Criminal Minded

by Tracy Brown

  After that day, we all went back to see Curtis on the first Sunday of every month. It became our routine, and I was smart enough to pack street clothes to wear for the visit. I didn’t want to be caught out there looking like a schoolboy in front of all those hard rocks that Curtis was incarcerated with. Soon, Papa began bringing a deck of cards on the visits and me, Papa, Curtis, and Olivia would play Spades, PittyPat, Crazy Eights, and all the other jailhouse card games Curtis taught us. I looked forward to those visits each month and I knew that Curtis must have anticipated them even more.

  One Sunday, as I sat in church listening to the sounds of Grandma’s Baptist church congregation getting happy, I found myself laughing. I wasn’t laughing at the Lord, but some of these big women looked hilarious when they were shoutin’! They called it catchin’ the Holy Ghost. All I know is that the shit looked comical! Out of respect for Grandma, I tried not to let anyone see me laughing. I hid my face behind a hymnal, but Olivia knew I was laughing and she nudged me to cut it out. I tried, but that shit was funny. I started to feel bad, but then I noticed another young man about the same age as me sitting on the other side of the church. We caught each other’s eye and realized that we were both laughing. He pointed discreetly to a woman behind him whose wig had all but fallen off of her head and we both fell into hysterics at the sight of it.

  Eventually, the congregation calmed down, and the reverend got up and began his sermon. I kept glancing at the guy who I’d shared a laugh with because he didn’t look familiar. He also didn’t look like the church type.

  Besides myself, the only other teenaged boys in church every week were the ones who were raised in church. Their mothers, aunts, grandparents, etc., all attended that church. These boys were junior deacons and choir members—they were nothing like me. As soon as I got out of church I’d be thinking about which girl I would fuck that day, or how I could get my hands on some good weed. These boys were nothing like me.

  But this kid seemed like he had an edge to him. I couldn’t tell if he was black or Spanish because he had that “good hair” my mother always talked about. He was light-skinned and had sideburns and a little goatee. Probably a pretty boy! I told myself and I turned my attention back to the sermon.

  After service, as I was waiting for Grandma to finish talking to all the women in the church, the same kid came over to me.

  “What up?” he said. I replied and waited to see what he wanted.

  “It’s nice to see that there’s another person in here with a sense of humor,” he remarked with a smile.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I find humor in some fucked … some messed-up stuff,” I corrected myself and prayed that I wouldn’t go to hell for cussing in the Lord’s house.

  The kid extended his hand. “My name is Zion,” he said.

  “Lamin.” I shook his hand as I introduced myself. “How come you don’t look familiar?” I asked. I didn’t care if I was being nosy. I knew just about all the guys my age in my neighborhood, and his was a face I’d never seen before.

  “I just moved here from Queens,” he said. He seemed to search my face to try to figure out if I was real enough for him to level with. Then he put it out there. “I got kicked out of my last foster home, and they sent me to stay with her.” He nodded in the direction of a lady that my grandmother was talking to. I recognized the lady as Sister Bailey, and I couldn’t help wondering if she was telling my grandmother the same thing that Zion had just told me.

  “Oh,” I said. “What got you kicked out of your last foster home?”

  Zion grinned. “I got caught bonin’ my foster sister.”

  We shared another laugh, and I decided that I liked this kid. He seemed honest and unashamed. I admired that.

  “Well, Sister Bailey’s gonna have you in church every Sunday so get used to it. My grandmother drags me in here every week, too,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Well, at least now I got somebody funny to sit next to,” he said.

  Olivia walked over and I introduced her to Zion. He smiled at her and said, “Hi.” But he didn’t eyeball her like so many guys did. That scored big points with me, because it showed that he was respectful enough to not treat my sister like eye candy.

  “So, Lamin,” he said. “You play ball?” Zion made an imaginary jump shot to illustrate his question.

  I smiled. “Do I play ball?”

  Zion nodded his understanding. Looking at Olivia he asked, “He got game?”

