The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Then again, now that I think of it, these were mainly city guys, who had hung strong with Woodlawn, eighteen and nineteen and, like me, trying anything to get out to the suburbs. Slickheads and their expensive tennis did win the style war; but really, it was just that the city guys lost.

  That summer, about ten weeks after the beef got under way, I learned that the police was the slave patrol and the Confederate Army extended. I had been surprised when they refused to protect me from the Woodlawn slickheads, but I hadn’t known that my category was on their assassination list.

  My father replaced the yellow wagon with a Japanese compact car, used, but with a tape deck and a sunroof, a real surprise. Somehow I had the car in the early afternoon, and me, Charm, and Mighty Joe Young were skylarking around the neighborhood, telling lies about the fine honey, bumping “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.” I noticed two white guys and a brother in a Chevrolet Cavalier near the library on Garrison, but I wasn’t on the corner so it only seemed odd, not a personal threat. We stared them down and, three deep, drove off to the Plaza, doubling back and through, around Garrison Boulevard and Wabash Avenue.

  At Reisterstown Road and Fords Lane I reached the traffic light. All of the sudden it seemed like a car was smashing into the side of me. A Highlandtown cracker pushed a heavy revolver through the sunroof and up to my head, his other hand reaching for the steering wheel. I could count the bullets in the chambers and see the tiny indentations in the cones of the soft lead. I wet my lap. For real. I was preparing to die. The angry man was shouting, “Move over!” and “Git out the car! Git the fuck out the car!” Then, with some time, I thought to myself that he must be a damn bold car thief. It was broad daylight. And even though we had just bought the sporty little Toyota, I couldn’t see why he’d be so amped up for a $7,890 car. In a minor key, I thought that a cool hustler would probably find some way to drive off.

  I tried to throw the car in park and slide away from the gun at the same time, but I couldn’t get past Charm Sawyer’s legs in the passenger seat. Charm had been yoked halfway out of the window by the black gloved hand of . . . Five-O? I heard commotion in the back, and next thing I knew Mighty Joe Young had his teeth on the asphalt. Then I noticed a silvery patch swinging from the chest of the man from Highlandtown with the dirty beard, and he demanded my license and registration.

  After about fifteen minutes the dirty white man came back to the car.

  “You ran a red light back there but my buddy doesn’t have enough time to write you a ticket. Beat it.”

  I looked around fumbling with my mouth open and managed to get the Toyota away from the intersection. We got to the next block and pulled over, me and Charm shaking and crying from relief and shame and Mighty Joe Young mouthing Who-Struck-John. Never will get that dirty white man and that giant .38 from my mind.

  When I told my father about it, I could see in his face and his demeanor that there was no authority to appeal to. When I was just a kid, I had been robbed by some bullies and had reluctantly confessed that humiliation to my dad. In his house shoes he stalked out into the middle of the avenue, attempting to find the boys who had wronged his child. But this new violation was just a new burden to shoulder. I knew enough to sense him crying on the inside. We were father and son inside of our house, but outside we were black males in America, with the same honor and respect as No. 1 crabs in season.

  I guess prep or slick wasn’t all that.

  The Pell grants and the Maryland scholarships got cut off around this time, and all of a sudden nobody was going to college out of state. The money went out as fast as the dope came in. That ride to Edwin Waters or Cheney or Widener, that had been wish fulfillment in the past. By the second half of the ’80s, if you went to school, it was either down the street to the community college or up to Morgan, the old state college for Negroes where my parents and Charm’s parents had been sent, at the end of the #33 bus line. Most of my homeboys, their parents would let them try it out for a semester. Our people believed in control. In our neighborhood fathers would brag to each other, “I’m never letting that nigger drive my car,” meaning their own sons. Young boys like Dan Redd and Darryl and Mark were smart, but they couldn’t get to school out of state and get that big jump on life from out the neighborhood. I got into college three hundred miles away—and those last weeks when the beef was running fast and furious, I tried not to be so simple-minded as to jeopardize a chance.

