Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  “Michael, what’s wrong?” Nikki said to me, in that Nikki way that’s both sympathetic and get-your-ass-up at the same time.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” she said, putting her fists on her hips and just about setting me afire with that ferocious gaze of hers. “You ain’t moved off that couch in two days. You just moping around. What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said again, and then all the resistance in me drained away. “Nikki,” I said. “I’m fucked up. I’m broke.”

  “What do you mean, you’re broke?” she barked. She walked to the garbage can and swept the lid off it. “Where’s all your money?”

  “It’s gone. It’s what I’m telling you. I ain’t hustling no more.”

  She stopped and gazed down at me with those big, hot eyes of hers. “Ain’t hustling?” she yelled. “How we going to pay rent and shit?”

  Then she stopped. She could hear what she was saying. She’d never liked me dealing drugs. But now she was admitting she’d become dependent on the money the drug dealing brought in. She walked out of the room, and she and I didn’t talk all the rest of the day. But as we were getting into bed that night, she pulled me close and said, “I’m happy you’re not dealing anymore. Don’t worry about the money. We’ll get by.”

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  My brother Luke and his wife Kim ended up having two sons, Dylan and Michael. Dylan is the older by two years. Dylan fell into a coma as a newborn as a result of an undiagnosed medical disorder, but he survived that rough beginning. As the boys got older, the three of us founded our own Good Samaritans’ Club, in which our purpose was to look for nice things to do for other people. These were my brother’s sons, flesh of my flesh, my father’s grandsons. We were like three kids together as they grew up, and we all called Luke “Dad.”

  From the time they could talk and walk, I was almost freakishly close to both Michael and Dylan. But I had a special responsibility to Dylan, as I was his godfather. And I took the job seriously.

  Dylan has some ongoing learning and motor challenges, and he couldn’t quite get the hang of riding a bicycle, despite $75-an-hour therapy sessions. One wintery day Luke and I were out in the street in front of their house, taking our shot at teaching Dylan and Michael to ride a bike. Michael picked it up right away, as he does most things, but Dylan was having a harder go of it. Once he got going, he did just fine, but getting the start down was hard for him. After a while, we all got cold so Michael and Luke went inside. Dylan, though, wanted to keep at it. And despite my malaria-induced intolerance for cold weather, I hung in there with him. I remembered back to when I was his age, when I had severely pigeon-toed feet. One of our older neighbors in Kansas City, a cadet-in-training named Whit McCoskrie, took me under his wing and put me through a summer of painful physical therapy that almost completely straightened out my feet.

  He ain’t heavy, Father, …

  So Dylan and I stood in the driveway trying over and over. Dylan never got too frustrated, never got too mad, just frowned each time and said, “Again.” The shadows grew long. It started getting dark. It was very cold. Dylan, who was only eight, wouldn’t give up. “Again,” he said. “Again.” Luke and Kim called to us from the window: Come on in. Dinner’s ready. It’s getting dark. But Dylan wouldn’t stop until he figured it out. Finally, after about six hours—both of us blue with cold—he got the left-foot/right-foot timing down, and he took off down the driveway on his own. It was so dark by then I couldn’t see him turn around, but then here he came, grinning like mad, raising his arms and jumping like he was Rocky on the top of the Art Museum’s steps. That’s Dylan.

  J.P. and Dylan

  Out of the blue, I got a call from James. He’d gotten himself a job, and he asked Jean and me to come down and see him. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I wasn’t seeing or hearing much from Michael either. Occasionally I’d get a call, and every once in a while I’d go out and make a quick visit to Michael and Nikki and the kids, but it was always hit-and-run, just saying hello. It hadn’t worried me too much; James and Michael were grown up now, and what I was about was being a big brother to young boys. It never occurred to me that James and Michael might not have seen it that way. To them, we were no less brothers now than we’d been when we were fishing together on the dock behind the Watergate when they lived in the homeless shelter.

  Now in his early twenties, James looked thin, but happy. He was wearing baggy pants and a tight, fashionable shirt. His hair was neatly braided. I’d never seen James at a job before. “I’m going back to church,” he told us. “I’ve been going with my mom.”

  He alluded to having given up “the life,” and Jean and I both told him how proud we were of him. It was easier to talk about “the life” with him now that he’d given it up than it was to deal with it while he was all in.

  “I gotta take care of my kids,” James told us. “I don’t want them ending up doing what I been doing.”

  “How’s that temper of yours?” I asked.

  He smiled. “I got that under control now,” he said softly, then chuckled. “I used it all up.” He was very proud of his kids, and he seemed to be at peace for the first time in his life. Jean and I tried to be very encouraging about keeping on this track; we vowed to be in closer contact going forward.

  He didn’t have a very long break, and he had to get back to work where he was on a clean-up crew at a D.C. auditorium. We hugged and said goodbye. I started to feel as though maybe I should get a little more involved in supporting James’ choices, resuming my big brother role to the extent he wanted or needed it.

