I knew no one at home would take me to the doctor, and I was so accustomed to getting hurt that I assumed it would heal the next day. But every day that week I woke up with a howling, throbbing pain inside my hand. Six days later it hurt even worse. I was hanging out at the Jewish Steps when Jay noticed me trying to zipper my jacket with one hand. He asked me what was wrong and I told him about the fight behind the school, the blocked punch.
He took my arm and extended it out, slowly. “Close your hand,” he said.
I started to but couldn’t, like a clamp was tightened on my wrist. I winced even trying to move it.
“Shit.” He shook his head and pulled at my coat. “Let’s go,” he said, exasperated.
“Where?” I asked, but he just kept walking. “Where we going!” I followed him over to his car.
We got in and the car started up smooth and syrupy, lights aglow. A sudden thump and then the raw spurt of Nas’s voice, rhyming tactics, defects, and hyperactive.
“Don’t you know to go to the doctor when you’re hurt?” he said.
I was embarrassed. It was just one of the thousands of little things that a normal home life would have provided. “Yeah, but I—”
“It’s fine,” he said, the car pulling like water onto Crown Street. “Somebody’s got to take you.”
Kings County Hospital is a beast of a building, and as chaotic a place as you’ll find in New York. People whirling through on gurneys, doctors running and calling out codes, everything just a hair away from going off the rails. It’s one of the US hospitals where army medics are trained before being sent off to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. At Kings County doctors get experience with the speed, volume, and wounds of battle. This says more about my community than just about anything else.
My wrist barely merited a look there so we had to wait a long time. Jay and I flipped through magazines and watched TV for hours. We sat in the waiting room crunched among the walking wounded—a guy holding a thick bandage to his bleeding ear, a gunshot victim with his leg wrapped, a jittery guy limping around and yelling at the air, sleeping bodies pushing out a rancid smell, and countless of Brooklyn’s sick and maimed. Cops scattered in and out, some trying to catch parole violators, which is common.
As Jay and I watched Judge Judy with the sound too low to hear, Jay turned to me. “That’s some dumb shit, man,” he said. “You got size, you’re quick. You could make varsity if you could just get your shit together. That’s the path, right there.”
Unnecessary risk bothered Jay. He’d seen people lose so much over little things; he knew how easily the fight with Laurence could’ve snowballed into bloodshed or prison. Most of our conversations consisted of him trying to talk sense to me.
I was worried about my hand, but I tried to play it off. “It’s fine.”
“Oh, you a doctor now? You diagnose yourself?” he asked. “Walking around with a broken hand isn’t too smart. Shit, I thought you were smart.”
“I am smart,” I said defensively. I hated when people even implied this.
“Yeah? I think the jury’s still out,” he said, picking up a magazine. A woman came running into the ER, yelling about her mother on the sidewalk. EMTs rushed the electric doors whirling a wheelchair. The rest of the waiting-room eyes didn’t stray from the TV. That ER was a show they’d seen before, a channel they were tired of.
“What’s that mean?” I asked, but Jay ignored me, flipping through pages. “J—what’s that mean?”
“Look,” he said, turning to face me. “I live where you live and I been there a lot longer. I’m not your fucking dad. I’m not your guidance counselor. I understand if someone approaches you, you gotta do what you gotta do—”
“Damn right—”
“—I’m not saying be a punk. But don’t seek it out. You’re like a heat-seeking missile. Always seeking it out. You feed off it—that part’s gonna get you killed.”
I had no argument. But there’s a giant difference between understanding something and willing yourself to change because of it.
“Looking out for yourself doesn’t always mean warring.” He rolled the magazine and pointed it above my eyes. “Use your head.”
It was dark outside by the time we saw a doctor. A hand threw open the green curtain with a snap and an older white guy, trimmed beard and glasses, stepped in. He asked me to stretch out my arm, turned it slightly, and saw the expression on my face. He watched my eyes more than my arm. “We can X-ray, but I can tell it’s broken.”
