Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  Of my brothers, I was closest to Albert, who went by Al, and was two years younger than I was. Ernie was in between us, but Ernie was the loner of the bunch, content to sit by himself practicing his guitar all the time. Ernie wasn’t into sports the way Al and I were, but he could swim like a shark, slicing through the water fast and neat, able to stay below the surface for the entire length of the public pool without coming up for air once. I called him Submariner. Ernie had stamina, and he was no coward. He was the first one of my family to fight me back and damn near whipped my butt. And it was probably Ernie who decided to put an end to my bullying by having all four brothers jump me once after I threw them out of my room. Ernie even came with his own canine backup unit: an insanely devoted brown-and-white mutt he had adopted named Rocky. Rocky always had Ernie’s back and would attack even Ma or Pops if they didn’t show Ernie the respect Rocky thought he deserved. If that dog thought I was coming for Ernie, I’d be on my ass. He bit my leg once when I was just arguing with my brother. “I’m gonna kill that dog,” I threatened. Ernie just laughed. “No, you ain’t.” He knew Rocky would get me first.

  Al lived for baseball and basketball, just like me, and was most likely to do reckless shit with me, like ride a bike down Bear Mountain straight into the lake. Al and I shared one of the two bedrooms in the upstairs apartment at the Colemans’, and Michael, Ernie, and Leon bunked in the other one. Michael was the middle brother, the short one, as hardheaded as I was. He was not going to take any crap, and you’d best not offer him any. He loved martial arts and was always kicking or chopping the air or, if you made him mad, any vulnerable body part within striking distance. He could also do backflips and front flips. Finally, there was Leon, the baby. Leon was a follower. Leon wanted to be like me, but he was too sensitive to grow that tough a skin, and there was always a sweetness to him even after he followed in my footsteps to become a boxer. He was left-handed, so we called him Lefthand.

  The house in St. Albans was near 208th and Murdock. We thought of it as a famous neighborhood. A popular radio host named Ed Lover was from there, plus Russell Simmons and Run DMC. We lived five blocks from LL Cool J. There was also a dude named Sundance who could’ve made the NBA but got screwed up on drugs. It was a nice, middle-class neighborhood, I guess you’d say. There was a little grocery store run by Mr. Dobbins and his son. Mr. Dobbins was fair, and if you stole from him, you had to be a real lowlife. You’d go in, get your candy or soda, and keep moving. He didn’t give you the stink eye or tell you to get out like other storekeepers might when they saw a bunch of young neighborhood boys spill through the door. You’d hear of someone getting murdered a few blocks over on Jamaica Avenue or Linden Boulevard. That wasn’t our neighborhood. You’d hear of someone getting their ass whupped on Murdock, sure—we’d challenge people from other blocks to baseball, basketball, or football games, and every now and then we’d have our fights. But 208th and Murdock was safe.

  Murdock had a dude named William as our private security patrol. Everyone knew you didn’t mess with William or his two younger brothers, that you didn’t come into our neighborhood with that bull jive. William was in his twenties. I don’t know what all he was into, except I’ll say that William did what he had to, to survive. When a drunk driver plowed into a house down the street and killed the little boy and girl playing out front, William flew out of his house three doors down and tackled the fleeing driver, pinning him until the cops arrived. I remember the loud bang of that crash, the smoking car sticking out of the wall, and the hysterical mother screaming for her babies. I could see body parts on the lawn. The image was like a horror show that flashes to this day across my mind. The neighbors hollered for William to get the driver. He was lucky William let him go to jail instead of to the morgue.

