Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  I couldn’t have admitted this to myself at the time, but more than just faith in Michael was operating, and more than simple denial. I was reaching my personal boundary with Michael. My willingness to truly involve myself with him—to accept the kind of responsibility that our years together would have dictated—was clearly lacking. To engage thoroughly with what was going on would have demanded a tremendous investment of time and energy, and my mind wasn’t there. It was in Africa. That’s where I wanted to be—physically, intellectually, and emotionally. I couldn’t have articulated it then—I couldn’t even allow myself to be aware of it—but I was making a choice, and Michael was on the losing end.

  It’s not that I was a complete machine. I was aware of the big emotional holes in my heart even as I stepped around them. Every now and then, though, I was able to tune into my own feelings and express them right. One afternoon I visited my brother, Luke, and his fiancée, Kim, at their home in South Philadelphia. Luke and I were cordial, but neither of us was the first person the other would call to share thoughts. Even over the years, we hadn’t become superclose. Sitting in Luke’s house, though, I was overwhelmed with admiration for him. He’d chosen a hard and selfless path; he was still a teacher in an under-resourced Philadelphia public high school. And he’d done what I hadn’t been able to do—make a deep, permanent, emotional commitment to a wonderful woman.

  Before I could think too long, I heard myself telling Luke how much I admired him and cherished him as a brother. What he did on a daily basis at that school deserved real recognition. I told him I hoped we could spend more time together going forward.

  When dinner was over, I was walking down Broad Street when I heard my name being shouted. It was Luke, running after me. He ran up, out of breath, and his eyes were wet and shiny. “I just want to tell you how much being your brother means to me,” he said, “and how much I look up to you for who you are.” I was shocked. Luke had never shared anything with me before, and most certainly nothing about his feelings for me. I opened my arms and we had a deep embrace, a hug that erased those years of distance between us.

  As my high school teacher Mr. Woz once wrote to me, “Epiphanies are life’s diamonds amid the shards of glass we search through for solutions to emotional wreckage.”

  It was around this time that I was going up the escalator at the D.C. Metro and from the corner of my eye spotted a woman walking toward the platform. I was not a man given to falling in love; I’d spent too long as the Lizard, and I expended too much energy on my work and the boys, to hive off a piece of my heart that way. I’d had short-term girlfriends, sure, but none of them ever really laid a glove upon my heart since my high school sweetheart had taken a flamethrower to it. And as the self-protective years went by, I had become much more confident with women, and a bit of a hit-and-run artist.

  Something about this woman on the subway platform, though, seemed to yank the heart right out of my chest. I found her waiting for the Red Line in the direction I was going and stood next to her. She had caramel-colored skin and long wavy hair; the smell of her—musky and flowery and intensely female—made my vision blurry. The train was taking an unusually long time to come, and I finally worked up the nerve to say hello. She said hello. We started talking and didn’t stop, as the train came and we boarded. We reached my stop but I didn’t budge; I kept talking, and so did she. We traveled far past my stop—almost to the end of the line—before she got off. As she did, I put a slip of paper with my phone number on it in her hand.

  “What’s your name?” I asked as the doors slid closed behind her.

  “Jean!”

  I waited two agonizing days. The receptionist was alerted to page me if a woman named Jean were to call. Finally, the call came, and in my poverty-stricken state, we arranged to meet at a crummy little pizza shop for our first date. She ended up being two hours late, but something told me to wait for her. It wasn’t just her looks, beautiful though she was. Ridiculous as it sounds, I’d felt something sitting next to her on the Metro. There was some kind of subsonic communication, or maybe it was on the level of pheromones. Whatever it was, I’d felt a real bond between us. It turned out we both had very intense family stories; her family was shattered in a thousand different ways, and she was as tortured by it, and as eager to figure it out, as I was tortured and curious about my relationship with my father. It became the basis of our relationship—her supporting me in my painful dance with my family, and my supporting her in hers.

