“Man, we could go to college for free,” I emphasized.
What did we have to lose by applying?
“Let’s do this,” I said in as persuasive a voice as I could muster.
Finally, they gave in.
We would apply to Seton Hall, go to college together, then go to medical school and stick with one another to the end.
We didn’t lock hands in some kind of empty, symbolic gesture. Nor did we think much further ahead, like what would happen if one of us got accepted and the others didn’t.
We just took one another at his word and headed back to class, without even a hint of how much our lives were about to change.
5
CAGED
Rameck
OUR HANGOUT WAS behind the Clinton School. Whenever I went looking for my boys in Plainfield, I knew right where to go. By the fall of 1989, I was sixteen years old and a junior at University High. But every chance I got, I hung out with my boys in Plainfield.
“Those boys ain’t nothing but trouble,” my aunt Nicole often warned me. “You gonna get in a world of trouble following behind them.”
Just four years apart, Nicole and I grew up as close as sister and brother. We played together at Ma’s house and argued all the time. She was super-protective of me. One time, an older boy was bullying me just outside our house when Nicole stuck her head out of the front door. He had me in a headlock, and she ran outside and beat him up. Sometimes, though, it made me mad when she tried to pull rank and boss me around, like trying to dictate who my friends were. What she didn’t know was that the trouble had already begun. There were ten of us: Cast, Marley, Dre, Jamar, Buddy, Eric, Bookie, Sean, Shawn, and I. And we had earned quite the rep for beating people up.
My friends lived just around the corner from Ma, and most of us met in the first grade when we attended the Clinton School, a neighborhood elementary school for the children in our area. By the time we’d reached the seventh grade, they were already drinking beer. I’d take a sip, but at first I couldn’t stand the taste of the stuff. We also began riding our bikes or taking the bus to neighboring towns and beating people up for no reason. Sometimes I couldn’t go along. Neither Ma nor my mom tolerated my coming home whenever I pleased, so I couldn’t make it if my boys were going to be out late. But I was with them one day when we planned to jump some boys who lived on another street.
My friends were having a beef with some guys from Arlington Avenue. My friends and I lived around Clinton Avenue, so it was a territorial thing. We planned to fight the other guys one day after school. I was going to University High School by then, but I skipped my classes and met my boys after school at Plainfield High.
“Rameck came through,” one of my boys said when he saw me.
I felt so good that they were happy to see me.
We searched around the school for the other guys and waited, but we didn’t see them. After a while, we left and headed toward the bus stop. When we got there, the Arlington Street boys were in their cars waiting for us. A bunch of older guys, maybe their big brothers, were with them. They jumped out and surprised us. Everybody squared off with one person, and the older guys stood back and watched. One guy came at me and threw a punch. I ducked. I swung at him and popped him. He dropped to the ground, jumped up, and ran. My boys and I hopped onto a bus. They jumped into their cars and started following us.
At the next stop, some of their guys tried to board the bus. We begged the bus driver not to let them inside, but he kept saying he couldn’t refuse a passenger. One of my friends rushed to the front to explain. When the driver opened the doors, a guy standing outside leaned into the bus and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill to pay for his fifteen or so buddies to board. But when the driver explained that he didn’t have any change, the guy snatched my friend and tried to drag him off the bus. My friend grabbed onto a pole. That gave my boys and me enough time to run to the front, grab his legs, and pull him back. The driver took off.
We stayed on the bus until the end of the line. The other guys trailed in their cars. We begged the driver to keep going. He drove a couple more blocks. We had to try to make it to my friend’s house just blocks away. It was do or die, so we took off running. About the same time, my friend’s father heard a series of loud pops and rushed outside. He was staring at the bullet holes in his front porch when we made it there, out of breath.
Shawn and Marley had done time in juvenile detention. When they were thirteen, they beat up a white man and broke his nose. They served three years apiece for that, but when they got out, they went back to doing the same thing. A couple of my friends also were selling drugs.
Despite her problems, or perhaps because of them, my mother could see right through my friends. They were headed toward jail or death, she told me. She figured if she didn’t intervene, I was headed that way, too. That’s when she arranged for me to attend University High School. I told myself that she could make me go to high school in Newark, but she couldn’t choose my friends. I was loyal. That was the code of the streets. These are your boys. You stick by them, and if necessary, you fight for them.
I knew my friends weren’t innately bad or stupid. Sean and I were enrolled in the same advanced classes in junior high school. When we were little boys playing together in elementary school, we all had career dreams: fireman, police officer, basketball player, teacher. But the older we got, the less those dreams seemed real to us. The world around us seemed crazy: crack on every street corner, muggings, shootings.
In my friends, I saw myself: boys trying to become men with few good examples to follow. My father was a heroin addict who was in and out of jail. I didn’t have anybody to emulate. I had uncles, but they were busy doing their own things. My uncle Rahman had moved out of Ma’s house. Uncle Richard, who also had joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Rasheed, was developing a business that kept him busy. And Uncle Sheldon was away at college in Louisiana. They were all good guys, and I saw them regularly, but not as much as I saw my friends. I had no identity of my own, no sense of the kind of person I was or wanted to be. I was always looking for men to be like. I’d meet somebody who seemed pretty cool and tell myself I should try to be like him. When that wouldn’t work out, I’d find somebody else. I just knew I wanted to be cool. My friends seemed cool, and for the moment, I was trying hard to be like them.
