When I found myself in a financial jam, I usually waited until the last minute to call my mom. I would try everything else I could think of before turning to her, because I knew she would dip into her retirement savings for me. That is exactly what happened at the end of my senior year of dental school, when it was time to take my state licensing exam. The school passed out literature explaining the logistical details of the exam, but I was so busy preparing for graduation that I forgot to read it until a few days before the test. When my eyes fell on the line about fees of nearly $1,000, I panicked. There was no way I would be able to come up with that amount of money in such a short time. I was too scared to call my mother that night. I lay awake practically all night wondering how I could get the money on my own. Two days before the money was due, I was near tears when I called my mother and asked for her help. She borrowed the money from her 401(k), the fund she had established to secure her future.
Other times, she called on her eight brothers and sisters, who chipped in to help. My mother’s friend Deborah and her husband James, a lawyer, also gave me a few hundred dollars a couple of times a year to help buy my books. Deborah had helped put James through law school, so they understood my struggle.
About four months after my mother moved to her new house in Piscataway, I had to call on her for help. Maintaining our old apartment on my own without a job proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. She told me that I could move in with her and my stepdad in their new home. I packed all of my things, moved to Piscataway, and commuted to school in bumper-to-bumper traffic that stretched a drive that usually took just forty-five minutes into an hour and a half. I couldn’t stand it. After just four days, I packed up again and headed back to my apartment in Newark with a new determination to do a better job of budgeting. Fortunately, I had not notified the board or called the utility company about my move, so everything was just as I had left it.
Before I even unpacked, Blonnie Watson called and asked if I wouldn’t mind relocating to a one-bedroom apartment so that a new family moving into the complex could have the two-bedroom unit. I agreed and moved two doors down.
I had no idea that living in the old neighborhood again would be such a distraction.
There had been something invigorating and quietly inspiring about the environment at Seton Hall, where I was surrounded daily by thousands of other young men and women all hustling to achieve their dreams. Everywhere you looked, students were huddled in study groups or curled alone on lounge chairs or under trees with their books.
If there was an opposite of that, my neighborhood was it. Sometimes it felt surreal, walking past the drunks, dealers, and addicts on my way home from dental school with a pile of books. I’d wave and greet them with a “Hey, how y’all doing?” and head on up to my apartment. When I tried to study in my room, I’d hear pit-bull fights outside my window or people yelling back and forth across the street. This went on every day, all day.
When I went out, I had to watch my back. The security I felt at Seton Hall had desensitized me to my old environment, causing me to relax too much during my four years in college. One time, the temporary lapse of street smarts could have cost me my life.
One afternoon during my sophomore year at Seton Hall, I drove back to Newark to visit a friend. As I got out of my car, a guy walked up and offered to sell me some brand-new speakers really cheap. I had just bought my car, and I was, like, man, I could use a new sound system.
He asked me to drive him to pick up the speakers. I drove a few blocks, and he showed me where to stop. He got out of the car and began walking toward a more secluded area.
Like a fool, I followed him. All of a sudden, he turned around quickly and pulled out a gun.
“You know what it is,” he said.
I gave him $45. He ran away.
I was mad at myself for ignoring the rules of the streets that had kept me alive. But I was madder at the hustler who had just run away with my $45. I hopped in my car and drove to my cousin Reggie’s house, not too far away. He was well respected in the streets, and he and my brother were pretty tight. I told Reggie what happened. He was angry. I didn’t know it then, but he had told my brother that he would never let anybody mess with me.
“George don’t ever mess with nobody,” he had told my brother.
He walked into his bedroom, opened the closet, and put something into his jacket. I couldn’t see what it was.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We got in my car and retraced my steps.
“You see him?” my cousin kept asking me, looking for the guy who had just robbed me. “You see him?”
We drove around for fifteen minutes, and I didn’t see the guy. But I made a right turn, and there he was. We locked eyes for a second.
“You see him?” my cousin asked again.
“Naw, man,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
Many of the friends who had been like little brothers to me had never even left the neighborhood. They were doing nothing with their lives, or rather, nothing they felt free to talk about. But I was still cool with them. They rang my bell all times of the day and night. I kept an open-door policy because I preferred that they drank a few beers and played video games inside my apartment than that they found trouble in the streets. Sometimes, I drank a beer or two with them. I had started drinking socially in college.
Many of my friends were as deep into the streets as I was into school, but I didn’t judge them. When we saw each other, the ten-year-olds we once were came out. They didn’t see me as a potential victim of theirs or as a person studying to become a doctor. And I didn’t see them as a potential threat. We saw each other as the kids who used to play football together in the parking lot. So they didn’t mind leaving their guns behind before walking into my place.
My friends respected me enough not to do certain things in my apartment or in my presence. One time, I overheard one of the guys say to another, “Make sure you don’t tell George.”
I confronted him.
“Man, you need to leave those streets alone,” I said. “If you’re even thinking about doing something crazy, you’re not plotting it in here.”
