Back in the pre-Internet days, once you learned your piece was accepted by the Washington Post, you’d have no idea when it would run. So every night at 2 A.M., I’d walk down to the 7-Eleven to wait for the new day’s paper to arrive. The late-night clerk at the 7-Eleven was Ethiopian, and when the bundles came flying off the truck, he and I would each grab a copy and turn the pages furiously to get to the op-ed page. Weeks went by like this, until one morning the article suddenly appeared. The 7-Eleven clerk and I rejoiced, and my coauthor Almami Cyllah from Amnesty International and I were asked to do a number of press interviews that day, magnifying our message.
I imagined our words ringing through the halls of power, awakening the conscience of the nation, and changing the course of history.
How blissfully naïve I was.
It would take a lot more than one op-ed to move people, and I learned quickly that stopping genocide and promoting peace wasn’t like fixing a streetlight. It would take a patient, long-term commitment to real change.
Regardless, every byline, no matter the paper, was a victory—not for me, but, in my mind, for Africa. If each article made one American care about the destructive wars and famines far across the ocean, I’d have been happy. (To my mother, of course, the bylines were gold stars on little J.P.’s homework papers. She framed the first one from her local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer.) Between my trips to Africa, and my halting attempts to get the American power structure to listen, I was little by little figuring out issues of war and peace in Africa and what the U.S. government could do to help. A personal ambition began forming in my mind: Maybe by the time I’m fifty, if I had learned enough, I could be a desk officer for some war-torn African country at the State Department.
Whenever I was home, no matter how briefly, I’d get up to North Capitol Street to see the boys. David continued to come along, and he was just the easiest, sunniest, and most pleasant little guy in the world. He wasn’t at all prone to the dark, violent rages that would come upon James at surprising moments. He was more the way Michael had been as a little boy. And for that reason, it was probably easier for me than it should have been to let Michael go. Michael was fifteen years old, old enough to make his own decisions, whereas David was very eager to listen and to do all the things kids love to do.
One day when I drove up, Michael was on the stoop with his arms folded; James and David ran eagerly for the car. Michael nodded but didn’t move. Then Denise burst out of the front door and pulled me inside.
“That boy’s out of control,” she proclaimed. “You got to do something.”
I closed my eyes. I just couldn’t listen to more horror stories about Michael.
“Dealing them drugs, got a gun up under his shirt. Almost shot his brother by accident here in the house one night.”
As Denise went on and on about all the terrible things Michael had done since I’d last been there, I felt a coldness drop over me like a sodden blanket. This is what my father used to go through—a long complaint from my mom about all the terrible things the kids had done the minute he walked through the door from a business trip. I was starting to understand him. I could see why he’d fly into a rage. Thing is, it wasn’t Michael I felt myself growing angry at; it was Denise. Maybe it was that way for my father too, but instead of snapping at Mom, he turned it all on me instead. I pushed down the anger and tried to brush off everything she was saying.
“Come on, Denise.…”
She grabbed my arm. “I got nobody here to help me with that boy,” she said. “He’s going to end up dead in the gutter if you don’t do something.”
I gave her some vague assurance of my concern and went back outside to take James and David off to play. But not before Uncle Artie loomed up from the shadows to touch me for a few dollars. What a household that was.
Michael was standing on the stoop when I got outside. He hadn’t grown very tall, but he’d filled out the way young men do. His shoulders were broad now, his arms muscular. He had a little beard and his hair was in corn rows.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You’re not dealing drugs, are you?”
“No.”
“And you’re not carrying a gun?”
“No.”
“Okay then,” I said, and shrugged. Michael and I bumped fists, I saluted him as I got into the car, and James and David and I went off to have our fun.
10. Amazing Grace
MICHAEL MATTOCKS
I’d just turned seventeen when I was out in front of the house one day doing my thing. Up rides Little Charles’ brother Stick on his bicycle. I asked could I borrow the bike for five minutes so I could ride down to the store for a bag of chips and a soda. I’m gone five minutes, and as I ride back, I see someone lying on the sidewalk. When I get up close, I see it’s my mom’s boyfriend Kenny, with blood all over his shirt. Stick turns to me, and is like, “Give me my motherfucking bike,” and he’s gone. Kenny is lying there breathing heavily, and then he gives one big breath and dies while I’m standing right there. I look up and I see my little brothers James and Tyrell looking out the window; they’d seen the whole thing.
Well, the police come, the detectives start talking to James and Tyrell, who are fifteen and eight. I’m responsible for them, because they’re my little brothers, and my mother is in no kind of shape.
I look up and down the street, at people watching my little brothers talking to the police, and I know that isn’t good. So I get up in the faces of those detectives, and I say, “You need to get away from my motherfucking house.” If James and Tyrell were to rat out Stick, or Stick even thinks that, Stick’s people are going to come back and kill them. I know that, and those detectives know that. But they don’t give a fuck. They just want James and Tyrell to tell them who stabbed Kenny. I’m getting hot. I explain, “You’re going to get my little brothers killed standing out here on the front stoop talking to them.” Finally, they back off, and I’m like, good. Be gone. But then I hear something, and I run around back of the house, and there the detectives are, talking to James and Tyrell at the back door. I flicked off, screaming, “You are putting my family in danger. You are going to get my brothers killed!” It’s a wonder they didn’t take me downtown. What they did was hustle James and Tyrell out of the house, put them in the patrol car, and take them to the police station. Got the whole story from them when I wasn’t around.
