A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  The sense of safety in the air was palpable, the same way that the threats were back on Crown Street. The only visible problems in the neighborhood were from us, a fraction of the commuting student body. We brought the unrest with us in our backpacks and inside our jackets, five days a week, from Crown Heights, Bed Stuy, and Brownsville. With the commute, my troubles in the classroom, and my broken wrist that prevented me from even trying out for football, I had little reason to show up at all.

  When I did go, I got caught in the chaotic stream: cliques clashing over gang activities; fights over which colors someone was wearing and who said what to whom; conflicts with Lincoln and John Dewey High Schools, which were minutes away and formed a sort of triangle.

  The street had taught me that the only way to keep others from imposing their will on me was to impose it on them first, so I became reckless. I would attend school extremely high, tipsy, and carrying my knife inside my North Face jacket. I discovered that being under the influence emboldened me. Often I’d pick a fight with another student, go to the locker room to take someone’s money in a dice game, then maybe smoke a joint in the stairwell. School safety officers would give chase and I would exit the school building through a side door and vanish for a few weeks.

  Once I returned to school, suspension would await. The principal, wise to the fact that I wanted out of school, began to give me in-school suspensions. They’d hand me a packet to complete and lock me up in a small room with three or four other students whom I ended up fighting with. I dug myself in such a hole that there was no way out and I’m sure that knowledge was simmering underneath. Little things would gnaw and gnaw at me until the anger would fill my body—run up my legs, my arms, heavy in my chest. Electric and thick and coursing through my veins.

  One afternoon I was cutting class and playing dice—cee lo—in a small hallway behind the gym with this kid from Bed Stuy we called Rummy. He was quiet and kept to himself, but he’d bet wild and heavy at dice. In cee lo you hold the money you’re betting in your left hand and roll the dice with the right. Rummy would lie all the time about what he was holding—ass betting.

  When the bell rang I picked up the dice to leave before the halls flooded. “That’s one-twenty you owe,” I said. “Is that all of it?” I reached for the stack in his hand but he pulled it back, stuffing it in his jeans pocket.

  Rummy threw his backpack over his shoulder. “Nah, it was twenty.”

  “The bank was at one-twenty. I’m the bank. You pay me.”

  “Nah, I never said one-twenty. I said twenty. You heard wrong, man.”

  I hadn’t heard wrong and he knew it. Like “What size you wear?” this was a dare. He was saying come and get it.

  I was like a Bugatti, zero to sixty in a blink. His mouth didn’t move, but it was as if I heard him say, What you gonna do about it, pussy?

  A teacher popped in. “Boys, where are you supposed to be?”

  We didn’t respond, keeping our stares locked.

  “Boys!”

  Silence.

  “Should I bring you to the principal?”

  But I could barely hear him. This was the line for me: under no circumstances could you allow someone to get over on you, or it opens the floodgates. You don’t need to pay Buffett, he’s not going to do shit about it. I was. I had to.

  “You gonna pay me,” I mouthed. “You gonna pay me.”

  “Fuck. Outta. Here,” he mouthed back.

  I charged him, linebacker style, right into the wall, and started whaling on him. The teacher got in between us and before I knew it, two school safety officers and the principal, Mr. Siegel, were pulling me off.

  “You spit on me, man,” Rummy said. “Fucking pussy.”

  I pushed through and swung at him again. The principal grabbed me and pinned my arms back. He was stronger than he looked.

  “Stop. Stop! What’s going on?” Mr. Siegel said.

  “He owes me money,” I said, trying to shake off his hold.

  “Look at me. Calm down. Jim, calm down.”

  “He owes me—”

  “First off,” Mr. Siegel said, “you shouldn’t be playing dice in school.”

  That just made me angrier. It was beside the point. I kept swinging my arms to free myself and both officers ran up to grab me again. During the struggle my gold chain popped off and fell on the floor. It was less than a hundred bucks and probably fake, but it was mine. The officer went over to pick it up as I was being taken away.

