D pulled out his cell phone. His sometime employee Ray Ray didn’t live far away. Just over at 315 Livonia Avenue in the same Tilden project building D had been raised in. But why get the kid involved in this mess? It was best to keep moving. Speed, not reinforcements, was needed.
Now he was on Livonia Avenue where the Marcus Garvey projects ended. He made a sharp right and headed toward the Saratoga Avenue subway stop. A 3 train grinded past him on the tracks above, moving deeper into Brooklyn. Surely a train toward the city was coming soon.
He was hurrying alongside the Betsy Head Pool, a WPA relic where, decades ago, D had almost drowned before getting scooped out of the chlorine by his brother Matty who gave him mouth-to-mouth at the pool’s edge. Matty had been a bigger, better man than D knew he’d ever be. But this was no time to remember.
If he was gonna die this night, D told himself, it wasn’t gonna happen on Livonia Avenue. This Brownsville street had already had its chance. But vows ring hollow when bullets blaze past your head. From behind him in the direction of Rockaway Avenue and the Tilden projects, two shots had whizzed past him.
D’s lungs were burning, which was a problem, but this didn’t feel nearly as pressing as the fact that his right foot, left ankle, and both knees hurt with more intensity with every stride he took. Getting shot at had made every part of his body tense up and tingle with pain.
D heard feet stomping about a block behind him. Maybe half a block. Where was the car?
Two long blocks ahead was the subway station. A dubious haven but, at twelve thirty a.m. in the hood, it was all he had. Inside Betsy Head Park he spied two kids playing one-on-one under the lights. D was contemplating calling out to them when another shot landed at his feet. A thug was trying to drive the Range Rover with his left hand while shooting through the open passenger window. A bullet bounced off a cast-iron subway support and ricocheted back at the driver, cracking the jeep’s rear passenger window, forcing him to swerve into the other lane.
D dashed across the next intersection, the subway staircase only a block away now. He felt vaguely relieved. He was even beginning to smile when the door to the storefront office of AKBK Reality swung open and two men walked right into his path, one of them talking about “the time I scared Lil’ Z,” and D ran dead into his chest. Both went flying down toward the sidewalk.
D fell atop a 230-pound Latino with the stink of rum on his breath and knocked the wind out of him. He had on a black Nets hoodie, with a fierce-looking salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that, even in a moment of surprise, were narrow and hard. Despite the man’s unfriendly visage, for a moment D felt comfortable on his ample belly.
With the assistance of his pal, a middle-aged white man with a hot-pink complexion wearing a Yankees jacket, the guy pushed D onto the sidewalk. “What the fuck! What you doing jogging at this time of night?” the Latino asked even as he struggled to rise.
The shooter who’d been chasing D on foot—a black man in his twenties wearing a red Abercrombie hoodie, holding up his loose-fitting pants with his free hand—had just reached the corner, out of breath but not malevolence. Light brown and round-faced, with fat cheeks and a mouth made for cursing, he stormed over and pulled out a box cutter. “Gimme that backpack, motherfucker!” he shouted.
“What’s going on here?” the white man in the Yankees jacket yelled.
“Mind your business, you old motherfucker!” the young man said viciously.
The Latino guy, still on the ground next to D, looked at the backpack and his eyes got real wide.
D just said, “This guy is crazy”—which actually wasn’t true. Angry, embarrassed, and homicidal, yes, but this fool wasn’t insane. To D’s surprise, the man on the ground reached over and tried to yank the backpack away from him. Instinctively he pulled away. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Just give that shit to me!” the Latino yelled.
The box cutter–swinging Abercrombie wearer now swung at the straps of the backpack with his weapon. D quickly rolled away from all three men.
“You got him!? You got him!?” It was the Range Rover driver, who’d pulled up to the curb and was yelling through the passenger-side window.
“Yeah,” Abercrombie replied, and then stepped toward D, box cutter low and pointed at his face.
