“You just get here?” I asked one day, instead of nodding. I was down to a month left on my sentence. I wanted to learn from him how to make money so I could make my own way back in the world. I was tired of being ordered around by old men flashing badges; I wadn’t tryna find myself back at home and back under the rule of my father, not when I knew it was a big world out there for me.
Miguel black nodded back, but smiled this time. “What up, blood. You know how it is. They say I messed with this one dude, happens to be one of my old customers. Muhfucka always comes up short and I cain’t do shit but take a loss. He crossed me on the regular and I never responded, never sought no get-back. And they got the nerve to accuse me of puttin’ these paws on him. They should know I’m too smart to do that. At least get my charges right, know what I’m sayin’? Sent a nigga to gotdamn Treasure Island behind the wrong thing. And speakin’ of wrong shit, that island, blood, somethin’ ’bout that mug ain’t right.”
“You’re tellin’ me, blood. That whole place is laced with poison. They don’t put us there to survive.”
“Word. It gotta be the devil. Have you wondering what’s the meaning of life.”
“Beans and rice, bruh. Everything else is just part of the poison.”
“Cope, you’re different. Somethin’ about the way you talk and carry yourself. Like, you used to be quiet than a Chinese exchange student on BART after midnight. Now you done got talkative. Done got some height and weight on you, too, I see.”
I nodded at Miguel’s clipped braids. “Everything’s different in here, blood.” He was right, though. Once in a blue I looked at myself in the stainless steel mirror of my cell. My frame had me doin’ double takes, like some bigger, older dude had snuck into my image of myself and was hogging the whole mirror. I knew what puberty did to the body, of course, but why was it that I was changing so fast and so much? It was like my life clock had sped up, like the island or incarceration had made me stronger. “I just wanna finish my bid,” I said. “This place, it messes with you.”
“For real, for real.”
“I heard you was making ends downtown, though?”
“You know me, always got a hustle.”
“What’s the hustle?”
“What’s on your feet?”
*
It just had to be the shoes.
That’s right. Miguel had been hustling shoes. And not just any old shoes. You know who and what I’m talkin’ about. Everybody and they momma seems to love this Negro. Hell, you probably love him your damn self. Michael Jeffrey Jordan’s old unpolitical ass. If it was a championship in cigar smoking and not giving a shit, that dude woulda won all the chips. I’m generations too young to know his game, only seen a couple clips on social media and whatever, but what I know is that he keeps his distance from us. And, nah, don’t gimme that *8:46 stuff. I was knee-high to his Nikes back then, but I remember they forced his ass into them statements and donations and shit, acted like he was Zuckerberg or some shit, like he just woke up one day and realized everybody ain’t white and rich and beloved. Now, on the other hand, as someone who got political and got everybody and they momma mad at me, I gotta give Black Jesus his propers. He knows what he’s perpetrating: just run, jump, dunk the ball, win the ring, don’t vote, make that shoe money, snag a Cubana bitch, and smoke them big fat cigs like a boss. That’s M.J., and America loves him for it. Even the hood, which he couldn’t give two torn dollars about, loves that man. Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, white guys, black girls, everybody loves him and his shoes. You can put your hard-earned down and buy you a pair, hold them shits for ten seconds, then turn around and resell them at a major markup. Maybe black Mars Blackmon joked too true when he said, “Must be the shoes, money.” Cuz it was all about the shoes and it was all about the money, and it’s still all about the shoes and the money.
“You have any idea what you can get for some vintage Jordans on the resell market, loved one?” Miguel asked me one day.
Nah, not the slightest.
He answered his own question, kinda: “A grip of money.” Point is, I got the point.
I knew I was going home long as I did not fuck up and commit no major infractions. On top of that, a brother wadn’t trying to go home, recidivize, and return to that sunlight spilt across my windowpane. I remember Miguel assuring me that the shoe resell enterprise was 100 percent legal. “No doubt, blood. Nobody in they right mind wanna come back here. Keep your shit legal. I done made hella scratch with them shoes, all legit,” he said. “The reason I’m in here is that my stupid ass went and got unprofessional, had my boy jack up a customer who had got over on me. Muhfucka went and snitched on me after he did the shit, said I told him to jack dude up, which is true so maybe I deserved to get sent here, but not behind some snitch shit. Learnt my lesson, though; that’s the last fight I’ma get into and I wadn’t even in it.”
It’s so much irony in life. “It’s funny, blood, as much of a square as you used to be, I bet you you’ll be a better salesman than me, more popular. You read and shit. That’s necessary, blood. You gotta match these white boys book for book and you can do that. They be having the Kelley Blue Book on Jordan shoes and will quote your ass official list prices and shit. They come with real statistics like they the Better Business Bureau.”
I might be smart, but I didn’t have half his looks, which I bet probably sold half his shoes. “Don’t matter, blood. Every nigga got they own audience.”
