“What’s the matter with you?” I say a little more calmly. “Why’d you run from me like that? You been in any more trouble besides the crack?”
“You got my file,” he says into his hand.
I didn’t bother looking at the file on the subway, but now I see he’s gotten two hit notices since he was transferred to another P.O.’s caseload. He was arrested a month ago for a disorderly conduct in the Bronx. A week later, he was picked up for possession of a controlled substance in this neighborhood.
“Have you tried quitting?” I ask.
“Yeah …”
“How many times have you quit?”
Charlie holds up two fingers.
“What is it?” I say, slapping my thigh in frustration. “The responsibility? You were doing well. What’s the matter? Couldn’t you take the pressure?”
“What do you know about it?” Charlie sniffs.
“Not much, I guess. I thought you were tough enough to make it. I was wrong. You know you really disappointed me.”
He looks away from me and scratches the back of his head. “What does this have to do with you?” he asks.
“What?”
“You say I ‘disappointed’ you. I let you down. What makes you so important?”
“Don’t try to turn it around,” I say, pointing at him. “We had a relationship …”
“Oh fuck you, man,” Charlie makes a swatting motion with the back of his hand. “You’re just like all the others, you just don’t know it.”
“All the other what? White people?”
Charlie smirks at me. “You said it. I didn’t.”
Wheels screech on the street and something I’m standing on cracks.
“Ah, don’t punk out like that.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Charlie says heatedly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah … You know, I hear that bullshit twelve times a day.”
“And you still don’t get it.” Charlie rubs his nose. His face looks sucked out and lifeless. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh yeah? What don’t I understand?”
“How hard it is.”
“Ah, find me a Kleenex. I’m gonna start crying.”
“Hey, you know something, Mr. Baum?” Charlie says. “I know exactly one guy from my block who’s a success.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Rashid.” Charlie points down the alley and across the street. “On that corner last year, he started out as a lookout for one of the crack dealers on my block. He made a hundred dollars a day. Now he’s out on his own, selling his own shit on the corner and he can make a grand on a slow morning.” Charlie adjusts his glasses and raises his voice. “So you tell me why I’m gonna bag your groceries for three fuckin’ dollars an hour at the Grand Union.”
I can’t think of anything to say for a long time. The sun beats down on the alley, making the air thick and the garbage stink worse. This is the argument I’m most afraid of. There’s no honest answer for it.
“You’ll just end up in prison or dead if you stick around the crack business,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” Charlie says in a voice that has nothing behind it. He’s physically still sitting on the trash can in front of me, but his mind is down the street already. He’ll probably buy two vials within five minutes of me leaving. His body begins to agitate like a test tube full of combustible elements.
“I thought you were a smart guy,” I say despairingly. “Doesn’t it mean anything when I say you’re gonna die if you keep doing this?”
“If I die, I got no needs,” he says, folding his arms and facing the wall away from me.
“Oh yeah? What if you go to prison?”
“Still got no needs. I’ll have a home, three squares, TV.”
“That’s a bunch of shit,” I say.
“And I’ll be with my Muslim brothers.” He gives the clenched fist salute.
“Oh, you’re gonna be with them, huh? Don’t real Muslims have strictures against drinking and doing drugs?”
Charlie waves his hands dismissively. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Baum,” he says, somehow managing to sound both rote and angry. “White people say crack shatters lives and shit like that, but the real reason they don’t like crack is because it’s the black man’s business. Ain’t no Mafia or policeman getting our money.”
“You got it so backward,” I say with a sigh. It’s like he’s taken all the old black nationalist rhetoric and twisted it just enough to suit his own purposes.
“Y’all always act like you wanna help black people when you just wanna take shit away from us,” he says fiercely. “You give our women birth control and say you wanna ‘prevent cycle of dependency,’” he says in a nasal “white” voice. “But you just afraid of all these little black babies growing up to take over your world and rock your shit.” He turns and jabs a finger right at me.
I’ve heard a lot of what he’s saying before. I’ve even thought some of it might be true. But at the moment, it doesn’t make much difference to me. He’s throwing away all the good work we’ve done together and I’m starting to get good and pissed about it.
Charlie, in the meantime, is continuing his crack-fueled rant. “The Holocaust wasn’t nothin’,” he’s saying. “My people are dealing with genocide right here in this country, and y’all still can’t figure out why we can get behind Darryl King.”
For some reason, this sends me right over the edge. I grab him by the collar of his sweatshirt and push him hard right up against the wall. “Hey, you know what?” I hear myself shouting. “You know what? I give up on you people!”
For a second, Charlie looks kind of stunned, and then pushes back at me. I flash on the idea that he might have a knife in his pocket and I try to figure out what I’d do if he lunged at me. “You people?” he says, scrunching up his face. “What do you mean? You mean you niggers, right?”
“That’s not what I said.” I take my hands off his collar and back away from him. But it’s too late.
Between “you people” and “you niggers,” there’s very little distance. Charlie knows it and I know it.
We move a little farther apart and give each other wary looks. The only sounds I’m aware of for a minute are both of us breathing and the blood pounding in my ears.
