The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  The uncertainty of white males of their place in the economic and social hierarchy also seeped into music. The iconic grunge musician Kurt Cobain grew up one hundred miles southwest of Seattle in Aberdeen, a rough, economically depressed logging town that had seen unemployment balloon in the 1970s and 1980s as the local timber mills shut down. For a few years at the end of the 1980s, Cobain lived in Olympia, sixty miles south of Seattle and then the scene of the nascent Riot Grrrl movement, where he was introduced to feminist, progay, and anticorporate ideas. This mixed with his experiences of divorce, poverty, and family dysfunction to create a music that set his acerbic rage to punk-influenced melodies. Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind struck a cultural nerve, selling more than 10 million copies.

  The other dominant pop music of the early 1990s, gangsta rap, had its own masculinity issues. It packaged the worst aspects of poverty-riddled, postindustrial urban America—violence, misogyny, and the glorification of crime—and sold them around the globe. The iconic and enormously talent gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur charted a contradictory path between adeptly cataloging the ills of the ghetto—joblessness, the poor treatment of women, lack of educational opportunities—and glorifying the hyper masculine, relentlessly violent “Thug Life,” a notion he believed in enough to have tattooed across his stomach. As the son of a mother who was a dedicated and active Black Panther, Tupac grew up steeped in the nationalistic, communitarian ideology of the movement at the time it was falling apart—many of the Panthers around Tupac, such as his godfather, were thrown in prison for street crimes; others, including his mother, became strung out on drugs. Tupac never resolved the pull between black nationalism and the individualist ethos of the new era. As he rapped on the song “Only God Can Judge Me”: “Black Power is what we scream as we dream in a paranoid state/and our fate is a lifetime of hate.”

  Two mammoth demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s captured the anxiety over men’s roles. Though one was for black men and the other mostly attended by white men, both harked back to much older movements. In October 1995, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March, which attracted somewhere around that number of black men to the city. It had been a hundred years since Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech, in which Washington had called for blacks to focus on improving themselves rather than asking whites for political and civil rights. As the leader of the conservative, black nationalist Nation of Islam, Farrakhan preached a message intellectually descended from Washington, focusing on black self-improvement and personal responsibility. He called for “atonement,” asking each man in attendance to apologize for his mistakes and pledge that he would “strive to improve myself spiritually, morally, mentally, socially, politically, and economically for the benefit of myself, my family, and my people.”

  In 1997, another million men assembled on the Mall for a gathering called by the Promise Keepers, an organization of evangelical Christian men with an ideological lineage back to Muscular Christianity ( just as Muscular Christianity was led by coaches such as James Naismith, Promise Keepers was founded by Bill McCartney, the coach of the University of Colorado football team). Concerned that men were not involved enough with their kids, the core message of the group was that fathers needed to return and take their places back as the heads of their families. The Promise Keepers emphasized physical vigor and making a space for men to gather without women. Once rejuvenated, they could lead as “godly men.”

  The disenchantment with modern masculinity got a different spin in the 1999 movie Fight Club (based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk). The character Tyler Durden—played by Brad Pitt—proposes that the only way to attain manhood in a consumer society in which men are dominated by women, trapped in soul-crushing office and service jobs, and sedated by shopping at IKEA, is to experience physical pain through fighting. The step after that is to destroy the whole structure of modern capitalism and return to an agrarian idyll where the freeways are turned back into farms. “An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars,” Durden says. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.… We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

  The underlying question was how a man was supposed to be a man in a time when his wife is in the workplace (and quite possibly making more money), job security has vanished, technology means that the workday never ends, and life fluctuates to the whims of the market. The traditional gender role for men was becoming less and less tenable; new formulations had to evolve.