People on the street said what happened was Stick was playing with Kenny, picking on him, and Kenny kept telling him to stop. Stick wouldn’t stop, so Kenny punched him in the face. They say Stick went into the barbershop there, got a pair of scissors, came out, and stabbed Kenny with them a bunch of times. Then he ran back in the barbershop and washed off the blood before the police could get there and before I could see.
I felt bad about all that. Stick and Kenny were both good dudes and never was beefing with each other before. I guess they were just having a bad day.
Before James saw Kenny get killed, he was still in school, riding bikes and skateboarding around the neighborhood. James, though, was close to Kenny. He saw Kenny take his last breath, and that really fucked him up. He stopped riding bikes and doing kid stuff. Seeing Kenny get killed was a major turning point for James. That’s when I started bringing James out hustling with me. I wanted him close by me, to protect him. James was fifteen, and on those streets, fifteen is a man. It wasn’t like he was begging me to go out in the streets with me. But when I gave James a .22 pistol, he was so excited to have his own gun the clip kept falling out of it. When I went out to sell my crack, I brought James with me. I kept him right there by my side all the time. Brought him into the life to keep him safe, and look what happened.
JOHN PRENDERGAST
After a few years of somewhat volatile and on-and-off dating, Jean and I finally decided to get engaged. When I was going shopping for an engagement ring, I asked Luke and my old U. Penn buddy Adam, who was a real sharp business whiz, to accompany me in case my feet got too cold. Of course, the Dream Tea
m had to come along too, as I had brought them up to Philly with me that weekend. I’ll never forget the rattled jeweler showing us dozens and dozens of stones, as the Dreamers kept arguing, grunting, and hissing over each and every option, all of them taking it as seriously as if they were going to be walking down the aisle instead of me.
Jean and I were married in 1991, so now it wasn’t just a girlfriend relationship I was trying to keep alive; it was a marriage. By this time, I was living in two worlds. I would spend about half my time in Africa, working for different human rights and humanitarian organizations, moving through war zones and learning as much as I could. And when I wasn’t physically in Africa, I was mentally in Africa. Jean was studying nutrition at the time, and she had a career to launch; she wanted my involvement and support. But even though my parents had stayed together, I hadn’t learned from my dad any secrets of keeping a marriage real and alive over the long term. If he’d had lessons to impart, neither of us was in a space to let that happen, even though we were moving toward reconciliation thanks to Jean.
I was consumed with Africa, and the unspeakable suffering I saw in the war zones I was visiting and working in. Any time I took away from learning more about it, or writing about it, or networking on Capitol Hill and in the halls of power around Washington, felt to me like an affront to the people there—the refugees and mass rape survivors who so earnestly would implore me to go back to Washington and get the American government involved in helping to make peace. One after another, in refugee camps and destroyed villages, the frontline witnesses would describe to me the horrors they had experienced and look at me with hope that their story would be heard somewhere that mattered. How could Jean’s need for a functional relationship compare with that?
As for the boys, I was now really enjoying my relationship with David. David had become a truly phenomenal athlete. He was only ten or so at this point, but we had a great time playing basketball together. Down on the border of Southeast D.C. and Maryland, off of Pennsylvania Avenue, was an old Lowe’s warehouse converted to an indoor complex, a basketball Mecca, with about fifteen courts laid side by side. I had never seen anything like it before. The courts were open twenty-four hours a day, and every time we’d be there in the middle of the night, all the courts would be full. David had amazing strength and grace. A few years later, we’d be playing, and guys on the other courts would stop to watch him; he was that good. A lot of young men dream of playing professional basketball, as I did. Great as they are on the playground court, most of them don’t have anywhere near the skills to play professionally. David had a shot at making it to the NBA if he’d had the slightest bit of ambition or discipline.
Michael had stopped coming on our outings altogether. Denise would torment me, every time I showed up, with tearful pleadings to help Michael. I would leave trying to come up with a plan to help him, but it would peter out, losing in the competition with my Africa work and, frankly, with my own ambivalence about getting more deeply involved in his life.
As for James, what had been a bothersome temper when he was little had become a disturbing darkness. He was a fully grown teenager now, so whatever violent streak he harbored could now do real harm. I didn’t fear for my own safety; we were too close for that. But he was difficult to be around. His eyes sometimes took on a hooded coldness, and I worried about being witness to something truly awful.
I’d often think: I should go see the boys. But there’d be so many Africa reports to read and write, and never enough time for Jean, and many times in this period I’d let the moment go by.
A lot of the time I’d be plain beat, and I would simply lie on my bed watching a basketball game. Babies are dying in Africa, Michael is disappearing into the streets, and the self-styled superhero is lying on his bed watching hoops. It’s amazing I could concentrate on a basketball game at all.
