A gang of black and white people got off the C train at Nostrand but D kept standing. When he was thirteen the C train was his domain. He and his boys would roll on it after school to vic niggas, scare old men, and hover over smaller kids, standing right on top of them until they damn near volunteered their train pass. For that whole silly summer of thirteen, D felt he owned this subway—the iron horse was his personal ride, and he could decide if those around him rode in fear or comfort.
D had escaped incarceration by sheer dumb luck and the influence of a cop named Tyrone “Fly Ty” Williams, the patron saint of the Hunter family who’d recently retired from the NYPD (and was now chillin’ somewhere outside ATL). Like a lot of kids who’d mugged people as a teenager, D never saw himself as a criminal or thug or predator, justifying everything he’d done as an adventure. If he’d grown up in a place with fast cars and open roads, D would have been racing near cliffs on precarious curves.
At thirteen he’d wanted a thrill and robbing people had been that. Despite his size, D was never solely the muscle. He’d been a tactician. A strategist. He pointed people out, whistled that a mark was coming. He had kicked people and scared people and enjoyed the chase. These days D was all about security, keeping people safe and being a paragon of some loose virtue. He stayed as clean as hand towels, yet was always vaguely worried his bad adolescent deeds would somehow catch up with him.
D’s move back to Brooklyn was triggering many unwelcome memories. But the “new” Brooklyn of today pulled him back to now. Where had all these white people come from? He remembered when they all got off at the Lafayette stop. Then some went one stop farther to Clinton-Washington. Now they went to Nostrand and sometimes all the way out to Ralph. That lots of white people, mostly in their twenties and often dressed corny, rode this far into Bed-Stuy bugged him out. Word was these new white folks had already staked claim to Bushwick, and were edging into the border of the rugged, distant ghetto hoods of Brownsville and East New York.
D was even more shocked by the goatee-growing, Converse sneaker–wearing, tight jean and peacoat–sporting black folks these hipster types rolled with. He’d dealt with more than his share of bourgie, suit-and-tie fly Negroes in his day and way too many bureaucratic Queens home-owning black people staring at him across desks at clinics, Social Security offices, and police precincts. None of them seemed that different from D except they had a nine-to-five and he didn’t.
But these new black folks were from a planet D hadn’t visited. So when one of these kinky-haired, peacoat-wearing dudes approached him, D didn’t know what to think. In another era this guy would have been a mark, someone he and his crew of thirteen-year-olds would have smacked and jacked. The dude reached into his pocket, pulled out a flyer, and said, “You look like a music head. If you have any vinyl to sell, come through.” D nodded and took the flyer as the kid and his white buddy exited the C train at Ralph. The flyer read, VINYL DUNGEON. Bushwick.
D surveyed it, stuffed it in his pocket, then shook his head.
THAT’S THE WAY OF THE WORLD
Rajan, fourteen years old and angry, sat on a Mother Gaston Boulevard curb holding his left leg as blood oozed out of a small gunshot wound through his jeans. He was already a vision of scarlet with his red flat-brimmed New York Yankees cap with the reflective sticker still attached, red bandanna, red hoodie, and neon-red sneakers now dotted with his own blood. His small-caliber pistol lay in the gutter next to one of his sneakers. The air stank of burnt fabric.
A kid named Z-Bo, dressed in a similar crimson costume, stood laughing. He pointed at Rajan and said, “I told you, yo, that safety wasn’t on.”
“Fuck you!” Rajan snapped. He was trying to seem hard but tears were welling in his eyes.
D walked over and stood there as Z-Bo used his cell phone to snap shots of his friend’s predicament. “You wanna bleed to death?” D asked.
“Do I look stupid?” replied Rajan.
“Wrong answer,” said D.
“Fuck you.”
D reached down, grabbed the hand Rajan had shot himself with, and pressed it onto the wound. Rajan yelped but D looked him in the eye and the kid fell silent. D took Rajan’s hat off, pulled off his bandanna and stretched it out, then wrapped it tight around the kid’s leg. “You Damu’s brother?”
“No,” Rajan answered, apparently more concerned about this question than his accidently shot leg. “He my uncle.”