“What is?” Jay asked.
“The ligament here.” He pointed and started to write on his chart. “The wrist.”
“Shit,” Jay said, more upset than I was.
“How long ago did this happen?” the doctor asked.
I started to answer, but Jay cut me off. “But can’t you cast it?”
“It’s too late to really do anything,” the doctor said.
The doctor started turning my hand over, slowly. I winced. “Well, we can. So it won’t break again. But it’s not likely to matter. It’s already settled into place.”
“But you can cast it?” Jay said again.
“Sure, we can fit him for a cast.” He swiped the curtain open and called for a nurse. Then he turned to me. “What’s your name, son?”
“Jim,” Jay said.
The doctor eyed Jay, then looked back at me. “What’s your name?” he said again.
“Jim,” I said, my voice hoarse.
They put me in a cast but, ignorantly, I took it off less than a week later. With that, my football career ended before it began. To this day I have to do push-ups on my fingers because my palm won’t go down. Once that single path was closed off—even the hope of it snuffed out—the trap of my circumstances got that much tighter.
I rarely went to school and when I did, I was a terror. The bilingual classes were taught mostly by Haitian women, trying their best with few resources in overcrowded rooms. I was like my own weather system in there, a magnetic field pulling things toward me. Strolling in late and arrogant, swinging on kids at the slightest provocation, yelling and tossing things across the room. Friends would pop in from the hallway and interrupt class to give me a dap, let me know the latest news. Just like when I was younger, teachers hung that vagabond label on me. This time I embraced it.
There was a stigma to being in those bilingual classes and once my English was good enough, I wanted out and the teachers were more than willing to help. Early on in eighth grade, Dean Walton switched me to the regular-track classes, hoping the change would work to everyone’s benefit. The fact that Mr. Walton had faith I could succeed was something of a motivator. I didn’t want to let him down and I put together a well-behaved streak, even tried to do some homework. I sat at the kitchen table with my books trying to make sense of Ancient Egypt while Colin threw food at Roothchild and Roothchild screamed back and my grandmother screamed at everyone as she tried to pay bills. I tried to decipher algebra textbooks while my cousins and aunt argued over the television. My dad complained that he couldn’t sleep, the street noise high and tight like it was there in the room with us. You couldn’t even hear your own thoughts in that place.
But I didn’t last long as an eager student. The gravity was just too powerful. In fact, moving me into the main-track classes actually made things worse: it extended my circle, so now I was mixing it up with kids in the regular classes and still the protector of those left behind. If anyone took the bilingual kids’ money or threatened them, they would come to me and I would sort it out. It was a feedback loop: as my stature grew, people came to me for help and I got into more trouble because I would get involved. Now I was the center of another orbit and I liked it.
3
Hustle
The United States is really terrible at turning boys into men.
—DAVID BORKOWSKI
I gazed out that window of my grandmother’s apartment and things started to crystallize. The quick exchanges tucked-inside handshakes, the tight-
jeaned girls catching hollers, the corner dudes who reeked of grit and hustle, the diamond shine of the cars, the solid force of those who ran the street. There were those who “held things down,” were respected and feared in equal measure, and there were chumps. I didn’t even consider it a choice.
The more time I spent time with Jay and his crew, and with Pierre, Mackenzie, and their clique, the more my burgeoning mind understood things for what they were: I needed money. To get what I wanted, even to be who I wanted. It was a fact as solid as the bricks stacked high and the concrete spread wide.
But I didn’t even have money for the vending machine or a subway ride. I began taking on odd jobs or, as we called them, hustles. A hustle is about putting yourself where the money is, squeezing something hard enough or from the right angle to find the money inside of it.
In Haiti, panhandlers are a rarity, despite the poverty blanketing the country. There’s a work ethic in our blood and in our history—the same ethic that galvanized an island of slaves over two hundred years ago to do the unprecedented: take down their colonial masters and reinstate their freedom. It coursed through my veins too.
