“Keep moving, Jim. Not today.”
“C’mon, just let us shoot a fair one.” I was pleading to Dean Walton in the second-floor hallway of Lefferts Junior High. He’d heard I had come to school to get revenge on a crew that had jumped me at Field Day a few days prior.
Mr. Walton was right—that’s why I was there. I was often at school specifically for that reason. It was the one place where I knew exactly where someone was going to be and at what time, down to the room and to the minute.
“You know I can’t do that,” Mr. Walton said. He was trying to catch my eyes, but I wouldn’t let him. I refused to get locked in. Mr. Walton had me pinned up near the lockers, but I was somewhere else.
“Let it go, son.”
As we were talking, the crew’s leader, Gregory, tall and athletic, came up the stairs. Mr. Walton called him over.
“Gregory! C’mere.”
“Yes, sir.” Gregory looked confused.
“How about an apology?” Mr. Walton said.
“Sir?”
“I hear you and Mr. St. Germain had an altercation at Field Day. Something you were responsible for escalating?”
Gregory looked at me like he thought it was a setup. I just looked right through him, burning a hole. Mr. Walton’s body blurry, his voice muffled and distant. Gregory’s face just wide and open and asking for it. Mr. Walton’s thick arms were between us and I was counting the seconds, waiting for him to move.
Gregory snapped to, like it all flooded back to him. He knew my crew was three times the size of his; he respected me now and Mr. Walton had nothing to do with it. He wanted my approval a whole lot more than the dean’s. That disconnect—between whose approval we were seeking and whose approval we should have been seeking—was massive.
“Yo, it’s all good. My bad,” Gregory said. “Sorry.” He stuck his hand out but I didn’t take it. I just kept my eyes locked on him.
“All right, let’s squash this gentlemen.” Mr. Walton grabbed my hand and pushed us together, forcing us to shake.
As we came in, Mr. Walton relaxed his body backward. It was almost slow motion. I could see Mr. Walton’s eyes pop, like his brain was telling his body to step back in. I pulled quickly out of the handshake and threw a right haymaker across Gregory’s face, landed it square and clean. That satisfying contact where it’s all give.
Mr. Walton’s two hundred pounds were around me fast, and he grabbed me by the shirt and walked me down to his office, angrier than I’d ever seen him. If I’d been reckless enough to knock a kid out in front of the dean, right after he told me specifically not to, then I couldn’t be talked sense to. And Mr. Walton knew it.
I was transferred—sentenced, really—for a few weeks to Pegasus, a suspension school for kids with extreme behavior problems. It was basically a small, disorganized prison for teenagers where we went home at the end of the day. Teachers had zero control over a student body that boasted rap sheets, records, and a bevy of shooting and stabbing stories. Pegasus was a way station, a warehouse to store troubled kids while the system figured out what to do with them.
Pegasus was also right across the street from the Albany projects—Bloods territory—so I got it on both fronts: fending off classmates inside and rival gang members outside. Pegasus was like the minor leagues, a feeding pipeline for the criminal justice system eating away at black America. That place did nothing but build me a harder shell. When you’re dropped in among other wolves, the choice is simple: become the alpha or get eaten. The hordes of angry and futureless young men roaming the streets and prison grounds are not inherently this way. You get through places like Pegasus by adapting. Instead of stemming any kind of bleeding, it speeds up the process of criminalization. There’s no incentive to behave, to do well, to be a good person. Your reward—your survival—is based on your ability to impose your will on others.
After two months at Pegasus I got dropped back at Lefferts, but something had shifted in me. My time there drew me into a rougher crowd, a no-conscience crowd. As happens at that age, Devon and I stopped fighting and became close friends. The anger and animosity gets pulled inside out and that person becomes a brother for life, someone you can go to war with.