“I don’t know how you’re gonna keep this from him,” D said. “But maybe your boy shouldn’t be posting pictures on Facebook.”
Rajan turned toward Z-Bo. “You posting?”
“No,” Z-Bo lied.
“Why don’t you call 911?” D said.
“What?” Z-Bo said.
“Yo,” D countered, “man up.”
“What you sayin’?” Z-Bo said.
“Call 911, fool!” Rajan shouted.
D held out his hand. “I should take the gun.”
“I paid eight hundred dollars for that gun,” Rajan said. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I know your family. My name is D Hunter. I know possessing that gun will get you in more trouble than getting shot with it.”
“He’s right, yo,” Z-Bo affirmed.
“Whatcha know anyway?” said Rajan.
A small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk now that it was clear that this gun shot was, on this day, a singular event.
D took Rajan’s gun and put it in his waist against the small of his back.
“I should take the gun,” Z-Bo said. D ignored him, as did Rajan.
D asked Rajan, “Your mom’s at work?”
“I guess . . . No, she home.”
“So you better call her.”
“No. She can’t see me in the gutter like this.”
D said, “Bet she gets here faster than EMS,” then looked at Z-Bo. “Stop talking pictures and call his moms.”
Z-Bo called, pulling Rajan’s mother away from the Kardashians’ latest drama. Rajan was getting dizzy, but the bleeding had slowed and he was moaning through the pain, which to D suggested the kid would live. D wondered if there was a reality competition show in guessing who could get to an injured ghetto child faster—NYPD, EMS, or a reality show–watching mother.
There was some blood on D’s right palm, most of it already dry. He hadn’t thought about why he’d walked over to help this stupid kid. Hadn’t he learned long ago that minding your business was the safest way to get through your day in Brownsville? But Rajan’s uncle, Damu, had done some security work when business was good and was now in the army stationed somewhere in the Middle East.
Now here D was with a bloody hand holding the pistol of a kid who’d shot himself in the leg. Rajan was lucky as hell that he hadn’t shot his own dick off. D glanced over at the onlookers and had a sobering thought: What if this kid has hep B or even C?
“Here comes your ma!” Z-Bo pointed down the block where an anxious heavyset black woman who looked to be in her early forties, in a shiny black-and-red bob and a pink sweat suit, was run-walking in their direction.
“You be good,” D said.
“You ain’t waiting?” Rajan asked.
“What for?” D said, and walked away.
Three blocks later he bent down and dropped the gun in a sewer. Then he pulled himself together and walked through the front door of Brooklyn Funeral Home & Cremation Services.
ASCENSION
D knew this place too well. All three of his brothers had had their services here, where their bloody bodies had been made presentable to the public. It was where he first encountered the news media when someone had tipped off the New York Times about a family with four boys, three of whom had been shot dead on the same Brooklyn street corner. A white man with a notepad had spoken to his mother and she’d given him Polaroids of her dead sons. It had all happened here in an office in the back.
Today he was a witness to someone else’s pain. He sat in the back as the wake began for Dalvin DeGrate,
the Abercrombie kid who’d tried to slice him with a box cutter a few days ago. D didn’t really know what he’d learn at the twenty-two-year-old’s wake, but there was a lot about that night he didn’t understand and maybe he’d get some kind of insight into why the kid had chased him for a bagful of guns.
Mr. Elvin DeGrate had come up to Brooklyn from North Carolina as a young man, took a job with the Transit Authority, and now owned a home in East New York. In front of Dalvin’s body Mr. DeGrate talked of his son’s passion for football and how talented he had been as a high school wide receiver/defensive back, how dedicated he could be when given a task. Mr. DeGrate held himself erect and with great dignity even when he cried and had to be led back to his seat by a coworker.
Dalvin’s little brother DeVante, sixteen and lean as a New York streetlight, reminisced about his brother showing him the ins and outs of Madden NFL with religious fervor. A couple other speakers rose as well, friends of the family who recalled Dalvin’s childhood hijinks and sporting prowess.