  My own street-fighting skills were a work in progress. When I first moved in with the Colemans, the school I went to was in a Spanish neighborhood of the Bronx, and right off the bat, some older boys jumped me for my coat. They asked if I was in a gang—there were the Savage Skulls, the Savage Nomads, and a large assortment of other Savages all claiming their piece of turf. I wasn’t about to just hand over my coat, so I fought, even though I was outnumbered three to one. They took my coat. But word got back that I’d fight, and after a while, the Spanish kids left me alone. I had a temper as a kid. I hated losing. Couldn’t stand it. In sports, losing a game of basketball or baseball would send me over the edge, and God save the teammate who missed a winning shot or dropped a home-run ball. Eventually, boxing would change that, because if I lost, there was nobody to blame but me. But at twelve, I didn’t have that passion or discipline yet—all I had was my anger, and there was plenty of it to go around. To my new classmates, I looked Spanish, but I wasn’t Spanish, which left me open for the same half-breed ridicule I got from blacks. I didn’t automatically belong anywhere and was always forced to prove myself. Whatever conflicts I found or got myself into inevitably trickled down to my brothers. I took them aside to tell them how it was going to be: “Look, any one of us gets in a fight, all of us jump ’em. You gotta just learn how to fight.” Biting, kicking, scratching, whatever it took to win. I didn’t stop until I saw blood. I never picked up a pipe or bat or anything to throw or hit a dude with, though. Everything was fair and square back then.

  One day, this bully named Floyd came up and said he wanted to fight me. We went outside, and he bent over pretending he was tying his shoe. I knew he was going to come up swinging. He busted my nose. I busted his nose. He gave me a black eye. I gave him an ear scrape. The teachers broke us up.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Floyd.

  “See you tomorrow,” I agreed.

  We fought for several days like that until we called a truce and became friends. Same thing happened with my friend Arnie. It took a week of busted lips, torn clothes, and bloody noses before we became the best of friends. It was starting to dawn on me that any respect I got seemed to come through my fists. Fighting established who I was, what I would take and what I wouldn’t, who I would stand up for and who I would put down. When I was in the eighth grade, a tangled romance involving Arnie’s sister Marbles led me to cockily spread the word that I was going to fight their older brother, Donald, who happened to be the head of the Savage Skulls. Marbles called the gangbangers off, but one of the biggest and baddest dudes in the neighborhood delivered a message: “You got a lotta heart,” he said, “a lotta heart.” I know now how right he was, that fighting was slowly but surely giving me what a father should have—confidence, character, courage. Everybody else could abandon me, but I would never abandon myself.

  At the Colemans’, I never really felt like a son so much as a boarder. In the seven years I lived there, I never heard the words I love you. Pops would come home from work and settle into his basement domain for the evening. He had this big bucket he would fill with a block of ice, which he would then chip away at with a knife, creating a cold nest for his Seven Crown whiskey. He would sit there and watch baseball on the TV for hours, but he never once came to watch me play when I was in Little League or basketball. The trophies I won were lined up on top of the TV cabinet without any comment or even passing interest. We were both rabid Mets fans, but the shared interest never grew into anything resembling an actual bond. When the Mets were in the World Series one year, I ditched school, snuck back into the house knowing Ma would be gone that afternoon, and settled in to watch the daytime game on TV. Pops was no dummy, and he knew I would be there, and I knew he’d come home early and lay into me with his belt. But I made a calculated decision: it was worth the ass-whipping. Pops delivered, but so did the Mets. They won the game, and I considered the burning red welts on my backside to be the ticket price. If it had been Geese caught playing hooky to watch a ball game, the Colemans probably would have popped his pampered ass some popcorn and asked if he needed a bigger TV. When Geese said, “Ma, I want a bass guitar,” he got it, boom, just like that. “Ma, I want a moped,” boom, here you go. I asked for
a five-dollar pair of Bruce Lee kung fu shoes and had to beg two days; Maurice got them instantly. I’d beg and beg and beg for hours for some little thing; Ma would look at me with disgust and say no. I got my first bike by stealing it. I was scared as heck. I saw a kid go into a store and leave his ten-speed unlocked outside. It looked fast, that bike, and I wanted it in the worst way. I made my choice in a matter of seconds and ran up, jumped on, and pedaled off, thinking all the time, I can’t get caught, I can’t get caught, can’t fall. Back home, the Colemans immediately confronted me.