It’s part of the process: Guys from one block sort it out and then join up to take on other blocks. It’s like practice scrimmages prepping for game day. The trust creates a thick and tested bond. Those battles filter out who’s going to not be there when it matters. It was cleansing: we’d get all of our shit out of the way first. We would often seek out who was closest to us, who perceived the world as we did, and Devon and I had been cut from the same mold, even down to the fact that he spoke Creole.
One Halloween night Devon and I were walking down Empire Boulevard on the way to the park next to Lefferts Junior High. It was a regular hangout where cliques got high on the swings and playground slides. The scene there was that mix of innocence and rebellion that you see in a lot of New York City parks. It was cold, and a harsh rain whipped sideways at us, flicking our cheeks. We got to the park and shielded ourselves underneath a playground bridge from the wind.
I pulled a thick blunt out of my coat pocket and was about to light it when we heard a squelching sound, gushing boots stepping on rubber. Eight to ten guys appeared in the dark. They surrounded us until Devon and I were back-to-back inside their circle.
Off the streetlights, I saw nothing but masks: Jason from Friday the 13th, Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street, a skeleton face, a devil face, some others. The all-star team of horror movies.
Their words punched through the mouth holes in the plastic, their breath drifting out white in the cold air. Little puffs of smoke in the dark.
“What’s good now, pussy?”
“What the fuck you gonna do?”
“What’s up, pussy?”
Even against those numbers, we couldn’t back down. And we certainly couldn’t run because we lived in a cage. Being a punk knocks down your self-worth, removes the value that others give you. Getting out of one fight creates a hundred more as a consequence. It’s the reason I went after Devon that first day on the basketball court. It’s the reason neither of us moved from that circle.
“We’re right here,” Devon said. “Whatever you want. Let’s get it in. Let’s go.”
We weren’t going to start anything, but we had to stay, see if they would make the first move. It was tense, Devon’s words holding in the cold air like that.
I started planning in my head: whom I was going to hit first, and how; who was going to come at me from behind, how to get out of that. I played it in my mind like in those Bruce Lee movies, though the reality was always scrambled and messy.
It was eerie being face-to-face with those masks, even though I sensed who they were. Darrell, a broad-shouldered kid we used to play football with, had one of those frozen sneers that he thought made him tough. I had recently gotten into a few fights with him in the schoolyard, then a few fights with his cousin J.J. Then his whole block was hunting me.
The masks had given them false confidence, and once they saw we weren’t scared, they seemed less eager to fight. They played it like they were messing around and then just wandered off. The second they were gone Devon and I took off back up Nostrand to round up our crew. That kind of thing couldn’t stand. An open case makes you look weak. People start talking about you and word leaks out. We circled them up and they didn’t do shit. It would be open season on us.
When we got back no one was around except for an older dude named Malone, one of the sages on the block. Before we even finished telling him what happened he grabbed a gun from under his mattress, and I grabbed two meat cleavers from his kitchen.
“Aw shit,” Devon said.
“All right, we’re out,” I said, handing one of the knives to Devon.
A few blocks down, we spotted Darrell and some of his clique on the corner. Their masks were all gone, but the jackets and hats were the same.
“Hey!” I yelled out, crossi
ng the street toward their corner. “Hey!” They all looked up.
We all crossed against the traffic, not showing any of our weapons. If you showed them, you had to use them. And you didn’t want to cut or shoot someone you knew unless there was a solid reason. They hadn’t harmed us; they violated us. In my mind, it had to be addressed, but in proportion.
Devon and I were both talking at the same time, edgy and hyped. We were hungry and ready to go.
“What the fuck was that?”
“What’s good?
“Ya’ll trying to play us?”
“Let’s get it crackin’. Let’s go.”
“Who wants?” I whipped off my jacket, trying to build momentum. Malone stood off to the side keeping watch, his chin low and his gun tucked in the back of his jeans.
