Contents
The Get Over
Check out an excerpt from Monster
Check out an excerpt from Darius & Twig
Chapter One
Chapter Two
About the Author
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Get Over
So it’s me, Bobo, Slice, and Little Willie sitting on the stoop talking. Mostly it’s Bobo, Slice, and Little Willie doing the talking and me just listening. The talk was stupid, about what girls they would mess with and what they would make them do if the girls were stupid enough to fall in love with them.
“If a girl falls in love with you, it means she’s weak,” Bobo, who was the oldest guy on the stoop, said. “If she’s strong, she ain’t going to fall in love with nobody unless they rich. That’s why all those girls chasing football players and rap stars. You got the paper, you got the girl.”
“If I make it big-time, I’m just going to buy what I need straight out,” Little Willie said. “Some girl run up on me talking about some love and I’m going to slap her upside her head, slap on her ass, and then pull out my checkbook and tell her exactly what I want and what I’m willing to pay for it.”
“Love doesn’t sound that bad to me,” I said.
“That’s ’cause you’re a punk to begin with,” Bobo said. “Ain’t that right, Slice?”
“Yeah.”
“Steve Harmon, well-known punk with a camera, believes in love.” Bobo was on a roll. “What a girl need you for except a damned payday?”
“Especially Steve,” Little Willie said. “Look at the way your ears stick out, man. You get caught in a strong wind and she ain’t going to see you no more.”
“And what you doing outside your house, anyway?” Bobo asked. “You got diaper rash or something, and you out here trying to cool it off?”
“Steve needs to sell that fancy camera he got and invest the money in strawberry blunts.” Little Willie turned his hat to the side of his head. “That way he could be a banker. Did you know those guys down on Wall Street sniff their money when they take a break? You pile a bunch of money up like they got, and you can actually get high on it!”
“You can’t get high sniffing no money,” Bobo said.
“That ’cause you’ve never had enough money to make a difference,” Little Willie shot back. “You trying to rub two quarters together and get some altitude. You got to have millions and billions the way those suckers downtown got. They don’t sell no Viagra down there, either. Now tell me what that’s about!”
“Yo, man, check out who’s coming down the street,” Slice said. “Arnold and JT.”
“Arnold just came off a six-month bid for aggravated assault,” Bobo said. “He was going to be his own lawyer. The woman assistant D.A. had him so confused, he was speaking in tongues and saying Hail Marys. My boy Owen was on trial with him, and he said the jury was cracking on him.”
“Hey, what’s going on?” Arnold is six three, almost six four, and lean.
“What you doing running the streets?” Bobo said. “I heard you had a steady three, and a cot over at Rikers.”
“That’s yesterday’s news and last week’s blues,” Arnold said. “I’m back on the street, back on my feet, steady sliding and riding hard!”
“Go on with your bad self!” Bobo said. I saw him nudging Slice. “What you got going on, player?”
“Me and my boy here peeped a bank delivery yesterday,” Arnold said. “It was definitely wrong. They got to be new on the gig. It’s a stone get over and we’re thinking of making a play, but we got to get some backup.”
“What you mean?” Slice asked.
“Can I run with it?” Arnold asked, looking at all the dudes on the stoop.
“Go on, man.”
“Who’s youngblood?”
“Steve’s okay,” Bobo said. “What you got?”
I felt my balls tighten up a little. Was he actually going to run his get over to me?
“Okay, it goes like this,” Arnold said. “I see this armored truck pull up to the bank on 145th Street to pick up some cash. The first guy hops out the cab and pulls his piece. Then he looks around like he’s mean mugging the fucking world and spreads his legs. He thinks he’s got everything under control.”
“Go on,” Slice said.
“Then the second guy gets out, but he don’t have his piece out.” JT was talking now. He was short, square, brown skinned, and ugly. “The first guy is still holding his piece as the second guy goes into the bank. Two minutes later he comes out with a pouch and some boxes, which I got to think is coins.”
“Yeah, yeah.” This from Slice.
“But then me and JT are across the street, eating some pizza—and you know that little cage they got inside the truck?”
“Yeah.” Slice.
“The first dude reaches in and pulls that mother open,” Arnold said. “He don’t unlock the mother. He pulls the mother open.”
“So what does that mean?” Bobo asked.
“It means the lazy assholes don’t lock up between pickups,” Arnold said. “When I saw this, right away I checked the time.”
“There’s a clock right there in the window of the pizza place,” JT said.
“I see it’s three o’clock, and I figure the dudes are running late so they’re getting careless,” Arnold said.
“So what you going to do?” Slice asked.
“Me and JT figure we hit the truck,” Arnold said. “No big deal. Bam! Bam! We get the drop on the dude with the gun while the other dude is in the bank. We open the cage and snatch the pouches, and we get down the street into a car we got stashed with the motor running.”
I see the scene in my head. The camera PANS down a busy Harlem street. It goes past the armored car, then stops and pulls back. On the right side of the screen we see people in front of a pizza shop.