  My parents loved Jean, and she became my bridge back to my father. She spent many hours with him—just the two of them. I would pass through a room and find them talking—her forehead surrounded by shiny brown ringlets, sometimes almost touching his, crowned by his gleaming white hair. I never asked Jean or my dad what they talked about, but their conversations were long and deep. My dad would often find his more serious side around Jean, with less of his clowning and Irish bluster. He loved to sit and talk with her, heart to heart, like a priestly confessional. Jean seemed to find the secret passage to my father’s heart with no effort at all.

  Michael and James loved her too; she was very kind to them. But I could always tell that she was holding something back from the boys, even if they couldn’t see it. She’d occasionally come along if I was taking the boys to a festival on the Washington Mall, or to a movie that she wanted to see. Mostly, I’d head off to see the boys, and Jean would go off somewhere to study—she was always taking courses. It wasn’t very pointed—at least, not at first—but the message to me was: those are your boys, not mine.

  8. “I Was Trying to Do the Thing”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  I guess I wasn’t all the way into the life back then, even with all the crack I was selling. I guess some little part of me wanted to live straight, and that’s why I told Cool I didn’t want to hang with him no more. Because when they sent me back to seventh grade the next school year, I really tried to do the thing. I went to class, and showed up on time. I did the work and read the books. I remember thinking, “Okay, I can do this.” But then one day my name came up on the loudspeaker. “Michael Mattocks, please report to the office,” and I thought, what the fuck? I go down to the principal’s office, and he says, “You’re too old for seventh grade.” I was like, “What? I ain’t but thirteen!” He said, “You look too old; you got a mustache; I don’t want you to be bullying the other kids. You ought to be in vocational school.” I wasn’t bullying nobody, and I told him so. But he didn’t let me come back.

  I felt so bad. Here I was trying to do the thing, and they put me out just for looking like a tough little motherfucker. My mom marched right up to the school, and the principal told her the same thing. They sent me to some vocational school, but I quit that place after two days. So I was done with school at thirteen. Nobody from the school district called, or came to the house. That was that. I ain’t been back since.

  That shit crushed me. It broke my spirit. Once I finally had got my head right, I really liked going to school.

  At this point my life was so fucked up I couldn’t go straight if I tried. And I was broke as shit. I was partying way too much. I was drinking and smoking weed, and all my money was going into that. Little Charles getting killed was still affecting me in ways I couldn’t even count.

  One day I’m hanging out with my buddy D when this big, dark-skinned fat man walks up. He’s got glasses and a big bushy beard; an impressive-looking dude. “Son-son,” D says to me—everybody called me Son-Son on account I was the youngest dude out there—“Son-Son,” D says, “this is Fats. Fats, Son-Son here can pump.” That means I could sell drugs good. This Fats looks me up and down; he was a mountain of a man. “You like the life?” he asks me. He’s got this deep, rumbling voice and intelligent, warm eyes, as opposed to, say, Cool. I liked him right off.

  “I do,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Fats says. “I’ll front you five twenties and see how you work them.”

  I took those five tw
enties out on the street, and they were gone before the big hand reached three. When I went back, Fats chuckled in a deep, proud, rumbly way that made me feel like I was his son. He took $50 and gave me the other $50. Then he gave me fifteen twenties, and I sold them right quick too.

  “Tell you what,” Fats says. “Since you pump this shit good, I’ll bring you half a ki tomorrow.”

  And sure enough, at eight o’clock the next morning, there was Fats a tap-tap-tapping on my door. When he took out that half a ki—a white lump about the size of two softballs—my eyes got big as a motherfucker. This was the big time.

  “You’re going with me, right Shorty?” Fats said. “We’re going to do this thing together.”

