Paper Chasers

by Mark Anthony

  The moment I stepped foot inside the church I heard the sound of an organ playing that same sad funeral song that I hear at every black person’s funeral. I also heard loud wailing and sobbing all around me. Some people were so overcome with emotion that they fainted. Others had to be restrained from grabbing the casket. It was an extremely emotionally charged and sad situation. I guess when someone so young and with such potential dies so suddenly it has a greater shock on people’s emotions than when a person dies who has a disease or has lived a full life. Everyone was just in shock that Richie was gone so unexpectedly.

  My head suddenly began to feel very light. From that point on I didn’t notice anyone that was around me. It was like I had slipped into another world. I heard people saying a bunch of that funeral mumbo jumbo such as, “Hi, how are you doing? How are you coping with it?” I would answer them, but my glossy eyes never made contact with the person to whom I was speaking. It was as if I was ignoring them.

  My girl, Sabine, who was very emotional herself, stood next to me and escorted me to my seat. Elizabeth was already sitting down. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Elizabeth. I sensed she was also crying. There was just no way that I was gonna look at her.

  I took my seat next to Sabine and Elizabeth. Randy, Tee, and Kwame also came and sat in the same pew as me. My body was getting numb. I was totally out of it. Someone was preparing to deliver the eulogy. I heard the speaker, but I really wasn’t paying attention. And I wasn’t even being a gentleman. I mean there was my girl, sitting there crying, and I didn’t even put my arm around her or help wipe away her tears.

  Time was moving so slowly.

  Then came the time for all of those who wanted to look at Richie’s body one last time to do so. Almost everybody got up and formed a line. One by one, people walked past his coffin. The coffin was money green—Richie’s favorite color. Elizabeth couldn’t get herself to walk past the casket. She said it was just too much for her to handle.

  Others stopped and stared at Richie’s lifeless body. Some shook their heads in disbelief while others kissed and touched his lifeless body. This, by far, was the gloomiest part of the funeral. It was marked by observers who just couldn’t bear the grief and had to be restrained and led away from the casket.

  All of Fourth Crew walked past Richie and said good-bye to him. I stopped at his coffin and stared at his body. I felt him looking at me. Although music was playing, I no longer heard it. My world was in total silence as I looked into his coffin.

  Without blinking, I stared at him. Then I reached out and touched his hand. It felt somewhat cold and hard. I knew he could feel my hand. I kept my hand on his, then I started to break down. Ah man . . . Ah man, ah man, I thought. I had never cried at a funeral before. I’d never even cried in front of my girl. Sabine was right behind me and she just stared at me, but she didn’t say a word.

  “I’m sorry, Richie,” I said very quietly as I cried. “Are you still my man? We still boys, right?” Why wouldn’t he answer? When was he gonna answer me? I waited for as long as I could for an answer but I never got one, so I prepared myself to leave the coffin. Before I left, I kissed Richie on his forehead. “Richie, I love you, man,” I said. “I’ll see you, kid. I’ma see you.”

  Then I walked back to my seat. Sabine held my hand and followed behind me as we made our way back to our seats and sat back down. I was still crying. Sabine hugged me.

  “It’s gonna be OK, honey. He’s going to a better place. He’s with God right now. It’ll be all right,” Sabine said. Then she wiped my tears away.

  I was beginning to come back to reality a little bit, but not totally. We sat for a little while longer, and before long people were going to the microphone and speaking about the good times that they had spent with Richie.

  After the last person spoke, someone sang “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away,” and then people started slowly filing out of the church.

  Everyone piled into their cars. Relatives and close friends got into limousines. Fourth Crew had two limos parked in front of the church, waiting to take us to a cemetery out on Long Island.

  The ride to the cemetery wasn’t too long. But when we arrived at the cemetery, I just couldn’t get out of the limo.

  While everyone else went to go see Richie lowered into the ground, Sabine and I stayed inside the limo. I was just about fully back from the shock that I had slipped into when I first walked into the church.