“Hold on,” the Latino man said. “You ain’t got shit. I’m taking that backpack.”
“Back off,” warned the Abercrombie kid, “unless you want an extra smile.”
“Is that right?” The Latino suddenly hopped to his feet, glanced at his friend, and nodded. Two New York Police Department badges and two guns appeared, one of them aimed at Abercrombie and the other at the driver.
“Put that thing down!” shouted the white cop. “You are all under arrest!”
On the surface this looked to be a fortuitous turn of events. D was not going to be sliced and diced in some ghetto basement for the backpack. Good news. But being interrogated and possibly incarcerated for what was inside the backpack didn’t strike D as ideal. The Latino cop clearly wanted the bag. What was that about? So D kicked the Abercrombie kid in the shin.
Grabbing his leg and yelling, “Motherfucker!” the young man, despite the police firearms, swung his box cutter toward D, nicking his forearm through his black jacket.
The Latino, standing close to the swinging weapon, fired first. The Yankees jacket squeezed off a second. Abercrombie was hit by both shots.
The driver, without thinking and seemingly with no plan, fired three, four, five shots at the cops, sending blood, smoke, and angry cries into the Brownsville night. The white cop yelled in pain—a bullet had landed in his shoulder.
D rolled away and then scrambled to his feet to the crackle of police walkie-talkies, the rhythm of a hip hop track pounding from the jeep, two more shots, and voices of distress, anger, and obscenity surrounding him. This was not a good place to linger.
“Come back here!” the Latino cop yelled when D took off down the street.
D heard a Manhattan-bound pulling into the nearby station and took the steps two at a time. Blissfully, there was no clerk in the booth, MTA budget cuts having seen to that, so no one noticed D’s wounds. He slid his card in the slot, pushed through the turnstile, charged up more steps, and dove into an empty car on the 3 train, breathing heavily.
It wouldn’t take long for the cops to figure out he’d jumped on the train. They’d be on him in two stops at most.
Next stop was Rutland Road, the last elevated station before the subway went underground. When the train pulled in, D dashed to the front of the platform, hopped down the stairs next to the tracks, and climbed over a short fence, putting himself on the dingy side of Lincoln Terrace Park. He went over another fence, headed past some crumbling tennis courts, and found himself on Eastern Parkway, a long tree-lined boulevard that ran across the spine of Brooklyn, cutting tins through Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights.
D walked a few blocks west to Utica Avenue, a central location for north/south buses and an express subway. He stopped by a garbage can, was about to drop the backpack in, and then changed his mind. As long as he didn’t get caught with the guns, they just might be useful later. So D made a left and then a right, crossing Union Street, which would take him through the heart of Crown Heights’ Hassidic community. It was a place of peering eyes and suspicious Jewish security teams but it felt safer to him than Eastern Parkway’s wide boulevard.
As he crossed New York Avenue, D suddenly felt very tired. All his joints were throbbing—his knees, his ankles, his lower back. He was in good shape but a full-on sprint through Brownsville with contraband guns hadn’t been on his itinerary.
Twenty minutes later D walked wearily up Washington Avenue back to Eastern Parkway. He moved past the Brooklyn Museum’s awkward, ornate, classical/modern glass entranceway. A few cars sped by him on Eastern Parkway and D hoped he didn’t look too conspicuous (or memorable). When he reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
he paused, put his feet together, and then counted off ten long strides, stopping before the cast-iron fence that bordered the garden and the thick, dark bushes behind them.
He bent down and squeezed the backpack through the bars and deep under some bushes. Using his cell phone as a flashlight, D made sure the bag was fully covered. Satisfied, he stood up, looked around, and continued west. His new apartment was just a few blocks away. He needed to sleep. Only after that would he turn his attention to the only question that mattered: what the fuck had just happened?
