Living and Dying in Brick City

by Sampson Davis

  I’m a strong believer in partnerships, and Beth Israel seemed to me a natural partner for The Three Doctors Foundation, especially for two of our signature community events, Mentor Day and the Healthy Mind and Body Summit. For Mentor Day, hospital volunteers are matched with Newark children interested in medical careers. For the summit, hospital staff and medical students are provided with free blood pressure screenings, literature, and lectures about heart disease, diabetes, sexually transmitted infections, obesity, prostate and breast cancer, smoking cessation, depression, and other issues that have a significant (and often disproportionate) impact on minority communities. One of my favorite events as community outreach director was the hospital’s annual holiday celebration that provided gifts donated by hospital employees to poor families in the community. I loved this event so much because I’d never forgotten how much a similar celebration had once meant to my family and me.

  I was about eight years old that blustery winter day when my mother, Andre, Carlton, and I hopped on the number 24 public bus and headed downtown to the Newark Symphony Hall for a Christmas party thrown by strangers. My mother signed us in, and we took our seats among the crowd of families already gathered there. Holiday music played in the background, and then I heard someone announce, “The Davis family.” My mother grabbed Carlton’s hand and mine, and we all walked to the stage. The presenter handed Moms a big black plastic bag filled with brand-new toys and clothes. Andre, Carlton, and I were so excited that we wanted to rip into the bag right there. But my mother thanked the presenter, and we rode the bus back home and put the gifts under our Christmas tree. I felt like I was about to pop with anticipation every time I walked past that pile of gifts—that year, I felt like a normal kid. I’d been embarrassed during the holiday season in previous years when other kids talked about the new bikes, Big Wheels, and board games they were getting for Christmas, and I had nothing to share. Now some stranger had given us a Christmas. I never forgot that feeling.

  Hospital administrators threw their full support behind me in my new role. They lent staff and financial support and showed up at community events to mingle with our neighbors. I was still as busy as ever, spending far more than seven hours a week volunteering in the community, but transferring seven of those hours into my workweek lessened the load a bit and increased my sense of fulfillment. The experience taught me a valuable life lesson: Ask for what you want on the job, and increase the chances of a positive response by presenting the mutual benefits.

  I was in a good place mentally when a friend invited me to a house party in Brooklyn in July 2003. Brooklyn had not impressed me the few times I’d visited before, but something about the atmosphere seemed different that day as I made my way through the Holland Tunnel, across the Manhattan Bridge, and down Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues, finally landing at a two-story brick house in a tree-shrouded neighborhood.

  The girls seemed earthier; the guys more laid back. I liked this vibe. Music blasted through the house, and a nice breeze kept the humidity and mosquitoes at bay. A DJ set up in the corner of the backyard played a crazy mix of the hottest songs. I was really digging the scene when I looked up and noticed a beautiful young lady standing a few feet away. She stood about five feet five inches tall, with curly, shoulder-length brown hair, a golden honey complexion, a knockout smile, and the body to match. Dressed in a fitted red T-shirt, low-cut dark blue jeans, and stilettos, she was waiting in line for the bathroom. As I watched her move forward in line, I came up with a plan to meet her: I would ease closer, wait for her to step out of the restroom, and make my move. On cue, just a few minutes later, she sauntered out, heading directly toward me. Suddenly she was close enough to touch. Palms sweating, heart pounding, I tried to think of something smooth to say, but my mind went blank. That’s the only excuse I have to explain the cheesy line that came flying out: “Hey, could I have some of that?”

  I was referring to an oversized plastic cup she was holding in her hand, and I immediately wanted to freeze the moment, rewind, and start over. She looked at me as if to say, Honey, please! Try again. And she walked away.

  About a half hour later, I got another chance when I noticed her standing next to celebrity publicist Marvet Britto, whom I’d recently met. I asked her about her friend.

  “Oh, you mean Melissa,” Marvet responded.

  My red T-shirt, stiletto-wearing friend now had a name. When Marvet introduced us, Melissa, who worked with the American Black Film Festival, first gave me that “Oh, the guy with the whack line” stare. But she quickly warmed. We talked for about a half hour, exchanged numbers, and I called her the next day. Thus began my falling in love—with Melissa, who later became a creative director at a national magazine, and with Brooklyn.