  Not long after that, Michael called. “J.P., I got to see you,” he said, and my first thought was: This is his one phone call from jail, that he has finally done something really serious and needs me to get him out of it.

  “Sure, buddy,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ll talk when I see you,” he said. I drove out to his new apartment in Laurel, Maryland, and we sat on their couch set with Nikki, our knees practically touching. Michael looked shaken and tense, and I began wondering if he’d done something irretrievably serious.

  “J.P.,” he said. “I fucked up.”

  “Fucked up how?”

  “I’m broke, man,” he said, and I immediately felt a flood of relief. If it was only money, nothing serious was wrong at all. I realized that it was the first time money had ever come up between us. In all our years of being brothers, he’d never asked me for a nickel; it hadn’t been a part of our relationship at all.

  “What happened?”

  He looked at Nikki, who nodded at him and nudged him with an elbow. “I been dealing drugs, J.P.,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  Did I know that? Of course I did. It had been the elephant in the room for a decade or more. It was strange to have it come up so plainly now, after all these years of denial by avoidance. The conversation was getting real in a way for which I had never really prepared.

  “But here’s the thing,” Michael went on. “I stopped dealing cold a while back, and I’m out of money, man. I’m broke.”

  I breathed a little easier. I could get out of this conversation, maybe, by writing a check. He needed a little money, that’s all it was.

  “I started down on North Capitol Street,” Michael went on.

  “Wait. Started what on North Capitol?”

  “Dealing.”

  “What, like pot?” My mind was locking up. Michael had been a little boy on North Capitol.

  “Crack cocaine,” he said, with exquisite precision, as though pinning me like a butterfly to a piece of cardboard. “I was a drug dealer, J.P.”

  “Like selling a little bit on the corner?”

  He sighed and looked at the floor between his knees. Sitting there, holding Nikki’s hand, the babies yelling from the other room, at twenty-three, he looked like the weight of the entire world was on his shoulders. As I stared at the corn rows on the top of his head, I thought: How d
id all this happen?

  “I was a drug dealer, J.P. That’s the size of it. I was a drug dealer. You don’t really need to know it all. But that’s what I was, and I ain’t no more. I’m fucked up. I need help, J.P., is what I’m saying.”

  I took out my checkbook and wrote him a check. The sound of the pen point on the paper echoed through the room. I put it on the coffee table between us.

  “I’m going to show you, J.P., that I can do it,” he said, as he picked up the check, his eyes shining. “I want to make you proud of me. Tell Uncle Bud, tell Jean, tell your mom and dad, that I’m getting it together. You’re all gonna be proud of me.”

  “We already are, buddy. You know you can always come to me and tell me anything.” Even as I said it, I realized it was something I should have told him years earlier.

  19. “You Don’t Look Like J.P.’s Brother”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  It was hard telling J.P. how bad I’d fucked up, and it was hard to ask him for help. I don’t know why it was; it shouldn’t have been. But I’d kept a lot from J.P. over the years, and I’d lied to him the few times the issue came up. And what hung between us was that conversation we should have had a million times but never did—the one where he said, Michael, this ain’t right; you got to stop dealing them drugs. The one where he said, Come live with me again, this time for good. Because we’d never had that conversation—a conversation that for years I’d both dreaded and prayed for—it told me he didn’t want to know about my real life as a grownup man.

  Anybody with eyes in his head would have known I was a drug dealer. I walked like a drug dealer. I talked like a drug dealer. I dressed like a drug dealer. My mom told him a thousand times I was a drug dealer. Yet he barely mentioned it. That meant he didn’t want to deal with it. So to tell him now that that’s what I’d been doing all those years and was broke because I quit doing it, well, that hurt. I didn’t tell him too much.

  He wrote me a check, which got me out of my immediate hole, and he told me he’d find me a good job. Two days later, J.P. called with the name of some dude he knew who owned a roofing company and was doing a big job at a housing development in Maryland. If I went over there, J.P. said, he’d put me on the work crew. But when I drove out there and introduced myself as J.P.’s brother, I could see right away we were going to have a problem. He looked me up and down like, You don’t look like J.P.’s brother. The dude’s wife was worse: She practically said, What the fuck are you doing here? They had all Spanish guys working, and they was underpaying every motherfucking one of them. He kept me on a couple of weeks to make it look good, and then the guy told me, “That’s it. There’s no more work.” But I drove down there the next day and everybody was still working. Racist is what he was. I told J.P. about it, and it made me feel good that he was as pissed as I was. He said, “I will never speak to that dude again.” And he never did.

  We started seeing J.P. a little more. He’d come by and take us all to Fuddruckers or Buddy’s. What blew my mind was, every place we’d go, someone would come up to J.P. and say, “Aren’t you John Prendergast?” They’d be like, “I read what you wrote,” or, “I saw you on TV.” I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. J.P. had told me he was working in the White House and in the State Department or some shit, and it was always about Africa. But until I saw strangers coming up to him to shake his hand, I had no idea he was such an important man. It made me proud to be his brother.