Being in school would be the perfect front. “The student-athletes get gear for free. I ain’t know that at first, was running all over the damn place tryna find customers. If I had known about the athletes I woulda went straight to them instead of fussing around with all them white people. All you gotta do is buy shoes off the athletes and then flip them shits at three times the rate at the shows and pocket the profits.”
The system was stealing from the athletes to begin with, so it was only right that they sell the shoes the schools gave them. “You know how much paper these high schools and colleges be making off of football and basketball, blood? And do they pay the players a dime?”
I watch people’s hands. Women know this; they stay watching a man’s hands. Hands tell what the mind is planning, they tell what the heart is feeling. Miguel’s hands hung open like doors he didn’t care to close. He was generous like that, and honest, too.
“I don’t front, Cope. I done things that was wrong, na’mean? Criminal shit. But ain’t no shame in a legal hustle. Nobody gives niggas a chance. Niggas don’t give niggas a chance. But I know a nigga who does.”
The funny thing with all these investigations they wanna throw at my shadow is these fools cain’t think to do anything but look up my records and talk to “school officials” and all kinda nonsense, like it’s gonna reveal somethin’ some way somehow. But I’m the opposite of official. My records don’t tell you a thing about me. They don’t tell you what I care about, who I love, the people that’s made me who I am. Like, they don’t know nothin’ ’bout Miguel. You’re not from where I’m from, so maybe y’all talk to the authorities, but I don’t trust them jokers no further’n I can run from them. You cain’t take a few notes from a file and know the truth about anyone, let alone someone like me who’s lived half his life in a spotlight and the other half in a shadow. Anyway, since you’re not the cops, I’ma tell you somethin’ that’s not in my records: me and Miguel shared more’n a street hustle. What we shared wadn’t anything to do with what the investigators is after. What we shared don’t really even matter to anyone but me. It was its own thing; it mattered to me and hopefully to him, which makes it part of my story.
When he spoke, Miguel liked to occupy his hands slappin’ out a rhythm on whatever he had close by. In the silent breaks, I would hear him mumbling the song that came with the beat: We was working on the grave shift, or just was up too late, and definitely wadn’t making shit. And at night, that song took us places. There was no out loud singing allowed at night, of course. If
the authorities recognized you gettin’ your Stevie Wonder on after lights out, you’d be in hella trouble. So at night we knocked out rhythms on the metal siding of our mattresses instead. The guards who patrolled the hallways never could tell one boy’s beats from the next. But I knew Miguel’s beat. In the dead of night, when I would hear it, I would stir from my restless half-sleep and try and mimic it, try and bring the beat back, but I could never get it quite right, or the rhythm wadn’t what I thought it was, or whatever, cuz even when I hummed out the lyrics—the spaceship—that first back beat never broke, it just drifted off, past the sky and deep into the groove where I couldn’t go. But I did my best nevertheless, just so my man would know he wadn’t alone.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: In keeping with the public trust bestowed upon it, Soclear Broadcasting is compelled to issue the equivalent of a community charter to the citizens of the country that it serves. Amid the political and environmental shocks of the previous decade, members of the American armed forces and government surveillance systems experts teamed with Soclear Corporation to establish the Insurgency Alert Desk to more effectively communicate information about domestic terrorist threats by providing timely, detailed information to the American public about the dangers that must be combatted.
The journalists of the Insurgency Alert Desk are only one part of Soclear Broadcasting’s print, online, social media, and televisual universe. We deliver to a greater degree than any other news organization in world history all the news of consequence fit and unfit for print, from government communiqués to breaking bulletins to deeply embedded reporting on politics and business. The most influential network and media empire in American history, Soclear has been without peer in viewership and online traffic in the decade since the upheavals of 2020. According to a 2028 Brand Keys Influencer report, Soclear ranked as the brand most instrumental in shaping American public opinion. The research and analysis company also named Soclear as the top brand in the country for morning and evening political commentary in its Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, while a 2029 Hoover Institution poll found Soclear to be the most trusted source nationally for political coverage. Owned by Soclear Corporation, Soclear Broadcasting has risen above the rest in an era of crisis to dominate the American news and opinion landscape.
✦Urban Dictionary: Soclear: 1) Having come to national prominence in the wake of the White House insurrection with the express purpose of providing far right–wing journalism on terrorist and insurgency threats, Soclear has expanded into a comprehensive American news and entertainment media organization valued at upward of $30 billion; 2) Founded by Stephen Miller and having come to national prominence in the wake of the *8:46 protests and riots, Soclear is a multilayered media and security organization that exploits factional conflicts in the American government and municipal police departments to advance its authoritarian, racist, xenophobic agenda; 3) Sieg Heil.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Soclear Broadcasting exercises tremendous tact when considering what we put on our airwaves, keeping first and foremost the prerogatives of our nation’s security organizations and the health, safety, and security of the American people. As a result, the Insurgency Alert Desk has as its policy that we do not release what law enforcement deems excessively detailed reports of heinous crimes. In our mission to serve the American people, we report that information which is necessary to the public welfare. We do not release information that glamorizes those individuals who commit mass shootings, extremists who commit acts of political terror or insurgency, or those who foment dissent against the United States of America. While striving behind the scenes to uncover the truth through all the considerable means at our disposal, we do not and will not publicly interview their friends and family for the purposes of show and spectacle. We do not publish their baby and graduation pictures. We will not risk personalizing and romanticizing these individuals simply to drive ratings.