  Her neighborhood was a jazzy, diverse place with people of all races and immigrants from around the world. Trees lined the streets, and there wasn’t a mall or chain store in sight. The commercial establishments were primarily small specialty shops, corner diners, and other eateries, with names like Sugarcane, Mike’s, and Buttercup. People actually sat outside, and they even talked and looked out for one another. There were basketball courts filled with little Kobes shooting hoops. When you walked the streets, strangers smiled and greeted you. This wasn’t some cookie-cutter suburb, like the one in South Jersey where I’d lived during medical school.

  Back then, my apartment was in a huge complex, where little more than Sheetrock separated me from people I never saw. By day, they vanished (probably to Philly to work); I found it so strange to see rows and rows of parked cars every day and no human beings, ever. In the evenings and on weekends, I’d hear televisions, music, and voices, the only evidence I had that people actually lived within those walls. And God forbid you ever got stuck in the elevator with a real live person. There seemed to be some kind of unwritten rule against saying hello. People would rather stare at the back of your head than actually face you to say good morning. Needless to say, that was not my vibe. Brooklyn, however, had a pulse.

  Before I knew it, months turned into years. And I was still digging Brooklyn and Melissa. Life was settling into a good place.

  The rumors started swirling around the E.R. in 2004: Big budget cuts were coming to Beth, and my part-time position as director of community outreach was on the chopping block. I went to Darrell Terry to get the truth. Always straight up with me, Darrell confirmed what I feared, that the tight budget would likely squeeze out my position. The hospital appreciated my work and connections to the community, he said, but tough financial times demanded difficult choices. He would do what he could to protect the hours, but he couldn’t make any promises.

  I then turned to Dr. Marc Borenstein, chairman of the emergency medicine department. He, too, said he’d try to prevent the hours from being cut. Dr. B, as we called him, was one of the coolest white dudes I’d ever met. He played the guitar and didn’t mind showing off his dance moves at staff parties. We had shared some meaningful conversations, during which he talked about his own struggles growing up. Struggle can leave a lifelong imprint on a person’s soul, and it often breeds compassion. Dr. B was a compassionate soul and one of my biggest supporters. This budget issue, though, was out of his hands.

  For months I met with every administrator I knew, including executive director Paul Mertz, to try to save the position, but the inevitable happened—it was cut. To avoid a loss in pay, I would have to return to working full-time in the emergency department. The news was deeply disappointing. I could hardly fathom how seven measly hours a week of community time would even register in the size of the budget needed to operate a major urban medical center with more than six hundred beds. There had to be more to it than I was hearing. I wondered: Was it me? What had I done but try to connect the place to the community, save some lives, and bring the spotlight to a gritty urban hospital that had helped a native son rise? What about the things all the higher-ups had told me about the hospital’s commitment to the community? For once I felt out of sync with Beth Is
rael. And that hurt.

  I knew I couldn’t return to the chaos of my life in the emergency department before the change, so I began negotiating with the administrators to come up with an alternative that would be cost-effective for the hospital and still allow me the time I needed physically and mentally to continue trying to make a difference in my community. We considered the possibility of trying to secure grant funding for the position, but that quickly fell through, given that I had no time to write a proposal or assistant to help me. We also talked briefly about possibly merging The Three Doctors Foundation with Beth Israel, but George, Rameck, and I decided that it was important to remain independent. I wanted things to work out at Beth, but it seemed that our talks kept leading nowhere.

  In the middle of negotiations, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend the annual American College of Emergency Physicians conference, where I reconnected with a colleague I’d first met years earlier. I had just begun my residency at Beth Israel when several people told me that I needed to meet Dr. Duane J. Dyson. He’d grown up in East Orange, a small city on the border of Newark, and returned home to work at East Orange General Hospital, where he quickly made his way up to chairman of the emergency department. I called and arranged to meet him at his hospital. The first time I saw him, I was immediately struck by his presence. He was a cool, confident African American man in his late thirties. As he showed me around his department, I was impressed by how he seemed so in control. He had a comfortable, down-to-earth manner with both patients and staff. This was the kind of doctor I wanted to be.