Gradually, the noise from the street begins to fade back in. No one pulled any knife here, but the damage has been done anyway. I scribble down the name and address of a drug rehabilitation program on a piece of notebook paper, but when I try to hand it to him, Charlie turns away. The physical contact involved in taking it from me would be too much like a handshake. Something I don’t particularly feel like doing either. I leave the note on the nearest garbage can lid so he can pick it up himself.
“I want you to report to that place immediately,” I say. “If you don’t, you’ll be looking at jail time for smoking crack.”
“Yeah, right,” he says bitterly.
We turn away from each other without saying good-bye. It’s almost two o’clock and I hear myself mumbling, “Ignorant bastards,” as I walk back through the alley. The girl who I saw before in the yellow smock dress is lingering in the building’s doorway, giving me what you’d call an accusing look if that’s what you were expecting.
I used to argue with the old saying “If you scratch a liberal, you’ll find a guilty racist hiding underneath.” Now, maybe, I’m not so sure.
52
DARRYL KING LOOKED OUT the window. A brilliant day was in progress and a breeze blew through the screen. Twelve floors below, a group of small children screamed and frolicked in the spray from an open fire hydrant in the middle of the six-building city project called the Charles J. Stone Houses. Across a long stretch of brownish grass, several elderly women gathered on the benches, leaning on their canes and nodding solemnly at each other.
On the asphalt court, some fifty yards to the east, a half dozen young men Darryl’s age were playing a furious game of basketball.
From his
window, Darryl couldn’t see the players, but he could hear the slapping sound of the ball being dribbled. He wished he could go outside and join the game. He tried to visualize what it would be like in his mind. He saw himself jumping high above the fray of scrambling boys and then above the backboard. As he descended, he reached back behind his head and jammed the basketball through the hoop so forcefully that the backboard slid down the pole and crashed into the court. Rival players and scantily dressed girls stared in awe at the devastation he’d caused.
His mother’s voice, talking to someone on the phone, interrupted his reverie. “So who we want to go and kill that grand jury witness?”
“Let Aaron do it,” Darryl told his mother to tell whoever she was talking to on the phone. “He did Eddie Johnson all right.”
She went on talking and he shut his eyes tightly. “Moms, we got any ice cream? I’m hungry now.”
She put her hand over the receiver and looked at him. “Honey, we just moved here,” she said in a flat voice. She wore a Same Shit, Every Day T-shirt and a pair of gray stone-washed jeans. “I ain’t had no time to shop … Since when you wanna eat anyhow?”
Darryl lumbered over to the refrigerator and took a look inside. All the food seemed old. With all the moving around and relocating since the big shoot-out, he hadn’t done much eating anyway. Crack took most of his appetite away. It had him always agitated over one thing or another. He’d watch the news on TV or his mother would read the newspaper to him and he could hear his name and see his picture and he’d be glad that he was famous but then he’d think that these people who put these things on the tube did not know him and did not know about his mentality and the things happening in his head and he’d get enraged about their lies and start to break things.
“They don’t know me,” he said to himself. “No one knows me.”
In between everything else, he kept getting images of his probation officer. He could not quite picture the guy’s face in his mind, but he could still hear him saying, “Don’t be late … Dooky,” from the last time they saw each other outside the courthouse elevators.
But then the little glass pipe beckoned to him like an old friend waiting in his room. He’d smoke and smell the heady ether aroma and his heart would beat like a huge bass drum and he’d feel on top of things and in control again, even if he couldn’t keep track of time or think things through so well. The future was only the time between the last high and the next one. Hours and days would go by and he wouldn’t sleep or eat. Then he’d crash for two days and wake up starving.
Instead of “visualizing” like his sister told him to, he’d sit in front of the TV for days, playing with the Nintendo games and watching the Channel 5 news at ten (to see if they would show his picture again). Other times, he just watched Dallas and Dynasty reruns. The plots he didn’t care about, but he liked seeing the beautiful ladies and the big cars and the huge houses filled with nice stuff.
Sometimes that made him angry too, though. Especially when the commercials came on. It was like standing outside a candy store with your nose pressed up against the glass. They put the shit right in your face. Cars, women, airplanes, sneakers, diamonds, giant televisions. But they never let you have any of it.
The worst was the rich guy he kept seeing on the news. The one who always seemed to be flying somewhere in a helicopter or walking through some casino with a bunch of bodyguards. Every time Darryl saw him, he seemed to have a different woman with him, younger than the one before her. One time, the TV people even said the rich guy had a contract with his old wife that basically said he could fuck anyone he wanted.
Though they always claimed the guy did something else for a living, Darryl knew the guy had to be a drug dealer, because otherwise people wouldn’t be falling all over him all the time like he had something they desperately needed. Darryl kind of liked the guy’s style, except that the guy never seemed to be having that good a time.
Darryl decided if he ever had that much money, he’d really live it up right. He’d have all kinds of clothes. A different color warm-up suit for every single day. And a different chain too, instead of the same old cheap-looking red tie the rich guy wore every time he was on TV. Dinner would be at Red Lobster every night. And the other thing was he’d have as many ladies as the rich guy had, except he’d keep all of them. And if one of the old ones wanted to throw down and do the humpty dance again, he’d be happy to oblige. But the most important thing was that if they ever showed Darryl getting off a helicopter, he’d have a much bigger smile on his face than the rich guy.