Once their mobile devices have been tracked and their contacts have been traced and the individual has been brought to justice, there will never again be the imperative to identify them. Soclear Broadcasting refrains from referring to them by name but instead simply says that they are “the accused” or “the assailant,” except on occasions when the individual is brought to court, is being indicted on criminal charges, or is standing trial for their crimes. Their name will effectively disappear from these airwaves. Soclear Broadcasting and the Insurgency Alert Desk pledge to the American security apparatus and to the American people to never personalize any individual who is suspected of committing criminal acts against the state or who is suspected of organizing protest actions against the state.
✦Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Copeland Cane V was first entered into the California Gang Member Database on his first birthday. He was subsequently removed from the database at the age of five due to an algorithm error. It appears that he was reentered into the database only after he became criminally involved as a teenager.
*Soclear Broadcasting, the only media empire great enough to span the globe and to answer the questions you and your S.O. discuss at the dinner table. Soclear Business Daily: History Facts: Who’s the richest guy ever?:
The Elon, $600 billion
Jeff Bezos, $577 billion
Jack Ma-Mugabe, $495 billion
Mansa Musa, $400 billion
Vladimir Putin, $380 billion
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Juvenile criminal records obtained by Soclear Broadcasting detail a long history of violent behavior that dates back to Cane’s early teens, when he attempted to set an East Oakland apartment complex on fire and was subsequently detained in a citizen’s arrest by appalled tenants of the housing development.
✦Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Authorities believe that convicted arsonist Cane is traveling alone and that he is armed. Anyone who sees Cane should assume that he is armed and should contact authorities rather than attempting to take the law into their own hands, no matter how justifiable such action would seem to be. It is believed that Cane is in regular communication with an associate, likely a coconspirator in activist circles, though law enforcement has not ruled out the possibility that this associate is from Cane’s criminal network. Authorities do not believe that this individual is harboring Cane, but rather that they might be giving media information to Cane and that he might pass information about his motives and whereabouts to them.
*Cope side note: You notice how much Soclear Broadcasting loves them some Insurgency Alert Desk reports. It’s they audience, right? The American people love us some insurgencies and some alerts and some terrorists. But what we don’t wanna hear about is things like the problems on the island, problems that won’t plant a bomb or shoot a cop or pray to Allah. But courtesy of Copeland Cane, here’s the dispatch of the day: “Insurgency Aftermath Desk: The weeds that rose up and choked the chief gardener wadn’t weeds at all, but flowers spoilt by the soil …”
*Urban Dictionary: The Ghetto Flu: 1) A popular culture phrase used to describe the multiple novel influenza viruses that came from Southeast Asia in the early ’20s and caused the deaths of several million Americans during the decade, the vast majority of them black and Latinx; 2) The respiratory illness that emerged in ’18 or ’19, resulting in a pandemic and major economic losses worldwide; it was largely eradicated by vaccines in the ’20s and only persists in sub-Saharan Africa and other pockets of Third World underdevelopment; 3) Hood slang that POC use to encapsulate all the challenges to their health and well-being that they face due to living in the hood; 4) A bullshit nonexistent disease that blacks blame for their self-created problems with poor diet, vitamin D deficiency, crime, history, and lack of exercise, now that blaming whitey for their problems is no longer believable because most white people fell for the *8:46 movement lies and are more pro-black than they are pro-America; 5) Whatevs.
✦Soclear Health & Wellness Hour: On today’s show, we will visit with andrewjack-sonslaststand010621, an online acco
unt–cum–internet sensation who has made waves from Urban Dictionary to The Root by challenging Marxist groupthink, offering security expertise, and championing conservative politics. Over the next hour, they will be posting, texting, and emailing in response to our questions about a range of issues, from the legacy of insurrection and leftist terrorism to China and the link between public assembly and flu contagion.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Having been removed from the California Gang Member Database due to an algorithm error, records show that Copeland Cane was reentered into the database at around the time that he was sentenced to the California Youth Control. He remains in the database. Though he is not associated with a street gang, Cane is alleged to have ties to *8:46, the Black Panther Party, and other domestic insurgent organizations.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Soclear Broadcasting has investigated Cane’s juvenile record. We can verify not only his incarceration in the California Youth Control, but multiple incidences of violent and illegal behavior. It is also apparent that Cane is in communication with an individual who hails from Piedmontagne, California, a highly affluent suburb. This individual attends a university and is part of an underground insurgent network that uses dark encryption apps to conspire against government and the police. Law enforcement is attempting to gain access to university records that pertain to this individual.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 11