  From then on, I had plenty of crack. Some days you had to be out there for hours because there’d be so many guys out there selling. You’d have to be quick and say, “That’s my sale; I got him, I got him.” But unlike a lot of guys, I was good at it. Here’s why: I was loyal to selling drugs, you hear me? The main thing that separates a good dealer from a bad one is: Don’t talk smart to your crackheads. Make them be loyal to you. Treat them good. Make them feel like they’re somebody. Make them feel like you care. Every Friday, I’d buy gallons of liquor and cartons of cigarettes, and I’d set up a table right there on the street. My crackheads would come by, have a drink and a smoke, and they’d know I was looking out for them. They might say, “I’m hungry,” and I’d take out $2 and say, “Get yourself a McDonald’s.”

  Little by little I’d get them to work for me. I might give a crackhead fifty joints, which is like $500. Now there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’ll smoke them all up. But if he does, all I got to say is, “You ain’t getting no more until you pay me back.” Half of those motherfuckers had been in the Army and shit, and they had pensions. They had money coming in. I knew I could be patient. This is what separated me from the bad hustlers.

  Me, I only shot one guy in my whole life, and that was at my older cousin Glen, Aunt Evelyn’s son. He was staying with us, but when he was too drunk, or fucked up on crack, my mom would lock the front door against him. One night he’s bang-bang-banging on the door, and I got sick of that shit. I took a bucket of water and leaned out the third-floor window and poured it on his head, and he stopped that banging. I forgot all about him being out there.

  Couple hours later I go out, and he’s waiting there for me by the stairs. Gets me around the neck from behind, and I can’t shake him off; Glen knew how to wrestle. I feel myself starting to fall out. I don’t know if he means to kill me or what. So I get that .32 out of my belt and Pa! Pa! I shoot him twice in the leg. I ran back inside and hid that gun before the police and ambulance could show up. Glen, he was cool. He didn’t tell the cops shit. He came out the hospital and apologized, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I told him, “You got to walk around with me a little bit, show the cops there’s no hard feelings between us.” And he did it. Deep down he’s a good dude.

  Obviously, after Cool put that gun up on my head and said he’d kill me if I tried to stop dealing drugs and robbing people with him, I went right back to it. Did I really think he’d kill me? I don’t know. More likely, I was deep-down glad he’d said that so I could go back to the life, because even though there were times I wanted to get out, the truth was, I needed it.

  Here’s how you know it wasn’t just being afraid of Cool that was keeping me in the life. One day this dude walks by on North Capitol wearing this really slick green jacket with leather sleeves. Without even thinking about it, I pulled that long-barreled .32 out of my belt and put it up in the dude’s face. “Give me the jacket, motherfucker,” I said, even though I only come up about to his chest. I didn’t take his money or anything; I just liked the jacket. A week later I see the same dude on the street, in the same place. He walked right past me, and I’m wearing his motherfucking jacket! It pissed me off; he was showing me disrespect. I put one hand on his chest and held the gun down by my leg. “What the fuck you doing up here?” I asked him. “I robbed you just last week! Don’t you know better than to stay out of here?” The motherfucker was all, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” so I let him go. Bitch went home and called the police.

  Well, I see them coming fast around the corner, and I ditched the gun, so at least they didn’t get me with that. But they took me downtown and strip-searched me and put me in a cell. I’d never been locked up before, and I was nervous. I didn’t call my mom though; I didn’t call anybody. After a while, this old white lady gets shown in to see me. Her name was Florence, and she said she was my court-appointed lawyer. She was a real nice lady; she must have been about seventy. She asked me what happened, and I told her some bullshit. I remember this: She looked side to side kind of crafty-like, and she said in this real low voice, “I know you robbed him, but I don’t want to see you locked up.”

  Best she could do for me was a month in juvenile hall. It wasn’t too bad. I had to put on a sweat suit, and they gave me a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a sheet, and a blanket. I had my own room; it had one window with a cage on it. There was a big lunchroom where everybody ate together and watched TV, played a little Ping-Pong. I never did see the sun that whole month. They never let us outside or let us exercise. But it wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t scared or anything.