There was a process to getting a gun in my neighborhood, a built-in checks-and-balances system that filtered out a lot of hotheaded nonsense. It started at the top of the tree: The older dudes, the OGs, had the gun. If you wanted to use it you had to give a reason and get permission. Then maybe as you learned your business, your clique would all share one. Later that year we all chipped in and bought an old rifle, which we hid on the roof of my building in a black plastic garbage bag. We also bought a .22 that we stashed behind the heater in the lobby of Devon’s building.
With Malone and Devon standing back, Darrell and I fought it out there on the field, punching and wrestling and kicking by the metal backstop. We scrambled on the ground, rolling into the jagged fences. Just as we were getting winded, a cop car pulled up in the darkness, sneaky and soundless in the rain.
Everyone took off. I ran through the supermarket parking lot into an alley, ditching the meat cleaver. My whole arm and hand were bruised and cut—skin scraped away from the cement and sliced from the fence. It was late when I got home and I didn’t know if I was being followed. I tapped on the door with my fingers, loud enough for someone to hear, not loud enough to wake someone’s wrath. Roothchild opened it just a peek, looking groggy and annoyed. “What the fuck, man?”
“Just let me in, Patou. Now.”
“What the fuck happened?” He saw my arm cut up, my clothes drenched.
I pushed the door open and walked past him. No way was I getting stuck sleeping in that cold hallway. I went straight to the kitchen and shook out some salt into a giant plastic bowl. For about an hour I sat in front of the TV and pushed my fist down in there, let it eat away at the cuts. I remembered when I was a kid my dad used to make me kneel on a metal grater and then kneel in salt. I had assumed it was a cruel punishment but maybe it was supposed to be a healing thing after all. Maybe it has to hurt first for it to heal. I thought about how the two things could be so close to each other, maybe even two sides of the same coin.
I fell asleep like that, with my hand in the bowl.
Devon and his friend Fernando provided a blanket of protection. Fernando was more filled out than me, with the early scribbles of a mustache. He was flashy, rocking fresh skullies, new fitteds, diamond earrings, and gold teeth. I was not immune from the peer pressure they brought—not just in taking on our enemies, but even targeting the innocent.
One night the three of us were walking through the lobby of my building when the elevator rattled open. We stopped just to see who was coming out. A quiet kid our age, who lived in the building, was standing there. He was about to walk past, but we were in his way. I saw a flicker of panic and I pounced. For no reason, I clocked him, straight and square in the face, knocking him back into the metal frame. A loud rumbling boom as he fell into it. Devon and Fernando both busted out laughing. “Oh shit!” Fernando said, as we took off up the stairs to my apartment.
I never saw that kid again, but I still remember his shocked face, his falling body, the reverberating boom, and then silence. It felt like nothing at the time but now I can’t shake it from my memory.
There were no backyards in our world, so we were out in the open a lot—drinking and getting high in front of buildings, stairwells; in lobbies, playgrounds, and public parks. Neighbors would call the cops if we got too rowdy so we had escape routes and lookouts. We’d hear “Boys!” and take off, split up, cut through back alleys and parks. Cops would chase us in an endless game of cat and mouse. We’d vanish behind buildings, knowing which alleys led to which cut fences, to which backyards, to which back doors. We had those things mapped in our heads.
Of course we’d be right back an hour later. All we could see was about six inches in front of us, five minutes into the future. It was a by-product of our impulsivity, which justified our unnecessary risks. It gave us a hunger to push the limits of our newfound power.
Devon’s parents drove a Camry and we discovered those keys could start other Camrys. One afternoon we stole one parked on the Jewish side. I had no idea how to drive but I faked my way slowly around the block, knowing I just had to keep the steering wheel straight. As I came back around the loop on Rogers Avenue cop cars were sitting there waiting. I blew through the stoplight, drove to the fire hydrant in front of my building, jumped out of the car while it was running, and ran inside. The older guys would nab cars and then sell them for parts, which made a lot more sense. Devon and I lacked that forward thinking.