CLOSE-UP: A profile of Arnold. His eyes are narrowed as he walks along the sidewalk. We see ARNOLD as he speaks to the GUARD, who waves one finger to let him know that he doesn’t want to talk.
Then: We see JT open the gate. The GUARD turns, but he is face-to-face with ARNOLD’s gun. Stunned, he puts down his weapon.
“Then we drive ten blocks to where we got another car stashed.”
“And all the while we driving the ten blocks, we’re changing the jackets we had on when we made the grab,” Arnold said.
“So you need drivers?” Bobo said.
“No, man.” Arnold hunched his shoulders twice. “We got two girls who can motor their asses off. What we need is a way to turn the paper right away. We can run with the paper for a minute, but then we got to get rid of it in a hurry. We want to find somebody to take the paper right away and turn it into something useful, like some coke.
“Anybody be looking for us, they’ll be looking for some guys with a bunch of hundred-dollar bills, but we’ll be clean! We’ll put the coke out on the street, and it’s just like another shipment came in from Mexico or somewhere. Right now we need a hookup.”
“When you want to run with this thing?” Bobo asked.
“Soon as we get the hookup,” JT said.
“I can hook you up,” Slice said. “I know some Latino brothers who can deliver 24-7 if you got the cash. All it takes is a phone call.”
Arnold and JT got all excited about that and said they would contact the girl drivers right away to get ready. Then they split, headed up the hill toward Douglass Boulevard.
“Them fools ain’t going to get no money,” Slice said. “They don’t have enough brains between them to change their minds.”
“Yeah, but they thinking they got a get over,” Bobo said. “We can use that to get something. My brother got a sentence hearing co
ming up. If they score, we drop a dime in return for some slack.”
“If they do cop, we can make some money when they try to get the dope,” Slice said. “We get our hands on the money, we got to cop some of it.”
“Or all of it,” Bobo said.
“If they get a big enough taste, we can just cop the whole thing, run over to Newark for a while, and snitch from there,” Little Willie said. “Let them fools go down and look for the money from behind bars.”
“So what we going to do now?” Slice asked.
“Let the fools play it out and wait until they bring us the paper,” Little Willie said. “Then we got to be ready!”
My heart was beating a mile a minute. I thought somebody sitting on the stoop would have heard it. It was like the music was rising and my heartbeat was setting the rhythm. Cool.
The music rises as we switch to a LONG SHOT. The sound of a heartbeat raises the tension. We see LITTLE WILLIE, BOBO, and SLICE get up from the stoop and walk casually down the street. Then we see STEVE HARMON stretch out his legs and try to look as if he is not scared out of his mind. CLOSE-UP of HARMON. His eyes are wide as he knows he has just heard a major crime being planned.
CUT TO: STEVE HARMON at home. He is sitting at the dinner table. At the far end of the table, his FATHER is looking at the newspaper and shaking his head.
FATHER
Another basketball player caught with a gun! At the airport, too. What’s wrong with these fools? They got all the options in the world and absolutely no common sense.
CUT TO: A montage of scenes as STEVE HARMON reviews his options.
There is the scene in which ARNOLD and JT approach the armored car. They pull open the gate and a SWAT TEAM comes out and captures them.
Or SCENE 2:
ARNOLD and JT are giving the money to BOBO, who looks around to see if anybody is watching. Then he winks at ARNOLD and hustles down the street.
We see BOBO stopping to make a phone call to the POLICE.
CUT TO: A BASKETBALL PLAYER reaching for his bag at the airport. He is startled as the SECURITY GUARD grabs him.
CUT TO: ARNOLD and JT in Burger King. They are on line when suddenly there are plainclothes cops everywhere. We see ARNOLD and JT with surprised looks on their faces.
CUT TO: A CLERK.
CLERK
If you wanted your burgers to go, you should have said something!
CUT TO: CLOSE-UPs of ARNOLD and JT. They are confused, wondering about their options.
But now I had options, too. Little Willie and Bobo were thinking about double-crossing Arnold and JT. The only thing they were worried about was how they were going to do it.
It didn’t bother me that Arnold and JT were going to get in trouble. Well, it did bother me some, but I didn’t know what I should do about it. I could call the police and tell them that there was going to be a holdup. But suppose they were just shooting off their mouths and didn’t really plan to do anything? Guys did that all the time.
And if I did call the police, would I have to give my name? Would they ask me who else had heard the plan? Then what would I say?
If I didn’t call the police and the robbery went off, then it didn’t matter what happened to Arnold and JT, because they had already committed a crime. And if Bobo and Slice and Little Willie ripped them off, it would be what they deserved. Of course, if Arnold and JT did have guns, things could get hairy in a heartbeat.
FADE-IN: WILLIE, BOBO, and SLICE are sitting on my stoop.
WILLIE (with alarm in his voice)
Uh-oh! Here comes trouble!
Camera PANS LEFT and we see ARNOLD and JT with machine guns running parallel to the building. They stop and begin firing as kids and older people scramble for cover.