  “My chain, man. That’s mine!” I said.

  “I’ll put it in the office safe,” Mr. Siegel said. “Someone from home can come and get it.”

  When I got that angry, all the emotions opened up so I started crying too. My face locked and my breath got tight, like I was hyperventilating. Their reactions went from puzzled to alarmed to terrified. Everyone’s faces told me that I looked like a demon.

  “We gotta get this kid to a hospital,” Mr. Siegel said.

  A nurse called the ambulance and the school safety officer put me in handcuffs just to keep me contained.

  Coney Island Hospital was a faded place with walls like dirty water and bright lights that buzzed my brain. It was creepy in there, as if poor souls were passing their lives away. I didn’t want to touch anything or look at anyone, least of all doctors.

  Everyone spoke to me cautiously. Mr. Siegel reported that I had exhibited abnormal and dangerous behavior. The young doctor went through a checklist, trying to get me to talk. I zoned out during the questions, thinking about getting my money, smashing Rummy’s teeth out on the curb, figuring out who could pick up my chain from school. My dad wasn’t even at home anymore; he was living with a girlfriend in Queens. We had been fighting constantly and one night he smacked me in the mouth, striking blood. Someone called the police, children’s services showed up, and he was removed from the house.

  And no way my grandmother was going to travel over an hour to pick up my chain.

  “Why are you so angry?” the doctor asked.

  I peered out the windows, or what the bars let me see through. “What?”

  “You seem angry. Why are you so angry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I offered them little, but the psychiatric evaluation determined I was depressed much of the time, irritable and angry most of the time, and had trouble concentrating all of the time. I was low energy and worn out, though I never had thoughts of self-harm or suicide. I did wonder Why me? a lot. Why are we drenched in poverty while others have so much? Why are violence and hopelessness so prevalent in my world? What’s the purpose of living if this is all there is?

  They kept me overnight to be safe. I slept in a rickety metal bed, so narrow I couldn’t move without falling. I woke to some kid yelling in his sleep and rain pelting the long barred windows.

  My grandmother picked me up the next morning. On the drive home, staring out the window, I was quiet. A threshold had been crossed. There was no going back for me, both literally—I was done with school—and mentally. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. I understood that I couldn’t have one foot in the street and one foot out—you lose a foot that way. There was no more halfway for me. There couldn’t be.

  The less time I spent in school, the more I was attracted to the older crowds that seemed to be doing fine without it. They took me to some clubs. Around midnight, there’d be two lines in front, one for men and the other for women. Sleek cars would pull up, women dressed in just about nothing but high heels, rancorous dudes smoking and shouting obscenities at the ladies. A heavy police presence right around the perimeter. We would get searched and one of the older guys would slip the bouncer a twenty to let me in, though I soon got a fake ID.

  Inside you couldn’t see much in front of you. The club would be filled with smoke and dancing bodies. The DJ would swivel between reggae and hip-hop: Sean Paul, Vybz Kartel, Mavado, Sizzla, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and others were on heavy rotation. On the dance floor the guys would go from woman to woman and compete to see w
ho could grind against the most and get as many numbers as possible. If you left with someone, you were crowned the champ.

  Like clockwork, once everyone’s buzz topped out, there’d be a huge fight in the club. Cliques fighting over old beefs or someone’s girl or ice grilling in the club. Broken bottles would fly and someone might get stabbed or shot out on the sidewalk. Most of the time it would spill into the street where the police would get involved. After too many of these fights, the older guys began to frequent more upscale clubs in Manhattan, which I couldn’t sneak into. I would stay on the block and hustle all night until the sun came up. I’d see them driving through the neighborhood after a night out, looking for a parking spot, bleary-eyed and hundreds of dollars lighter.

  Friday nights I joined the younger clique at the roller rink on Empire Boulevard, the prime spot in Brooklyn for teenagers. The skating rink was our stage, the hub to display what we pretended to have. We’d hustle all week just to have enough for the rink. A New York City landmark, the Empire roller rink had been there since the 1940s. It was the “Birthplace of Roller Disco,” as a neon sign bragged. Friday nights were teen nights so we’d put on our best outfits, smoke some blunts, and pound Hennessy and Hpnotiq.

