Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  Of course, talking was what Michael needed at that moment, and I wasn’t there for him.

  Then something unfortunate happened on the home front. I was at my mom’s house in Philly and we were waiting for Luke to bring Khayree and Nasir over for the day. Luke had skillfully maintained the relationship with the boys that I had foisted on him when I left for D.C., but that day he had been pressed for time so he had decided not to pick up Khayree. I had a bizarre overreaction to Luke’s oversight, feeling that I had somehow once again let one of the brothers down, but my self-loathing expressed itself in the form of fury toward my biological brother. His seeming nonchalance was goading me into a temple-busting rage. After an escalating exchange of accusations, I lunged at him and the last official Prendergast brothers’ rumble was on.

  When it was all over, there were few things left standing in the living room, including Luke and me. To have blamed Luke for my own shortcomings with Khayree, an extension of my neglect of Michael’s real-life challenges, was absurd and unfair. It was typical me: biting off way more than I could chew, getting those around me to pitch in and help, walking away and leaving it to others, and then if it didn’t work in my absence, blaming those that only tried to help.

  9. “That Shit Is Fun”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  You wouldn’t think so, since I’d lost my buddy Little Charles to a gun accident, but a thing I really liked about the life was the guns. These two Chinese guys used to drive around in a BMW, with their trunk full of them. Nines. Four-fives. I’d thrown away that .32, but shit, $300 or $400 would get you whatever you wanted. I had a nine, and a four-five, and a MAC, which is a compact little submachine gun. Weren’t many AKs around in them days; that came later. I used to walk around with my buddy Tony’s sawed-off pump shotgun up under my coat. I had the barrel in my pocket and the butt up under by my shoulder. We’d rob crackheads with it. We’d only get like $50 or $60, but it was the fear in their faces when I’d whip that big thing out that I liked. Respect, man. Fear and respect.

  There was this summer night I’m standing on North Capitol with seven of my friends. It’s about two o’clock in the morning, and you should see how the women dress up there on those hot nights! Anyway, we’re out there, drinking our beer and smoking our weed and just chilling, and we see these four dudes coming up in hooded sweatshirts and skullcaps. We know they’re strapped; wearing hoodies and it’s 90 degrees? But there’s too many of us, so they just go by; them eyefucking us and we eyefucking them. So they go past, and we get our guns and run around the corner real quick, so that when they get in their car, we’re there. Two of them see us and jump out, pulling their guns out, and it’s like Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa!—must have been about fifty shots. We shot at them, and they shot at us. Bullets going everywhere, and nobody got hit. They drove off, and we ran around to hide our guns and get back on the stoop in front, laughing like a motherfucker. When you’re fourteen years old, that shit is fun!

  We did a lot of shooting, but hardly anybody ever got hit. It’s not like we ever took our guns to the range and practiced with them. What you’d do, if someone got in your face the wrong way—disrespected you, eyefucked you in a way you didn’t like—you might peel off a few in his direction. If you hit him, good. But it didn’t really matter most of the time because even if you didn’t put one in him, you’d said something. You’d said you had the power. You’d made yourself heard. There was a time I was shooting my gun at least once a week. Sometimes I’d just shoot it for fun. I liked doing that when I was sitting on the toilet; I’d open the window and shoot out, just to hear it go bang.

  Aside from Cool, Little Charles’ big brother, Stick, was one of the few people I knew who’d actually killed somebody on purpose with a gun. He was a couple years older than me, maybe seventeen. He was tall and slim and brown-skinned, and had this big round face. I think losing his little brother made him crazy mean, because he never was the same after that. One night he saw this homeless dude bedding down in his mother’s backyard, and he killed him with a pump gun. Two days later he was back out on the street. He’d paid his bond and that was that. He was a juvenile, and the guy he killed was some homeless dude; nobody gave a shit.