  Olivia knew she better represent. “Of course!” she said, smiling.

  Me and Zion made plans to get a game going in the Big Park the following day. Although I was meeting him for the first time, I felt like I’d known him for years. When he gave me pound at the end of that day, it began a friendship that would remain for a lifetime.

  Zion

  There was something about Lamin that I liked right away. At that point, nine out of the ten niggas I had met when I moved to Staten Island were cornballs. Wanna-be thugs. But Lamin seemed like a real nigga, and real recognizes real.

  When his sister stepped up on the scene, it took a lot of willpower for me to keep from telling her how fine she was. The girl was tall, dark, and lovely. I figured I’d get to know her a little better and see where her head was at. Time would tell.

  But, in the meantime, I decided to get to know this cat, Lamin.

  THREE

  things done changed

  Lamin

  Zion and I got along well. We had similar interests: basketball, girls, hip-hop, and sneakers. We spent the rest of that summer chillin’ and getting to know one another. But nothing could take the place of Curtis. Curtis said he was adjusting to life behind bars. Whenever we visited him, Aunt Inez brought him books to help him pass the time. My moms wouldn’t let Curtis call us collect, so I wrote him letters in between our visits. He told me that he’d had a few fights, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. But no matter how optimistic he sounded, I missed my cousin, and I still couldn’t fathom the fact that he would be in his twenties by the time he was a free man.

  To make matters worse, my moms’ behavior was really beginning to disgust me. Now that I was getting older, it began to really bother me that my moms had so many different men in her bed. In my lifetime, I had seen at least five different men move in and out of my mother’s house (not including Olivia’s father!). Not to mention the ones who just came by late at night when she thought we were sleeping. Since Olivia and I were teenagers, she didn’t bother to pretend anymore. I started to resent her for the lack of respect she had for her kids.

  Sons feel naturally protective of their mothers. They treat them like flowers that have to be handled delicately. The son of a single mother automatically treats any man that comes around with suspicion. Daughters tend to be more trusting. But sons don’t fall for the okey-doke so easily.

  But as I got older, I realized that my moms didn’t care about my suspicions or my desire to protect her. Instead, she treated Olivia and me like we were in the way. Soon, I came to realize that we were nothing to her but dependents. Money was her only focus.

  Suddenly, she was stressing me about getting a job. I knew that I was getting older and taking care of me was expensive. But it got to the point that she was asking me to pay for ridiculous shit. If I poured myself some cereal, she would insist that I buy a gallon of milk to make up for the half a cup I had just poured. If I ate a sandwich, it was suddenly my responsibility to bring home a loaf of bread, ajar of mayonnaise, and some cold cuts. I was beginning to feel like she wanted me to grease her palms or get the fuck out altogether.

  To make matters worse, one day my moms announced that some cat named Wally (his real name was Wallace Perkins) was moving in. I had met this dude before and I didn’t like him from Jump Street. He had an arrogant aura about him, and he never even tried to make conversation with me or Olivia. Whenever he came around, my moms would suddenly find errands to send us on or, depending on her mood, she’d just tell us to go the fuck outside. I didn�
�t like Wally’s ass at all. Now that he would be moving in, I decided to spend as much time away from home as possible.

  I completed summer school and went on to my senior year of high school. Olivia was now a junior, and guys of all ages were anxious to get with her. I wasn’t trying to hear none of that shit! Maybe I couldn’t control my mother’s love life, but I wasn’t about to let Olivia get used.

  When school started, I saw Zion a couple of times in the hallway or in the schoolyard. Sometimes we cut class together and hung out with some girls from school. We had begun to form a bond that was new to me, since up to that point I had only been close like that with Curtis. But, as the months began to pass I saw less and less of Zion at school and more of him in the ’hood. Eventually, Zion stopped going to school altogether.

