I was more worried about that in my self-protective state of ignorance than of the real dangers and temptations that the boys faced on a daily basis.

  But the good news was that my social worker contact told me that any talk of taking the kids away from Denise had dissipated, and Denise herself felt a bit renewed from the break she had gotten. I’m not sure the family ever even knew how close they had come to being broken up and the kids thrown into the foster care system. That train wreck was averted, but other disasters were in formation.

  As though I didn’t have enough going on, between the new job and the boys, I enrolled in a graduate program at American University, after attending a semester of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where I accumulated a few lackluster Cs and one lifetime friend, Adam Braufman, who used to sit in the back of class with me and pass notes back and forth about our dreams beyond those academic walls, as well as our endless Sixers versus Celtics debates. So American U. was lucky college number seven. Lord knows I didn’t want to leave myself a spare minute. I might have relaxed. I might have had a girlfriend. I might have slept more than four to five hours a night. But I guess self-declared superheroes don’t have steady girlfriends. Comic book heroes don’t sleep.

  J.P. and James

  Michael, Sabrina, and Mr. P.

  6. The Unthinkable

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  It felt good to get back to North Capitol, to tell the truth. The summer in Philadelphia with J.P. was fun—getting to know all those new people, hanging with Mr. and Mrs. P in their big house—but I’d gotten a little taste of that fast nighttime life back in D.C., and I kind of missed it. Soon as I returned, I went back to cooking up my phony crack out of soap, baking powder, and Orajel. I hid what I was doing from James and Sabrina. Sabrina would have kicked my ass, and James, he wasn’t but about ten years old then. I was going to sixth grade and all, but on the lunch break I’d go out to the corner and sell my shit. Miss Hurston would come out and say, “What you doing?” I think she knew, but what was she going to do about it? Put me out of school? She knew I’d have liked that; I could be out on the corner all damn day.

  Selling bits of soap and candle, though, you make kid money. Candy-bar-and-sneakers money. Pretty soon I wanted to be in the life full time. James and I had a job pumping gas, and I’d watch the drug dealers come in and out in their nice rides, thinking, That’s what I want. I was the oldest, and I felt like I was the man of the house. I wanted to take care of my family, and this was the best way to do it.

  One day a dealer comes in driving a big-ass Cadillac, and when I open the gas cap, a little bag of rocks falls out. I look up; the dealer is busy talking to somebody, and I think, Should I put this in my pocket? I chickened out, though, and handed it to him. He laughed and gave me $30.

  Just holding those crack rocks in my hand that one minute, though, helped me make up my mind. One day I asked Gomez to get me some of the real thing. He came by the house and took from his pocket a handful of tiny little plastic bags, each one with a tiny white nugget in it—my first real crack cocaine. I held it in my hand, and it seemed to pulse with power—like holding a little bit of uranium or some radioactive shit. Something way more powerful than it looks. I could see with my own eyes what that shit was doing up and down the block. I could see people so burned up by crack that they looked like scarecrows. But I could also see how fine the people who were selling it were dressed, and how tall they walked. I gave Gomez the $100 I had saved, and he gave me twenty-five of those little bags; told me to charge $25 apiece for them. When Sabrina and my mom weren’t paying any attention, I went out there on the street and offered them up. Little Charles took me by the hand and showed me how to get it done, but really, it was like pouring water on the ground in the middle of the desert. Those twenty-five were gone in a single heartbeat, and I had $500 in my pocket. $500! For about a half-hour’s work!

  Things started to get really crazy for me up on North Capitol Street. I saw people getting shot, getting beat up. I started getting used to the violence, to the dope fiends that used to scare me so much.

  I started hanging around with some older guys, and some of them were real killers. The truth is I was attracted to the power those dudes had. No one ever fucked with them, and everyone respected them. I wanted that. I was tired of getting picked on for wearing those three sweat suits and being called dirty. That shit had to end.