  “Where’d you get that bike?”

  “A friend gave it to me.”

  “What kind of friend give you that kind of bike?” They knew the story made no sense and had to suspect what had really happened, but they let it go. After that, stealing bikes became a thrilling hobby of sorts. First I would make some bull-jive bike out of extra parts I saved—no seat, tires torn up. Then I would leave that bike in place of whatever better bike I was stealing. I never did it in my own neighborhood.

  Bikes weren’t the only thing I helped myself to. Sometimes I would snatch a piece of fruit from a produce stand or go into a store and sneak a package of ham or baloney from the deli aisle and slip it into my pocket. My stomach was growling with hunger more often than not, it seemed. The Colemans locked their refrigerator to keep my brothers and me from getting an extra snack or glass of milk. “We already fed you” was the standard response if we came downstairs hungry at night or on a weekend afternoon. Maurice could have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. I can remember angrily accusing the Colemans more than once of not loving us, not even caring for us, and just wanting the monthly check from child services. I don’t remember either Ma or Pops ever telling me I was wrong about that.

  Whatever money the state sent to support us, it sure didn’t go toward clothes, because “the Dewey boys,” as we came to be known in the neighborhood, were the clown fashion show of Murdock Avenue. Mrs. Coleman did the shopping and dressed us in cheap getups like Michael Jackson pants with stripes down the side, and red, white, and blue Skips tennis shoes. I hated how I looked. I yearned for a pair of black suede Converse 69 sneakers so bad, I took a paper route and got up at three in the morning to deliver the New York Daily News to fifty houses. I loaded most of the papers into a crate I had jerry-rigged onto the front of my bicycle and put the rest in a backpack, wobbling through St. Albans like an urban pack mule. At first, it would take me two trips, but it didn’t take long for my legs to get so strong and lean, I could deliver all my papers making one loop without missing a breath. I’d finish up just before school. Earning my own paycheck gave me my first taste of what it was like to actually make choices about my life, small as they were. I could have a bag of chips when my stomach was growling, or lace up a pair of shoes that wouldn’t get me laughed off the basketball court. I didn’t ever want to be without my own money again. Money gave me freedom. Money let me belong to me, plain and simple.

  Once I started at Andrew Jackson High School, though, I became too hip for a lowly paper route. I quit my job. I even stopped playing baseball. I thought I was all grown up, with better things to do. I had my priorities, and tenth grade is exactly when they all started going backward. My best buddy, Herbie, was going to a different high school—one for troubled kids in Manhattan—but we hung out together at a park on Hollis Avenue, playing basketball. We were good. I was a mean jumper, and Herbie could come in underneath and steal a ball before the other guy realized he was there. When we weren’t shooting hoops at the park, we were hanging out smoking Newports and reefer and drinking Old English 800 beer from a place across the street. The old-timers in their twenties and thirties hanging out in front of the beer store or chilling in the park would help us out, buy our quarts for us.

  “Aight, I ain’t got nothing to do with you, you get caught,” they’d warn.

  “Aight,” we’d agree.

  Pops was the likeliest one to catch me when I brought the party home to our place, but I knew he would stay put in his basement hideout drinking his own bottle as long as we kept quiet. Pops was crazy, but he was fair. We’d be in and out till two or three in the morning. When it got too rowdy, Pops would charge up the stairs, bellowing as he came. “Goddammit, stop making all that noise!” Dudes would be jumping out the window and up on the roof to get away. The Colemans never seemed to have a clue about all the wasted teenagers up there. I got so high on one Friday night that I passed out in my clothes, slept right through Saturday, and didn’t wake up until Sunday. No one even checked to see if I was okay. I think Pops tried in the beginning to get us to go in the right direction by punishing us when we acted up, like grounding us with no TV, or giving us the belt, but once he lost control of me, he lost control of all of us. I may have been the first to turn rebellious, but my brothers closed the gap quick enough. We were all stealing stuff, except Leon. He’d try to follow behind me but I’d push him away.