  Zion was a year older than me. So, technically, on his eighteenth birthday, he would no longer be a ward of the state. Zion knew that, and despite all of Sister Bailey’s best efforts, Zion refused to obey. He began to make friends with some of Staten Island’s seediest characters, and before I knew it, Zion was hustling. He started selling crack, workin’ for one of Shaolin’s well-known hustlers—Street. With me going to school and Zion learning the streets, we saw less of each other.

  Up to that point in my life, I had managed to steer clear of most illegal activity. Like Curtis, I was no angel. Still, hard-core crime had me kinda shook. But, the events that began to unfold over the next few months would have me considering the game as an alternative for the first time in my life.

  It all started in my Global Studies class. I had a racist teacher named Mrs. Kramer. Most of the faculty didn’t care about the students they were getting paid to teach. Finding a teacher that gave 100 percent to every class they taught was like finding a diamond in the rough. Mrs. Kramer was one who didn’t give a damn. Most of the time, I cut her class. But with Curtis gone and Zion in the streets, I had nothing else to do. I actually tried to put all of my energy into school. Most of my academic experience had consisted of me showing up only when necessary and doing just enough work to pass. I was trying to change that.

  But Mrs. Kramer was making it hard. She had some fucked-up interpretations of World History. My first confrontation with her was during a lesson about Ancient Egypt. This bitch tried to tell us that although Egypt is in Africa, the early Egyptians were not black. That ain’t how I saw it.

  I raised my hand and she called on me. “If Africa was the birthplace of civilization, then the first people created must have been black,” I said.

  Mrs. Kramer was undaunted. “No,” she said. “They were Jewish.”

  I tried to press the issue further, but she held up one bony hand and raised her voice to an annoying shrill. “The lesson is closed, Mr. Michaels!” She slammed her book shut and picked up the chalk. Turning to the blackboard, she wrote the homework assignment while I seethed in my seat.

  But I wasn’t done yet.

  The next day, I brought in a book of Egyptian hieroglyphics that Papa had in his study. I had gone to his house the night before for the sole purpose of obtaining evidence to prove Mrs. Kramer wrong. I was confident that this book and the evidence it contained would shut her racist mouth up once and for all.

  I strolled into the classroom and waited until she called the class to order. I walked over to her and showed her some of the pictures in the book that proved my point. The pictures showed paintings on the walls of the pyramids that depicted the life of ancient Egyptians. The people in the paintings had African features and black skin. Mrs. Kramer studied the pictures in silence.

  “Why would they draw pictures of themselves that make them look black if they were not black?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me. She just kept looking at the pictures. I felt like this meant she was speechless due to the fact that she’d been proven wrong. “These people were smart enough to build pyramids with no machines, and you’re saying that they wouldn’t have been smart enough to draw pictures of themselves that showed exactly what they looked like?” I asked.

  She handed me back the book and began to rifle through some papers on her desk. I pressed further. “Their noses look wide like black people, their lips are full like ours …”

  “Mr. Michaels, take your seat,” she said flatly.

  I was defiant. “How am I supposed to learn if I can’t ask you questions?” I demanded, slamming the heavy book on her desk. “I might as well not be here!”

  Mrs. Kramer smirked. “There’s the door, Mr. Michaels. I get paid whether you learn or not.”

  She called the class to order and proceeded to begin the day’s lesson despite the fact that I was still standing there. I wanted to punch her dead in her face. But instead, I picked up my book, grabbed my schoolbag, and walked out of the classroom.

  “Adios!” she called after me, and slammed the door.

  I could hear the class erupt in an uproar of laughter and yelling as I exited the school. I knew at that moment that I would never set foot inside of that building again.

  Of course, I got home early that day. It was about 1:00 in the afternoon and I walked in my house to find that the living room was empty. I knew that nigga Wally was home because I saw his ugly car parked outside. I plopped down on the sofa and turned the TV to Video Music Box. I loved that show, since rap music was my passion. I had a jones for watching imagery onscreen. I wanted to be a video director for the hottest M.C.’s. I could see the ideal video for a song in my imagination, and someday, I wanted to pursue that as a career. I could also see myself as a movie director. I loved visual arts and I knew that someday I would find a way to make money in that field. As I sat there watching Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Do Me” video, Wally’s fat ass came in, shuffling his feet. He sneered at me and walked into the kitchen. Fuck him! I thought to myself. The guy had the nastiest attitude I’d ever seen.