  But I had to do things to earn that respect for myself. It got easier and easier for me to do some of the things that I used to be scared of. As soon as I could afford some better clothes, I would go to school with a .22 in my pocket that Little Charles lent to me. Everything changed. The older guys started looking out for me. After that, nobody picked on me or none of my brothers and sisters.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  Around this time, money was tight for me. Getting rich was never part of the justice advocate’s plan, but dancing on the poverty line wasn’t eith
er. To make ends meet, I sold my beloved baseball card collection, which was probably bringing me bad karma anyway because Luke and I had shoplifted so much of it—one pack or box of packs at a time—from grocery and drugstores in all the places we were growing up. Then the basketball card collection. Then football. Even the booklet of player stamps that my dad had helped me collect from gas stations when I was seven—every player in the NFL. Then my treasured comic books, when things got really tough.

  To save rent money, I moved into—or more accurately, squatted in—a sparse unit in a condemned apartment building about ten blocks east of where the boys were living. Even by the standards of the places to which I’d become accustomed, it was on the edge. People were always prowling around on the back porch of the house at night, and because of the position of one of the streetlights, their shadows would be projected on my bedroom wall in eerie detail. Water and power had long been switched off by the utility companies, but somebody had jury-rigged them back on. The only problem was, the two systems had somehow gotten scrambled, and whenever I took a shower, I’d get a tiny electric shock about every thirty seconds—a constant reminder of my squatter status.

  Bread for the World was engaged in exactly the sort of work I’d hoped to learn: moving American public opinion toward effective policies to combat hunger both in the United States and abroad. This was the mid to late 1980s, and conservative Christian organizations were getting a lot of attention and praise for organizing church members all over the country into political constituencies against abortion rights and gay rights, and in favor of things like vouchers for religious schools. Bread for the World, which took its name from the edict enunciated in the Book of Matthew—“I was hungry and you gave me bread”—aimed to marshal a similar faith-based constituency in the fight against world hunger. When I joined, it was trying to found a chapter in every congressional district, in the hopes of elevating the fight against world hunger to an urgent issue for Christians, and one that they would take action to rectify.

  It was an uphill fight. The Cold War was still the overriding organizing principle of American foreign policy, and the United States did little overseas that didn’t somehow give it a millimeter of advantage over the Soviet Union. The loudest Christian voices called themselves the Moral Majority at the time. I never believed they were a majority. They certainly weren’t focused on poverty, and they were zealous supporters of budget cuts for poor people’s programs. One prominent official proclaimed, “Let them eat cheese,” referring to the government’s surplus cheese distribution programs, which did more for subsidized dairy farmers than for poor children’s nutritional status, and the government at the time tried to get ketchup certified as a vegetable for the school lunch program in order to save money.

  Bread for the World had one small advantage though. It had been founded by Art Simon, the brother of Illinois Senator Paul Simon, who was new to the Senate then and in a position to ask his colleagues to at least see activists from Bread for the World. Nominally, I worked out of an old warehouse at Eighth and Rhode Island Avenue in Northeast D.C. where Bread for the World kept its headquarters. My job, though, was on Capitol Hill, walking the halls of Congress and trying to buttonhole staffers. I’d harangue them about hunger in places like Somalia and Ethiopia and about the need for the United States to invest in solutions. It became clear to me the first week that few on Capitol Hill knew much about what was really happening in the most forgotten corners of the world. The geography of my beat—the Horn of Africa, Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, Zimbabwe, and so on—obviously meant little to them.

  At first I was depressed at the general lack of knowledge, but then slowly I began to see opportunity. There was no real opposition to alleviating hunger or to making peace; the obstacles were ignorance and apathy. Somebody who really understood the issues, and who also knew how Washington worked, could nudge the ship of state in the proper direction. Heck, the staff members were so overworked that they were happy to have people like me help them draft legislative language.

  I was seeing the boys a lot during this period. We’d still go fishing and play in the park, but mostly our time together was jammed with my job. Just as I had done when working for Congressman Gray in Philadelphia, I brought the boys to work with me, and I counted on both their good behavior and other people’s goodwill to make it work. My friend Mike Bandstra and I would sit up on the roof of the Bread for the World warehouse, which overlooked Washington, D.C.’s dual face of majesty and destitution, and argue politics while the boys ran around playing hide-and-seek or football. Luckily for me, Bread for the World had hired a gorgeous young intern named Melissa Day who really loved Michael and James and spent hours with them. Melissa knew how to talk to them in a way that drew out long conversations. I’d be on the phone, or studying some report on my desk, and I’d glance over to see Michael and James talking on and on with Melissa. She also hugged them a lot, and they couldn’t get enough of that.