  The place drew all types, not just low-level peddlers like me. Among typical schoolyard fighters and weekend hustlers were hardened young men whose lifestyle demanded constant armed protection. Late night, out front, things usually turned fierce—too many different cliques thrown together in one spot—so we’d come prepared. Beforehand we’d grab knives, brass knuckles, hammers, and then roll thick over to Empire Boulevard. We were emboldened by the rink’s proximity to our neighborhood. Somewhere by the gas station on the corner we’d stash our weapons in trash cans, bushes, and Dumpsters.

  Outside the rink, we’d get on the long line, the Ebbets Field public housing rising tall and industrial in the distance, the funeral home and liquor store across the street. We’d be searched and pay our fifteen dollars, security guards eyeing us tight as we passed. The place had a frozen-in-time look: slippery wood floor, cheesy neon palm trees, walls lit in bright fluorescents. The DJ would play hip-hop at a deafening volume so everyone had to shout. The tables and hangout area was a small square inside the rink and we’d be in there watching the skaters circle around us. After 11:30 they would end the skating and the entire rink would become a dance floor. When it closed, and we emptied out, the fights would start like they were part of the schedule. Too many young cliques thrown into one spot full of raging testosterone mixed with alcohol and marijuana. It was the perfect recipe for disaster.

  One night on my way out there was a big brawl between gang members from my neighborhood and one from Bedford Stuyvesant. After I passed through and started walking home, empty-handed and alone, I got jumped by a group. They knocked me onto the sidewalk, and one of them repeatedly stomped on my face with his Timberland boots until I was out cold. I was laid up for a few days. It could have been a wake-up call; a turning point, even; but it was those five blocks of my world again. I couldn’t see past them so I just thought about revenge.

  6

  T and T’s

  I think about this show I saw on the Nature channel the other day about elephants. About how despite weighing up to twenty-five thousand pounds and standing thirteen feet tall, they can still be chained . . . It starts when they’re babies. Some asshole puts a metal chain attached to a wooden peg nailed into the ground around the baby elephant’s foot. The baby elephant struggles but fails to break free and learns at that very moment not to struggle, that struggle is useless. Later on, even when the elephant can easily break free, it doesn’t.

  —MK ASANTE, BUCK

  By fourteen I was stuck inside a trap that I mistook for freedom, driven by a sense of power that was likely to bury me. As a young riser in the drug trade, I was driven to plant my feet in all of it: the money, the fashion, the respect, the girls. It didn’t even occur to me that there was anything else out there.

  The lobby of Devon’s building was our sanctuary. We would spend hours there, slinging drugs from broken mailboxes and selling off boosted clothes and electronics hidden in his family’s first-floor apartment. In the winter we’d lose whole days on the thick steps and metal railing, smoking weed and passing a bottle of E&J cognac.

  The streets strip away much of who you are, but it does give you a sharpness and an intuition about people. I can still look at someone, chat with them for a minute, and unwrap them, read something significant about them: desires, fears, and motivators. It was a skill honed in a place where the ability to do that meant your life.

  For a while we got suspicious of this Jamaican guy who was always coming and going from an apartment off the lobby. In our world, our friends weren’t even really friends, and everyone else was automatically an enemy. Over months of watching him, we sensed he was a big player in the game. We called him Dread, though he didn’t have any. He was discreet, quiet, and killer smooth, part grace and part menace.

  Devon was an extrovert, and they were neighbors, so he started talking to Dread first. We were all hoping for a connection of stature, a ladder to the next rung of the game. That payday, that pot of gold, kept us going. We worked corners all hours of the night, all times of the year, to become the next Tony Montana or Nino Brown. It’s every street-level dealer’s dream. We made dangerous decisions in the hopes that we’d become big enough to rewrite our misery. That was the costly lie we packaged and sold back to ourselves.

