Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  It isn’t easy getting a kilo of crack away from drug dealers. You need guns, you need brains, and you need big brass balls even to think about robbing them. I arranged to meet the Philly dudes at the McDonald’s on New York Avenue. I took a soft-sided laptop bag and put a couple of folded towels in it, so if you felt it from the outside, it seemed like it was full of cash. I strapped up with two guns and James had two also; I’d left the life, but we still had guns. We met in the parking lot; six of those motherfuckers got out the car. I look up and see this extra dude on a fire escape, and I think, uh oh. He’s with them too. But it was too late now to back out. I get James to keep most of them busy talking, and I say to the dude with the bag, let’s walk around the corner and let me see the shit. It’s all there, a full kilo of cocaine, and I feel my heart going like a motherfucker. I say let’s go back to the car and get you your money. I hold out the laptop bag with my right hand and reach for the cocaine with my left. The dude puts his hand on the laptop bag, and I can see in his eyes he knows right away that isn’t crinkly money in there, but cloth. He says, “Yo, yo, yo,” and before he can do anything else, I drop the laptop bag and pull out my gun. “Ain’t no use for that,” he says and puts his hands up. I yelled to James, and we got in the car and went before any of those dudes could come unstuck. I never did know if the guy I saw on the fire escape was one of them. All I knew was, we’d just robbed some Philadelphia drug dealers of a kilo of crack cocaine and lived to tell about it. I sold it off cheap, and we still made $25,000.

  After that, I was like, fuck that shit. I’m done. I knew it like God was talking in my ear. I was lucky one too many times. It had been more than a year since I’d left the street, and my half of the $25,000 wasn’t going to keep us going very long with three little boys in the house.

  So we all moved in with Nikki’s mom. That hurt me; a man should be able to take care of his family. It was the most hurtingest thing I’d ever done. But I was stuck in the used-to-be and was waiting for the not-yet. It took me a while to figure out the rock-bottom truth: I had to get a job. A job. It stung even to think it. I’d never had a job except that roofing shit. Hardly anybody in my family had ever had a job. Nikki’s sister said she could get me an interview at Washington Hospital Center and that I should go over and ask for a white man named Jeff.

  This Jeff dude took one look at my cornrows and turned to the lady sitting there beside him. “Looks like a drug dealer,” he said, and I almost went off on him. Like, what the fuck does a drug dealer look like anyway? I hadn’t dealt any drugs in months.

  “No,” said the lady next to him. “I think we should give him a chance. What about it, hon? You want a job? You want to start right now?”

  I said sure, and for the first time in my life, I was a working man. She put me in the cafeteria, washing tables to start. I felt all kinds of different ways all at once. Depressed, first of all; it’s not any fun washing tables. Not like hanging on the corner with a big roll of bills and a four-five in my pocket. But also kind of calm and peaceful because I didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder all the time for the thugs and the cops. And a little bit proud too. I was holding a job.

  Of course, come that Friday and I get my paycheck, I was like, What the fuck is this? $423. I called up Nikki and said, “You know what this is? I wash tables all fucking week and make this? I used to make this in ten minutes dealing drugs!”

  She was like a fucking rock though. “You got to stay with it,” she told me in that voice that allowed no bullshit. And her mom was all over me with hugs and kisses and how proud she was that I was working an honest job. That woman loves me, and she loved me even more for putting on those overalls and going to work for no money. And J.P. was real proud of me too. They kept me at it.

