This was one of many times when we were just walking the streets for fun. There wasn’t much else to do. Our only attraction had been the Twin City Skating Rink, located on the border of Newark and Elizabeth. Dayton Street had been known for its skating rink, and what happened around the rink had helped earn the area its reputation. Some of the neighborhood thugs would hang out at the rink and plot against the teenagers from other neighborhoods who would come on Friday and Saturday nights to skate. They regularly attacked them on their way home and robbed them of their jewelry, money, and clothing. There were many nights when we saw a terrified teenager running through the adjacent park, trying to catch the Number 24 bus and escape the grip of the Dayton Street boys. Eventually, a few murders in the vicinity of the rink shut it down. That’s how Newark was. You stayed on your side of town and all was fine.
Frank and I walked past Twin City on our way to Elizabeth. By then, it had been turned into a supermarket. Dried blood was still on the pavement.
The man with the familiar face caught up to us.
“Man, let me get two dollars,” he said to Frank.
“I don’t got it, man,” Frank answered.
“Man, I know you got two dollars,” he persisted. “Don’t play with me.”
“I don’t got it,” Frank repeated a bit louder.
The guy pulled open his oversized black goose-down jacket, lifted up his shirt, and pulled out a gun. He must have been desperate, because nobody pulled a gun on Frank. Frank had a rep around Dayton Street, and he hadn’t gotten it by being a nice guy.
“What if I shoot you right now,” the man threatened, his glassy eyes intense as he pointed the gun at Frank. “Would you give me two dollars then?”
“I don’t got it, man,” Frank said, still calm.
The guy turned to me, still pointing his gun at Frank.
“Marshall, I know you got it.”
“I don’t have it, man,” I responded quickly. “I don’t have it.”
By now, he was frustrated and angry.
“Frank, I could shoot you right now,” he said between clenched teeth.
Either Frank believed the guy didn’t have the heart to shoot him, or he didn’t care. With the man still pointing the gun at him, Frank turned his back and walked away. I followed on shaky legs and waited for bullets to slice through my back.
That was one of several times I came close to being a casualty of the madness all around me. I was sixteen, and my life was careening off-course with no direction. It had happened so quickly.
In my early teen years, kung fu lessons with Reggie had kept me away from the danger and temptations just beyond my door. I was working at McDonald’s at the age of fifteen. Eager to get a job and help out at home, I’d altered my birth date by a year on the application to meet the minimum-age requirement. I wanted to do the right thing, but it seemed that everywhere I turned, someone or something was always pulling me in the opposite direction. By my junior year, I was drinking and hanging out late at night with older neighborhood boys eager to guide me into trouble.
It didn’t take long for one of them to make a proposition I found it too difficult to turn down.
“Hey, Marshall, I got a way for you to make some money,” he said.
He promised to split the profits of his crack sales with me if I invested money on the front end to help buy the drugs. The butterflies in my stomach told me this was wrong, but I told myself I needed the money. If I could take care of myself, Moms wouldn’t have to worry about me. And why shouldn’t I get a little piece of the action? Everybody around me was doing drugs on some level. The business certainly wouldn’t dry up if I decided not to participate.
I didn’t hustle on the streets, but I made a pickup once and helped bottle the tiny pellets into $10 vials. The first time I went on a pickup with my so-called business partner, we took the train to Harlem. When we walked up to the brownstone where we were to get the drugs, a guy was standing in the door wearing a gun in a holster. He patted us down. We walked into one room and turned over the money, then walked into another and picked up the drugs. It looked like the scene from a movie, with all the drugs piled on the table and guys standing around with guns, ready to shoot. We walked away with a plastic sack full of crack cocaine. As we stepped out of the house, I looked up and noticed the misty rain glistening in the street light. The night didn’t even seem real.
“What in the hell did I get myself into?” I asked myself quietly.
I never went back. I made some quick cash, lots more than I was making at McDonald’s, but no matter how I tried to justify it, I didn’t feel good about what I was doing. After about a month, I told my friend that the benefits of the partnership just weren’t worth the risks, and I eased my way out.
On January 19, 1990, the night of my seventeenth birthday, some of the fellows picked me up for drinks. We went to the Seth Boyden Projects, a set of low-rise projects separated from the Dayton Street development by an elementary school, to see a guy named Hock. He had just finished hustling when he got into the car with us. While sitting there in the parking lot, the other guys lit up some weed and started smoking.
“Yo, man, it’s your birthday,” Hock said. “I wanna wish you a happy birthday.”
He handed my friend a package for me. It appeared to be cocaine.
“That’s cool. Word up, word up,” I responded.
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. One of the guys came up with an idea: we could make what was called a woolly, a drug-enhanced cigarette made by taking the tobacco out of a regular cigarette and mixing it with cocaine. One of my friends took two puffs and zonked out. His head bounced against the back of the car seat.
“Yo, man, it’s your birthday,” my other friend said. “We love you, man. You go.”
Something on the inside said, “Don’t do it.” This was one of those times when I paid attention.
“Naw, man, that ain’t me,” I said.