  One alternative came from hip-hop, embodied especially in the form of Jay-Z, a rapper who had grown up in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. His first record, released in 1996, was a straightforward tale of a dealer trying to work his hustle in the “crack game.” Over the next decade, Jay-Z branched out in a way other rappers hadn’t, starting his own record label and clothing company, opening a Manhattan nightclub, buying a share of the New Jersey Nets, shilling for Budweiser, and appearing in a commercial for HP computers. On his albums, he built an intellectual framework around what he was doing—he was still a hustler, still keeping it real. It was just that he’d moved far beyond crack. His new gig was hustling in the global marketplace, promoting his brand, and getting paid. In Jay-Z’s formulation, the “game” was everywhere. Crack, business, politics—everything is a hustle. Global capitalism is just the projects writ large, survival of the fittest, and it’s up to every individual to try to get over however he can. As he rapped, “Momma ain’t raised no fool/Put me anywhere on God’s green earth/I’ll triple my worth.”

  If anyone from our team has found secure footing within this new economic world, it’s Dino, who has been enabled by technology to run a hedge fund from a financial outpost as Seattle is. At the same time, anyone else anywhere in the world with the ability to raise some cash can start his own fund, whether he is in Cape Town, Moscow, or Kuala Lumpur. Against this global competition, Dino has created his own structure, consisting of his tightly knit Greek family for emotional support and his group of analysts. Dino is, as he says, the “team captain,” piloting his small ship through the global markets. “If you can deliver exceptional value to people,” he says, “they’ll pay you.”

  If street hustling is a metaphor for life in the global economy, there’s a lot more payoff in rapping about it than living the lifestyle. For the guys who got into the underground economy, it’s a structure that’s a lot easier to enter than to exit.

  One morning, I visit JT at the two-bedroom house he shares with his mom in the South End. I sit in the living room on the couch facing a window that looks out on the street. A TV in the corner plays SpongeBob SquarePants at low volume while JT sits in a reclining chair across from me. His two-year-old daughter, Simone, perches on his chest, smiling, with her arms around his neck while we talk. JT’s mom, Sharon, hurries in and out as she prepares to leave for her job as a sales clerk in the china department at a downtown department store.

  On my lap, I’m holding The Tupac Shakur Legacy, a coffee-table book that is a cherished possession of JT’s. It’s a lavish production, full of photographs and little pockets that hold pullout items such as reproductions of the playbill from when a twelve-year-old Tupac landed a role in Raisin in the Sun at a Harlem community theater, a complete reproduction of one of his notebooks, and even a copy of his prison ID card from when he was locked up in 1995 after being convicted of sexual assault.

  Tupac, JT tells me, is his favorite rapper. “He really talked about what was happening, like Marvin Gaye did,” JT says. I mention Tupac’s contradictions, such as singing one song lamenting the death of his friends from violence and then another with lines such as “Fuck you, die slow motherfucker/My four-four make sure all your kids don’t grow.” JT tells me, “
That’s what the streets are like. He was telling both sides.”

  JT says that everything he has learned to survive on the street works against him in the straight world. For example, on the street, you need to be “cool”—showing any type of enthusiasm or emotion can expose you to violence (the African-American sociologist Elijah Anderson calls this “the code of the street”). You learn to lay back and let things come to you. When you start to look for a real job, JT says, it’s hard to get out of this mind-set. You still tend to just sit around. And without ever having learned to read very well, JT is totally blocked off from modern technology. He tells me he has never used the Internet. “If you can’t spell, you can’t use a computer,” he says.

  Two decades after going to the streets, JT says, he’s got nothing. The money comes and goes, and is impossible to hold on to when you do get it. Without a steady income, you can’t support your family, which makes you question your own manhood. You see your friends go to jail or die. You find that others will double-cross you. Eventually you feel trapped. “It’s like a drug, man, it’s an addiction,” JT says. “I fight every time somebody’s talking to me about the game or they’re making this money, or they got this plug, and I get that idea, ‘Shit, maybe I should jump back in the game, maybe I’ll be successful again.’ But then again I think about, ‘What if I do it just one more time and I get popped?’ Like Blow, you see that movie? When he’s older and fat, and he’s got the hookup, and that one time cans his ass. That could be me.”

