by Carl Hart
When she got shot in an incident that reverberated through our social world, we were just beginning to drift apart. Joyce wasn’t the intended victim: that was Kenneth Good, who would later become the lighting man for our DJ group. I don’t even know what the beef was about, but a guy whom I’ll call Wes—and who had dated my sister Patricia in junior high—had a problem with Kenneth. Wes was then in high school, maybe sixteen or seventeen, short and stocky. Whatever the issue was, Wes had taken it seriously enough that he’d planned to shoot Kenneth over it. No one knew when it would happen. When trouble was coming, we usually could sense it, but the timing here was a surprise.
We’d all gone to a high school football game. I wasn’t playing, but Beverly was cheerleading. Some of my female cousins were there as well. It was sometime in 1979 and I was twelve or thirteen. I’d started deejaying but wasn’t getting much play yet.
After football games, everyone always went to a nearby McDonald’s in Hollywood. It was across the street from the city’s major mall, the Hollywood Fashion Center. Hundreds of people would flood into the large parking lot. Under the palm trees, music was bumping at volumes aimed at displaying the raw power that could be achieved by a carefully selected and modified car sound system. KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Do You Wanna Go Party” was one of the biggest hits that year and I’m sure they played it at least once that night. Bright streetlights, almost like floodlights, kept the parking lot lit up.
With such a large crowd, the line for food already stretched almost to the door when I rolled up with my cousin James. Joyce was standing near the doorway, probably next to Beverly and near my brother Gary. A crowd of people was gathered there, including Kenneth, laughing and talking, maybe deciding whether it was worth it to get on line then or wait.
We’d just parked when several shots flew across the parking lot. It was maybe ten thirty or eleven at night but the garish lighting made it pretty easy to see. I was starting to step out of James’s car. I heard a sudden, familiar tat tat tat. Everyone knew instantly that this wasn’t some firecracker or car backfire. We all hit the ground. We knew the drill. It was far from the first time I’d seen gunplay.
In fact, not long before this, I’d seen a white guy get shot and killed outside a park where I sometimes played basketball. He’d been killed in retaliation for the shooting of a sixteen-year-old black teen whose street name was Flap, the older brother of a boy I knew. I’d seen how that death had changed his family. My mother was close to his, even though I didn’t know him or his younger brother that well. I’d kept a lid on my feelings about all of it, trying to seem nonchalant as I watched the white guy fall dead to the ground and then learned about what happened to Flap. It was hard to believe that moments like that could end a life.
Of course, when the shooting starts, the thought that you might get hit is inescapable. Everything seems to go into slow motion and your senses heighten to take in every sight and sound. Memories rupture into snapshots. The next thing I heard was Joyce shrieking desperately for my sister Beverly because she, Joyce, was hit. She was on the ground, bleeding and just screaming and screaming. Beverly was holding her.
Wes was hanging out of the window of a car, with the huge black barrel of a shotgun pointing toward the crowd at the McDonald’s door. My sisters and brother Gary were still vulnerable. I saw Wes pull the gun in. Then whoever was driving him began pulling away.
Someone called an ambulance, which arrived almost immediately because we were close to Hollywood Memorial Hospital. By the time the EMTs arrived, staff from the McDonald’s were already with my sister, bringing out whatever they had on hand to try to stop the bleeding. She’d been shot in the head with buckshot and her face was drenched with blood. I was afraid that she’d die. I thought about how we’d once been so close. But my sadness and concern were quickly replaced by anger and a desire for revenge.
No one talked about those thoughts. Or rather, those who talked about get-back were quickly discovered to be braggarts or cowards who wouldn’t actually do anything. We weren’t so stupid as to incriminate ourselves like that. You might say a few words like “That motherfucker needs to get his,” but it was your body language and rep that spoke for you. It showed you were a man.
What seemed like only a few seconds later, the police showed up with Wes in the back of their car. They asked me to point out the shooter. I looked straight at him. He was desperately trying to seem hard, but I could tell that he was really terrified. He looked diminished and shrunken somehow; in handcuffs he seemed like a child. I pointed my finger accusingly, acknowledging to the police that he was the one I’d seen with the gun. You didn’t protect the kid who had shot your sister from the police. But I also wanted him to pay with more than an arrest and conviction.
Meanwhile, my cousin Wendy had gotten into the ambulance with Joyce, holding her hand and trying to console her. Beverly stayed back, trying to reach my mother to let her know what was going on. I didn’t know it then but the fact that Joyce had remained conscious suggested that the wound wasn’t that bad. It turned out that she’d been hit over her right eye and on her tongue. She escaped being blinded in one eye or worse by only inches. But the doctors were unable to remove the buckshot from her tongue, which remains there to this day.
However, she stayed in the hospital only a few hours that night, until she was stabilized; she returned a few days later to have plastic surgery on the wound over her eye.