  I continued watching videos until I drifted off to sleep on the sofa. The last thing I heard before I fell into a deep sleep was MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” video. The sound of my mother yelling and furniture moving upstairs jarred me awake.

  I sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. I heard my mother’s voice upstairs. “What we gon’ do about the cable bill, Wally? What the fuck am I supposed to watch when they cut it off? This is bullshit. You said you would take care of the damn bill!” Her yelling was followed by Wally’s booming voice.

  “BITCH, SHUT THE FUCK UP! I AIN’T GIVIN’ YOU A MUTHAFUCKIN’ DIME!”

  Did that muthafucka just call my moms a bitch? I couldn’t believe my ears! As I sat there debating whether or not I should get involved, Olivia came through the front door. She had just gotten home from school, and she looked puzzled.

  “What the hell is all that noise, Lamin? You can hear it from outside,” Olivia said.

  “The two lovebirds are going at it,” I explained.

  “WHAT DO I WANT WITH YOU WHEN YOU GOT A LAZY MUTHAFUCKIN’ SON SITTIN’ AROUND ALL DAY EATIN’ UP ALL THE GODDAMN FOOD?”

  Wally was pushing it now! I wondered to myself how much longer I would just sit by and listen to him talk shit about me. After the day I had, I knew it wouldn’t be long.

  “YOU SHOULD MAKE HIS ASS GET OUT THERE AND GET A JOB OR SOMETHIN’! DON’T MAKE NO SENSE TO HAVE HIM SITTIN UP IN HERE LIKE HE RUNNIN’ THE PLACE! HE’S A LAZY MUTHAFUCKA!”

  My mother finally tried to defend me somewhat. “Wally, don’t talk about my son like that …”

  Olivia sat next to me, and as soon as her ass hit the sofa, the sound of my mother crying had both of us on our feet. I could hear that bitch-ass nigga slapping her, and I raced up the stairs two at a time. Olivia was hot on my trail.

  I got to the second-floor landing and couldn’t believe my eyes. My moms was curled up in the fetal position. Wally was hovering over her with his heavy hand raised at my mother. I couldn’t believe that this son of a bitch had the nerve to raise his hand to her knowing that I was home. In one step I w
as on that nigga. I punched him in his face so hard that his big ass tumbled backwards. Grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, I punched him continuously until I was out of breath. Then I dragged him to the stairs and shoved him down with all my might. It wasn’t until he landed at the bottom like a ton of bricks that I realized that there was noise coming from my mother’s bedroom. I turned around in what seemed like slow motion to find my sister looking at my mother like she was crazy. My mother stood there with two black, swollen eyes yelling at me.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Lamin? Huh? Why the hell did you do that? You stupid muthafucka! Who asked for your help, Lamin? Do you hear me talking to you?”

  I was so shocked that I couldn’t respond. Olivia seemed just as amazed.

  “Ma, what are you yelling at Lamin for?” Olivia asked. “He was defending you!”

  “Shut the fuck up, Olivia. This shit ain’t got nothing to do with y’all. I can’t believe you did this, Lamin! I can’t believe you!”

  By now, Wally was struggling to get on his feet. Still shocked at my mother’s rage, I turned to make sure this nigga Wally didn’t rush me while my back was turned. As I stood on the stairway landing, I watched him pull himself up using the banister for support. He stumbled into the bathroom, but he left the door open. Suddenly, I felt something soft fall to my feet. I looked down and realized that they were clothes … my mother was throwing my clothes at me from my room. Back and forth she went, from my closet to me and back again, throwing my clothes, sneakers, jackets …

  “Get the fuck outta here, Lamin!”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “What?!?” My eyes observed her walking back and forth to my room, but my brain couldn’t process the fact that she was throwing me out.