But it wasn’t until the kid’s cousin Cedric Hailey came forward—a short, dark-skinned man with jail-built shoulders and a face of nicks and scratches—that facts surrounding Dalvin’s death were actually addressed.
“I know some people, even some of the people in this room—a lot of people in here—thought Dalvin was a gangsta,” Hailey said, surveying the room and waiting to be challenged. “Yeah, Dalvin is dead and he had did some dirt. But, quiet as kept, Dalvin had no choice. That’s right—no choice. He was under a man’s thumb and they squeezed him. That night wasn’t about vic’ing nobody. It wasn’t a job he had to take. So they can say what they want about him on TV. But the streets know.” Hailey pulled a small bottle of vodka out of his back pocket, took a swig, poured a bit on his cousin’s body, and then sat back down.
There were other speakers after that but Hailey’s talk pretty much shut the wake down. D had spent the last few years living with the fallout from a conspiracy theory about hip hop. He’d never paid much attention to such theories in the past (many black folks were obsessed with them) but now he gave everything he heard some bit of credence. Did his cousin really know something or was that just the vodka talking?
In Brownsville you were always being sized up—a threat, a mark, a future baby daddy or mama, a joke, or just plain corny. It was a place where danger and opportunity were often embodied in the same person. D knew better than to just run up on Cedric Hailey, who now stood outside the funeral home on Pacific Street with two do-rag–wearing homeys who looked more hardened than him. With his unfamiliar face and black suit, D rolling over to the trio to introduce himself and ask questions would just be a waste of time and, probably, a touch dangerous.
Suddenly D felt a shadow pass over the sun. The man was NBA-power-forward big and dressed very ’90s—Coogi sweater, baggy FUBU jeans, regular blue Yankees cap backward, dingy, once-white Air Force 1s, and a white do-rag.
“I seen you at the fight club. Am I right?”
“If you say so.”
“I do. My people call me Ride. You D, am I right?”
D didn’t feel like being bothered but this guy was too big to ignore. “Yes. D Hunter.”
“I also seen you with that fool youngster who shot himself. I was walking here and saw you. Am I right?”
“You are.”
“I like that. I see you out here helping people.”
“Glad you do, Ride. You a friend of the family?”
“Yeah, I know them. But check this—I know your family too. Your brother Rah. I ran with him a bit.”
“I don’t remember you, Ride, and I’m sure I would.”
Ride laughed. “You were a kid and Rah didn’t wanna bring his business around you.”
D nodded and then asked, “So when did you hit the bricks?”
“Shit,” Ride said, “I ain’t counting days no more. I’m out. That’s all I care about.”
As the two men spoke, Hailey glanced over at Ride, then smiled and came over to greet him. “Nigga, I didn’t know you were home.” He hugged Ride, as did his two thuggish friends, all three treating him like a fallen warrior miraculously come back to life.
“Yo,” Ride said, “this is D, an OG homey of mine. He’s from Tilden.”
“What building?” Hailey asked.
“315,” D answered, which seemed to satisfy Hailey’s curiosity, then added, “I liked what you had to say.” D decided to see if this introduction had possibly opened a door. “I just moved back to Brooklyn and heard about what happened and thought, New mayor, same cops.”
“Yeah,” Hailey said softly. “I shouldn’t have been putting it out in the street like that, especially in front of his father. They gonna do some kind of investigating and that could only get them in trouble. You go to the police around here and you never know who you talking to. They say the devil wears red but I know that nigga likes blue too.”
An older woman, one of Hailey’s aunts, walked over and started chirping at him about his comments at the wake and said Dalvin’s mother wanted to speak to him. Anticipating a verbal ass-whipping, Hailey excused himself and, followed by his two friends, headed back inside the funeral home.
“You leaving, D?”
“I was thinking about it. Thanks for the intro, by the way.”
“I could tell you wanted to speak with Ced. I figured I could assist and then, you know, maybe you could do me a solid.”
“You know anything about what he was talking about in there?”
“I just got home. Was off the streets seven years, so I ain’t really current. But I could ask around if it means something to you. You a helper type. I see that. The world needs helpers. I need a helper right now.”
“Okay, what’s your mission, Ride?”