  All of us carried guns. We’d trade them around like baseball cards. Back then there was this guy going around killing people with a shotgun—the “Shotgun Stalker” is what they called him in the paper. That dude was scary because he had no reason for what he was doing. He’d pull up to someone on the street and BAM! Just random. We used to stand around on the corner wishing he’d come by and try to get one of us. Man, we’d have lit that motherfucker up!

  One day, I bought a gun from a drug addict in my neighborhood for $40. It was a Colt .38 snub-nose; a nice little gun. I thought I’d taken all the shells out of it and was sitting on my bed with James click-click-clicking it when suddenly the bitch went off. Bullet went right past James’ head and up into the wall. Man, my mom came running in, all drunk, like, “What the fuck is going on?” She didn’t take the gun from me though. Kenny, he just laughed. He was a cool dude.

  I wish Mom had taken that gun away because not long after that I was standing in front of my house in the early morning when I see a police officer over here walking my way, and three more over there looking at me, and I’m thinking, uh oh. Then a police car pulls up right in front of me, and a whole mess of them jump out, and I’m thinking, What the hell do I do now? I got that .38 in my jacket pocket. I turn to go inside, but the door is locked. My mom always put me out in the morning and wouldn’t let me back inside until three, even though she knew I wasn’t going to school. I guess she thought if I was out of the house during school hours, she could pretend like I was going to school. All I know is, that door was locked, and by the time I turned around, all those police were right on top of me. “Why aren’t you in school?” they asked me.

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” one of them said. “Take your hands out of your pockets.”

  I took the left one out but kept the right in the pocket on top of the gun.

  “Other one,” the cop said. He had his hand on his gun now, and I knew that if I came out with that gun in my hand, they’d shoot me dead right there.

  “It’s broke,” I said.

  “I’m going to pull it out,” he said.

  “Well, then that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

  He pulled my arm and my hand came out with the gun in it. I think they were all so surprised they froze for a split second, and in that split second I broke free and ran. They didn’t catch me for another month; I made sure to come and go only at night. They got me finally, and then I found out why they were so interested in that gun. It was a police detective’s gun. It had been taken from him in a bank robbery. They took me downtown in front of a judge, and they tried to get me to tell them who’d sold me the gun. I told them, “A drug addict.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. A drug addict.”

  We went round and round like that for hours. I wasn’t going to rat out one of my own crackheads; that wouldn’t have been right. The police tried getting tough, telling me I was going to grownup prison, but I knew that was bullshit; I wasn’t but fifteen years old by then. There really wasn’t nothing they could do to me, and they knew it. So they tried making nice. They had a lady detective there named Davis, and she said she’d get me into a GED program at University of the District of Columbia. I went to the program, even though I never did tell them where I got the .38. But then I dropped out. I was making too much money dealing drugs to bother with getting a GED. What was I going to do with that? Get a $6-an-hour job?

  It felt weird when J.P. came by to pick me, James, and David up. David had been coming along for a couple years now. He was ten now, four years younger than James. From the time David started coming with us, J.P. was covering him with questions—Who’s your favorite player? Who’s the cutest girl in the second grade? What did you eat for dinner last nigh
t?—like he used to do with me. To me, though, he’d just say, “Hey, buddy.” I waited for his questions. I had answers all ready if he’d have asked if I was dealing, or carrying a gun. But he rarely asked anything.

  J.P. had had a lot of girlfriends over the years who he’d sometimes bring along on our outings, but I could tell this new girl, Jean, was something special to him. He was quieter around her. He acted less goofy. She was real sweet to me and my brothers, and when it was all of us together, we did different kinds of things—like outdoor art shows down on the Mall in front of the Capitol building and shit like that. She didn’t come with us too much though.

  It was a mixed-up time for me. Playing around with James and David, or fishing with our little rods, was starting to feel like little-boy shit. I was a man now. So there came a day when J.P. pulled up in that big ugly car of his, and while David and James ran down the front steps as happy as they could be, I just stood up there with my arms folded. Naw, I said. Not today. I’m not going today.