  Now here’s the part that really tells you that it wasn’t being afraid of Cool that kept me in the life. I called my mom from the pay phone in juvie, and she told me Cool was dead; somebody had shot him in the stomach. I could have walked away from dealing drugs and robbing people the minute I got out, now that I didn’t have Cool threatening me to stay with it. In fact, this guy I never seen before came up to me and said, “I shot your boy, and if you try to retaliate on me, I’m going to kill your ass.” So I had a double reason to walk away.

  I didn’t though. I went right back to the street. It’s not like you really think you can die when you’re fourteen years old. Plus I had Fats giving me the best crack around—that shit was easy to sell. And as my little stop-in at juvie had taught me, the law couldn’t really do shit to me. So why should I quit?

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  Jean’s effect on the relationship between my father and me was remarkable. Dad loved her, without qualifications, and that seemed to soften him on me. The thaw ran both ways; on our visits to the house in Berwyn, I found I could start glancing at my father. I remember times where I would watch him surreptitiously across the room, studying how he had aged, focusing on his every move and mannerism, hauntingly familiar despite the years of interrupted connection. I yearned to reestablish some kind of connection, to rekindle the magic of our early relationship when he was my childhood hero.

  Soon I was able to make occasional eye contact with him, but it was hard as the feelings it evoked were at once overwhelmingly positive and negative. There was no big cinematic moment where we suddenly threw our arms around each other, weeping. And the changes weren’t discussed. But everybody in the house could feel it. My dad and I were exchanging words—however few, however tentative—for the first time in twenty years. I owe that to Jean.

  Jean and I did disagree about one big thing: the boys. I would argue to her that the investment I was putting into the boys was going to pay off in the long run—that I was more than a role model. I was a stable and reliable source of love. Because I loved them and they loved me, I argued, the example that I set—hard working, studious, concerned about the world—would rub off on them, turn them into good citizens, and raise them above the difficult circumstances in which they were being raised.

  Jean thought I was kidding myself. “The minute you leave those boys, they’re right back in that destructive environment,” she’d say. “You think you can counteract years of upbringing with a few afternoons fishing?”

  The arguments between Jean and me took the form of an intellectual disagreement—at least at first—but there was a genuine emotional heat behind it. I thought perhaps that Jean might have been a bit resentful. I would work at the
office so hard, then do my second job with the Dream Team, and then when I had a little time off that I might spend with her, I was often off to see the boys. But instead of understanding the frustrations of a lonely partner, I resented her resentment. Couldn’t she see how much the boys needed me? But I wasn’t good at all at expressing that or at making Jean feel included. My relationship with the boys was a point of contention between Jean and me that never went away.

  I was seeing the boys as often as ever, but I could feel a distance opening between Michael and me. He’d stand on the dock behind the Watergate with his fishing rod, and I’d stand there with mine, and long minutes would go by without either of us talking. I didn’t want to do my usual thing of asking him questions because I didn’t fully trust where those questions would take us. Michael seemed to be thinking the same thing, that if he started talking about his life, he might start owning up to things he didn’t want me to know. The few times I asked about the things his mom had told me, Michael earnestly assured me it was all exaggerated.

  I didn’t press it because on some level I believed this was the natural order of things. I’d taken on Michael and James when they were little kids. That was the relationship I’d signed on to have. In a funny way, I felt okay withdrawing from Michael because he was a teenager now and I’d never signed on to be a brother to a teenager. I was investing more energy and time into his brother David now, another little kid.

  In the same way that my father was great with me and Luke when we were little but couldn’t handle our getting older, I simply wasn’t willing to deal with Michael and his older kid problems involving life choices and moral dilemmas. I didn’t know how to deal with his living a secret and scary life of his own. I loved him no less, but I was so unsettled by his becoming a teenager that I nudged our relationship from the deep, intensely connected one we’d enjoyed for years into a zone of superficiality. All I wanted to do with Michael was just pal around and have a good laugh, as we’d always done. Did we have to talk?