Even as a young kid with nothing, I didn’t expect anything for free: I wanted to work. By the time I was six, I was already working for the local taxi service in Haiti, called a tap tap. It was a used converted pickup truck with a Technicolor top, people scrunching in that tight space, passengers up on the windowsills, bodies spilling out. I’d sit above the tailgate and collect the fares, scoring free lunch and maybe ten dollars. In Brooklyn, I kept my eyes open, my ears pushed tight to the ground, studied the way money exchanged hands, and put myself in between those transactions. I became a student, keeping a watch over what went on, what was paid for, and where I might fit into the mix. And in that, I found the value in myself.
I washed the exteriors of cars and vacuumed the interiors, carried boxes down stairwells, and loaded furniture onto trucks. In the summer I ran water bottles to sweating drivers at stoplights. In the winter I high-stepped through packed snow with a shovel, knocking on doors behind driveways buried in white. I’d get eighty dollars for twelve hours demolishing an entire brownstone with a sledgehammer, exhausting and unhealthy work. Pierre was plugged in to the odd-job economy around the neighborhood. He brought me along when he needed a second pair of hands, and vouched for me on those early jobs.
“Just don’t talk. Don’t say nothing,” Pierre said, as we ventured one Saturday deep into the Hasidic side of Crown Street. It was late summer. On compact lawns, other lives reared their heads: teenage boys spraying one another with a hose, a family blowing up a kiddie pool, a girl pulling a red wagon with pristine white dolls lined up straight, a Hasidic man unloading straw and plywood from a truck. Not a thousand feet away were the faded bricks of my apartment building; I could turn around and still just about see my window. That’s how New York unfolds—you look up and you’re in another country, with its own rules and population. You’re a local on one block and a tourist on the next.
An Orthodox family had offered Pierre four hundred dollars to paint their small one-story house. “Let me do the talking,” he said. “I know these white folks.”
“What if they ask my name?” I said. I was always polite to adults, of all stripes.
“They won’t,” he said. “Don’t say nothing unless they ask you a direct question. They ask if you want water, something to drink. You say ‘No, sir.’ ”
“What if it’s a woman?”
Pierre quick-punched my arm. “Then it’s ‘ma’am,’ dog. But it won’t be. The Jews don’t let their women talk to anyone. You can’t shake their hands or even look at them. Strange shit.”
I had noticed how shy and covered-up the Orthodox wives were. Pierre was right: we always dealt with the men. The women usually had multiple babies in various stages of need, dangling on them like they were the tree of life. I felt for those women. There was something meek about them and we might as well have been the wallpaper for all they talked to us.
These early hustles were all legal, but that didn’t mean they were always safe. There are trip wires in that environment that can turn things quickly.
My friend Lorenzo got me a job at a supermarket out in East Flatbush where I bagged groceries at the end of the register counter; if there was an open spot, I’d go on walkabouts with him to hand out the weekly circulars. Given the choice, I’d take the fresh air every time. One time Lorenzo and I were handing out circulars a few blocks from the store, putting the pamphlets under doors and on windshields. Some of those apartment complexes were dangerous—deep out of our neighborhood and run by the Bloods. We were young and black with no work uniform, so every pair of eyes—homeowners, street gangs, law enforcement—stared us down. It was enemy territory from all angles.
We were folding and shoving coupons into mailboxes off an empty lobby, our voices traveling down cold hallways.
“I’m gonna hit Clarkson,” Lorenzo said. “Make sure you do the mailboxes on the other side.”
“Yup,” I said.
I heard him go through a fire door off the lobby to cross between the buildings. Far from our home base, I was more alert than usual. When I heard muffled conversation from outside, I stepped back to get a look. There was no way Lorenzo ran into someone he knew.