  For Damian, the church and his faith in God have provided an alternative structure to the streets. In Sam Townsend, his pastor, Damian has found a mentor who provides advice on things such as work situations, marriage, and buying a house. “He’s this stable male figure that leads by example, somebody I can look at whose life is one of stability, a life of love and care for others. I can look at that and say, ‘OK, that’s the way a real man’s supposed to be.’ ”

  Damian also has longer-term plans to build a foundation for his family. In addition to his job as a teacher, he has started a number of businesses, though he’s found that it’s difficult when you don’t have much capital to invest. One was selling suits—Damian got catalogs from wholesale suppliers, found customers, took measurements, and then ordered the clothing. He did this for a couple of years, but the margin on each sale was tiny. When a discount clothing warehouse opened in a shopping complex south of Seattle, offering brand-name suits at slashed-rate prices, Damian couldn’t compete. He moved on to a few multilevel marketing ventures, including one that involved loan origination—basically, finding people who wanted mortgages, doing the paperwork, and passing it on to a lending company. The housing crash ended that line of work. To increase his income, Damian has decided to leave Zion Prep—as I write this, he’s applying for a teaching job with the public schools. His goal, he tells me, is to build some generational knowledge and wealth, so that younger family members, such as his nephew David, won’t, like him, have to start from zero.

  After my visits with him in jail, Myran ends up doing a little over a year and a half of time (vindicating Myran’s delaying tactics, the prosecution eventually dropped the charge that Myran had involved a minor in a drug transaction and reduced the sentence it was seeking). One afternoon, after his release, I meet him at a public housing complex in South Seattle, where he is staying with his girlfriend of fifteen years, who works nearby as a coordinator for a food bank distribution center. The development, tucked behind a Safeway, consists of rows of town houses along tree-lined streets. It’s a warm, late summer day, just before the start of school, and a group of kids is running around, playing in the street. Myran stands behind them and waves to me as I drive up. He wears jeans and a green golf shirt, and has sunglasses pushed back on top of his shaved head. He looks healthy, though he also carries a noticeable air of uncertainty.

  We drive to a pizza place for lunch. Myran tells me he’s trying to keep everything cool, to avoid losing his temper or getting knocked off balance, because the addiction is always there. When he starts to feel frustrated, he tries to do something positive, such as going out and washing the car. When he looks back on his life over the east decade, he tells me, he is ashamed. He thinks of all the things he could have been doing, and the time lost with his kids. As he talks, an image sticks in my mind. Before we left the housing complex, Myran called out to his eight-year-old daughter. She dashed out of the group of kids and grabbed on to his leg, smiling. He introduced us and told her we were going out to get lunch but would be back soon, so she shouldn’t worry. As he spoke, he rested his hand on her back, a man trying to grasp a stability that has often eluded him.

  Play Hard and Keep It Clean

  From my very first trip back to Seattle, the idea of getting the team back together for a reunion comes up as I speak with my teammates. At first, when it isn’t apparent to anyone—certainly not me—how far I’m going to pursue finding everyone, it’s idle chatter. As time passes, though, and I keep coming back, I find myself relaying information about each player to every other one. The talk of the reunion becomes more consistent, though it’s always in the vein of “Wouldn’t it be great if we all got together again?” I realize it’s going to be up to me to organize it.

  There are a few practical matters I fret over. The first is whether we should just meet somewhere like a pizza place, or actually play basketball again. Most of the guys on the team remain in good shape, and when I put the question out, it’s unanimous that we have to play. If a guy wants to sit it out, that will be fine, too.

  The second worry is logistical: I don’t know where to have the reunion. Sean, who has stayed active with Lakeside, tells me he could get the school gym on a weekend. That would have a nice symmetry, as we always practiced at Lakeside. But it strikes me that once again it will require the black side of the team to travel up to meet the white side. It doesn’t seem quite right. When Damian tells me about a South End community center that rents courts by the hour and is only a few blocks from Zion Preparatory Academy, it seems perfect.

  When I send out an e-mail suggesting a date, Damian, Chris, and Dino all answer within a few minutes: They’re in.

  “I guess I’ll have to work on my game,” Eric Hampton chimes in to the whole group.