“What, man? You think you better than that?” my friend said, offended.
“Naw, dog, I’m just too faded right now,” I said, easing my way out of trouble again. “Plus I gotta go to work tomorrow.”
They backed off. But I still had a difficult time saying no to my friends, even when I knew they were wrong. I wasn’t afraid of them; I was afraid of what they would think of me. I didn’t want to appear weak or afraid. That could have made me a constant target in my neighborhood. It was easier to just go along. And I admit, sometimes the adrenaline rush of getting away with something wrong felt good. I lived for the moment, too afraid to imagine a future that could be cut short any day.
I was kicking it on the corner with four of my boys one day in the summer between my junior and senior years when one of them came up with a moneymaking scheme: we could rob drug dealers. At seventeen, I was one of the younger ones. Another guy in the group was fifteen, and the other two were in their twenties. The suggestion took hold quickly as my friends added their individual touches. We would all dress in black. We would ride around Newark and neighboring cities in which there were hot drug markets, target young, inexperienced dealers, jump out on them with a gun, take their money, and split it four ways.
At first it seemed like a fantasy. But the more we talked, the more real it became. We thought we were justified since we were just targeting drug dealers.
The butterflies in my stomach started acting up again, but I played it cool and nodded in agreement.
The first couple of times, the operation went smoothly. I drove and sat in the car while they did their thing. I got my cut, and it didn’t seem like a big deal.
But one evening as I was walking home from a Kentucky Fried Chicken after an exhausting game of basketball, one of the guys approached me.
“Man, why don’t you drive out tonight?” he suggested.
I had bought a car during the school year a few months earlier, and the guys were ready to score again.
“Aw, man, I don’t feel like it,” I said, the butterflies i
n my stomach fluttering like crazy.
“Come on, Marshall,” my friend pleaded.
I gave in. The two of us walked back to my house to get my car, picked up the other two guys, and headed out. We rode around for a while until we spotted about ten to twelve teenagers hanging out on a hot drug corner in Montclair. We figured they were dealers.
“Let’s get them right there,” one of the guys said from the back seat.
I stopped the car and my friends jumped out on the crowd. This time, I joined them. My friend pulled out his gun and shouted, “Empty your pockets!”
The other three of us began patting down pockets, pulling out wads of cash. All of a sudden, another car, a brown, four-door Citation, rolled up. The driver and front-seat passenger were young guys, probably in their twenties. The four of us didn’t recognize them. The guys we were robbing didn’t react like they knew them, either.
“What in the hell is going on?” I whispered.
I was close enough to peer into the car, and my eyes quickly fell upon what appeared to be a police radio mounted to the floor.
I began backing away.
“21 Jump! 21 Jump!” I shouted, trying to alert my friends that a police officer was on the scene. (At the time, 21 Jump Street, a television series featuring young undercover cops, was popular.)
I was about twenty feet away when police cars began whizzing toward the scene from every direction. I kept walking, cool at first, as though I was just a passerby. But as I rounded the corner out of sight, I took off running. When I was far enough away, I stopped and rested my hands on my knees to catch my breath. Sweat rolled, like tears, from every corner of my face. My stomach did somersaults. I waited there a few minutes and calmed myself down, then doubled back to the scene to pick up my car. It was gone. My friends were gone. The police and the crowd of dealers were gone.
I hailed a taxi to take me home. But I slept little that night, worrying about what would happen next.
I figured my car had been towed, and I called the town’s towing company the next morning. An employee told me that my car was on hold and that I needed to call the Montclair Police Department. My throat was so dry I could hardly swallow as I punched in the numbers to the police department. An officer told me to come to the precinct house to answer some questions. All three of my friends had been arrested.
I confided in my sister Fellease, who drove me to the police station. She assured me that the police would release me in her custody since I was a juvenile. And I was sure that my friends, most of whom had already spent time in juvenile detention, would see my arrest as a medal of badness, something to be respected.
“Are you Marshall?” one of the officers asked as I entered.
I thought it strange that he knew my middle name, which was used only by my family and friends. The officer escorted me to a small, spare room with a desk and two chairs. He sat on one side of the desk, and I sat on the other. He clicked on a tape recorder.
“Someone said you were involved in an incident last night in Montclair,” the officer said.
“What incident was that?” I asked, trying to appear clueless.
The officer described the robbery. I could have lied and told him that my friends had put a gun to my head and made me drive. Or, I could have said they had stolen my car. But I would have to live with the results of the lie. I came clean. He arrested me, charged me with armed robbery, and sent me to a juvenile-detention center in Newark. A judge refused to release me in my sister’s custody because a gun had been involved.
The detention center was divided into four units based on the type of crime committed. I landed in Unit 1, where juveniles arrested for violent crimes were assigned.
I was led to a small room with a metal cot screwed to the middle of the floor and no outside windows. I was handed a sheet to use as a cover. I felt ashamed. Day and night I sat there thinking, “How could I disappoint Moms like this? All she asked of me was to get an education. How could I be dumb enough to participate in a robbery? How could I end up here? I’m a better person than this. Aren’t I?”