  “Yo . . . I cried, Sabine,” I said with a slight smile on my face.

  “It’s all right, baby. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yeah, there isn’t,” I said after I thought for a moment. “Sabine, I can’t watch them put Richie into the ground. I just can’t watch that!”

  “It’ll be all right, Mark,” Sabine reassured me, calling me by my real name. “I’ll be with you.”

  Again I started to cry as Sabine gestured for my hand and helped me out of the limo. Together we walked across the grass and toward the spot where everyone was standing. A cemetery service was taking place for Richie.

  Since it was still drizzling from earlier, everyone was forced to stand under this tent. The coffin was decorated with all types of flowers. A few people spoke and then I realized that they weren’t going to put Richie into the ground right away, at least not until all of the rain had completely stopped. The electrical equipment which was used to lower the coffin into the ground might have gotten wet and caused problems.

  As everyone started to disperse back to their cars, I took one more long look at the coffin, shook my head, and turned to walk back to the limo. Once inside the limo, I started to panic. Yo, I forgot to write Richie a poem, I thought. I didn’t have the time to write what I wanted to write and what I had promised myself that I would write, but I asked Sabine for a piece of tissue and a pen, and then I scribbled this poem:

  To Richie

  Look into the world Tell me what you see. Maybe you see hope Maybe you see me. I certainly see fear I certainly see despair,

  Despair is sure to be me. Definite is hope, Hope waiting to be set free. I know the better of these But which one will I find? Maybe just maybe it’ll be hope.

  Only if you help me, Richie, Help me find the grace of God.

  Love Mark

  I got out of the limo and ran back over to the gravesite. I tossed the piece of tissue and I watched it softly float to the spot where the casket would be set into the ground. That way it would be waiting for Richie when he got there. I looked at the coffin one last time.

  “Richie, you’re with God now,” I said. “So don’t worry about a thing. You’ll be a’ight. We love you.” Then I yelled as loudly as I could, “Fourth crew!” as I jogged back jogged back to the limo.

  The limo ride back home was slow because it started to rain very hard. It was raining about as hard as it did on the night Richie was killed. I remember thinking how it was a good thing that it had rained on the night Richie was murdered, simply because the rain helped to wash away the blood stains that were left on the concrete from Richie’s wound.

  Fourth Crew

  The funeral was finally over. I’d taken off my suit and I put on my baggy jeans along with my high-top green and white Nike Airs. I then placed my gold caps into my mouth and I clipped my beeper to my pants.

  “Paula! Paula! If Ma is looking for me, let her know that I’ll probably be at Randy’s house, or I might still be over Richie’s crib eating dinner, a’ight?”

  “OK, be careful,” my sister hollered back as she told me that she would be dropping by as well.

  With that, I walked across the street to Randy’s house and knocked on his door. I called out for him to come open the door. Randy had been slow at everything he’d ever done in his entire life, so finally, after about five minutes of knocking, he opened the door for me.

  “Yo, man, you ain’t change your clothes yet?” I asked as I followed him into his basement. Randy still had the same clothes on that he’d worn to the funer
al.

  “Yo, hurry up, man! Everybody’s already at Richie’s house. His family cooked dinner for us. We gotta bounce.”As Randy switched outfits we started kickin’ it with each other.

  “Holz,” he said, “I can’t believe Richie is dead.”

  “Word! I know what you mean.” Although death for us was nothing new—we all knew people who in the past had been killed—Richie was the first one from Fourth Crew to be exterminated.

  The crew was so close that we might as well have been family. There were so many of us. We even had peoples in Virginia who were down with the crew. Aside from the females that were in the crew, the main members of Fourth Crew were as follows: me, Randy, Latiefe, Dwight, Kwame, Xavier, Donnie, Erik, Claudius, J.P, and Reggie.