11. “Old Enough to Be a Drug Dealer, Young Enough to Cry”
MICHAEL MATTOCKS
I was sitting on my bed when James came up the stairs crying. I thought maybe some kid had pushed him down or some shit. He sounded like a little boy.
“Uncle Mark took my shit!” he wailed.
“Say what?”
Uncle Mark was one of my mother’s thirteen brothers and sisters, a big tall motherfucker, and just as useless as the rest of them. He didn’t work. He just kind of hung around, living off my mom, buying drugs, kind of an all-around fuck-up. James took me downstairs, to where we had a dresser that stood in the front hallway of the house. James used to keep his drugs in that top drawer, and now it was empty.
Damn. Uncle Mark had already ripped me off once—took $1,000 and 150 joints out of my dresser one time. I hadn’t had any proof, though, and I’d let him off that time. Shit, he towered over me. If I was to do something to him, it would have to have been with a gun.
James stood looking down at that empty dresser drawer with tears on his face. He wasn’t but fifteen years old—old enough to be a drug dealer on North Capitol Street, Washington, D.C., but young enough to cry when somebody stole his shit.
We went out looking for Uncle Mark, and he wasn’t hard to find. I backed him into an alley and put my .38 to his head and my nine to his chest. “You give my brother his shit back.”
Uncle Mark’s eyes got real big, like he didn’t know whether to laugh or have a heart attack. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I shot twice in the air, right next to his face, and Uncle Mark began whimpering. James was standing next to me, and he got this funny little smile on his face and a genuinely scary coldness took over his eyes. “Let’s kill this nigger,” he said in a kind of low growl. I looked at him, like, what the fuck you talking about? Kill Uncle Mark?
I looked up at Uncle Mark, who was muttering, “You ain’t going to shoot me. You ain’t going to shoot me.”
I thought: He’s right. I’m not going to kill this nigger. Funny thing is, I wasn’t even thinking about prison. I was thinking about my mom, and how mad she’d be if I killed her little brother. I told Uncle Mark to beat it, and he scurried off like a rabbit. James was pissed, waving his little .22 around. “We shoulda killed him!” he kept saying, and I had to say, “James, James. Cool down, man.”
James always had a temper as a kid; I knew that. I guess I thought it’s the kind of thing he’d outgrow. But he held onto it and turned it into a scary grownup thing. And if you think about it, North Capitol Street was the worst possible place to have a temper, because that shit can be lethal up there.
One day he and I were walking with Sabrina. We liked having Sabrina around because she carried our guns in her purse; the cops was less likely to search a girl. Also, if any shit went down, you wanted Sabrina there with you, just like when we were kids. She not only had James’ .22 and my .38 in that purse, she had a big shiny .357 Magnum that she just loved. She could handle it too, little as she was. And wasn’t shy about whipping it out either.
We’re walking along and we pass a dude leaning on some crutches. Just some scruffy guy on the street, a guy we don’t know. He whistles at Sabrina. Men often did that; she’s real good-looking. Sabrina let it go, but James got that same weird little smile on his face like he did when we were shaking down Uncle Mark.
“Nigger,” he said, “that’s my motherfucking sister.” Next thing I know, James has snatched away the guy’s crutches and has him down on the ground, really whipping his ass with one of them. I knew better than to try to pull him off. We leave that guy there bleeding and unconscious, and I’m wondering what the fuck is up with James. We were so close. We’d sleep in the same bed. We’d drink Nyquil and smoke weed every night before going to sleep. But there were times when I still didn’t feel like I knew what the fuck he was thinking.
With Don chased off and Kenny dead, it seemed like things was falling apart for us. Stick was facing thirty to life for stabbing Kenny with those scissors. He called me one time from jail during the year that they held him while he was waiting for his tri
al, and this is what he said to me: “I hope your brothers die.”
That was it for me. Once James and Tyrell were identified as witnesses to Kenny’s murder, we couldn’t stay up on North Capitol no more. Besides, that house of ours was full of rats. It was time to go.
I was almost seventeen by now, a full-grown man. My mom found us a nice house up on Georgia Avenue. The house on North Capitol was rat-infested, and they told her to leave. She got subsidized rent, and I paid all the bills and helped out with my brothers and sisters. It was two-story, brick, in a long row of identical attached houses. It had a porch we could set on and look straight across Georgia Avenue at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It was nice up there—quieter than North Capitol, and a lot less nasty, being far from Sursum Corda. Turned out, moving into that Georgia Avenue house changed my whole life because something happened that very first day that is still a big part of me today.
We was carrying our stuff inside the house and this dude walks up, introduces himself as Chris, and offers to help us unload the cars. When we were done working, Sabrina went over to his house, and while she was there she met his sister, Nikki. Sabrina liked what she saw; Chris and Nikki lived a normal life, with two parents in the home, and neither Chris nor Nikki had any connection to the life. Nikki had her a newborn baby boy, Rolando. Sabrina sees all this, and she says to Nikki, “I got a brother you might like.”
Unlikely Brothers Page 14