I was seventeen. What would happen to me now?
Every day, I sat on my cot and thought: If given another chance, how could I change my life? I wondered what George and Rameck were doing with their summer. I had no idea Rameck had already experienced what I was going through.
Even behind bars, it was hard to stay out of trouble. Brothers were always picking fights. I was outside playing basketball one day and walked over to a table to get something to drink. As I reached for a paper cup and the water pitcher, one of the tough guys snatched the pitcher.
“That’s mine,” he said, staring me down, clearly trying to mark his territory.
“This is everybody’s water,” I retorted. “What you mean, it’s yours?”
One of his partners quickly piped in: “Naw, man, that’s Marshall, he’s cool.”
A potential blowup had been deflated. I didn’t want to get into a fight and make my troubles worse.
The word on the street was that prosecutors were considering trying me as an adult, which could result in a jail sentence of three to ten years. The thought of spending ten years in jail petrified me. My parents had been visiting every other day, and they hired an attorney. Within a few weeks, he worked out a plea bargain. I would serve 365 days in juvenile detention in exchange for a guilty plea.
On the day I was scheduled to go to court to accept the plea agreement, my attorney rushed back to my holding cell with another offer: a two-year suspended sentence and two years of probation for my guilty plea. I was reluctant to accept it until my lawyer explained that I wouldn’t have to serve the suspended sentence as long as I stayed out of trouble and abided by the terms of my probation. Since I was a juvenile, the crime would not appear on my permanent record.
I’ll never forget that court hearing. I had to face a judge, plead guilty, and accept the sentence agreed to in the plea bargain. My lawyer had not had a chance to explain the new agreement to my family, who were waiting in the audience. Moms was sitting behind me in the front row, separated from me by a wooden partition. When the judge announced my sentence, she mistakenly thought he was sentencing me to serve two years in jail.
“Your Honor, just take me,” she cried out. “He’s a young boy. He didn’t know what he was doing. Please, take me!”
I was disgusted with myself. But I had just gotten the biggest break of my life. I told myself I would never end up behind bars again. Somehow, I would change my life.
I walked away from court that day after spending four weeks in juvenile detention.
Summer was ending, and I was about to enter my senior year. I had never been so determined to succeed. There’d been times when I hadn’t taken the pact I made with George and Rameck seriously, but I certainly did now. I could have gone to prison for ten years. Suddenly, spending eight years in college didn’t seem like a bad idea.
I remembered that a couple of times George had mentioned wanting to become a dentist. It amazed me that he could dream so big. I had thought about pursuing a career as a big-time business tycoon, but that dream had faded as I grew older. It seemed easier to me to give up my ambitions than to have to face the disappointment of not fulfilling them. I often asked George how he managed to stay focused on his dream.
“I just believe it can happen,” he would say to me.
I used to wonder what George had in his life that I didn’t. I realized that he believed in himself and believed something mystical would happen for him. Many times it did. For one reason or another, George had luck that way. Things appeared to work in his favor. I felt it was God’s way of rewarding him for remaining so focused. I always admired his patient virtue and never-say-die attitude.
I didn’t tell Rameck and George about my arrest—at least not right away. I wasn’t sure what they would think of me if they knew. Instead, I shifted my focus to getting into college.
I wanted to share the news about my college plans with my
boys from the neighborhood. One of the older guys who had participated in the armed robbery was out of jail, awaiting his trial. We were hanging out on the stoop near the basketball court at Dayton Street Elementary with two other guys when I brought up the subject.
“Man, I’m thinking about going on to college,” I said.
They burst out laughing.
“What? College? Man, that ain’t gon’ never happen,” my friend said.
I sat quietly and took their taunts. I didn’t blame them for being unable to visualize my going to college. I could hardly see it myself. I just knew that I wanted more out of my life, even if I couldn’t quite define what more I wanted. I knew, too, that I had to let these guys go. I would never be able to rise with them tugging at my heels.
That was the last day I hung with them.
Eventually, the three others involved all got jail time. They had previous records, and each of the cases was handled separately. The fifteen-year-old, the youngest of the four of us, was sentenced to three years for the crime. One of the older guys, the one who had pulled the gun, got seven years; the other one, five.
Years later, I would encounter my old friends again. And I would be jolted by the reality of what my life could have become.
7
HOPE
George
AND THEN BEFORE WE KNEW IT, we were seniors.
“How you coming along with that application, man?” I asked Sam and Rameck almost daily once the school year began. I wanted to make sure they kept up their end of the deal.
By January, most of our classmates were either still working on their college applications or waiting for a response. A few of the early birds had already received acceptance letters.
Rameck still planned to apply to Howard University, and despite his promise Sam couldn’t decide whether he wanted to spend eight years in medical school or pursue a degree in business. I halfheartedly applied to two other colleges, but my focus was on the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus Program at Seton Hall. As the deadline drew near, our competitiveness helped us rush the process along. When one of us finished part of the application and bragged about it, the other two hurried to complete theirs.
The Pact Page 8