  My government name is Mark Holsey. However, for years everybody called me Holz. Randy’s birth name was Randolph. Everyone called Latiefe, Tee. And there was Dwight, who went by the alias Dee, or Big Dee, or Godfather Dee. Xavier was known as X, and Claudius was the six foot, five inch more-hops-than-Mike-Jordan-basketball-man-child. Reggie stayed in Virginia because his dumb jackass joined the Marines after high school and he got shipped to Virginia like a slave.

  We all grew up together. All of us lived on the same block, either right across the street or down the block from one another. We hailed from a town in Queens, New York called Laurelton, or L.A. for short. More specificly, we grew up on 234th Street in Laurelton Queens, L.A. consisted of many rectangular streets and perpendicular avenues. There was 221st, 222nd, 230th, Francis Lewis Boulevard, and many, many more blocks. But the main street that ran through all of Laurelton was called Merrick Boulevard.

  Merrick Boulevard was where all of the action took place. It helped New York earn its reputation as a fast-paced, crime-filled city. All kinds of dirt went down on Merrick—everything from drug dealing, to killings, to numbers running, to prostitution, and much more. Merrick Boulevard had literally, although illegally, made millionaires out of a few brothers.

  Since we lived on 234th Street, we used the word fourth from the last number in 234, and that’s how we named our crew. We pronounced it “Forf Crew,” because saying “Fourth” sounded too proper and white.

  As a crew we were mixed up in all sorts of things, including crime. But we weren’t a gang because usually gangs are of negative mentalities from their origin. Fourth Crew was basically about positive actions. Everyone in the crew had roots in a positive mentality, in the sense that we all came from good middle class families. Yeah, we got mixed up in wrongdoings, but so did almost everyone else in America, including the government and its officials.

  On occasion we had been compelled to bring it to a nigga. We’d definitely stomped out many other crews and gangs. We’d gotten into a lot of beef in our day, but no one in the crew had ever been murdered, not until Richie was killed. I guess you could say that it was bound to happen sooner or later. But even with Richie’s death, it was not like the crew was just gonna dismantle. We would continue on as a crew, no doubt about it.

  In the past, Kwame had brushed or flirted with death on a number of occasions. Latiefe had been slashed on the back of the head and neck and needed almost one hundred stitches to close the gash—a gash wound that left a permanent nasty scar on his head. But death, never, at least not in Fourth Crew.

  Randy was finally ready. We walked down to Richie’s house, and when we arrived we mixed in with the rest of the crew members that were already there. My sister was there, as was her best friend, Nia. Sabine and Liz were also there, and everybody, including Richie’s family, was all packed shoulder to shoulder inside the house. We ate the typical black Sunday meal, which consisted of cornbread, black-eyed peas, collard greens, and ribs drowned in barbecue sauce.

  As we ate we exchanged our different memories of Richie. I didn’t say anything out loud, but the memory that stuck out most in my mind was Richie’s common sense. He was hip to the streets and may have had a temper but he definitely had a lot of common sense. I guess that in and of itself was not really a memory of a past event, but that was what I remembered.

  Richie and I always discussed things like what it was that we thought led blacks to kill one another, or why there were so many drug dealers and things of that nature. We constantly rapped about the problems of the black community. We would also discuss the different stereotypes that went along with being an inner city black male.

  We would discuss all kinds of topics, including things like the New York City public school system, college, religion, the thought of “really knowing” yourself, and things like that.

  Like I remember one time when these Jehovah’s Witnesses had approached me and Richie on the streets and when they were done talking to us Richie said to me, “Yo Holz, you know what their main problem is?”

  “What?”

  “They too damn religious with all their rules and regulations but they don’t have a relationship with God and there’s a big difference between being religious and having a relationship with God,” Richie said.

  “Whatchu mean by that?” I asked Richie.

  “I mean just what I said. Like all you have to do is read the Bible and if you read about Jesus all you gonna see is that he chilled with and hung out with everybody and he never was giving people a whole bunch of religious rules and regulations like these people do who go to church now a days. All Jesus ever did was talk to people and let them know that they should have a relationship with God. That’s it. He kept it simple and religious free. And then you got the religious people who came later and screwed everything up.”

