He needed to go see some nuns—I had the impression he did that a lot, just kind of checked in on them—and he took me along. They treated me like a little king, except I didn’t like all the cheek-pinching. Then we picked up some dry cleaning and bought groceries, and all the time he was either asking me questions or telling me stories. After a while I started picking up that this dude really liked kids and didn’t get to talk to them often enough. That was a trip for me: an older man who liked kids. J.P.’s dad was a trip. He had some kind of job that got him lots of great food that they kept in the freezer in their basement. Mrs. P went down there and brought up all kind of cool stuff: corn dogs, breaded chicken fingers, tubs of barbecue. We had a huge lunch all together, and then Mr. P taught me how to swim.
That day was so warm and sunny and happy. But I remember when J.P. came home, something changed. There was tension between him and his dad that you could feel all over the room. It made me sad. I loved both of those guys so much, and they were so much alike. But for some reason they didn’t like each other.
Mrs. P. (in the background), Mr. P., Michael, and David
JOHN PRENDERGAST
As that first summer with the boys was ending, I stumbled into a really good job for a guy interested in urban affairs. Bill Gray was an African-American Baptist preacher from Philadelphia who’d been elected to Congress in 1978. He kept a storefront office at Fifty-Second and Market, a very busy corner in what was at that time a seedy part of West Philadelphia, and for some reason he hired me—the only white guy in the office—to do all-round constituent service while I went to school at Temple University at night.
The office could easily have been the setting for an HBO series, so rich was the cast of characters. Al Smith was a young, smooth, earnest, and ambitious political operative who always wore a perfectly tailored suit and drove a black Corvette; I always felt as though I was in an episode of Miami Vice when he and I would go riding around West Philly. Jimmy Simpson was the leader of a local veterans’ group, and his empire was built on a hot dog cart in Atlantic City. It seemed Atlantic City only gave hot dog cart licenses to veterans, and while Jimmy had gotten one, he wasn’t about to sully his hands actually running it. He had “people” who operated it for him so he could hold court all day at Fifty-Second and Market. Jimmy Smith was a hard-core union organizer with an air for the theatrical who often wore a gleaming white suit; when he walked in, all eyes had to be on him. Frances Walker was the den mother—sturdy, loud, totally committed, and radiant in her mid-forties—she knew everybody’s name, everybody’s story, everybody’s needs. The place was more like a barbershop than a political office. People walked in and out all day, sat around, ate Philly cheese steaks out of waxed-paper wrappings, and talked politics. I spent my day helping constituents—some of the most disadvantaged residents of Philadelphia—cope with everything from Social Security to the Veterans’ Administration to getting their water turned back on. “Let Johnny P. handle them old ladies!” Frances would holler. “They love him!”
The job only paid a thousand dollars a month, but I loved it. I was still in my antimaterialism phase, and the apartment I’d moved into was a $200-a-month rat hole in a dilapidated working-class Italian neighborhood in South Philly. The old ladies sat in front of their houses all day in folding chairs, like sentinels. On the first floor of my house lived a bunch of World War II vets who did nothing all day but drink up their benefits and tell extraordinary war stories extolling their exploits on the battlefield. I lived on the second floor, and on the third was a guy living under a false name because he was running from his child-support payments. My mother was horrified to have her son living in such a place, and she begged me to come home and live with them. I wasn’t going to have any part of that, of course. Not so far away from the action, and not with my dad around. Besides, the old Italian ladies loved me—waved and shouted to me every day, made me taste their cooking, and treated me like a long-lost son.
Instead of driving up I-95 every weekend, now I was driving down from Philly to D.C. to see Michael and James. I wouldn’t stay in D.C. though; I’d pick up the boys and drive the two or three hours straight back, leave them with my parents, and go off to install shrubbery and mindlessly dig fence post holes—my specialty—with the Russians.