All of that shit was waiting for him now. He had to just figure out a way to get to it. For now, they finally seemed to be settling in this apartment. The old couple they’d gotten rid of had kept the place clean and well-furnished. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a living room with a view of the plazas and the entrances below. This building was called the Fortress. Pops Osborn controlled it before he was killed, and it was still virtually impenetrable for police.
The “security team”—a group of young men paid by Darryl King’s sister and Winston Murvin to act as lookouts in the lobby—could spot unfamiliar faces and call upstairs with warnings before the intruders could cross the plaza outside. If any strangers did get inside, a King family lieutenant on the eighth floor controlled the one working elevator and could shut it off at any point. With the time it took to climb the twelve flights to get to them, the King family could get rid of whatever drugs or weapons they had, sneak out of one of the back entrances—which had doors that only opened from the inside—and disappear before a raid got going.
Logistically, the building was a firetrap. Its sprinkler and alarm systems did not work and a dangerous, flammable residue coated the walls of one incinerator chute. But for drug dealers, it was a palace. Back when Paul “Stewy” Harris was running his operation out of the Fortress, a joint city-federal narcotics task force spent $303,174 on a massive sweep through the project. Vials of cocaine and guns literally rained out of the windows. Because of the strategic problems with the building’s structure, the agents were only able to assemble enough evidence to support five felony convictions. Given the expense, the law enforcement agencies began to concentrate on other drug-infested parts of the city and the Fortress was left alone.
“When we eat?” Darryl King asked his mother.
“I dunno. What do you want?”
“I didn’t eat for half a week.” He patted the side of his stomach. “I want Ring Dings and Devil Dogs and then some Chinese food. Like takeout.”
“You crazy. We can’t let no delivery boy come here, Darryl.”
“Fuck! When do I go outside again? I’m bugging out up here, Moms.”
It was the most fucked-up thing. For the first time in his life, he was in a position to have some real money, but there was no way he could spend it. Somewhere downstairs, there was a brand-new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that Winston had bought for him. He was even paying someone to wash it for him every day. But he’d never actually seen the car because he couldn’t go outside now. He went over to the closet and looked at the custom-made white leather jacket his mother had bought all those weeks back. With the way things were going, he was never going to get to wear that either.
“You got only yourself to blame,” she said.
He grabbed the jacket and walked to the door. “OUTTA HERE!”
“Darryl, you walk out that door, I swear I’ll stab you right here and now.” Her voice stopped him in his tracks. “Goddamn,” she said. “Sometimes, I think you’re same as you was when you was five years old.”
“I WANNA GO OUT, MOMS.”
“Darryl baby, if it was up to me, you be on the street right now. But the shit done happened already with those cops.”
“It’s ’cos of that probation officer,” he grumbled. “Mr. Bomb. We gotta have somebody take him off the count.”
“Aaron and Bobby are working on that,” his mother said. “They’ll get going. Now you just gotta rela
x here.”
“When?” Darryl asked.
She sighed. “They know a guy, who knows another guy, who’s got a cousin … I dunno. They’ll work it out. They just got to get going, that’s all. See if they wanna do him outside his office or follow him or what the fuck. So don’t worry. They do it right.”
“All right,” Darryl said, scratching the back of his hand and looking around the room for his crack pipe. “I just wish they do it soon, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Why? You can’t go out just because your probation officer’s dead, right?”
“No. But it sure as hell make me feel better.”
“Well, all right,” Darryl King’s mother said. “You wanna get high now?”
53
NATURALLY, THE DOWNTOWN TRAIN stops several times between stations, and this band of rowdy black kids keeps swaggering back and forth between the cars, hanging from the straps and menacing old people. Usually I just ignore gangs like this and read the hemorrhoid ads. But today, they’ve got me in a rage. After talking to Charlie, I’m in no mood for taking shit from anyone. I pick the one kid who seems to be the leader and just start staring at him.
He’s got about seventeen thin gold chains wrapped around his neck. On his fingers, he has all these gold rings with different colored stones. Even his mouth is full of gold, though from the way the light hits his teeth, it looks like he’s got a diamond implanted in one of his front caps.
In short, he’s wearing what I clear after taxes. And I’m supposed to go back to my office and tell some little motherfucker like him how to run his life.
No way.
For a while, he doesn’t look back at me because he’s busy putting his face near an old lady’s ear and shouting. Then he notices me and smirks. I keep staring. He sits down on the bench across from me and his six other friends sit down next to him. Softly at first, he begins to tap out a rhythm on the edge of his seat with his index and middle fingers. His friends start to tap along with him. He looks at me and starts slapping the rhythm a little harder and a little more defiantly with his open hands, and his friends join in after him. I just keep my eyes right on the level with his. Finally he starts to beat the rhythm out with his fists and the rest of them do the same, and it sounds like war drums echoing through the stalled train.
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