  THERE WAS THIS OLDER WHITE GUY NAMED RALPH who drove a big white truck and would buy any damn thing we brought him.

  “Hey, Ralph, I got a lawnmower,” I would say.

  “Looks like a real piece of shit.”

  “What’ll you give me for it?”

  “Five dollars.”

  We’d go into garages and steal tools. There was also good money taking copper off houses—the waterpipes, mainly—and selling it to junkyards.

  It was during my teens that two of my lost older siblings briefly appeared, each showing up for a quick, awkward visit arranged by social services. My sister, Janice, offered a stunning piece of news.

  “Dewey, you know I seen Pop,” she said, meaning Dirty Harry.

  I had locked our father out of my memory and thrown away the key, secure in my belief that he was rotting away in prison somewhere.

  “What do you mean?” I asked Janice now. She told me she had caught sight of him out on the street one day.

  “I remember those glasses,” she said. “He didn’t come up, didn’t approach me, but I seen him.”

  We left it there, neither of us wanting to discuss it more. We didn’t, in fact, have much of anything to say to each other. We’d been separated and had lived our separate lives. What we had left in common was something too ugly, too painful, for either of us to want to revisit. Janice got up and said good-bye. I never saw her again.

  My brother Tony’s visit was less unsettling but still awkward. I’d never even met Tony before. He was seven years older than I was, a grown man when we first laid eyes on each other. He was one of the “new” siblings my mother had told me were going to come live with us just before Dirty Harry gave her that last beating. Tony was a decent guy, but we were polar opposites. Tony didn’t have the dangerous polish that street life gives you, that cold steel, urban gleam. He was country. His language, his demeanor, his clothing all told the story of a world less complicated than mine. You could tell he was a worrier. He came to see me at the Colemans’ a couple of times, and even though we were only in the beginner stage of getting to know each other as brothers, he stepped up later when I needed a refuge away from New York City.

  As maddening and heartless as it seemed, the bureaucracy that ran my childhood did make an effort to give my younger brothers and me a little taste of the good life every now and then. We were taken on orphan-kid outings to Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium. We got to go to an Al Green concert. There would be field trips to cultural events around the city, and different educational or vocational training programs they offered us. I blew most of those off, too young and cocky to recognize opportunity when it tapped me on the shoulder. The one privilege I did take advantage of to its fullest was the annual summer vacation for foster kids at Camp Comanche. It was a sleep-away camp on a pretty little lake, which I loved to dive into and swim all the way across, powering through the cool water like my man with the seven Olympic gold medals around his neck, Mark Spitz. Mark Spitz had it all: the athleticism, the swooning women, the hero poster, the Ferrari. Pushing y
our body to the limit like that, reaching peak performance, was something I really admired.

  At school, I was a good student when I bothered to do the work, which wasn’t all that often. I could sort of skate by in some courses, like math, which I loved and was pretty good at; I liked to sit down and figure out the problems. Math was straightforward: a math problem told you whether you had solved it or not, and the right answer could always be proven. I enjoyed science, too. Science made me think and see things differently, appreciate that things weren’t always what they seemed. If I had stuck with it, I probably would have been a natural at physics—I was an ongoing experiment in energy, force, and motion, with the scars to prove it. English was another story. English was my downfall. I would write everything in street language, and my papers would come back all smashed up. Hyper as I’d always been, it was hard for me to sit still all day long in some classroom, and by my freshman year, school was rapidly losing its hold on me. Even the lure of extracurricular sports wasn’t enough. I’d been told I had real talent on the baseball field, for example, but I didn’t try out for my high school team. It felt like I was outgrowing everything good in my life, like Camp Comanche, and I couldn’t go back. I stopped playing hoops and started skipping school to spend more time on what I now considered my regular activities—getting high, hanging out, and stealing.