Some summers, my beloved godmother and social justice advocate Aunt Mary arranged for the extended Prendergast family to commandeer what must have been the cheapest rental house on the Jersey shore in a town called Stone Harbor—a big, drafty, pile of splinters that I’d loved since I was a kid. It seemed perfectly natural to bring Michael and James and sometimes even Sabrina to that gathering too, and my aunts and uncles loved having them—especially Uncle Bud and Aunt Jo. Bud was my father’s youngest brother, and he had all the Irish storyteller, and all the jokester, that my father had, but little of the dark side that I could see. For a long time I thought it was because he and Jo never had any children.
It wasn’t until I was older that Uncle Bud let on what was really up with my father. He took me aside one night down at that shore house, after everyone else had gone to bed, and by candlelight at the kitchen table, he let me in on a family secret. Uncle Bud said that his and my dad’s father had a huge personality and was a great storyteller, but he had been mercilessly hard on my dad and at times, had beaten him. I never knew my grandfather. He died the year I was born. But he was a hard-working Irishman of the old school, a steelworker who’d emigrated from Ireland to a rooming house in Youngstown, Ohio, where he and the other Irish mill workers slept in shifts in bunk bed–filled dormitories, and then on to Pittsburgh, where he’d apparently channeled a lifetime of hardship onto his oldest son. By Uncle Bud’s account, it was rough, and my dad took it for years.
It was no wonder my dad was a rage-aholic; it was what he’d seen as a child, and it’s in some ways remarkable that he was able—to some extent, at least—to limit the violence he wreaked on me to the psychological and emotional. At least now I could start to see a reason why my dad had been the way he was with me. It wasn’t an excuse or justification, but it was the beginning of a reason. And the reason had nothing to do with me—with whether I was good or bad. Or unlovable.
Uncle Bud was an open, loving, dynamic guy, and he took a particular liking to James. Something in James’ visible psychic wounds really moved that big, florid Irishman. I’d look around for James, and there he’d be, way down the beach digging a sand castle with Uncle Bud. At the big, noisy meals we shared, James would always be tucked up beside Uncle Bud’s bulk. I was always grateful to Uncle Bud and Aunt Jo; their special attention to him meant the world to James and to me.
Around this time I decided that since my interest was in the institutions that addressed poverty, I should develop another relationship with a kid like the one I had with Michael and James, but through a proper organization, like Big Brothers Big Sisters, in order to see how such organizations worked. Since Michael and James were in D.C., I figured I’d have the time to take on another kid where I was living in Philly. The man running the Big Brothers Big Sisters office in Philadelphia was named Steve. He was legally blind, very sweet, and caring, and he had a wry, ironic sense of humor. I liked him immediately. We talked for a while—he asked most of the questions—and finally, having heard about my relationship with Michael and James, his face took on a sly smile.
Steve told me he had one boy that was hard to place, named Khayree, who had cancer when he was six and almost died. He even got selected by the Make A Wish Foundation, and they sent him on a last-wish trip to Disney World. He survived, though he lost a leg to the cancer. Apparently no one wanted to be his big brother.
Steve made a phone call, and after a while the door opened. In came an eight-year-old kid. He was wiry and tall for his age, and he was hobbling on a prosthetic leg that seemed as if it had come from Kmart. He didn’t have any of Michael’s sparkle. Even James, with his instant darkness, was a ray of sunshine compared to this kid. I tried everything with him
that I had tried with Michael and James, all the questions—“What’s your favorite sport?” “Who’s your favorite player?” “What’s your favorite movie?” He just looked at me and gave me one-syllable answers. Anybody else probably would have run the other way, but something about this Khayree lit up all my protective tendencies.
He ain’t heavy, Father, …
I began wrapping Khayree into my schedule. He had a brother, Nasir, who also needed a big brother, so he usually came along when Khayree and I went fishing or out to play. Khayree was a hard kid to reach—much harder than Michael or even James. Losing his leg had really taken it out of him, and he was awash in self-pity. He couldn’t say what his favorite sport was because, “I can’t play sports.” He wouldn’t say what games he liked because, “I can’t play no games with one leg.” He couldn’t even tell me his favorite flavor of ice cream. “Don’t matter,” he muttered, looking down at his prosthetic.