All that time, I focused on revenge. I was young, but I knew that men didn’t tolerate that kind of offense against their family. If I didn’t stand up for my sister, my reputation would fall. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the intended target: Joyce was the one who got hurt. But there was a complicating factor: Wes’s family and mine had been close. My sister Patricia had previously dated him and I’d dated his sister Lisa in middle school. Our mothers were good friends and whenever I visited, Wes’s mom had been especially kind and welcoming to me. I also liked his brother.
Still, while I waited to find out whether Joyce would be all right, I thought about how to get back at Wes. I tried to get a gun, but at twelve or thirteen, I didn’t have friends my age who had guns, though many of them pretended that they did. Guys who had real access wouldn’t take me seriously. I think they were trying to protect me from doing something stupid. And even if I had managed to acquire a weapon, I didn’t know how to find Wes. He’d been taken away immediately to juvenile prison. There wasn’t really more that I could do.
By the time I saw him again, everyone had moved on. To the family, Joyce seemed fine. Amazingly, she wasn’t even disfigured. Thinking back over the course her life later took, however, I wonder now about how traumatic it must have been for her. She went back to school just a few days after the shooting. This was not the age where people received counseling for possible psychological distress. And once we knew she was physically okay, no one said another word about it in the family.
Joyce was left alone to grapple with having had a profoundly life-threatening experience. No one in the family realized that she needed extra love and support; we all thought that once the physical wounds healed, she’d be fine, and she behaved as though she was. But Joyce would ultimately be involved in a number of violent incidents, two of which stand out. Once, she got stabbed by a woman who was angered that they were both seeing the same man; another time, she stabbed a different woman in a similar dispute.
For most of her twenties and thirties, her life was chaotic and unsettled. But it’s interesting to note that despite all this, she never had any kind of drug problem. Her issues were related to her relationships and, possibly, her experience of that trauma. Sadly, she would later blame me for leaving the family to join the air force as she was left dealing with these events, saying that I’d failed as a brother by not being there for her at that time. None of us realized back then that such support was supposed to come from parents and other adults, not siblings who were just children themselves. Her feelings of disappointment
still pull at me.
As for Wes, he was incredibly apologetic when he got out of juvie. He said over and over that it had been an accident. He certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Joyce. Our families stayed close, and since Joyce seemed physically fine, we put it behind us. I wouldn’t get my hands on a gun until the idea of getting back at Wes for shooting Joyce had long been discarded.
CHAPTER 6
Drugs and Guns
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
—AUDRE LORDE
It was Richard’s grandfather’s gun, a large rifle that looked like an M16 but shot .22s. It wasn’t a handgun that you could hide down your pants, so we usually kept it in the trunk of my car, a 1972 Pontiac LeMans in midnight blue with a white vinyl top and a suave cream leather interior. I’d paid four hundred dollars for it. I was planning on putting Tru-Spoke rims and Vogue tires on it, but never got around to it. I was sixteen, just entering my senior year in high school. I was at the wheel and Richard, whom we called RAP III, for Richard A. Ponte III, was almost literally riding shotgun. He held the gun across his lap as we headed home.
We were driving down Hallandale Beach Boulevard, just coming off I-95. It was a four-lane road that marked the border between Carver Ranches and a white neighborhood. We were probably returning from eating at a local Denny’s, a place we frequented with an irregular policy of “dine and dash,” sometimes failing to pay the bill. We were bored.
Then I noticed someone walking along the side of the road. That in itself was unusual: this was South Florida, and people drove, they didn’t walk. But what was really strange was that it was a white guy.
“What he doing here?” someone said.
In the back of my car were the two Derricks, my good friends Derrick Abel and Derrick Brown. No one ever called Derrick Brown by his given name. Since elementary school, he’d been “Melrose,” after the local school for developmentally disabled kids (whom we then called retarded). He wasn’t really any more “retarded” than the rest of us, but he’d tested badly in school and the name had stuck. Melrose was slightly taller than me, about five foot ten. His skin was a dark, blue black and he was built. Most of my teenage friends looked immature compared to the well-developed young women around us, but he looked like a man, with a huge chest and arms.
Derrick Abel was something of a mama’s boy. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness and she tried to keep close tabs on him. We called him Super Slick, but the name wasn’t as resonant as Melrose was for the other Derrick. Sometimes it seemed aspirational or almost ironic. With his strict mother, Super Slick always felt he had something to prove.
Though his mom blamed us for being a bad influence, much of our misbehavior was, in fact, instigated by her son. He was tall and very thin, with the close-cropped hairstyle we all wore at the time. We thought the more flamboyant eighties hairstyles like Jheri curls were uncool. Like the rest of us, Derrick dressed in tightly pressed high-water pants and short-sleeved Izod shirts. He was constantly trying to show how tough he was.
In this case, though, it was probably my idea to mess with the white guy. As usual, Slick joined in and no one dissented. We didn’t consider any possible consequences or even think at all about what might happen if things went wrong. We just thought that the guy was out of place. He was on the border of our turf and this particular intrusion by a white man was something that we didn’t have to tolerate. We had the power here.