  “You sure?” J.P. said. He was standing by his open car door, leaning on the roof.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. I think I expected J.P. to beg me to come along. I think, deep down, I hoped he was worried about all the shit I was doing and would drag me away from it. I wanted him to love me that much.

  “Okay, buddy,” he said, and he gave me a little salute. Then he climbed in the car and drove off with James and David.

  I felt good and bad at the same time watching him drive off. Good, because I was a man now, through with that little-boy shit, independent. But sad that something real good was leaving my life. I’d been hanging with J.P. for nearly nine years. Those outings of ours had been a big part of my life, something that made me different from all the other knuckleheads up and down the street. I had Mr. and Mrs. P in my life, Luke, Uncle Bud, and Aunt Jo. There’d been a whole lineup of J.P.’s friends—from Geoff and John up to Jean. As I stood watching that car of his disappear around the corner of O Street, I didn’t know if all that was leaving my life for good. Then David and James would come back from their adventures with J.P. that I wasn’t going on anymore, saying, “We did this! We did that!” and I’d get all sad. I wanted to be with J.P. and I didn’t, and it had me all confused.

  One night, it all got on top of my ass. Suddenly, I was tired—but I mean, like, deep tired. Tired of the stress on the street. Tired of the drugs. That image of my buddy Little Charles with that big hole in his face, was popping up in front of my face every day. All the fun had gone out of it and left behind nothing but the terror and the meanness and the despair of those streets and those crackheads. I was sitting on my bed with the door closed and the lights out, drinking one Saint I’s after another and smoking a ton of weed. In my lap was a gun I’d borrowed from a friend—a nickel-plated .38 snub-nose, fully loaded with hollow-point bullets. When I was so drunk and stoned that I figured I’d feel no pain, I brought that gun up to my head and pulled the trigger. It went click, and I passed out.

  Next morning, I took that gun out to the alley behind our house, pointed it into a pile of trash, and pulled the trigger. It fired. I pulled again and it fired again. I shot off all six; the gun worked perfectly. I threw it in the Dumpster and walked away, shivering—like something bigger than me knew I wasn’t supposed to die that way at fifteen.

  I never told J.P. about that. Never told anybody, in fact, until now.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  After years of running in every direction and grazing aimlessly, I now knew in what direction I wanted to march. My goal—and it hasn’t changed to this day—was to help guide U.S. policy toward relieving some of the worst suffering in Africa, particularly resulting from the wars there. So I knew I was going to have to devote myself now to two parallel pursuits: returning to African war zones as often as possible and learning as much as I could back home about U.S. foreign policy as it related to peacemaking and the protection of human rights. Where are the real levers of power in Washington, I wanted to know, and how does one learn to pull them?

  Washington was, and is, full of nongovernment organizations, or NGOs as they’re called, focusing on hunger, AIDS, children, human rights, trade, the environment, peace, and on and on. All these issues touch Africa. And as I went around visiting, I found that a lot of them were glad to find a guy willing to travel to the most dangerous corners of the continent for them. All those years I spent cramming books into my head and writing complicated graduate-level papers at the last minute had prepared me well for the relatively easy task of writing up reports for an NGO, and it turned out that my ability to produce clear writing on a deadline was every bit as valuable to these organizations as my willingness to take dangerous and uncomfortable trips. Word spread among them that I could get the job done, and suddenly I had all the work I wanted in all of Africa’s most violent war zones. I would go in, listen to the people most affected by the conflict, and conspire with them on constructive solutions. Then I would come back to the United States and try to package what I had learned into messages that might move policy-makers to do something in response.