. . . TIL THE COPS COME KNOCKIN’
The next day the NY1 Time Warner cable channel reported that a shoot-out between two New York City policemen and two gunmen ended in the deaths of the two criminals. The official story was that two off-duty officers were walking toward their cars at the end of their shift when they were fired upon by a man from a jeep and one on foot. The off-duty officers returned fire. The two shooters, Aaron Hall and Dalvin DeGrate, had long rap sheets for violent crimes and some association with a branch of an East New York drug gang. There was a recently opened real estate office on Livonia Avenue and police theorized that the gunmen mistook them for employees of that new company and were attempting a robbery. Apparently the owners had recently reported extortion attempts to the local precinct. There was no mention of anyone matching D’s description.
D chewed on his oatmeal laced with almond butter and mulled over the news report. It was going down as a botched robbery attempt in an area known for crime. Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it was still a mantra in some parts of BK. While D’s absence from the report was a momentary relief, it created a host of new worries. That cop seemed to know something about the backpack. Unlikely, yet he had been real interested in the bag when he should have been focused on the kid with the box cutter.
It was one thing to have those now-dead fools chase him and take potshots. It was another for his role in a deadly shoot-out washed clean off the books. That Latino cop would definitely remember his face. Would someone connect the incident at the fight club to this shoot-out?
D sat back on his sofa and took stock of his life. He hadn’t lived in Brooklyn for decades and certainly never expected to again after he’d left like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Alfred Kazin in A Walker in the City, and thousands of other Brooklynites who’d crossed the East River to make their mark. Brooklyn was a place of your roots but not your future, unless you planned on being a cop, crook, civil servant, or candy store owner. Brooklyn had been a place to visit, Manhattan a place to thrive.
But all that had been turned upside down. Post–9/11 Fort Greene, once a site of brownstone house parties, Spike Lee joints, and butter wavy bohemian girls, was now a leafy adjunct to Manhattan—and Clinton Hill was close behind. Do-or-die Bed-Stuy, while still having deep pockets of both black ownership and poverty, was full of white pioneers getting off the C and A trains after work.
Even in the Ville, the never-ran-and-never-will land of D’s youth, there were signs of protogentrification amid the microgangs and stop-and-frisk-obsessed cops. It would be a long time before his beloved (and detested) Brownsville would see serious change, but a lot of locals saw stop-and-frisk as an urban pacification tactic, and D, who knew more about plots against black people than he’d like to, couldn’t totally dismiss the paranoia. Why else would that AKBK Realty office be situated on dark, deserted Livonia Avenue?
D had looked for a place in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, but couldn’t find anything affordable. Through the manager of a rap group D got a line on a reasonable rental apartment in Prospect Heights, a relatively small patch of real estate surrounded by Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Park Slope, and Crown Heights. His place was just off Washington Avenue, a few blocks down from Eastern Parkway and three of the borough’s cultural touchstones—the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Garden, and Prospect Park. On the northwest edge of Prospect Park, next to Flatbush, was a faux version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe that D always thought was kinda weak after seeing the real thing a few years back.
In the opposite direction, going east on Eastern Parkway, was Franklin Avenue, which used to be the gateway to Crown Heights but was now home to a mini-Williamsburg with hipster bars, artisanal restaurants, and gourmet grocery stores. These days, if you walked across Eastern Parkway going south you’d be in another world. Hunkered down on the north side of the parkway was a deeply entrenched Hassidic community, folks who hadn’t left when all the other white people in that section of Brooklyn had fled and were still here now when a new wave of white folks were arriving.
The Hassidim had survived the blackout of ’77, the primal racial violence that followed the killing of the black child Gavin Cato by a Jewish man driving a station wagon in ’91, and various small-scale confrontations with police, hipsters, and real estate developers. Despite being perpetrators of racial profiling years before the term had been invented, D respected the Hassidim, viewing them as one of the city’s renegade posses, who looked upon everyone else in the city with a wary skepticism. Vigilantism in defense of your property was, in D’s eyes, not only logical but necessary. That’s what life in New York City had taught him. His D Security company, though now failing, was, in his mind, a secular extension of the way the Hassidim guarded their homesteads in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and wherever else they wore their black hats.