On a cold, clear Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving in 1989, I was in Plainfield for the holiday break and, as usual, I was hanging out with six of my boys behind the school. We were just chilling, sitting on the steps at the back entrance of the school, talking and sharing forty-ounce bottles of Olde English malt liquor. A couple of the guys were smoking cigarettes.
A man we recognized as a crackhead approached our group and started begging one of my friends for some crack. The man, who appeared to be in his thirties, had once been a lifeguard at the community pool. His clothes were dirty, his hair matted and unkempt, his eyes glassy, red, and tired.
“I’ll sell it to you, but you can’t smoke it back here,” my friend told him.
Our hangout was strictly a cool spot, not a place for selling or using drugs. That’s where we drew the line. As strange as it may seem, we had our unwritten codes of honor. Kids sometimes wandered back there to play basketball on the concrete court, and we didn’t want them exposed to that stuff. We figured we were protecting them, never mind that we were smoking, drinking, and throwing our own lives away.
My friend and the crackhead made a quick exchange, and the guy walked away.
A few minutes later, my friend looked up and saw the orange-and-blue glare of a crack pipe blazing from behind a big green Dumpster across the schoolyard.
“I told him not to do that shit back here,” my friend said. “I ought to go beat his ass.”
We set down our bottles on the steps and walked over to the Dumpster.
“What did I tell you? I told you not to be smoking back here,” my friend yelled, chastising the man as tho
ugh he were a child.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the man responded.
“Leave, now!”
“Hold on, I’m almost finished.”
His lips were still wrapped around the crack pipe, and his eyes were closed when my friend punched him. The man dropped to his knees.
As liquor mixed with adrenaline and flowed through our bloodstreams, our judgment quickly warped. The atmosphere turned into a one-sided boxing match.
“Aw, man, you dropped him,” somebody in the group shouted, laughing hysterically.
“You knocked him out,” yelled another.
The crackhead stumbled back to his feet. Somebody else took a shot. The man hit the ground again. His pipe shattered into tiny pieces. He couldn’t get up. This time, he moaned, rolled over, and began writhing in pain. By now, we were out of control, whooping it up, jumping from our ringside seats into the ring. Somebody else helped the man up, not out of mercy, but so all of us could participate in kicking his crack-smoking ass. I punched and kicked, too, thinking to myself he was probably somebody’s father, in the back of an elementary school smoking crack when he should have been at home.
For twenty minutes, we punched and kicked him until he was red, black, and blue all over.
Suddenly, a daring thought popped into my head. I had bought a switchblade from my uncle Rasheed’s small swap shop, and it happened to be in my coat pocket. I knew I would really impress my boys if I pulled it out now.
I whipped out my knife. For a couple of seconds I enjoyed the look of surprise and admiration in their eyes, the that-nigga-is-crazy look that can play on the ego of a confused teenaged boy and make him more dangerous than even he knew was possible.
“Un-huh, look what I got,” I said, with a cold face, a puffed-out chest, an extended right arm, and the knife in a tight fist.
I felt a rush of fear. Lord knows I didn’t want to stab this man. But I had pulled out the knife, and now my friends were looking at me, like, “What you gonna do?” If I did nothing, I would look like a punk.
I jabbed the crackhead lightly in the thigh right under his butt and quickly closed the blade, hoping I hadn’t hurt him. There were more cheers. I tried to appear cool as I slipped the knife back in an inside coat pocket, but I was scared to death. Exhausted, we walked away and headed to the corner store.
Three of my friends left for the evening. The rest of us went back to the school to finish our beer. We walked along the side of the building to get back to our spot. When we reached the open court, we noticed a police car. Our first impulse was to run, but in a split second we decided to play it cool.
“Hey, come over here,” one of the officers yelled to us, heading our way.
We stopped.
“We got a report that three guys who fit your description beat up this other guy pretty good,” the officer said. “Were you back here?”
We figured he was fishing because there had been six of us.
“No, it wasn’t us,” we protested.
The officer started patting us down.
“He said one of you was wearing a black trench coat and had a knife,” the officer continued.
My heart was sprinting, and my knees felt weak. I was wearing a black trench coat. The officer patted me down quickly. He missed the knife. I sighed deeply. The officer was about to let us go. Just then, his partner rushed over. Looking me dead in the eyes, he said to the other officer, “Did you search this one?”
“He searched me already,” I said angrily. My heart picked up the pace again.
He ignored me and patted my pockets more carefully.
“I’d better not find a knife,” the officer threatened. “If I find a knife, I’m gonna hurt you.”
The officer reached into my inside pocket, pulled out some tissue and threw it to the ground. Next, he pulled out the knife.
“I told you not to lie to me,” he said.
With a hand on each end of the wool scarf I had around my neck, he began to choke me. He threw me against the police car and kneed me in the stomach.