  I had some vague sense that bringing the boys with me to work would expose them to the functioning professional world and give them aspirations beyond the petty crime and the various other negative influences they were exposed to every day. But that was mostly just an excuse. I brought them to work with me because I wanted to be working all the time. I didn’t really want to burn an entire day fishing anymore. In a single day, a thousand African children might die; how could I spend that day casting for catfish in the Potomac? The options for me were either bring the boys to work or not see the boys at all, and I couldn’t have that.

  But I was increasingly only half there for them. One night during a visit to Philadelphia, the boys and I were driving around with my brother, Luke, and it was very hot—one of those humid, leaden nights that made everybody cranky. We all needed to get out of the car, and we stopped near the Art Museum, at one of the big, ornate fountains in downtown Philly. We couldn’t help splashing each other, it was so hot, and before I knew it, the kids were in the fountain, fully clothed, up to their knees. I knew I should have scolded them and pulled them out, but they were so lit up with glee that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Before I knew it, Luke was in there with them, splashing and yelling and hamming it up. I thought about climbing in myself, but then I remembered that I hadn’t yet read a report on Africa from the United Nations that had just been released. I had an appointment the following afternoon with Congressman Mickey Leland back in D.C., and I wanted to be fully prepared. So while Luke and the kids played, I sat under a street lamp and pored through the report.

  That image—the boys scraped off onto Luke momentarily so I could cram in another hour of work on Africa—is emblematic of my relationships. I’d never fully been a brother to Luke. I’d been willing to use him as a buffer against Dad, but I’d never really brought him into my heart the way a big brother ought to. And now I was using him again, just the way I was using my parents as caregivers for the boys without acknowledging any appreciation for my dad’s efforts.

  Even so, the boys had bestowed upon me another chance at childhood. They were helping me understand my father in terms of the challenges of dealing with kids with independent or even rebellious natures, and they were giving me the chance to outperform him at fathering. They were allowing me to be a real brother for the first time. They were warming a place inside me that had been cold and dark for a very long time.

  We were family now.

  The sad thing was that as a man in my mid-twenties, I still didn’t really know how to be a real member of a family. I suppose I wanted to be a real brother to James and Michael and David—just as I’d wanted to be one to Luke—but my heart had been skating in its same icy ruts for too long.

  The way these feelings percolated up to my consciousness was as a vague worry that my relationship with the boys and my passion for Africa were on a collision course. One thing or the other was about to happen: Either my responsibilities to the boys were going to keep me from spending as much time in Africa as I wanted to, or my work in Africa
was going to remove me from the lives of my precious little brothers. Either outcome was too horrible to contemplate, so I did what I did best: I avoided the issue. I kept myself in a hamster-wheel maelstrom of work and school and brief, frenzied bursts of play with the boys, and in so doing, avoided thinking about the unthinkable.

  7. “A Gun Was Easier to Get Than Books Around There”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  One day Alvin, Mickey, Little Charles, and me went to Mr. Natly’s, a store in the neighborhood, to get some candy. Who walks in but another friend of ours, Mumar. Mumar was all excited and wanted us to come out on the sidewalk to see; he had him a four-five up under his shirt and wanted to show us all. Man, guns was easier to get than books around there. That’s cool, we said, and Alvin, Mickey, and I went back in the store to get our candy. Suddenly: BANG! The three of us go running outside, looking this way and that, and don’t see nothing. But when we turned around, Little Charles was right there at our feet, fallen against the wall with a big hole in his face. Blood was coming out of him like water out of a water fountain—a big spurt in front and another bigger one out the back of his head. Mumar was just standing there, frozen, tears all over his face. “I can’t believe what I just did,” he said. “I can’t believe what I just did.” It was a cold accident, but that didn’t keep them from giving Mumar fifteen years. Lost his friend and fifteen years of his life in one second.

  I was all fucked up from that for a long time. I loved Little Charles like a brother. This is what started me drinking and smoking weed, and after that the violence didn’t bother me one bit anymore.

  After Little Charles died, I had nightmares for over a year. I used to drink myself to sleep, hoping I wouldn’t be woken up by them bad dreams. I was trying to ease the pain of losing my best friend. That pain was vicious.