Despite his struggles with self-esteem, I had high hopes for Khayree. He was smart and handsome, and he would flash a radiant smile when he relaxed a bit. I fantasized that maybe he would be a politician or social crusader who could work with me on the issues I cared about when he got older. I would talk his ear off about the injustices of the system and how we might be able to fix them. I was so keen on infusing him with my passions that I didn’t try to find out what his were, hidden though they might be.
Khayree loved my dad. Again, at that age, who wouldn’t? My dad always had time for him, and he had a way of encouraging him without directly referencing his leg. Khayree found a safe space when he came home with me to my dad and mom’s house, and I hoped that could help contribute to the rebuilding of his self-esteem.
I didn’t try to keep my new relationship with Khayree a secret from Michael and James, but I didn’t bring them together much either. I wanted to keep my relationships with both unique and special, as well as—in retrospect—compartmentalized. I balanced Khayree and Nasir with Michael and James; in one town, one pair of brothers, in another town, the other pair of brothers. And it was all going pretty well for a minute there.
Then I got a call: Steve, the sweet-natured blind man in the Big Brothers Big Sisters office, had walked himself in front of a train. The caller didn’t know if it was an accident or not. It hit me hard, not least, probably, because I remembered the night in high school when I almost did the same thing. I wondered about Steve, if he had finally succumbed to being around so much human need, and whether I was placing myself at similar risk. Or was he tortured by his own private demons?
Front row, from left: Rasheed, Luke’s wife Kim, Morris, and Khayree. Back row, from left: Tauheed, Luke, Nasir (on Luke’s shoulders), and J.P.
That fall, when I was twenty-one, I hurt my ankle playing basketball and couldn’t walk for a couple of days. I was sitting in my old recliner chair in my crumbling apartment with my leg up on pillows, icing my ankle, watching a basketball game on television. The set was on a dresser across the room, and if it’d had a remote, I’d have changed the channel or turned the TV off when the game ended. But it was a crummy little black-and-white with a wire hanger for an antenna and no remote, and I couldn’t be bothered to roust myself and hop over to change it manually. So I was stuck watching whatever came on after the game. What filled the screen was a news report from Ethiopia, which was then in the midst of a deadly famine that would later trigger the Live Aid concerts and the song, “We Are the World.” I was trapped in my recliner chair, staring at the screen, and flabbergasted at what I was seeing—a lunar landscape full of stick-figure children with distended bellies, mothers trying to nurse bony infants, babies with flies on their eyes. It was unfairness on a scale I had never witnessed before.
A spark shot through my memory all the way back to my Spanish teacher, Ms. Kane, and those pamphlets she’d placed on my desk during detention. Remember the scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss has seen Devil’s Tower on the television and is inexplicably obsessed with getting there? That’s how the images of Ethiopia struck me. I could barely move, my ankle hurt so much, and I had so little money that I was living almost entirely on bowls of Honey Combs and Froot Loops. (Mmmm, Froot Loops.) But I knew I had to get to Africa and understand why this was happening and what we could possibly do about it. My guilt-driven, wanna-be-a-superhero complex kicked in with a roar. I would have hailed a taxi with my crutch to take me to the airport that night if I’d had the money for a ticket.
Now, as educated as I might have been, I was until then entirely focused on American poverty, and I knew nothing at all about Africa. I couldn’t have found Ethiopia on a map. I don’t remember if I knew for sure that Africa was a continent and not a country. All I knew was: I had to get there. I called the Ethiopian embassy to ask about visas, and I made the mistake of saying I worked for Congressman Bill Gray. Little did I know, he had sponsored a sanctions resolution against Ethiopia so a visa for one of his staff members was out of the question. The Ethiopian official said I was probably a spy anyway! I studied a map. The next country over from Ethiopia was Sudan, but I was told a U.S. citizen had recently been shot there and the State Department was restricting travel to Sudan for Americans. So I moved my finger across the map to the west and finally settled on Mali.