I could see through the door into the alley: wires dangling out of back windows; broken A/C units and busted TVs. I could see Lorenzo’s back and a huddle of five or six guys waiting outside the door on the railing. There was nothing loud—that’s never how it goes down. It’s like a shift in the air and some voices you can’t place. It’s a change in temperature and airflow. That’s what it’s like to get robbed; quiet and creeping, then smack in your face.
“Yo, hold up. Hold up,” said a squirrely voice, heavy New York vowels. The words were distorted by the walls and the wind so I couldn’t make out anything he said. And then I heard, “Nice kicks, man. What size you wear?”
Now, a stranger approaches you asking that, it’s not a question. It’s a straight-up threat. In terms of saving face, the currency of the street, there’s only one way to respond. Lorenzo was no punk, so that’s how he answered. “Your size,” he said.
“Word?” the guy said, laughing. He flipped open a folding knife and took a step in, pointing with it. I weighed my options. Do I approach six guys with weapons in their own backyard or do I find a way to get Lorenzo out, and round up my own to come back at them? It’s not as intuitive an answer as it sounds. Where I’m from the hard and fast rule is to fight—even if you’re outnumbered. I started to creep their way when the guy took a swing at Lorenzo with the knife hand. Lorenzo jumped back in the air and the knife caught his North Face jacket, cut a big slash in it. The goose down flowed out, floating in the wind. Lorenzo took off and ran into me a few feet from the door’s entrance, feathers trailing.
“Knife, go! Go!” he yelled, turning me around and pushing me forward. The guy took off after us, so we cut through the lobby and sprinted across the street. I could feel my heart beating into my throat, but once I looked back he was gone.
“What the fuck, man?” Lorenzo said.
“I know, shit.” I turned around to check but no one was coming. I leaned against a mailbox, catching my breath. But Lorenzo kept walking, talking almost to himself.
“No way. Naw. We coming back at him,” Lorenzo said. He had the devil eyes.
If Lorenzo was gangster enough to say “your size”—by himself—he certainly wasn’t going to let it drop. And just by virtue of being there, I was in it too. I told him I’d grab anyone from my block and we’d have his back.
“Pussies,” he said, looking back toward the building. Lorenzo stuck his finger in the big hole of his North Face. The fabric was just flapping around, the insides already blown out. “Fucking pussies. I just got this. And trying to snatch my Jordans.”
The rest of the walk back to the supermarket, Lorenzo kept talking about whom he was going to round up, how quickly, and
what they were going to do. It was like I wasn’t even there. Back home I got sidetracked. I never did ask him if he went back there.
Most of my jobs were dull, exhausting, and dangerous, and three or four dollars an hour, less than minimum wage. But I was thirteen; I had few options and if I complained, there were literally hundreds of kids on my block who could step into my place. For a while I hung out at a barbershop down Nostrand Avenue sweeping up the hair on the floor with one of those big push brooms. I’d make piles that looked like dead animals and dustpan them up for a few bucks. The barbers were older dudes, mostly immigrants, who would give me a free fade or some of their takeout Chinese food.
A lot of buildings in my neighborhood had layers of businesses, operations hidden inside of operations. There was what the sign out front said was going on in there and then there was the rest of the onion. Often what was tucked inside was illegal, but not always. Behind the counter of the barbershop was a narrow stairwell that led to a dank basement where a husband and wife ran a cleaning business. They had seen me around the barbershop and hired me to wash and press shirts down there in a tight, hot room. I’d do six-, seven-hour shifts in that cramped basement and leave with twenty dollars. Whole weekends would roll by while I was down in that cave, buried from the world. Hours of standing up and ironing, my feet aching, my breath short, the heat from the lights inches from my head. I’d wipe the back of my neck and my hand would be painted in soot. There was no window or ventilation, so I’d step outside just to breathe and they’d give me a hard time for slacking. I just wanted oxygen. So many of my friends were making a lot more money by doing a lot less, handing out bags and vials on the street. When you’re poor, young, and colored, your options don’t extend much further than these.
A Stone of Hope Page 4