His new apartment had one bedroom, a bathroom with a big old deep tub, a good-size living room, and a dining area next to a narrow kitchen. A letter his mother had written to him long ago about survival and love was already hung up by the dining table. He was sitting on the blue sofa he’d brought over from his soon-to-be-closed Soho office. He’d also brought over a file cabinet and safe. From his Manhattan apartment on Seventh Avenue in the 20s, he’d moved his pots and pans, the dining room table, and sundry household items. So his new Brooklyn place was a mash-up of both his old office and home.
This prewar building had lots of marble in its lobby and two rickety elevators to serve its seven floors. It was the first time since D had fled Brownsville’s Tilden projects that he was living in a building with elevators and a shared incinerator. He’d vowed back then that he would never again live in a high-rise, which this was not—but the idea of having to share an incinerator with his neighbors irked him, reminding him of countless days stuffing garbage bags down the shoot at 315 Livonia. Sometimes his neighbors wouldn’t shove their bags all the way down back then, so he’d have to push on their garbage as well his family’s mess, a distasteful chore that still made his teeth grind. Hopefully the folks in his new building, who were paying good money for the privilege, would be more conscientious. He knew it would take a minute to get really comfortable in his new home/office. Still, there was one looming decision to make: what to paint the walls?
D got up from his sofa and walked over to the wall behind his flat-screen TV. He sat on the floor next to three cans of black paint, two brushes, and a large bottle of Poland Spring water. In his Manhattan apartment all surfaces had been black. Even the wall plugs and light switches had been painted black by the time he moved out. The sheets on his bed were a dark sepia. Over time he’d added a variety of charcoals. But the core of his self-created cave was “as black as the ace of spades,” as his mother once said dismissively.
Was that what he needed in this return to Brooklyn? He’d only been back two days and shit was jumping off. Black probably wasn’t the move. At least not yet. He took a gulp of Poland Spring, clicked off the TV, took in the sun on this nice early-spring afternoon, and headed out into his new Brooklyn hood.
Welcome home, D thought as he stood there on Washington Avenue. Welcome home.
At that moment, two men in suits emerged from a car double parked on the street. One was big, burly, and white. The other was light brown with a porn-star mustache and an air of superiority that reeked worse than his cologne.
The white one said, “Mr. D Hunter?”
“Yes, officer,” D replied as he sized up
them up.
“I’m Detective Otis Mayfield and this is Detective William Robinson.” They did a quick badge flip for D.
“Okay, officers,” D said, noting that they didn’t seem ready to arrest him.
“We’d like to talk with you,” Mayfield explained. “Can we come inside?”
“Officers, I was just going to get something to eat. You can join me if you’d like.”
Mayfield and Robinson seemed cool about it. Didn’t come to play hardball, though D knew they would love to have been invited inside. D started walking and they flanked him, with Mayfield doing the talking.
“Welcome back to Brooklyn, Mr. Hunter.”
“Strange to be back,” D said. “Never thought I’d be living here again.”
“Not the same place, is it?”
“Yes and no. New people. High-rise condos. The Nets. But I feel like its core hasn’t changed,” D said. “At least not yet.”
* * *
D sat at a table at the Saint Catherine on Washington and sipped on a large chai latte. Facing him were the two detectives, with Mayfield again asking the questions.
“Yes,” Mayfield said, “Brownsville is still Brownsville.”
“I know.” D’s stomach got tight but he hoped his face hadn’t. Was this about the fight club or Livonia Avenue or both?
“When was the last time you were in Brownsville, Mr. Hunter?”
D decided to start with a lie. “A few days ago. I visited a young man who works for me sometimes. Raymond Robinson. Lives at 360 Livonia Avenue. Apartment 8G with his mother Janelle.”
Mayfield smiled and looked at Robinson. “That’s very forthcoming, Mr. Hunter. When was your last time in Brownsville before that?”
The Lost Treasures of R&B Page 2