  Users and peddlers would flood in and out of Dread’s apartment daily. I kept my eyes up for an opening, a chance to talk to him, maybe get some work and boost my clientele. One Saturday afternoon I was hanging in the lobby with Fernando when he walked over to ask where Devon was. Dread spoke in this strong patois that gave him a layer of authenticity.

  When I told him I didn’t know, he looked me up and down. “What about you,” he said. “Wanna take a trip?”

  Fernando and I exchanged a look. I knew this was a risk. But one errand with Dread might open some real doors for me, get me off the corner for good. It would be an investment. High risk, high reward. Frank had named me Buffett for a reason.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Okay, wait here,” Dread said. He grabbed a Desert Eagle from his apartment, tucked the handgun in his waistband, and waved me over like, Let’s go. By then I had seen all types of guns but this one popped out at me. The barrel was like a visible threat. A gun like that might have given me a false sense of protection, but it would likely break my wrist.

  I jumped in the passenger seat of his two-door red van and we took off like a missile, dipping in and out of traffic. He was the wildest and most erratic driver I’ve ever seen, and I’d ridden with Devon, who literally didn’t know how to drive. But my face remained a rock.

  At the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, a driver cut us off. Dread sped up and pulled next to the guy, rolled down the window and pointed his Desert Eagle right through. “I will kill your fucking bloodclot!” he kept yelling as he sped up and stopped, sped up and stopped. This was a Jamaican phrase I’d heard before, though I had no idea what it meant. I slunk down just slightly in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio.

  “Don’t touch that,” Dread said. He pushed my hand away and turned it louder. Buju Banton’s “Hills and Valleys” shook the car. Dread sang along freely, soulfully, from a deep place somewhere inside of him. We inched onto the bridge.

  He parked in front of an unlabeled warehouse on the west side of Manhattan, took the keys, and exited the van, leaving me in there. My stomach just dropped; I was a squatting duck, trapped and convinced something was going to go down. Twenty minutes later Dread jumped back in the van and dropped a white envelope full of cash on the console. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t offer any.

  As soon as he pulled out he rammed into a car in front of us. Little damage but a clear hit; the other guy got out of his car.

  “Fuck,” Dread said. “Wait here.”
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br />   The one thing I could do on the trip was not show fear—it’s the value I could bring, what I was being tested on. But that car was a traveling felony: guns, drugs, and cash—and those were the things I knew about. But Dread seemed more annoyed than fazed by the sidetrack. He walked up and gave the driver a strong handshake with a stack of bills in his hand. Then he got back in the van and drove off. We didn’t say three words the whole ride back to Brooklyn. He just blasted the reggae and kept his beamed-out eyes straight ahead.

  Back on Crown Street, he handed me three hundred dollars. “Thanks, yute,” he said. “We haffi link up soon again.”

  It was both the easiest and hardest money I ever made.

  Dread had lured me in because of an almost chemical draw that some street dudes just have. Others carry the exact opposite—the guys you just knew to avoid, all quick tempers and invented slights, showy threats and follow-ups. Ky-Mani was one of those guys, much deeper in the gang life than any of us. I’d give him a dap here and there but that was it.

  One night Devon, Fernando, and I were hanging out on the Jewish Steps with friends. I had been shook up all day. That afternoon I had come out of a grocery store on Montgomery Street to see a young guy on his back, bleeding on the sidewalk. When I got a look at his face, I recognized it was my friend Reggie’s older brother. I froze, able to tell from his empty eyes that he wasn’t there. Blood pooled below him, and the front of his shirt was soaked red. Cops had just pulled up and the ambulance was bringing a stretcher out, but I knew it was too late. From ten feet away I watched him die on the sidewalk. Those kinds of things are hard to walk away from, but that’s what you have to do. If you didn’t, you’d never move. I was trying to get my mind off it while I was shooting dice on the steps with Devon, Fernando, and others.