Someone always seemed to be there when I needed fatherly advice or instructions. One time was in the second year of dental school and the first day of class with a conservative professor named Dr. Nicholas. I had heard rumors that he made all of the guys wear ties to class. I had managed to complete the first year of dental school without even wearing dress shoes, let alone a tie.
When Dr. Nicholas made the announcement, I started to sweat. No one had ever taught me how to knot a tie. Throughout high school, I had avoided wearing one or someone had tied it for me on the spot. The next morning, I dug through the drawers in my apartment until I found an old, multicolored silk tie. I clasped it tightly and dashed to class.
I got there a few minutes early and stood at the door. My eyes worked the room and landed on Jason Karns, a classmate with a kind face and a perfectly knotted tie. I walked up to him.
“Look, uh, I need this tie tied,” I said.
Jason must have seen the embarrassment in my eyes. He could have tied it for me right then and there, as I expected him to do. Without saying a word, he motioned for me to follow him down the hall to the bathroom. He took my tie and showed me step by step how to knot it. He took it apart and retied it slowly two or three times. Then, I took it apart and practiced two or three more times.
I tied it one last time.
And from that moment on, the knot I wore was my own.
15
D.W.B.
Rameck
November 10, 1996, about 2 A.M.
I noticed the three cop cars just blocks down the road behind me. I had gotten together with friends to watch the Mike Tyson–Evander Holyfield fight and ended up staying late to socialize after Holyfield shocked boxing fans everywhere with a TKO of Tyson just seconds into the eleventh round.
That many police in one place meant something was going on. It was a rainy night; I rolled down my window to get a better look. The officers were laughing. Maybe they had watched the fight, too. I locked eyes with one of them for a second. The laughter stopped. I glanced at my friend Dax, who was riding in the front seat.
“Man, you know they’re about to follow us,” he said.
All three officers jumped in their cars and fell in behind us, single file.
We knew the drill. Practically every black man who has ever been behind the wheel of a car knows the drill: make sure you’re not speeding. Use the proper turn signals. Double-check your seat belt. Double-check your lights. Don’t make one wrong move.
Without clicking on their red lights or sirens, they followed every turn I made for the next ten minutes, just waiting for me to slip.
“Man, why are they following us?” Dax asked, though he already knew the answer.
I was taking my normal route home and turned onto a dark, secluded street. Seconds later, red lights began flashing in my rear-view mirror. The steering wheel dampened in my grip. The warnings I had heard about Edison cops when I first learned to drive came rushing back: be careful there. They don’t like black folks.
I began to second-guess myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have made that turn. Who knows what three crazy white cops might do to two young, black men on a dark street in a predominantly white suburb this time of the morning? It didn’t matter that I was a first-year medical student or that Dax was in law school. The color of our skin alone was enough to make us suspect.
This was three years before the state of New Jersey signed a consent decree, agreeing to a major overhaul of its state police to end racial profiling and avoid a civil-rights lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice—a case that helped to catapult the term “racial profiling” onto the front pages of newspapers across the nation. On this night, racial profiling—the crime of driving while black—was just a truth shared among black men.
I was approaching a green traffic light. I rolled through, veered right, and began to pull to the side of the road. At the same time, the officer in the last car sped around the others, made a quick turn in front of me, and cut me off.
He jumped out of the car with his gun drawn. The cop in the car immediately behind me clicked on his floodlights and jumped out of his car, too.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” the cop with the gun yelled.
Startled, Dax and I looked at each other. My knees felt weak as I stepped slowly out of the car. The officer ordered Dax out, too. I was sure we were about to die.
One of the officers rushed over and slammed me against my car.
“Didn’t you see my lights?” he yelled.
He pointed his finger in my face so close that it was almost touching.
“Why in the fuck didn’t you stop?”
“I did stop,” I said.
“Not fast enough,” he shouted back.
He began patting me.
“Why are you frisking me?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Shut the fuck up,” the officer said. “You should have pulled over when you saw our lights.”
The other officers started looking through my car.
“Hey, man, you can’t go through my car,” I said. “Why are you searching my car?”
They ignored me and popped my trunk.
“You got any drugs or guns?” they asked, continuing their search without waiting for me to answer.
“Aha! Look what I found,” one of the officers yelled gleefully from inside the car.
I shook my head in disbelief.
Oh, my God, what have they planted inside my car? I wondered.
The officer held up a small knife about the size of a pencil. It was an old fishing knife that I had thrown into the glove compartment and forgotten. It never occurred to me that carrying it around was illegal.
“You’re being a smart-ass. Now you’re going to jail,” the officer said.