  I nodded at Richie because I got what he was trying to get at and at the same time I wondered how in the hell did he have so much deep insight on everything. Just about anything that you could name, I’d bet money on it that we had discussed it. We both used to have theories on the negative and rising statistics relating to black males.

  Richie always said that the reason for the rising negative statistics on black males, such as the number of black males in jail and the amount of black on black crime, was because of one or more elements going bad in a black male’s life. He called those elements, “The Elements To A Black Man’s Fist.” He always talked about the black man’s fist as representing anger. Usually that same anger was used to kill someone, pull a trigger, or knock someone out.

  Richie theorized that that same fist could easily be opened up into a gentle hand, a hand used for a warm handshake or used to grip a pen or grasp a book. I remember how frustrated he would get with society.

  “Society,” he would say, “could stop the negative statistics from rising. They could do this by identifying the specific elements in a black man’s life that needed fixing, and then help to fix them.” He theorized that the prevention, the detection, and the correction of a cancerous element was the difference between disaster and prosperity in a black man’s life. I guess Richie’s love for his girl is the only thing that can explain why he went against his own theories and brought it to Cory on the day that he was killed.

  As I sat in Richie’s house that day eating food and celebrating his passing to the other side of life, I said to myself, One day I’m gonna tell the world about those elements so that they’ll be able to help us. That way Richie’s death won’t be in vain.

  As we highlighted Richie’s life, his mother kept herself busy by serving food to everyone. I felt for her because I saw her as an innocent victim of a senseless reaction which was caused by a huge social problem. She’d lost someone precious, someone whom she helped to create, someone that she carried inside her for nine months, someone that she’d been patient with, nurtured, trained, and raised. She was a tough, strong lady, though.

  All of the food was just about gone. We had been there for nearly an hour and a half. Latiefe was saying that he thought it was time for us to leave. So one by one we thanked, kissed, and hugged Richie’s mom. With a look in her eyes as if she was saying good-bye to us forever, she thanked us for coming. I told her to stay strong. I
also told her that if there was anything she needed that she should not hesitate to ask.

  Most of the crew went back to Randy’s house. That was usually where we hung out. If we weren’t at Randy’s crib, we would all pile up at Latiefe’s grandmother’s crib.

  While at Randy’s house, Dwight started talking about how it was imperative that we kill Cory. We all joined in and added our input, trying to come up with the perfect murder plot. We all visualized that this would serve as a payback to Cory and as a favor to Rich.

  As we plotted, I remember thinking to myself that Richie wasn’t the type of person who would have wanted us to kill Cory. If we were to kill Cory, it would have just added to society’s misconception that all black men were nothing more than a bunch of hoodlums. I was willing to bet one hundred dollars that Richie was probably turning over in his grave due to our stupidity.

  “Word is bond!” Dwight said. “When we see that nigga Cory, we’re gonna empty a whole clip on him and then put one in his head to make sure he’s dead! He’s gonna be so swiss-cheesed up that his moms is gonna have to have a closed casket funeral!”

  “Yeah!” we all agreed with Dwight.

  It was getting late so some of us started getting ready to bounce home. After a few minutes everyone left except for Randy and me.

  “Holz, man, it’s only June eighth. The summer is practically just starting and look at how it started. It started with Richie’s death,” Randy said after everyone had left.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just ill man . . . real ill. But it gets worse every year.”

  “I know, you’re absolutely right. But, Holz, man, you better get used to it ’cause mad heads is gonna fly this summer. Just watch!”

  Randy meant that a number of people would die this summer, and I knew that his grave prediction most likely would be right on the money.

  “Holz, remember last summer and how wild it was around here? I’m surprised we even made it to 1991. I just hope I make it through this summer, ’cause once the summer is over, things start to cool down, you know? I’m only twenty-years-old. I don’t wanna die yet. I ain’t ready.”