  If I wasn’t focused on how violent Michael’s life had become, perhaps it was partly because violence was touching my own life in terrifying ways. On one trip to southern Sudan, I came as close to thinking the end was as near as it could possibly be. I’d flown from northern Kenya into rebel-held southern Sudan aboard a small plane, as I often did. I was trying to be discreet, though, because I’d recently coauthored a book for Human Rights Watch that assessed the human rights situation in Sudan, and it contained a tough critique of the rebels’ human rights record. (The Khartoum government of Omer al-Bashir was immeasurably worse, and we had covered that comprehensively, but criticizing only the government in the book would have been irresponsible and incomplete.) I doctored an expired entry visa for rebel territory, and I hoped to slip in unnoticed. But small planes were rare at the flyblown strips where I used to land, and a small crowd of rebel soldiers was there when I stepped out. Two of them grabbed my arms, and, speaking to each other in Dinka, they frog-marched me to a nearby town and threw me in a small shipping container that doubled as a jail. Nobody explained anything. A can of filthy water was put inside with me, which, since it was like an oven in there, I drank, with predictably disastrous results. The rebel soldiers told me in broken English, “Nobody knows you’re here, so nobody will know if you die here.” I spent three days in that makeshift jail—roasting, sick, deprived of food, and certain I was about to be executed. Finally, the late rebel leader John Garang ordered my release.

  This wasn’t the only brush I had with my mortality. Over the years, I was shot at in Somalia, had a gun stuck in my mouth on the Rwanda/Congo border, detained and roughed up by government security agents in Zimbabwe, missed by a rocket in a plane over Sudan, had a car in front of me blow up running over a land mine in Angola, was in a building in Somalia that was hit by a mortar and partially collapsed, and was taken captive by a militia in Congo in the middle of the night when no one knew where I was.

  On what I think one could call a lighter note, once one of my frequent indiscretions got the better of me, as I spent the night in a tent in a remote corner of a war zone with a striking aid worker. It rained all night, and she and I woke up in the morning in the middle of a swamp with a crocodile staring through the screen into the tent. Eventually the water receded and another proverbial bullet was dodged.

  This kind of stuff came with the territory, and I was prepared for anything. Ironically, Michael didn’t know I was facing such violence (and crocodiles) in my travels, and I didn’t want to deal with the fact that he had entered a very violent world of his own. The parallels were stark, had we only realized and catalogued them: violence, women, altercations, adrenaline addiction, defiance in the face of danger, trying to take care of people, wanting admiration, and on and on. Both of us had lost friends on our respective battlefields, whether on contested drug corners in D.C. or war zones in Africa. We would have had a
lot to talk about, if we’d have just sat on the steps one day and compared notes about how we both were forced to normalize the insanity that surrounded us.

  One of the shared emotional experiences that we never spoke of all those years but that tied Michael and me together was the childhood trauma we both experienced. Both of us at an early age were deprived somehow of our fathers’ protection. We both felt at a young age, because of this, an acute lack of power to change the unfairness surrounding us. We attempted to fill the holes in our hearts in very opposite ways: I reacted proactively by fighting to bring voice to others; Michael reacted defensively by becoming someone feared and respected so that he would never be disempowered by anyone again.

  In northern Uganda I once befriended a former child soldier who had recently escaped from captivity and who had endured some of the worst horrors I had ever heard from my years in the war zones. Seeing his hard eyes, cool demeanor, dangling cigarette, and ever-present vaguely concealed weapon, I couldn’t help but think how similar these child soldiers in Africa were to the child soldiers in the streets of D.C., making money for older people who are willing to use them as pawns, in a world that isn’t even trying to address the causes of this outrage, and who are perfectly willing to punish the children for their crimes.

  Anyway, as soon as I’d get off a plane from Africa back in the United States, I’d stay awake for a night or two writing up the report for whichever NGO had financed the trip, and then I’d recycle what I’d learned for articles and op-ed pieces that I tried to place anywhere. I always tried for the big-name papers, but I would settle for just about any place in print. When the Washington Post finally accepted a full 800-word opinion piece from me, I was beside myself with glee because it would appear right in the center of American power.