  I didn’t tell them, but my plan was to save up four or five of those little paychecks, buy me an eighth of a ki, and do a little dealing on the side. I was going to outsmart all those motherfuckers. But a funny thing happened. By the time a few weeks went by, I was liking the work. Punch in. Say good morning to everybody. Do my work. Have lunch. Talk to people. Work some more. Punch out. I’d even see guys from the street in there, and they’d do a double-take and say, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Working,” I’d say, and I’d be proud. To find somebody else in my family who worked steady you’d have to go all the way back to slave times.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  My dad was laid off from Fred’s Frozen Foods after nearly forty years as a traveling salesman. It was a blatant case of age discrimination, and the unfairness of it really burned me up. His professional life to which he had dedicated so much had come to a fairly abrupt and unceremonious end. Good old Fred’s Frozen Foods had been sold and re-sold, and Dad was just an employee number to headquarters by then, not the guy who the secretaries would cheer when he and his partner, Uncle Dave, would come back to the plant in Indiana with a bunch of new sales, guaranteeing paychecks for everyone for the foreseeable future. He was the last of the dinosaurs, the older guys who relied purely on personal relations to make the sales. Traveling around in his station wagon with Uncle Dave for years, making friends, telling jokes, slinging product. To no longer do that made him feel unwanted, unneeded, it seemed to me. He suddenly lacked purpose and professional identity—a salesman without a customer.

  One night when I was visiting the house in Berwyn, we watched Dustin Hoffman play the character of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It was a remarkable distillation of the dreams and disappointments of a salesman’s life, and to watch it with my father was powerful. To have Willy dream of hundreds of people at his funeral, “with their strange license plates,” and then have nobody but his wife and sons at the graveside was painfully tragic. I glanced over at my dad, but he was impassive. When the play was over, a million questions ricocheted around the inside of my skull. Was that how he felt about things? Was that an accurate portrayal of the salesman’s mentality? Did he feel as used up and spit out as Willy Loman did? “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” Willy had thundered. But my dad and I didn’t have the vocabulary for that kind of talk. We just turned off the set and bade each other good night.

  A month or so after the September 11 attacks, Michael and Nikki were married. They’d reserved a big community center in Silver Spring, and there must have been 150 people there. Nikki was pregnant with Marco; they’d soon have four boys running around their feet.

  It was like the final scene in a Fellini movie: Everybody from Michael’s past was there. His brothers and sisters, of course, but also all his cousins and aunts and uncles who’d been drifting in and out of his life all those years, sponging off him and his mom when they could. His father was there. Tough-looking buddies from his drug-dealing days and straight-arrow folks from his job at the Washington Hospital Center. Michael had spent so much time and energy on building up and protecting his family. To see them all—the admirable and the not-so-admirable—all gathered around Michael and Nikki was a beautiful thing. And, in the middle of all that, my parents.

  Michael’s wedding really gave Dad a lift. He and Mom danced every dance. Michael kept finding them in the crowd and hugging them. He was so happy to show us that, after all the time on the streets, he really was the good soul we’d loved in him as a child. To have my parents at his wedding—to validate his goodness, to put their stamp on it—seemed really to overwhelm him. He had talked for years about the importance of family, and here he was showing us that he could live up to his words.

  Michael and Nikki at their wedding, 2001

  21. “I’ll See You Tomorrow in Church”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  James had really straightened himself out. He had four kids to look after now, and he was living with their mom and the kids. He had gotten himself trained to be a plumber. In the old days, I never saw James without a gun in his belt. Now I never saw him without his plumber’s tools. He was a happy family man now.

  The old J
ames, however, was never far from the surface. We were all visiting my mom on a Saturday night in 2003. She was living in a four-bedroom townhouse in Maryland. Tyrell was living with my mom, and he looked fly as always. Tyrell had grown from that delicate boy into a real trip of a young man. He was about eighteen now, and he made his own clothes with a sewing machine—extremely flashy clothes, with ruffles and sashes and shit, the kind I’d never wear. He sold them too, for pretty good money, and he also made money doing clown shows for children’s birthday parties. He called himself Woozy, and the kids really loved him. He also made money by stripping for old women! No lie; he had this one group who’d knock on his door every Friday and say, “Tyrell, we’re ready!” and he’d go over and put on a strip show for them. His room was all fluffy with colorful cloth everywhere—slipcovers and curtains and shit like that that he’d made himself. And two little songbirds in a cage. That was Tyrell; he was always a little different.