  About two weeks before I was supposed to go off to Connecticut, a year now after the chase, the fellas wanted me to drive the brigade down to the Inner Harbor to square off against Woodlawn one last time. Remembering how my father’s car had got kissed by the concrete block, I chilled. I heard that when it went down, it wasn’t like a Murphy Homes versus Lexington Terrace scrap. Woodlawn had sent mainly the little boys. The police got into the fight before anybody got stomped or thrown into the water. Still, everybody began their adult criminal record that night in ’86, and later it helped me that I wasn’t there. But I saved the car one night and burned it up the next. When I got back after my freshman year in college, still dropping off into sleep after six weeks on line for Kappa, I passed out at the wheel and hit a neighbor head-on. I never drove again until I was on my own.

  They were dog years between the end of high school and the end of college. Time folded every summer: scrapping in ’86, macking in ’87, bent in ’88, and banging a gun in ’89. I wouldn’t want to live through ’89 again, bringing all of that time together. We weren’t Oxfords so much anymore—just homeboys now—and only rocking the prep style as a kind of occasional comment on the absurdity of our condition. The world had turned Slick with a capital S. To me the hi-top fade had its funeral rites when the cornball Toms at Duke started wearing it. I even stopped collecting house music and let the Blastmaster speak for me with that record “Ghetto Music.”

  We knew what time it was, but used the powerful narcotics to keep ourselves from the numbers. Heroin was flowing like water that summer, and Saddlehead and Jidda, Paris and Los, all of them good ole North and Poplar Grove boys could get it. Poplar Grove. Longwood. Bloomingdale. The Junction. Then we started falling further down. In the wee hours we used to slumber outside some spot at Lombard and Arlington, not far from ole H. L. Mencken’s, blunted, waiting for Troy and Stanley to finish sniffing that dope. The world of joogy. Around my way they call it boy or joogy. Girl is Shirl caine—after Shirley Avenue where you go get nice. If you live in a town with a lot of joogy, everything else, like girl, seems real regular, jive legal. Joogy got me down from the psychedelics that they pumped up at college. Put it like this: in a world of disarray, joogy helps you to carry that thing.

  That summer, back from college, every time I left out the house I saw somebody with tool, and one time I’m making eye contact with this lean slickhead, shooting a .45 into the air to keep street fighters tearing up a park festival from scratching his Benz. When I caught his eye I thought he was going to finish me. No question, joogy helps keep that begging, crying look off of your face. It got to the point where the police would be detaining me for walking down the street, and I’m getting ill to handle the stress, which everybody say is imaginary. That summer of ’89 people was cross and fussing and we used to wear our Africa medallions at these pro-black rallies organized by Public Enemy. The next summer all the music was about killing each other over colored rags.

  The summer Sonny got shot my right hand Charm Sawyer had to hit a boy who was holding a pistol on him, and even though I was making speed toward a degree, I doubted it was fast enough. Hanging out with Sawyer was scrapping every night, which wasn’t really my style, especially after he busted my head on Muhammad’s basement floor. Plus it’s tough on your gear, my main way to get notice from the ladies. “A yo, Lair, hold my glasses,” he’d say as he sized up someone for a scrap. “Imma piece that nigger.” I would take them. Then he’d smirk and start throwing the dogs. He started out with skinny light-skin boys, but he was working his way up to short
, wiry, dark-skin men. When we went out, he would always say that he would either get some pussy, beat a nigger, or get blind ill by the time the sun came up. I didn’t understand his rage at the ceiling of possibility until a little later.

  Charm got took over by the Myth, which had a couple of ingredients. The Myth meant crazy outrageous athleticism in every activity. It helped the style of it if the head of your thing went past your navel, but it all came together in an attitude of defiant obdurateness that we called Hard. I would try to cool him out, because I was being taught something different at school, but every time I wasn’t around, he would trip the fuck out. At a party he shucked off all his gear and swung around ill until he got what he was looking for. One night Charm fouled a catatonic girl’s mouth to stop niggers from running a train on her, but she still had to leave the city. He was getting known and some people were afraid of him. He had mastered the art of drilling any girl, no matter her look, no matter her size, at any time. Like, Pretty Ricky had written a book on the art of seduction. He had this snakelike way of peering into the eyes of the slinkiest, the trickiest, the flyest—the LaShawns, Letitias, Sheilas, and Keishas—the girls who had had so much exposure to slick that I didn’t even know what to say to them. I only tried to win by light touch. But Charm didn’t work in a whole lot of small talk or eye contact or hand-holding. He went on the Mandingo principle. He knocked down big China up against the freezer in my basement and she clawed grooves into his back. It took years for me to know what he did to make her cry out and lose control like that. She was so wide open every time we went with armloads of Guess apparel to the department store counter where she worked, it was like cashing a check.