My apartment was often so full of noisy neighborhood guys that it felt like a boys’ club. I learned to tune them out while I was in my bedroom studying. They knew that when I closed my bedroom door, I was studying for a test, and they respected that. They at least kept the noise down to a level that I could block out. It was sort of like living next to a train station. After a while, the noise just blends into the background, and you learn to function in spite of it.
Unfortunately, my neighbors didn’t quite see things that way. I had to appear before the board at least three times to respond to neighbors’ complaints about too much noise and traffic in my apartment. I always felt bad about that because I knew that Ms. Watson had vouched for me. One time, her daughter confronted me.
“My mom stuck her neck out for you,” she said angrily before giving me a verbal tongue-lashing, no doubt meant to make me feel worse.
I didn’t like her coming up to me like that, but she was right. What could I say? I stood there and took it in stride. She couldn’t have known how torn I felt between protecting her mother’s image and providing a haven for my friends.
I could tell that the whole neighborhood was proud of me. On my way to and from school, men and women in the community stopped to congratulate me or ask if I needed anything. Sometimes, they even knocked on my door to check on me. These were people who had little or nothing themselves, but they were willing to share what they had to help me. Their generosity always reminded me that I was carrying the hopes of a bunch of people when I walked onto that university campus.
Sometimes, though, straddling two distant worlds messed with my head. It felt weird spending the day with my dental-school peers, whose biggest worry was whether they would pass a test, and then returning home to such despair. I was in the middle, and that was a lonely spot. The only people I cou
ld relate to during those times were Rameck and Sam. I missed those guys so much.
The three of us had moved into an apartment near campus together with another guy the summer after our sophomore year at Seton Hall.
At one point Sam, Rameck, and I began to put our money together to buy one another an inexpensive but thoughtful birthday gift. Rameck had a busted-up notepad that he used as a phone book, and Sam and I used to rag on him about it. So when his birthday rolled around, Sam and I got him a really nice leather one. Rameck loved that gift. Rameck and I gave Sam a digital clock because he had an annoying bright orange wind-up clock that used to crack us up whenever it went off. I wanted to take a hammer to the old one when we gave Sam his birthday gift, but he wouldn’t allow it.
For my birthday, Rameck and Sam took me to Atlantic City and gave me money to gamble with. It was sort of a joke because they always said I had beginner’s luck. I always seemed to win when I tried a new game for the first time. Sure enough, I won around twenty times that night without losing a cent. The piece of my winnings that I broke off for each of them was more than they had given me in the first place. We all went home a little richer in money and friendship that night.
When Sam and Rameck moved to New Brunswick to finish their senior year at Rutgers and begin medical school early, I felt lost. We had been inseparable for all four years of college. Walking to class alone felt weird. But their leaving lit a fire in me. I had made average grades in college, but I may have been too comfortable because I knew I could count on Rameck and Sam to help me study. Sam’s tireless work ethic rubbed off on me. That wasn’t one of my natural traits, so I often wouldn’t put the hours and work into studying that he did. But I began to push myself harder because he was my boy. Rameck helped me to develop a more skeptical, analytical side. He taught me to think before accepting what someone says at face value. I tended to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Rameck was just the opposite. As a result of our friendship, I think I landed somewhere in the middle. Now I would be on my own the rest of the way, and I had to kick my performance up a notch to hold up my end of our deal.
Rameck, Sam, and I always called or visited one another when one of us needed encouragement. In their senior year of college and first year of medical school when they lived in New Brunswick, the drive was about thirty minutes each way. When they moved to South Jersey in the third year to begin clinical rotations, the drive was at least an hour.
I opened up to them about how odd I felt traveling daily between my two worlds. At times those worlds seemed at war, like on the nights I tried to study while sirens blared and yapping pit bulls clawed and mauled each other outside my window.
“Man, I know what you mean,” one of them would say.
That meant a lot. Talking to them always helped me put those feelings to bed and focus again on school. School had to be all that mattered if we were to finish.
I was always pretty good at figuring out what to study. The volume of information thrown at you in dental school can be overwhelming, but I was able to home in pretty quickly on what was significant. I could take eighty pages of notes from a lecture and figure out what the professor was going to focus on for a test. I usually picked up clues from the inflection in his voice or the amount of time spent on a subject during a lecture. I’d go over all of my notes a few times but concentrate mostly on the notes I had highlighted. Sometimes that approach backfired, and I got a grade less than I expected. But 80 percent of the time, I got that B+.
When it was time to study for the first state board exam at the end of my second year, I always wore cargo pants with lots of pockets. I transferred my notes to index cards and stuffed the cards in all of my pockets. Whenever I had a moment of down time, whether I was at a party or riding in the car with a friend, I pulled out my cards to study.
But no matter how hard I tried to focus on school, home competed for my attention. Soon after I moved back to Newark, I heard that my childhood friend, Na-im, was sleeping on another friend’s couch every night. I went over to see him and invited him to stay with me until he could get himself together. At the time, I was still living in the two-bedroom apartment.