  David was at my mom’s too. He had dropped out of high school, which made J.P. really upset. J.P. always thought David could get a scholarship to go to college because he played basketball so well. J.P. even thought David might get a shot at the NBA after college. David, though, he couldn’t finish high school. He wasn’t acting out or unhappy or anything like that; he just couldn’t be bothered. He’s the most easygoing motherfucker in the world—happy as a fucking clam. He just don’t do shit.

  So we’re all at my mom’s when James tosses a firecracker just as the girlfriend of this neighborhood guy, Danny Boy, happened to be walking by, and she was really freaked out by it. Danny Boy was pissed when she told him, and he came out and started arguing with James. James went off, and I mean off. I’d thought he was past that shit. He went after that motherfucker Danny Boy like to tear his head off. My mom was screaming and crying, begging James not to kill him. She’d watched her sons become drug dealers and not one of them dead or in prison, and now that they were out of the life, she didn’t want to lose one to a moment of stupid, pointless violence. We finally got James cooled down by reminding him of his babies and his responsibilities and the good life he now had. He finally smiled, but a real smile, not like the cold little smile he used to give before fucking somebody up. “I’ll see you tomorrow in church,” he said, and I took Nikki and the boys home.

  We had a fourth boy now: Marco Marciano. The day after the blow-up with James and the firecracker, I took Nikki and the boys to Virginia Beach and had a good time—the kind of nice, normal family day that I used to see on TV and in the movies but never thought I’d have my own self. We played in the water, ate ice cream, rode the rides on the boardwalk—all of that. We got home to our place in Laurel, and I just got out of the shower when the phone rings. It’s Sabrina, and she’s out of her mind crying and screaming that they shot James. I’m like, no, James ain’t shot. It couldn’t be. He’s not in that life anymore.

  I hauled ass over there to Kenilworth Avenue with my four-five in my fishing box. As I pull up, I see the yellow tape and I know it’s true. They’d just taken James away. Sabrina told me he’d run into that same motherfucker Danny Boy, and there’d been words. A rumble erupted, and everyone was fighting. Sabrina was fighting some neighborhood girl, and my brother André got into it with Danny Boy’s brother. And James and Danny Boy threw down. Both of them pulled out their guns and opened fire no more than fifteen feet away from each other. James had taken his bullet-proof vest off only minutes before the fight, and he got hit immediately in the stomach. When Sabrina got to him, James was lying on the ground. “I can’t believe that bitch-ass nigger shot me,” was all James said before he fell out. By the time we got to Prince George’s Hospital, James was in surgery. The bullet had gone through his bowels and filled him all up with shit, so he never woke up. To this day I believe if that ambulance had got there earlier, James would still be alive.

  I hunted that motherfucker Danny Boy down, and I almost had him. My mom was in the car when I saw the guy coming down the street. Mom was like, Let me go get some cigarettes, and she jumped out of the car. It threw me off just enough that the dude got past me. I think my mom didn’t want me killing that guy. It wouldn’t have brought James back, and it would have put my ass in prison and left my four boys without a father. The police eventually picked Danny Boy up, but they said James had shot at him first so his killing James was self-defense. They let the motherfucker go. Now he’s in prison, but not for killing my brother. I know if the same thing had happened to me, James would have killed Danny Boy and his whole motherfucking family. I think about that sometimes and wonder if I’m not letting James down. But James, he’s dead. My boys are alive.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  I’d been searching for ways to create a broader audience for our issues of war and peace in Africa, a way to reach and activate far more people than we human rights activists were capable of. The answer practically fell into my lap. Pure serendipity.

  I was invited to attend an event in 2003 in which Angelina Jolie would be speaking about refugees on Capitol Hill. She made a genuine heartfelt speech about the plight of refugees. After the event we had the chance to meet, and it took us only ten minutes to figure out that we should travel to Africa together. She really wanted to go to Congo, and the United Nations wasn’t able to take her because of security concerns, so your friendly neighborhood Africa human rights activist was glad to volunteer for the job.