  I got a strong dose of the Myth too, the dreamworld life of super-nigger. One night of the dream me and Charm drank a couple of quarts of Mad Dog and picked up some wild ill broads from the Brook down at the Harbor. I only had one condom, used it on the girl I knew was out there, and ran raw in Sheba, thinking the odds were better because it was her time of the month. I thought another threshold of existence was at hand. Even the girls laughed about it, lil Lair happy cause he trimmed twice. The ill vibe kept clicking, though. At a party in the Junction Charm hit this boy in the face and broke his nose, and the jam was at the house of the broke-nose boy cousin. We had to fight Charm to get him out of there. Then, sitting five deep in a two-door Sentra trying to cool out, two hoppers came up on us. One skinny boy was on the street side, and a bald-headed light-skin boy with a shimmer in his mouth stood in the back. Skinny boy tapped the window with something metal. I heard a crack and the glass breaking, and we were all shouting to Pretty Ricky, “Drive!” “I’m hit!” I was pushing Charm and Knuckles so hard to peel away from that hot one searching for my ass. Decades of nightmares about that gunman.

  About a week later, Sawyer and Sonny were throwing a cranker on Maryland Avenue, the little club district anchored by old-school Odell’s (You’ll Know If You Belong, the T-shirt used to say), house music Cignel’s, and citywide Godfrey’s Famous Ballroom. All the young hustlers and fly girls hung out in that zone. I was a little late getting to the jam.

  I’d get the feeling of supreme confidence and contentment, just walking up the street and wading into a real players’ crowd. Hundreds deep with hustlers and fly girls—herb bumping—passing quarts of Mad Dog and Red Bull malt liquor. Knowing my hair was faded right and I was getting dap from the players and intimate touches from Sheila, Kim, Lisa, and Tanya. “The Sound” by Reese & Santonio filling the air with our versions of the djembe, dundun, kenkeni, and sangban. Taking everybody way back. It’s better than caine. Demerara. Ouagadougou.

  Mighty Joe Young and me was nice, dipping up Murlin Avenue, near the bridge, gandering over to the zone from the Armory subway stop. All of a sudden, Ed from Bloomingdale drove by us and shouted, “Sonny got shot!” Old school, we ran the mile or two down the street. Ten minutes later we’re outside the operating room at University Shock Trauma, screaming on the state trooper and the young Asian lady doctor who said, “Your friend didn’t make it.” She spat out that shit to me like I put the gun on Sonny.

  I felt like the hospital was run by people with the slickhead mentality, that mentality that claims a nigger ain’t shit. Me, I always wanted to redeem a nigger. The state trooper, a brother who understood, saved that bitch’s Chinese ass. I wanted to do something. Sonny’s parents came in a few minutes later. Crushed. Crying scene. Me and Mighty Joe Young walked down to the central police station where they were taking Sawyer’s statement. We were amped up, spreading the word at hangouts like Crazy John’s and El Dorado’s, where we ran into some of our people.

  Sawyer had been standing next to Sonny when they got stuck up. Sawyer’s antsy brother Chester had a few dollars on him and gated up the alley, so Sawyer and Sonny, on the other side of the car, booked for it too. Rodney, Birdman, Dern, and Rock could only stand with their hands in the air while the runners gave it up. Sonny and a guy sitting on some steps got shot by a .22 rifle.

  A lot of people blamed Sawyer for Sonny’s murder, but I told him I was happy he had made it. He was my boy. We had been lightweight wilding up until then. No QP, no Z, no eight-ball, no stick-up, no home invasion, no pop tool, no cold-blooded train. Sawyer, James Brown, and Rock had taken a white boy for bad once. And Sawyer had been seen running down the street with a television, which had kind of got the police looking. Omar had taken a girl’s telephone and her father’s horse pistol. Sawyer and I had run a couple of gees on some wild young girls, and one time a grown woman did start fussing, but it was his cousin. I remember, because I left my high school graduation watch at her house. I thought if you were going to do the do, you had to take off everything. One night a little boy who had connections had tried to kill James Brown with a bat down at Cignel’s, and we beefed over our heads, but James Brown let the thing go. I don’t know how many times I got in a car with folk I ain’t really know, on their way from or to do I don’t know what. It was all right there. Rock, Darius, Worly, Chucky, Taft, Fats, Paris, Wood, Flip, Yippy, Champ, Ringfrail, Hondo, Reds. A whole lot of people got caught up in the mix.