  The two of us talked for about an hour, and I identified with him as he talked passionately about how he had returned home to make a difference in his community. With a population of nearly 70,000 residents at the time, East Orange struggled with the same social problems—drugs, gangs, and violent crimes—as its bigger next-door neighbor. Dr. Dyson had heard my story and thought I would be an asset to his team. When I was done with my training, he’d said, I could have a job with him. That was an exciting prospect, and I kept it in the back of my mind, even though at the time I couldn’t envision leaving Beth.

  When I ran into Dr. Dyson again at the medical conference, he told me that he’d been busy creating a new organization. Drug and gang violence had continued to grow and spread in East Orange, and he was tired of seeing so many young men and women, mostly black and Latino youths, come through his emergency room with gunshots and stab wounds. With financing from the New Jersey attorney general’s office and private donors, he’d created the Violence Prevention Institute, a non-profit organization providing gang and drug prevention programs to young people and educating the adults in their lives. I was particularly intrigued by an initiative called “Cops and Docs,” a kind of Scared Straight! model that would present kids with an unglamorized look at the consequences of gang and drug violence: no Hollywood lights and soundtracks, just police officers discussing the sights, sounds, and smells of death and dying; pictures depicting the mangled and bloody faces and body parts encountered at the scene after a gun battle; emergency room doctors sharing an unflinching look at what it takes to patch someone back together after a knifing or shooting, even including the scary-looking surgical tools; and a real gunshot victim talking about what it was like to lie in your own blood on the street, unable to move or control your bodily functions. The description of the program blew me away. I promised to call him to learn more after the conference ended and we were both back in New Jersey.

  Meanwhile, I was still hopeful that Beth and I would be able to reach an agreement. Months of back-and-forth talks had yielded nothing definitive. Then one day in December 2004, I joined Rameck and George at a local gym for our foundation’s annual “Spirit of Giving” holiday event—a charity basketball game and a clothing, food, and toy drive that enabled us to bring the joy of Christmas to dozens of poor families. Corporate donors brought checks for thousands of dollars to support the effort, and community members brought enough wrapped gifts and non-perishable food to fill the room’s many tables. All sat down together for a holiday feast, the gift giveaway, and the basketball game, featuring the three of us and guest players against a team of volunteers. At the end of a long but gratifying Saturday, I was ready to rest, but that was not possible. I had to report to Beth for the night shift.

  Weeks earlier, when the schedule for December had been sent out, I’d noticed that I’d been assigned to work on the same day as The Three Doctors Foundation event, and I emailed the scheduler to request the day off. There was nothing she could do, she said, but she encouraged me to try to find another doctor to cover for me. I knew the chance of finding a colleague willing to work an overnight shift on a Saturday for me was about as likely as winning the lottery. I was stuck.

  That night, as I stepped out of my car just moments before I was due to report for my nine-hour shift, and a mere hour after the charity event had ended, the frigid air seemed colder than I remembered. I buttoned my leather coat all the way to the top and slid the strap of my briefcase onto my shoulder. The air turned to smoke every time I exhaled. Winter was off to a brutal start. As I walked slowly across the parking lot, everything felt heavier than usual—my bag, the air, every step I took. I whispered to myself: “I can’t do this anymore.” Between work, the foundation, travel, and all that came with sharing my message with the world, I was just plain tired. The way I saw it, my opportunity to reach the hip-hop and younger generations eye-to-eye would last only so long. Even though I was by then approaching thirty-two, I looked younger than my years. I could see in their eyes that they didn’t view me as some elder with no understanding of what they were going through, preaching down to them from a bully pulpit. They knew my story. My struggle was theirs. If I made it, they could, too. I was them.

  Something had to give. I called Dr. Dyson.