“You wanna come sit with me a minute? I’m seriously hungry. My treat.”
“Okay, big man. Where you wanna go?”
The two men ended up at the McDonald’s near the funeral home. D had a bottled water before him, while Ride displayed a prodigious appetite: two large fries, three Quarter Pounders, an extralarge Coke, and an apple turnover for dessert.
“I need to find my woman. Her name’s Eve. It’s been seven years, but I love her like it was the night we met.”
“What exactly did you do, Ride?”
“I hit someone. A few times. They said it was assault. I’m back. But things done changed.”
“Don’t you have any friends who know her and where she is now?”
“I thought I had homeys but it turned out I didn’t,” Ride said.
He had been the muscle for Tim Tim Mosley, a salty Jamaican with a connect in Miami and a taste for rocking Clarks Wallabees back when selling crack was wack (and extremely lucrative). Tim Tim was a character. If he wore brown Clarks the laces would be red, or if the pair were black the laces were blue. Ride met him one afternoon at a basketball tournament at the Tilden projects. Ride had once been a promising high school athlete, but too much McDonald’s and a bad left knee cost him a career.
At six seven and three hundred pounds, he was too wide to run fast and had fucked up his knee in high school, so he had very little lateral mobility. But he dominated the paint that day and caught Tim Tim’s eye. Ride became, no surprise here, Tim Tim’s intimidator, a man so awesome in size and solemn of face that he squashed beef just by breathing. Ride claimed not to have killed anyone (that he knew of) but did breezily admit to bruising scores of people with a baseball bat (thirty-eight ounces was his preference) and, often, with his bare hands.
He’d been infatuated with Eve since they were in elementary school but Ride didn’t win her love until he joined Tim Tim’s posse and was clocking major figures. To launder his cash Tim Tim funded a music production company and, at Ride’s urging, recruited her into a new jack swing–era group called Money Gripp that tried to be SWV and ended not as good as Total.
Ride began to suspect that Tim Tim wanted his girl (and there was evidence that the desire went both ways).
Things took a nasty turn when, coming into the studio one night, Ride caught Tim Tim trying to steal a kiss. So Ride tossed Tim Tim up against the control room glass and beat him with a mic stand; only Eve’s cries kept him from committing homicide.
A week later Ride was walking by the old fish market on Belmont Avenue when two patrol cars came up on the sidewalk and arrested him for assault on a rival dealer. Turned out the key piece of evidence was a bloody Louisville Slugger provided by Tim Tim.
While Ride was upstate, Tim Tim was shot dead in a drive-by while purchasing gold chains on Pitkin Avenue. One day Eve went into Manhattan to see the latest Tyler Perry play at the Beacon Theatre and never came back. She left Brownsville and Brooklyn, but not Ride’s dreams on lonely, incarcerated nights.
D was trying to concentrate on Ride’s story but he kept noting this very nervous-looking light-skinned brother—late twenties, red Yankees cap, gray hoodie—watching them, even as he ate fries with one hand and texted with the other.
“No worries, yo,” Ride said after D gestured toward the kid. “He’s not concerned with you, so don’t you be concerned with him.”
“You owe people something?” D asked.
“No, but a lot of people owe me. And they will repay me. But that’s not your problem. Find Eve for me.”
Ride pulled out a knot of bills and D was unsuccessful in concealing his sudden greed. “Relax, my dude,” Ride said, smiling. “It’s mostly fives and tens. But I like it when people get that look. It’s fifteen hundred. Can you start with that?”
Ride stuffed the money into D’s right hand under the table. The pressure from the man’s fingers, thick as ballpark hot dogs, caused D to wince.
“Sorry, yo. Eve always used to say I should handle people like eggs cause if I get too angry I could hurt people.” Ride reached into his wallet, which was made of reddish cloth and held together by black Velcro tabs, and out of it fell a wrinkled photo of two people surrounded by a computer-generated heart. A younger, happier Ride sat with a honey-colored cutie, blessed with a sensuous mouth and inviting bright eyes. She looked barely legal but Ride, around thirty in the photo, clearly hadn’t cared.
The Lost Treasures of R&B Page 4