He snapped on a pair of handcuffs, much too tightly, and left me standing in the rain while he stepped away to talk to his fellow officers. Within minutes, I was soaked. I was grateful for the heavier-than-usual traffic because I figured it offered a bit more protection. But at the same time, I was deeply embarrassed. Passengers stared as cars slowed almost to a stop. I looked up in time to see one guy in a passing car shake his head at me in disgust. Finally, the officer led me to a police car and pushed me into the backseat.
“It ain’t no black thing either,” he said. “You should have pulled over when we told you to.”
“Man, I’m a medical student. My friend is about to go to law school. You’re not taking me anywhere until you call your supervisor,” I said.
He called for a sergeant over the car radio. At least three more police cars rolled up. An officer I presumed was a sergeant was in one of them. He walked over to the car where I was and listened as the officers told their side of the story. He walked away without even acknowledging me.
I noticed a couple of officers talking to Dax, who was still standing next to my car. They allowed him to drive my car home. But they took me to jail and booked me with some ridiculous charges: interference with a police officer and possession of a deadly weapon. They put me in a cell alone.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. I hadn’t done anything wrong. And possession of a deadly weapon is a felony—I would never pass the medical-licensing process with a felony on my record as an adult. I would never become a doctor now.
I looked up to find a white officer I hadn’t seen before standing outside my cell. He identified himself as a sergeant.
“How you doing?” he asked. His voice was kind.
“I’m all right,” I said calmly.
“What happened?”
For the first time, I told my side of the story. He glanced to his right, then his left, as though he was looking for someone. No one was there.
“You should file a complaint,” he said, then walked away.
About three hours after I was locked up, an officer unlocked the cell.
“Your friends are upstairs,” he said when I asked to use the phone.
I have never been so happy to
see George, Sam, Dax, and Na-im. When the officers let Dax go, he had driven to our apartment and picked up Sam. They called George, who told them he and Na-im would meet them at the Edison jail. All four of them had been waiting for hours.
When I made it home, it was nearly seven A.M. I couldn’t sleep. I sat alone in my room and replayed the night’s events in my head. A few hours later, I called my mother and told her what had happened. She promised to call her lawyer, who had gotten her out of trouble a few times before. The lawyer agreed to represent me pro bono as a favor to my mother. I explained that I was not open to a plea bargain. My career would have to survive this, and the only way was to get the charges wiped off my record.
My lawyer advised me that the simplest approach would be to persuade the officer to drop the charges. He assured me that he would take care of it. In the meantime, I went back to the police station and filed a complaint.
As the weeks passed, I had trouble sleeping. A couple of times, bad dreams jolted me awake in a cold sweat. I had worked so hard to change my life. Now I could lose everything.
During a preliminary hearing, I saw the arrest report for the first time, which explained why the officers claimed they had stopped me. The tint on my windows and dirty license-plate cover made me look suspicious, they said. Before the hearing began, my lawyer walked over to the prosecutor, sat next to him, and began to whisper. He pleaded my case and asked the prosecutor, a young guy fresh out of law school, to persuade the police officer to drop the charges. The prosecutor seemed to sympathize and agreed to help. Both lawyers then asked the judge to postpone the hearing.
When I heard from my lawyer again, the news was bad. The officer had refused to drop the charges. The prosecutor suspected that the reason was because I had filed a complaint against the officer. The complaint had been reviewed and resolved in his favor, but it still went in his personnel file as a complaint.
The judge set a trial date. But on the day the judge was scheduled to hear my case, my attorney didn’t show up. The judge set a new date. My lawyer missed it again. The judge set a third date. My lawyer missed that one, too.
The judge was angry.
“Listen, young man,” he said to me, “I don’t know who your lawyer is, but he has no respect for you or your well-being. I’m about to set a new date, and this case will be tried with or without your lawyer. If I were you, I would sue him and get a new lawyer.”
By now, I was frantic. While my peers planned their futures and anticipated clinical rotations at hospitals in the area for the following semester, I was worrying that this might be the end for me.
I had no money and no way of getting a new lawyer, and I feared a public defender would try to plead my life away. I turned to Dr. Tiedrich, a Jewish physician who had become my friend while treating my mother for a job-related injury. When she had bragged to him that her son was in medical school, he had asked to meet me. She had persuaded me to accompany her to his office. I did, and he became something of a mentor. He called regularly.
During one of those calls, I explained what was going on. He called an attorney who was a friend of his. His friend agreed to help. When the new trial date rolled around, my new lawyer and I showed up in court without a clue about what kind of defense to use. The knife found in my car was indeed mine, and under the circumstances, it was against the law.
“God, please help me out of this,” I prayed silently.
The judge called my case. My attorney and I sat behind a table on one side of the courtroom. I looked into the audience and saw the police officer again for the first time since my arrest. The charges were read. The prosecutor approached the judge, who hastily called a recess. I wondered what was going on.
After a brief recess, the trial began again.
“Well, we can’t seem to find the evidence,” the prosecutor said.
I couldn’t believe it. They had lost the knife.