Mali? Mali had nothing to do with Ethiopia! If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have flown to Kenya, which was closer to the famine and English speaking. It’s a measure of my rather unbalanced and completely naive single-mindedness, though, that I fixated on getting to Mali, a French-speaking country whose hunger problems had very little in common with the war and famine in Ethiopia.
I borrowed some money from my parents and threw in what I’d saved, which was enough to buy a one-way ticket to Bamako, Mali’s capital. Everybody—from my family to my friends to the people in Congressman Gray’s office—thought I was completely off my rocker. Who goes all in to buy a one-way ticket to Bamako?
The next time I saw Michael and James, I told them I was going on a trip to Africa and might not see them for a while. “Africa!” Michael piped. “Lions and tigers?” Lions and tigers, I said. No need to burden him with images of starving babies. I wasn’t sure either of them had any idea what Africa was, or how far away. Even the idea of “a couple of months” didn’t seem to register with them. After all, they were only eight and six. We went about our day, tearing around the parks of D.C., and forgot all about our coming separation.
My departure for Bamako all happened in a fog; I really had no idea what I was doing or what I was in for. But I was full of confidence because the constant moving since early childhood, though leaving scars, had left me very adaptable, sharpening my social IQ in a Darwinian sort of way.
I changed planes in Paris, but it wasn’t for another six or seven hours that the full import of what I had done really struck me. The plane landed in Senegal to refuel in the middle of the night, and everybody got out to have a smoke right next to the plane. I stepped onto the rickety metal staircase to walk down to the tarmac, and the thrilling, mysterious reality of Africa hit me in the nose like a two-by-four. It was roaring hot, and the air was thick with an exotic miasma of dust, diesel, cookfire, and goat. A single, garish light on a pole lit the apron, and palm trees murmured out there in the blackness. Boyish soldiers with enormous guns stood around listlessly. My fellow passengers were drooping with exhaustion, but I felt ready to run a marathon.
As we filed back onto the plane a young, very dark-skinned man in his thirties walked up and introduced himself as Mohammed, working for the Ministry of Agriculture in Mali. “I was at Georgetown with you,” he said in a rich, delicately accented voice. “I remember you playing basketball at the field house.”
He asked me why I was going to Mali. What could I say? That I’d seen a TV report about the Ethiopian famine, and Mali was as close as I could get? That I had never seen human suffering on that scale and wanted to do something about it? That I was driven by a completely unrealistic, self-ag
grandizing mission to help save the world? These answers may have been true, but at that moment I wasn’t registering much beyond the simple fact that there were lots of people that needed to be helped, somehow. I don’t know exactly what I told him. But I remember his face, and the knowing smile that crossed it. I didn’t have to tell him anything, really; he could see I was a naïve, ignorant, well-meaning American kid—which is just about the most unpredictable species on the planet.
If Mohammed hadn’t been there to guide me through the Bamako airport, I might still be there. It was utter chaos, a riot of shouting people, soldiers, even livestock. We seemed to pass through half a dozen different formalities—men in ragged uniforms sitting at scarred wooden tables, each wanting a different combination of papers and something else besides. Mohammed argued with every one of them in French or Bambara—two languages it suddenly occurred to me I should have learned before I got on the plane. From his tone he seemed to be saying, “You’re not getting anything out of this one, boys; he’s with me.” Finally we emerged into the raging, smoky sunlight of a Malian morning. Mohammed steered me into a taxi seemingly held together by rust and chicken droppings, and we threaded our way though an updated chapter of the Bible. Robed men and veiled women, donkey carts, goats, listing stucco houses, motorcycles piled with entire families, trucks as old as me belching soot.… In my sleepless, mind-blown state, it all passed by the cracked passenger window in an apocalyptic, cinematic, joyous blur.
Unlikely Brothers Page 7