I remembered an ad that said you could report crimes without giving your name. But suppose the police traced the call? I told myself not to think about it. There wasn’t anything I could do, really, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I couldn’t call the police and say that a crime might happen. But I knew the police would want to know who was going to commit the crime. If the police picked up Arnold and JT and questioned them, they would know someone from the stoop had turned them in.
We see a darkened screen slowly grow light, and the outline of tenements is evident. The camera PANS to the sky, and we see the sun moving across the screen, denoting the passage of time. CUT TO: Interior of STEVE HARMON’s house. We are in his room, where he is doing his math homework. Things are back to normal.
CLOSE-UP: A newspaper on STEVE’s desk. We see the date and two weeks have passed. The headline talks about how crime has been reduced in Harlem.
Sirens. Police cars zooming down the boulevard and turning up toward Jackie Robinson Park.
“It’s probably a gang fight, with that many police running up there,” said Dreana Winfield, who lived down the hall from me. “There could be some shooting going on!”
People were looking out of their windows, and some were standing on the stoop waiting to find out what happened. Nobody was walking up the hill.
Ambulances joined the police cars going toward the park. Dreana said she thought it was terrorists now.
It took a full thirty minutes for the police cars to start leaving. Some people were coming down the hill, and I saw my friend Jamie.
“Anybody know what happened up there?” I asked.
“You know that guy with the big shoulders?” Jamie asked. “Arnold something?”
“I don’t know him, but I’ve seen him around,” I said.
“He tried to hold up an armored truck!”
“What?”
“The guard shot him about three times, and the dude he was with . . .”
“JT?”
“Oh, you heard?”
“Somebody was saying he was involved,” I managed to squeeze out of my throat.
“He was there and tried to run away and got hit by a gypsy cab,” Jamie said. “A woman said he was hurt bad but still tried to run. He ran across the street to the store where they sell wigs and stuff and down into the basement across from the bank. The cops got him in that basement. They shot him about ninety-leven times.”
“He dead?”
“Yeah, he dead,” Jamie said. “When the ambulance came, the guy said they didn’t need no ambulance, just bring the chalk.”
“That’s cold,” I said.
“Yo, man, I heard he lived in that building on the corner, too,” Jamie said. “Not the good one with the bank in it but the one he died in.”
“Oh.”
LONG SHOT. ARNOLD pulls his gun and the GUARD turns slowly. Everything is in slow motion as we see the fire from the gun. We see ARNOLD’s body twist. We move in toward his face as he twists, his mouth open, with one last movement before he fades away.
Then we are in a gypsy cab. The DRIVER is Haitian and is talking on his cell as suddenly a figure hurtles in front of the moving car. There is a thump and the sound of screeching tires. Then: We see a figure get up from the street. He is limping badly as he runs across the street to a building. For a moment we lose him, but then the camera PANS down to a blood trail. We follow the blood trail until we reach a basement. We hear a voice.
VOICE
Drop that gun!
We hear the sound of gunfire. The shots build to a cascade of sound. Then: As the sounds of the gunshots lessen, we hear the heartbeat that we heard before. The screen is gray and blurry, and there is a circular pattern spinning rapidly. The spinning slows as the heartbeat continues. The gray slowly changes to colors that are indistinct, then become lit candles reminding us that the basement where JT died was where he lived. We move closer to the memorial candles. The screen goes black. The heartbeat stops.
The talk on the stoop was about how stupid Arnold and JT had been. That they had tried the holdup at the wrong time of day, and that they should have shot the guard first.
“You going for big money, you got to be ruthless,” Little Willie said.
There was a chorus of agreement, and then the conversation switched to baseball.
Check out an excerpt from Monster:
The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help. That way even if you sniffle a little they won’t hear you. If anybody knows that you are crying, they’ll start talking about it and soon it’ll be your turn to get beat up when the lights go out.
There is a mirror over the steel sink in my cell. It’s six inches high, and scratched with the names of some guys who were here before me. When I look into the small rectangle, I see a face looking back at me but I don’t recognize it. It doesn’t look like me. I couldn’t have changed that much in a few months. I wonder if I will look like myself when the trial is over.
This morning at breakfast a guy got hit in the face with a tray. Somebody said some little thing and somebody else got mad. There was blood all over the place.
When the guards came over, they made us line up against the wall. The guy who was hit they made sit at the table while they waited for another guard to bring them rubber gloves .
When the gloves came, the guards put them on, handcuffed the guy, and then took him to the dispensary. He was still bleeding pretty bad.
They say you get used to being in jail, but I don’t see how. Every morning I wake up and I am surprised to be here. If your life outside was real, then everything in here is just the opposite. We sleep with strangers, wake up with strangers, and go to the bathroom in front of strangers. They’re strangers but they still find reasons to hurt each other.
Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy. Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can’t tell what is going on and you just listen to the sounds and guess.
I have seen movies of prisons but never one like this. This is not a movie about bars and locked doors. It is about being alone when you are not really alone and about being scared all the time.
I think to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. I wish I could make sense of it.
The Get Over Page 1