  “I’ll see you all there … with my 1⁄4" vertical. Down from 1⁄2" in the 8th grade,” Sean adds.

  JT, who has been one of the most insistent about having a reunion, is not on e-mail. I call his house and speak with his mom. “I’ll make sure he gets his ass down there,” she says.

  I fly back to Seattle a couple of days before the date and drive down to the community center to pay $50 for two hours of court time. On the morning of the reunion, I wake up feeling nervous. Although most guys have said they’re coming, I wonder if they’ll actually show. I’m curious how everyone will get along. Though I’ve spent significant amounts of time with everyone individually, the group as a whole hasn’t been together in two decades. Many of my teammates haven’t seen each other since high school.

  I throw on some old black gym shorts and a faded maroon T-shirt. As I pull up my socks and jam my feet into my basketball shoes, I feel the calmness that comes from slipping into a familiar costume.

  I’m staying at my brother’s house in Ballard, a neighborhood on the north side of the city. Before I leave, I make a few calls. Sean picks up and we chat for a couple of minutes. He asks who else is coming and assures me he’ll be there. JT doesn’t answer; I leave a message telling him to call if he needs a ride. I reach Damian as he’s getting ready to head out and pick up a new pair of basketball shoes. He says he’s worried he’s packed on too much weight to play at top form.

  Finally, I try the home of Tyrell’s parents. The last time I’d seen them, I’d mentioned the plans to have a reunion. They asked me to let them know if it came together. When I call, Tyrell’s mom picks up. I fill her in on the location and time. She tells me they’ll be out doing errands, but they’d like to come, an
d takes my cell phone number.

  I leave my brother’s house and drive over to Interstate 5, merging into the southbound lanes. It’s a crisp, bright spring day. The Space Needle juts up before me, the downtown skyscrapers arranged beyond it. The sunlight reflects off Lake Union, which is dotted with sailboats. Farther south, the symmetric cone of Mount Rainier, its sides covered with snow, rises on the horizon. I realize as I’m driving that I’m trundling the same length of freeway that Willie McClain and the black half of the team drove in the opposite direction twenty years earlier to get to our practices at Lakeside. On the way, my mind returns to Tyrell. His death had been the impetus for going back and finding everyone else, and, in the end, this reunion. Over time, I had pieced together the story of his murder.

  During the summer of 1991, Tyrell spent a lot of time with his best friend, a kid named Mike Scott; people who knew them called them “T-Baby” (hence Tyrell’s tattoo) and “G-Money.” Like Tyrell’s older brother, Donnico, Mike was fairly active in the drug game. He was running up monthly mobile phone bills of about $1,100 and owned two cars, a Thunderbird and a white Buick. Tyrell, then nineteen, was more of a friend and sidekick—still living at home, he showed no inclination for getting into it like Mike, Donnico, and JT had at that point. “He was just the mellow guy,” says Donnico, who, after serving more than five years in prison on drug charges, is working as a water-meter reader in Portland, Oregon, when we speak. “Every now and then he’d get some dope from somebody, just enough to get him some money. I can tell you my brother probably never had more than a thousand dollars cash in his career—I think I seen him with maybe six or seven hundred at one time. Tyrell, he wasn’t really into anything heavy, as far as drugs or crime. He was just a guy who enjoyed life, smoked some weed now and then, and just liked to look good.”

  That summer, Mike and Tyrell often ended their nights at the 24 Social Club, an after-hours joint in the Central Area, on Jackson Street two blocks east of the intersection at Twenty-third Avenue, where there is now a Starbucks. The club had two rooms: a bar out front and a gambling room in back, with one table for dice and one for cards. Maybe forty people could jam into the backroom, drinking, smoking, and talking, some at the tables and others hanging back to watch sports on TV. Things got going at about midnight and went on until six in the morning, seven days a week. Mike liked to throw dice. Tyrell usually just chilled out, unless Donnico gave him some money to gamble. Early in August 1991, Mike had a run of luck at dice, pulling in, according to the club’s owner, $19,000.