Two other police cars and an ambulance carrying the injured man pulled up behind the school. One of the officers walked up to the ambulance and opened the door. The crackhead identified us.
The officers handcuffed us, pushed us into the car, and drove us to the precinct station. On the way, they kept telling us the man was in critical condition and might not make it. If they were trying to scare us, it worked. I had never been so afraid. I kept thinking, “Oh my God, what if he dies?”
At the precinct, we were charged with attempted murder. Attempted murder! We really hadn’t been trying to kill the man. We just never thought about the consequences. I called my mother, but she was trying to teach me a lesson and didn’t come to my rescue right away. In the meantime, two other officers transported us to a juvenile-detention center in Elizabeth. The officer driving the car joked with me about the knife.
“Man, that was a nice knife,” he said. “I wish I’d caught you. I would’ve taken your knife and sent you about your business. Now, I gotta use this as evidence. That’s a damn shame.”
We had beaten up a crackhead. He didn’t care.
My mother finally made it to the station, but I was already gone. She called a lawyer, but there was nothing he could do. It was a holiday weekend, and no judges were available. I had to stay locked up at least until Monday, four days away.
A security guard led me to my cell, a bare room hardly big enough for the two twin-sized cots that were side by side. A toilet sat on the concrete floor at the foot of the beds. Both beds were taken.
“Grab the floor,” the security guard said, and threw me a blanket.
On Thanksgiving morning, I awakened early.
“Whew, I had this bad dream I got locked up,” I mumbled, stretching and yawning.
I looked from one side of the room to the other. My Puerto Rican cellmates were still sleeping. I wasn’t in my room at Ma’s house. My nightmare was real.
Soon, the guards came to wake everybody else. They made us stand in line and escorted us to the cafeteria to eat horrible food. For one or two hours, we were allowed to watch television in a large room and play cards or go outside to a concrete courtyard to play basketball. Then it was back to the cell. My roommates spoke Spanish to one another, which made me uneasy. I figured they were plotting against me.
I spent most of my recreation time playing spades. I was good at spades, so one of the biggest guys in jail always chose me as his partner. The other guys figured we were friends and didn’t mess with me. I was shocked at some of the stuff that went on there.
Late one night, I was lying on the floor unable to sleep when I heard a guy screaming in an adjacent cell. I lifted myself up but couldn’t see past the cinderblock wall. I heard what sounded like underwear snapping. Terror swept through me like a cold chill. The guy next door was being raped.
Every afternoon, guys gathered around the tiny windows in their cells and talked to the girls headed home from school. The girls assumed they would never see the guys again and talked real nasty to them. As I looked out the window and saw kids my age walking from school, going to McDonald’s, laughing, and enjoying themselves, I suddenly felt sad. I wasn’t free. I was locked in this nasty, disgusting place. I felt caged, like an animal. I had to eat when guards told me to eat, play when they told me to play, and use the toilet with everybody watching.
So many of the guys seemed resigned to this kind of life, as if it were their fate. I didn’t get this sense from what they said. It was their mannerisms and the look in their eyes, a kind of cocky nonchalance that said that nothing much really mattered. To me, the experience was barbaric. “Never again,” I told myself. I didn’t want to spend my life this way.
The Monday after my arrest, I was released and placed on house arrest. The only place I could go was school. My probation officer visited regularly to make sure I was home. I saw Sam and George at school and made excuses for why we couldn’t ha
ng out. For a long time, I was too embarrassed to tell them the truth.
But my relationship with my boys in Plainfield was about to take a surprising turn. While we were all on house arrest, they began pressuring me to confess that I was the one who stabbed the crackhead. They were facing big time because of their previous records, and they were convinced that the stabbing—not the beating—had resulted in the attempted-murder charge. If I confessed to the stabbing, they said, they could get off on a lesser charge.
What about our loyalty to one another? I wondered. I wasn’t trying to get my friends into serious trouble, but my lawyer advised me to keep my mouth shut. “Just wait,” he said, “anything could happen.” The more I tried to explain to my friends why I hadn’t confessed, the more impatient they became.
“I’m not going to jail for you,” each of them warned.
In January, we attended a preliminary hearing before a judge. A couple of teachers and family members had written letters on my behalf, asking for mercy. The crackhead didn’t show up. The judge set a new date. That date came, and the injured man missed that one, too. A third date was set. When he didn’t show up for that one either, the judge threw out the charges. It was a highly unusual move on a charge as serious as attempted murder. Prosecutors still could have revived the case, but my lawyer pleaded with them to give me a break and not to pursue the matter. They didn’t, and I got another chance.
I thanked God.
I felt as if I had been racing blindfolded to the edge of a cliff, just about to drop when the hand of God snatched me back to safety.
It wouldn’t be the last time.
When I returned to University High after Thanksgiving break, I separated myself from my boys in Plainfield. I was ready to move on. I began spending more time with Sam and George.
6
A BIG BREAK
Sam
THE MAN’S FACE looked familiar as he walked quickly toward my buddy Frank and me in the drizzling rain late one fall night in 1989. We were headed up Ludlow Street to the neighboring town of Elizabeth, a thirty-minute walk from the Dayton Street Projects.
The Pact Page 7