As we came up from behind him, I slowed the car to a crawl. By then, Richard had positioned the gun in a menacing position, rolling down his window and sitting as though he was taking aim. “Put yo’ hands up, muthafucka!” he shouted. The dude froze.
I will never forget the complete look of terror on that man’s face. His eyes opened wider than I thought it was possible for eyes to go. He was standing still but clearly shaking. His heart must’ve been pounding out of his chest. He was probably just heading home from work, an ordinary guy in his twenties, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I’m sure he never expected anything like this. Looking back, I realize it must have been incredibly traumatic.
At the time, though, we thought it was hilarious. The four of us started laughing when we saw the look on his face. I’m sure he thought we wanted to rob and/or kill him. But that was not our intention: we thought we were just messing around. Our laughter must have seemed stone cold. In retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how we could have done it, given the terrible toll we’d all experienced from gun violence. Still, we had nothing particular in mind. It was just an impulse, one that could have had terrible consequences but fortunately didn’t. Richard stared at the dude, keeping the gun aimed squarely at him. After a few more seconds, the guy’s instincts must have taken over and he ran like hell. We just drove away.
The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute, but the image of that man’s fear and the sense of power we had—as well as, I see now, our heedlessness—has always stuck with me. I can see the world from other perspectives as an adult, but back then, I really couldn’t. My concerns were entirely focused on the respect of my peers and whatever was necessary to maintain my status. I just didn’t see that white guy as human; he wasn’t one of us. We kept laughing and going over what we thought were the funniest parts of his reaction.
“You saw that muthafucka’s face?”
“I bet he nutted on himself.”
“Damn . . .”
As I grew up, I maintained a complicated relationship with the street. First and foremost, I saw myself as an athlete. Sports and girls kept me busy at many times when cousins and friends were getting into troubling incidents that didn’t end as well as that one did. Sports also gave me the typical “jock” perspective of skepticism about things like smoking that might interfere with performance. First football and then, for most of high school, basketball were the primary reasons I went to school: while I practiced intensively and with great commitment in sports, I did only the bare minimum schoolwork needed to keep up the 2.0 average required to stay on the team.
My expectations about school had always been low, but not as low as most of the educators’ expectations were for me, with a few conspicuous exceptions. Here’s one example: My senior year, one of my classes was parking patrol. Just as it sounds, we just sat there and watched cars in the parking lot. I’m not sure what it would have taken to fail that class but virtually anything would have required more intelligence than it took to pass it.
Shooting a layup during a high school basketball game.
Another example involves the end of my engagement with real math in high school. In ninth grade, I’d actually been placed in one of the highest-level math classes. I had continued to do well in math throughout elementary and middle school, despite my refusal to do homework. But then I tore up my knee playing football and had to have surgery. It was after this that I switched from football to basketball. Before my injury, I’d excelled at algebra. However, because I’d missed so many classes when I was in the hospital, school officials told me I didn’t need to finish out the semester in the top class. Instead, I could take business math, which was basically addition and subtraction, third-grade-level stuff. That completed my math requirement—and therefore my math classes, period—for high school.
Rather than challenging me to learn, they gave up, figuring that it didn’t matter because I was just one more nameless black kid who would never go to college anyway. And of course, given an easier option and no reason to challenge themselves, almost any teenager—and most adults, too—will take it.
And so other than two to three hours of daily basketball practice—and of course, games—I barely spent any time in school. I’d been put on the “vocational-tech” track, which meant that I received school credits for working as a busboy at the café at Walgreen’s. I’d have class from eight to eleven; then I’d go to work. One-third of the time I spent in supposedly educational programming consisted of classes like parking patrol. But I always wor
ked as many hours and as many jobs as I could get, following my parents’ example of being hardworking.
Still, none of this meant that I didn’t sometimes engage in the same types of petty and ultimately not-so-petty crimes that people so often falsely attribute to the influence of drugs. The incident with the gun was only one of many criminal acts for which, luckily for me, I did not get caught. Starting at about seven, for instance, I’d been tutored in shoplifting by cousins Amp and Mike. Although a large proportion of the people in the neighborhood where I then lived were on welfare and receiving food stamps, no one wanted to be seen using them.
In fact, we mercilessly teased people who were caught showing the multicolored bills when they were sent to the store to get milk or other groceries. There weren’t any supermarkets in the neighborhood, so we shopped at a strangely named chain of convenience stores called U’Tote’M, which was bought out by Circle K in 1983. They were usually owned by whites or Middle Eastern people. They hired white staff, usually bored teenagers who didn’t care much about their merchandise or their jobs. That worked in our favor.
When my parents were together, we’d had no need for food stamps. But after they split up, I would be sent to buy groceries with them. It wouldn’t take long to find the few items like milk or eggs that were needed. What did take time was making sure I wasn’t seen checking out without cash. I’d hang back and wander the aisles, trying to make sure no one I knew was around. When the coast was clear, I’d pay. After my cousins taught me to shoplift, however, I started using what I’d learned taking candy bars and potato chips, to do the household shopping, too. This was another way I showed my cool—and got some much-needed extra loot.