One time there was a commotion on my block after a fight had broken out next to Medgar Evers College, which was across the street from my building. A whole squad of cops rolled up and inflamed the already chaotic scene: they pulled their guns and clubs out, were screaming and chasing people, cuffing bystanders. I was off on the corner on my bike and rolled up onto it. From my view, there was something almost comic about it all. “Yo, when the captain leaves,” I yelled out, “we gonna fuck up the rookies.” One of the cops heard me, holstered his radio, and gave chase. He was on me before I even had the thought to speed off.
“What the fuck did you say?” He grabbed me by my collar, spittle flying.
“What?” I said. “What’d I say?”
“You little fuck,” he said. He banged me against the trunk of the car, turned me over, handcuffed me, put me in the car, and took me to the 71st Precinct down the street.
I sat in a cell for a few hours, but they couldn’t really keep me—I was thirteen, ignorant of consequences, and had said something stupid. Arresting us for frivolous things like that, things that would never stick in court, was common. Because of the quota system, officers often get judged by their arrest numbers, even for minor offenses—which is what I was picked up for a lot of the time.
That was the MO: Rough us up, give us the hassle of fingerprinting and processing, the supposed scare of the cell, the nuisance of the time wasted, the call to the irritated parents, the reprimand or beating you’d get at home. I went through this a bunch of times: my father, grandmother, or Jay, posing as a family member, would come get me. It was just routine.
Over time, I drifted away from Pierre and his clique and started spending more time with Devon and Fernando, who both already had both feet planted in the street. My hustles began shifting from legal to illegal. The equation shook out simply to me underneath those hot basement lights and on those cold mornings: Why not stay on my block where everyone knows me? Why kill myself in eight hours of work for twenty bucks when up the block I can sell a package and make two hundred dollars? Devon made much more than me and he worked not even half as much. Passing out bags that got people high, gave them a good time? If I didn’t do it, someone else would, so why not? I rationalized it all back then.
Julio was a Hispanic guy in his thirties who lived in a ground-floor apartment of my building. He had been selling drugs there since the day we arrived, for years before then. The neighborhood users and dealers would line up outside his apartment where his mom, younger brother, girlfriend, newborn son, and big-ass pit bull all lived. Coming into the building I’d spot a line at his door spilling into the tight hall. Julio had a market in there: drugs, guns, counterfeit clothes, boosted electronics. He would sit home, and people would come to his door and
hand him money. The guy didn’t have to move; he didn’t even have to get up. Every six months or so the narcotics squad would smash his door down and lock him up. But he’d be back, every time, like the sun.
I’d been purchasing weed for myself from him for some time. One day, sometime in eighth grade, I stopped by to buy a quarter ounce. With his door cracked open, chain across, he handed me a bag and I handed him the money.
“Later,” he said. For some reason, I hovered there for a moment. Our eyes met and he could tell what I was thinking. Word had gotten around that I’d been hustling every free minute I had.
“Yo,” he said, “you looking to make some money?”
“Always,” I said.
“I got some work you can flip. Bring me back half. No pressure but let me know when you’re ready.”
I barely let him finish. “Ready now,” I said.
None of this was truly new to me. My father had connections to a lot of the drugs that flowed through Haiti. He even grew marijuana himself for some time, and all over the house I used to see these white squares, which looked like baking powder or sugar cubes. My dad and his friends would sprinkle some of the white powder into their marijuana blunts.
As a boy in Haiti, I was always doing errands for my father and plenty of times was his delivery boy for drugs. He’d hand me a package of thin brown paper, called sugar paper, and tell me where to deliver it and what to come back with and how much. I’d show up at a neighbor’s house, turn over whatever was in that sugar paper, and they’d give me money or food to bring back home. I never questioned it and nothing seemed strange about it.
Julio gave me my first pack—a hundred nickel bags of marijuana. As long as I brought him back his share, he didn’t care what I did with the product. I could be disciplined and sell it or smoke it with my friends, which was usually what I did. Like it does for a lot of young men in my position, the game sucked me in like a vacuum.
A Stone of Hope Page 5