  What really hurt everybody was that Sonny had a whole lot of heart. He was a stand-up cat who had the will to make a difference. Shirt-off-his-back type of cat. Break a bottle over a big nigger’s head for you cat. If the police looked for the killers, three men and a woman, they never found anybody. I had been in the Five-O palace on Baltimore Street and seen them lounging like they were on the whites-only floors. I had seen an office with a Confederate flag in it and some other of that old-timey, Frederick County shit. They always acted like Sonny’s murder was “drug-related,” like half of three hundred other murders that year. It hurts to think about his unsolved killing, twenty years later.

  After Sonny’s funeral, we started linking with cats who had hurt people, hoping to luck up onto that stick-up boy with the letter G on his hat who had gunned him down. The night after they shot Sonny we ganged into a dark room lit by the dutchy going around. A powerfully muscled old head addressed the mourning circle. “I gits a nut every time I pull the trigger.” None of us ever forgot his sincerity. He said it to us like he was confessing something deep and personal, something that came out of the soul. I believed him.

  Since Sonny had finished a year at Morehouse, the less stand-up guys figured that life wasn’t worth struggling for. They started to get ill after the funeral like it was a paying job. I knew I didn’t have as much heart as Sonny, so I did my share in the dim rooms. The morning after the funeral me and Clifton tried to run a gee on a young girl with a glass eye, not knowing she was five seconds from tricking on the corner—and Clifton months away hisself from the cemetery. Sometimes you would even pity a cat and bip half that bag of dope so that they wouldn’t get hooked. One reason I stopped getting high was that Rock, my man from the bus stop days, pulled me up strong about looking weak, chasing. Sometimes you need to see yourself through the eyes of someone who has looked up to you. Then he got caught
with a package and sat down at the Department of Corrections at Jessup, so I really tried to pull my pants up. After about eighteen months, overdoses began and cats started heading out of state to get away. Then there were the guys among us who thought that joogy wouldn’t get to them, since they weren’t shooting it up. But next thing they started flashing pistols to the countergirl at Roy Rogers. That gets you a seven-year bit at Hagerstown, or you could get lucky and go to Jessup where people at least can visit you.

  A couple of the cats really tried to make a fortune. If Sawyer was my right hand, then Muhammad was my heart. When I decided to make a break for school in 1990, after my father went back to Guinea, Muhammad told me soberly, “Lair. Imma make a million dollars this year.” The hustler thing was in the air. All of the rap music was trying to help you know the I Ching of Rayful and Alpo and our hometown man Peanut King. We all knew by heart the DC anthem “Stone Cold Hustler” and G Rap’s “Road to the Riches.” But I was so deep into reading about the COINTELPRO thing and what they did to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that none of the stories about stacking chips could reach me. Besides the fact that all the New York cats at school would be flipping out over the Bodymore stories I was telling, or the time my homeboys fell through for a visit, joogy-deep. Anyway, Muhammad acted hurt when I looked away from him.

  For about two years we didn’t have that much rap for each other, a homeboy blood problem. Meanwhile Muhammad tried to get water from the rock with Rodney Glide. They stretched out until they tripped. Eventually the state of Pennsylvania took the wind out of Glide’s sails for eight years, twenty-nine miles west of Philly at Graterford. I remember reading the newspapers about the old crew when I was in graduate school in California, a million miles away.

  Sawyer turned the Myth in a new direction. He laid up with a Jamaican sister, got back in school, and earned a degree. He won an internship with a congressman from the streets who knew where he was coming from. He started working with the hoppers at George B. Murphy Homes high-rises, before it got blown up to make way for condos and the university hospital, where they work on getting the bug out. Just going down to Murphy Homes was a trip to us back in the day, where life and death, crime and punishment was wide open, like at my cousin’s house on Myrtle Avenue, where Carmello’s from. “Fat Boy’s out! Fat Boy’s out! Girl on green. Girl on green,” is how the touts would run it down.