  By mid-2005, Melissa and I were spending every spare moment together, hanging out at events in New York City or Brooklyn or relaxing at her place. I’d begun to feel that it was finally time for me to move out of the Jacksons’ home and find a place of my own. I’d never considered living anywhere but Newark, but when I heard about an available condo in South Orange, my old Seton Hall stomping ground, I decided to take a look. It was spacious, modern, and just a short train ride into the city. The surrounding community was more diverse than I remembered, the neighborhood was familiar, and I liked the feel of a college town. Reluctant to buy the first place I saw, I looked at other places, both inside Newark and in surrounding areas. Nothing else measured up. I felt guilty at first about even thinking of living outside of my city, but that feeling soon passed. Newark had been my world, and I reassured myself that there was nothing wrong with branching out. I wasn’t abandoning my hometown; it was ingrained in my heart and soul. And I would never stop working to make it better.

  I bought the property in May, and it felt good to claim my small piece of the American dream. I took my time outfitting the place with furniture and moved in the following July. A short time later, Melissa and I agreed that she should move in with me. We both knew our relationship was for keeps.

  By then, I’d also begun a new professional adventure. A job offer had come a few months earlier from Dr. Dyson, inviting me to join his new Violence Prevention Institute. The plan was for me to reach kids primarily through the Institute’s “Cops and Docs” program and spend the other half of my time working under contract in the emergency rooms at two hospitals, St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark and Raritan Bay in Perth Amboy. The emergency department at Raritan Bay was run by Dr. Joe Calabro and Dr. Dane Clarke, vice chairman of the Institute, and the balance between clinical duties and community work seemed perfectly aligned with my goals and vision. Dr. Dyson was doing something different, and I was excited to be part of it. Saying yes had been easy. Letting go of Beth was the difficult part.

  I’d always figured I’d be one of those Beth Israel employees who hung around long enough to get my gold pen and watch. On the distant day
of my retirement, my decades of service would be emblazoned on a plaque. Speakers would regale the audience with tales of how I took my first breath within these walls, got my first stitches and cast there, and how I passed the imposing tan brick structure every day on the 107 and 39 public buses as I made my way to and from University High School. My brother Andre would surely want to talk about the time when I was about six years old, and he received a butt-whipping on my behalf when I got hurt after he finally allowed me to tag along with him to a park. I’d taken it on myself to try to fix a broken old bench, and a concrete slab twice my weight toppled over, crushing my foot. My parents blamed Andre for not watching me closely enough and rushed me off to Beth.

  Maybe someone would tell the story of the afternoon when I strolled onto the bike path at Weequahic Park and collided with a bike rider, whose handlebars knocked out my front baby teeth. And back to Beth we went. And, of course, there was the night in high school when I stumbled around outside the emergency room ambulance bay with my friends after one of them smoked marijuana for the first time and thought he was dying. The audience would get a good laugh, knowing all had ended well. The accident-prone, mischievous boy who’d grown into a troubled teenager had returned home to Beth as a doctor, and spent his life there trying to save others. The end.

  That’s the storybook finale that had played out many times in my head.

  It wasn’t supposed to change abruptly on an ice-cold morning in January 2005, just six years into my career at Beth, with me sitting in Dr. B’s office, silently rehearsing how I’d break the news that it was time for me to leave. When I’d first begun considering my life without Beth, I’d reached out to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark and even got close to an agreement to work as an E.R. doctor there. Like Beth, it was familiar, and that was comforting. I’d spent countless hours doing trauma rotations there during residency. Its reputation for saving lives after a trauma was unmatched in our area. If you had eight minutes to live and were five minutes from another hospital and ten minutes from University, you would want to take the gamble to try to get to University. The place was just that good. It’s funny, though, that during my childhood we always joked that “UMDNJ” stood for U Most Die in New Jersey. Perhaps that was because many of the gunshot victims from the neighborhood were taken there, and many never made it out. I suppose it was just easier to joke about the perceived inadequacies of the hospital rather than face the difficult truth about why so many black boys never made it home. But I saw close-up that University had the staff, the know-how, and the equipment to mobilize like nowhere else when a life was on the line. The thing that concerned me, though, was that there was no structured community outreach program at University, and while the hospital’s administrators said all the right things to woo me, I feared I would end up in the same situation I’d found at Beth.