  The trip to Congo was very low-key. Angelina was terrific. She slept in small inns, ate refugee camp food, wrote constantly in her journal, spent endless hours with families displaced by the war, and never complained. If anyone had been expecting a Hollywood prima donna, they couldn’t have been more wrong. She dressed way down, and not many people recognized her, though every now and then some African kid would yell “Tomb Raider! Tomb Raider!” at her, and she’d flash that million-dollar smile.

  We met with Congolese people who had experienced the gamut of human rights crimes that have become hallmarks of what is the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. We listened to gang rape survivors, former child soldiers, and people that had been displaced and re-displaced, as well as raped and re-raped. We talked about the mineral trade that fuels the war, minerals that are used in our cell phones and laptops, connecting us straight to the horrors we were learning about.

  When we returned home, the Holocaust Museum offered to host, on its website, a photo exhibit of our trip which featured Angelina reading from her diaries and me talking about the politics of the place. People magazine wrote about the website, and so many people clicked on it to hear Angelina speak about the Congo that the Holocaust Museum’s server crashed in the first couple hours the exhibit went live. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my political analysis people were logging on to listen to.

  The lightbulb started flashing. Hardly anyone’s interested—yet—in African wars, but everybody’s interested in movie stars. I decided to try to work with some of these more famous folks to encourage them and help them speak out about the people devastated by war so that the survivors wouldn’t be forgotten anymore. Most of the celebrities I encountered turned out to be effective and sincere advocates, with an audience full of potential recruits to the cause. These celebrities are the master recruiters, and their impact is huge in terms of raising awareness.

  From there, my work with actors, musicians, and athletes began to take shape. I forged a partnership with my dear friend Bonnie Abaunza, who ran the artist relations unit for Amnesty International; I was again working with one of the groups my high school Spanish teacher Ms. Kane had introduced me to that fateful day at detention when she tossed those pamphlets on my desk. Bonnie and Angelina introduced me to Ryan Gosling, who got very passionate about the child soldier issue in northern Uganda and traveled with me to the internal refugee camps there, where we met many of the kids who had been forced into combat at a young age. Afterward we lobbied Congress, went to the United Nations, wrote articles, and made YouTube videos together. We later went to Congo to
make films about the people there and how their lives are affected by war.

  I met and talked basketball with Don Cheadle at an early screening of Hotel Rwanda arranged by Bonnie and Amnesty. Don and I found that we shared a genuine passion for the anti-genocide cause. We ended up traveling to Africa twice together with ABC News, coauthoring two books and a bunch of op-eds, and making speeches all over the country together. The incomparable Samantha Power and David Pressman pulled me into working on Darfur with George Clooney, who is a master tactician and serious student of international issues, and with whom I later traveled to Sudan, met with President Obama, and did countless television shows, Congressional meetings, and student events.

  George Clooney and J.P. with the elders from southern Sudan

  (photo courtesy of Ann Curry, NBC News)

  You couldn’t have found three legislators or diplomats more committed or talented than Ryan, Don, and George. We became great allies and friends, and they made a huge impact in bringing attention to issues of war and peace in Africa.

  In 2007, with the backing of a foundation called Humanity United, my longtime friend and ally Gayle Smith and I started an organization called the Enough Project that aims to end genocide and other human rights crimes by continuing to build a political constituency for this cause. As part of the Enough Project, NBA star Tracy McGrady and I traveled with my Darfurian brother Omer Ismail to the refugee camps in Chad, and we created a sister schools program called the Darfur Dream Team that links students in U.S. schools to students in the refugee camps and funds the schools in the camps.

  It was right about then—when my dream of getting these issues out to a wider audience was taking shape—that Michael called to tell me James had been killed.