The prosecutor asked the judge to postpone the trial again. Clearly frustrated, the judge refused. Instead, he threw the case out.
My mouth dropped open. God had rescued me once again.
And I was free to go.
16
BECOMING DOCTORS
Sam
MY STOMACH TWISTED into a pretzel as I waited to meet with the medical-school dean to learn the results of my first state board exam.
All medical students take the exam at the end of their second year, and the results determine whether they can move on to the next phase, working eight-week rotations in different areas of medicine at hospitals affiliated with the university. The results hadn’t arrived by the beginning of the next semester, so Rameck and I had moved to Camden and started our clinical rotations at Cooper Hospital, adjacent to the South Jersey branch of Robert Wood Johnson. Dr. Paul R. Mehne, Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs at the branch, had received the results first and made appointments with each of us to break the news.
He didn’t waste any time.
“We didn’t make it,” he said sympathetically.
His words knocked the wind out of me.
“But it’s not a problem,” he continued, quickly trying to make it better. “We’re going to get you past this. I guarantee you you’ll be fine.”
I had missed the mark by just a couple of points. But that didn’t matter. For a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t see how I would ever get past this.
I had used review books and practice tests and had regularly stayed up studying all night. Everything I had worked for the past six years had come down to this one exam. The night before, I had been unable to sleep. On test day, I had trouble concentrating. Exhaustion had shut down my brain like a computer virus, scrambling or wiping out everything I had learned. When I’d walked out of the classroom after finishing, I knew I had failed.
I had just been hoping I was wrong.
Dr. Mehne was genuinely warm and encouraging as he broke the news. He still believed in me, he said. But I had to suspend my clinical rotations for six weeks to prepare to retake the exam.
When I walked into my apartment that evening, Camille, who had moved in with Rameck and me when we relocated to Camden, was standing in the kitchen. When she saw my face, she knew something was wrong.
I told her I didn’t make it.
She rushed over, embraced me, and began to cry. I was still too stunned to cry. Rameck came out of his bedroom and joined us. He knew immediately what was going on.
“Aw, dog, I’m so sorry,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’s gonna be all right.”
They had met with Dr. Mehne, too. They didn’t even have to tell me they had passed.
When I told George about my results over the telephone that evening, he drove all the way from Newark just to sit with me. Guys don’t like to make each other uncomfortable, so we didn’t really talk about it. He just wanted to be there.
The three of us had always been successful together, so this was awkward for us. Neither of them knew what to say to me. The truth is, there was nothing much they could say to make it better. I had to get through this on my own.
“Whenever you need me, dog, I’m here,” Rameck told me constantly.
In college, he and I had always talked through our problems or shared what we were going through during long conversations at night. But this was different. I needed all of my energy just to survive each day. I felt like a complete failure, like a boxer who had gotten knocked out in the first round of an important fight by an intimidating opponent he had to face again in just a few weeks.
Medical school had not been a nurturing, supportive environment, and from the beginning I had felt that I didn’t belong. Failing the board exam only heightened my sense of isolation. I had no confidence in myself. There was no joy in waking up each morning. As close as Rameck, George, and I were, I wasn’t sure even they could relate.
George called regularly and occasionally drove to Camden to check on me, and Rameck and I still played basketball togeth
er. But there were long periods of silence when we got together. For whatever reasons, my two best friends weren’t able to reach me.
Camille was the one who broke through. She had struggled in her first two years of medical school and knew exactly what I was feeling. I had been her backbone during that difficult time, and she became mine. We often hung out, just to talk. She became my sister. We were able to connect on an emotional level that feels too awkward between guys.
“You might not understand it now,” she said. “But God allowed this to happen for a reason.”
Alone in my room, I listened to Tupac. He rapped about the pull between his old life as a thug and the new one as a rich rapper. I related to his isolation.
But as defeated as I felt, I never stopped pushing myself. Every morning, I got up early, as though I was still going to the hospital. Instead, I went to the library. I studied review books in every subject, including surgery, anatomy, microbiology, cell biology/histology, and physiology. Periodically, I tested myself with practice questions. Sometimes I teamed up with a fellow student named Terry Rollins, a super-smart guy from Atlantic City, to go over questions and concepts. I brought my lunch and took a scheduled break to eat.
In the evenings, I studied with two girls who had also failed. We had hung together before at school, and now we bonded and worked to help one another through. They were roommates, so their apartment became our study hall. They often cooked dinner, and I went jogging through their complex listening to Tupac’s “Me Against the World” and “Makaveli.” Then we spread our books across the table or floor and spent the rest of the night studying. To lighten the moment, we told stories to make each other laugh. God knows I needed to laugh.
I also traveled to Washington, D.C., to hang out with our former roommate, Dax, who was attending law school at George Washington University. The change of scenery was refreshing.
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