Na-im and I had first met as kids living in the Stella Wright Housing Projects. He was three years younger, but he and I were in the same gifted-and-talented program at Louise A. Spencer Elementary. His situation at home wasn’t as stable as mine, though, and he later started selling drugs to take care of himself and his younger brother. Then he dropped out of high school. I was away at college when he, at the age of sixteen, got busted for selling drugs. He didn’t serve any time in jail, but he was sentenced to home detention and wore an ankle monitor for a few months. The arrest was enough to turn him away from his former trade, but he seemed unable to snap the pieces of his life into place afterward. I respected him because he was determined not to go back to selling drugs, even if it meant being unsure every night where he would lay his head. I wanted to help him.
“Look, man, I’ve got an extra bedroom,” I told him. “You can stay there. Don’t worry about anything. I’ve got the same bills whether you’re in my apartment or not.”
When I moved to the one-bedroom apartment, Na-im slept on my sofa. My only rule was that he had to be out looking for a job, going to school, or doing something productive every day. He couldn’t just lie around my apartment doing nothing. I always pushed him. I bought him books to study for his high-school equivalency diploma and took him to Essex County College to find out the dates when the test would be given. But it was extremely difficult to motivate him. He was completely drained of hope.
About two and a half years after Na-im moved in, he confided in me that he was worried about his seventeen-year-old brother, Abdul, who lived in Irvington with an aunt. Abdul, a junior in high school, had begun skipping classes and hanging with the wrong crowd. I was worried that Abdul would repeat his brother’s mistake, so I invited him to move in with us. I thought I might be able to talk some sense into him. Every day, I talked to him and pushed him to go to school.
“Man, you see how hard a time Na-im is having,” I told him. “As long as you have a plan, I’ll help you.”
Abdul stayed with me about six months, and Na-im stayed more than three years. But in my last year of dental school, just months before I graduated, my brother Garland moved back to Newark from Atlanta, where he had spent the past eight years. He needed a place to stay and didn’t want to move to the suburbs with our parents. He moved in with me, too. That meant four guys were now sharing a one-bedroom apartment. None of the others was working, so I was carrying everybody’s weight.
My big brother is a good guy, but he and I are total opposites. As a kid, Garland hated school and brought home F’s all the time. When he was in high school, he once brought home a report card showing a vast improvement in his grades. He had four B’s, three C’s, and a D. Our mom, who rarely gets excited about anything, was thrilled. She had this look of relief on her face that said she was finally getting through to him. But when she held the report card up to the light, she realized it was a big hoax. All of the grades had been changed with a typewriter. Garland had failed practically every class. I never forgot the disappointment on my mom’s face. I never wanted to make her feel that way.
The month after my brother moved in, my telephone bill arrived with more than $300 in long-distance charges, and nobody owned up to them. Though I had my suspicions, I couldn’t prove who had done it. I knew then that it was time to clean house. I asked all three of them to leave. I had helped them as much as I could. Graduation from dental school was months away, and I needed to focus on my future.
Na-im eventually got a job, bought himself a car, and began studying again for his high-school equivalency diploma. Sometimes we went together to the public library to study. But despite my best efforts, Abdul still dropped out of high school. That was a huge disappointment. Having grown up without a father for much of my life, I knew the importance of male role models. I had been fort
unate to know good men, including my friends, who stood in the gap and taught me life lessons, large and small.
It was Rameck, for example, who helped me choose my first car and taught me how to drive it.
I was a sophomore at Seton Hall and needed a car to get back and forth to work and school. My mom gave me about $3,000 to buy a used car, and I wanted to get a good deal. Rameck had just bought his second car, the white Volkswagen Golf, so he volunteered to walk me through the process. He took me to a small car dealership and introduced me to the salesman who had sold him his car. We spent a couple of hours checking out the cars on the lot before settling on a gray, two-door 1986 Volkswagen Jetta. It didn’t have power steering or air conditioning, and only the front windows rolled up and down. But it had a great engine and was within my price range.
There was one major drawback: it had a standard transmission, and I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift. Rameck assured me that he could teach me. For two days, my car sat idle in the parking lot at Seton Hall. I grew frustrated. One morning about one A.M., I walked across the hall and banged on Rameck’s door. He had been out partying and was in no condition to drive.
“Ra, man, I know you been out and everything, but I need to learn how to drive my car right now,” I said.
I knew the basics. I just needed some practice. Without saying a word, Rameck got up and followed me to the parking lot. I got behind the wheel and slipped the car into gear, but I released the clutch too quickly and it stalled. After a few tries, I bucked out of the parking lot and down the main street leading off campus. I picked up speed, but when I tried to change gears, the car again jerked to a stop in the middle of the street. A car traveling behind me slammed on its brakes and skidded into the back of my car. Fortunately, the Jetta was so sturdy that it didn’t even get a scratch, so I let the driver go without exchanging telephone numbers. When I hopped back into the driver’s seat, Rameck burst out laughing. We laughed all the way back to Seton Hall.
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