  I couldn’t keep touching him for money though, and after that racist shit with the roofer, I had no appetite for going out to look for work. Then an opportunity came up. Just like in the movies: One last job.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  Jean had always argued that whatever effect my friendship was having on Michael and James evaporated the minute I was out of their sight because of the environment in which they lived. And I’d always responded—more out of wishful thinking than anything else—that what I was trying to do was to plant a few seeds. By showing them that somebody loved them—that somebody cared whether they lived or died, succeeded or failed—I was keeping a lifeline open to them. Those meetings with James and Michael kind of proved both of us right. At one point, Jean actually said to me, “I see your point,” and the funny thing was, I was about to say the same thing to her.

  I’d let Michael and James down; there was no denying that. For almost a decade, I’d drifted in and out of their lives without ever engaging the deadly reality at their center. I’d figured all along that Michael was doing some nickel-and-dime drug dealing. But to hear the details—that he’d been a major player, that they’d regularly carried guns and used them—really shocked me. I didn’t get it all in the first or second meeting. After that first confessional conversation at his apartment in Maryland, we slowly drifted back into each other’s lives.

  Eventually, the Bush II era began and my run in government service ended. I was back in the activist world. Now that I was out of government and couldn’t help negotiate peace agreements myself, I decided to go back with renewed vigor to helping develop a popular constituency for peace in Africa, so that the next time genocide or famine reared up on the continent, the White House and Congress would be flooded with calls for meaningful action.

  I was still busy, but at least my hours were a little bit more my own and I had more time for Michael. As we spent some evenings together, additional details about his life bubbled to the surface. The corrupt cops. The gunfights. The beatings. Each new anecdote acted on me at first like a drop of corrosive chemical, eating away my own shell of denial. I was amazed; it didn’t seem possible that the James and Michael I had first known in the shelter could have done these things. I’d elected to see them only as the little boys I’d first known and loved.

  The environment in which Michael had grown up was an undeniable factor, yet somehow I had divorced my assessment of Michael’s prospects from the stark reality of his surroundings. Imagine how hard it is for boys like Michael to overcome the following context:

  One third of black males in their twenties are under some form of criminal justice supervision, and in cities like Michael’s Washington, D.C., the number surges to over half.

  Less than half of African-American males graduate from high school on time, and a majority of the nongraduates will end up incarcerated by their thirties if current trends continue.

  A staggering 75 percent of people currently in prison on drug-related crimes are African American despite the fact that usage rates are roughly similar to those of white people.

  There are more African Americans who are incarcerated, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved right before the Civil War.

  People who commit violent crimes were themselves often subjected to terrible abuse and neglect when they were young and defenseless, and nothing was ever done about it.

  Children fall through the tattered “safety net” as they leave or are pushed out of segregated schools, are passed around in foster care, suffer abuse and trauma, enter the juvenile justice system, serve time for a felony, and eventually become de facto second-class citizens who face discrimination in their attempts to get employment, housing, and schooling.

  After doing so little for these young people as they are growing up and dealing with abuse and single parenthood, our government finally steps in and starts really spending money on these folks once they make a big mistake, to prosecute and put them away in prison for a long, long time.

  These are the kind of things Michael and I would sometimes talk about, and we’d just shake our heads at how messed up things had become.

  As I told Jean, she’d been right. My effect on them had been limited to the times I was actually in their presence. Just as she’d predicted, the overwhelming reality of their circumstances had taken over the minute I’d gone to Africa or anywhere else that wasn’t with them.

  Jean, though, saw something else. Yes, she said, the boys had gone off course for a while. But they’d pulled away from the brink. So many dr
ug dealers end up either dead or in prison, but Michael had escaped and James seemed to have a chance as well. As far as we knew, they appeared to have stopped dealing and carrying guns of their own accord. And while we’d never know for sure, Jean argued, it seemed likely to her that one of my “seeds” had taken hold, just as I’d argued all along.

  There is all kinds of evidence—both anecdotal and academic—that these big brother–big sister types of mentoring programs have a remarkable effect over time on kids’ development, and countless school-based and community programs have been found to make a major difference in preventing crime and promoting achievement. They’re just chronically underfunded, and desperately need more volunteers. Maybe Michael and James would have pulled themselves up and out of the violence and drug dealing if I had never been a part of their lives. But it’s also possible that having someone care about them early in their lives had had the desired effect at just the crucial moment.

  Of course, there was no way to be sure.

  20. Strange License Plates

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  I was out of the life, but I still got the news. And the news was, there was a coke shortage in D.C. Nobody seemed to have any, for some reason, and the crackheads were getting fidgety. It’s not good when the coke runs short. Prices go up. People get nervous. Bullets fly.

  There was this guy I knew, no names necessary, who said he knew some dudes from Philadelphia who could bring in a full ki of coke. A kilo is a lot of crack cocaine; it’s big money. I didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money anymore; in fact, it was only because I was flat broke that I was even thinking about cocaine. James and I decided we wouldn’t buy that ki of coke; we’d rob it.