Synergy

by Georgia Payne

  In school, Tip was always playing sports. He felt like he didn’t even have to try that hard sometimes, like his natural height gave him the advantage he needed over the other kids who maybe had the same skill as him. When he was around thirteen, he decided he would get himself a scholarship to play basketball in college, but he never got there. Like many in his school, he fell victim to the peer pressure of the streets. It only took one car crash when he was fifteen and he shattered his knee into tiny pieces. Though he had surgery, the orthopaedic surgeon told him the break was so bad, it couldn’t be pinned or screwed, and so he had a pallectomy; an almost full removal of his kneecap as it was so badly shattered. From then, his dream was over. He had some physical therapy, but his knee was never the same, and so without an actual scholarship or hope of continuing, he quit sports pretty much altogether.

  As Dee watched her friend duck through the door, she smiled as her son ran over to him in excitement. Tip bent down to pick Tushaun up and as he pulled him to his shoulders, Tushaun squealed in excitement. Tip was tall to a lot of people, but to the two-year-old, it was like taking a trip to the moon.

  “How you doing lil’ man?” Tip asked, as Tushaun rested his hands on his shaved head as he sat contently on his shoulders, going along for the ride.

  “Good,” Tushaun replied, as Tip moved across the room to where Dee stood.

  Dee was prepared for his arrival, wearing some of her highest heels so she didn’t feel as dwarfed by him. She was used to feeling short generally anyway, but with Tip it was always to another level. Wearing flat shoes around him just wasn’t doable. She remembered the first time she met him, when they were thirteen, and he’d called her a short ass. It was safe to say they didn’t get onto the greatest start, but soon their words were used more for fun than insult, and they became best friends. Most people thought they were a couple, but they both always had other partners, and they saw each other more like brother and sister as they grew up. Tip was the first boy she felt she could talk to because he actually wanted to listen to what she had to say, and wasn’t just interested in what was in her pants.

  “Hey Beautiful,” Tip said as he moved to her small frame, bending down the best he could as Tushaun balanced on his shoulders. Dee reached up and received the kiss he planted on her cheek and smiled.

  “Hey yourself stranger, where you been at?”

  Tip rolled his eyes in reply. “Baby mama drama”

  Dee nodded in understanding, and moved to the kitchen, gesturing for Tip to follow. As she went to the fridge to look for them some beers, she asked him what had been happening. Tip had four baby mamas in total, and they all had their own issues, so when he told her he was having baby mama drama, it really could be any one of them, for any number of reasons.

  Tip always looked bad to people when he told them he had five kids to four moms, but people didn’t know the history behind it. He had actually had his first son when he was only fourteen. It was a case of horny teenagers that didn’t know about protection. It was stupid but it had happened and he couldn’t go back and change it. He wasn’t a father to the child when he was a teenager; he really wasn’t in that frame of mind. The mother wasn’t either, and so her parents had taken responsibility of the child. From then, the baby’s mother stopped talking to him and got into a bad crowd. Consequently, Tip had only got in touch with his child when he was seventeen and he had got a third lady pregnant. It wasn’t easy trying to get access to Tyson; by that time he was already three and didn’t know Tip from anybody, but luckily, his grandparents were understanding. They were actually pleased that he’d made the effort, as sadly, the child’s mother Janelle didn’t. She saw him on the odd occasion but by the time she got heavily into drugs, her visits became more sporadic and her parents banned her from seeing the child.

  Tip’s second child came along when he was sixteen to an older woman, a woman ten years his senior. They’d met at a party, and he was in awe that an older girl was interested. Technically, it was probably rape since he was still fifteen at the time, but he made no complaints. His second son Makai allowed him to grow up a little bit, as he took responsibility for his actions, and was part of his life. While the woman moved on and got married, she allowed him to see his son on occasions and made the time for him to come over, something he appreciated as he grew older. By the time he was eighteen, Kara, Tip’s on/off girlfriend through school had twin girls by him. Lovelle and Lilly sealed the deal for him, and he moved in together with Kara. He really did fall for her, and the two of them raised the twins happily. Two years ago, they had another daughter, but Sienna was stillborn. Tip had heard of couples who broke up after suffering tragedy with children, but he never understood it. After all, he loved Kara with all his heart. He thought she was his beginning and his end, but something changed in her when Sienna died. She became different, distant. They went through all the usual stages of grief together. The denial, the heartache, the anger and confusion, but when all was said and done, Kara didn’t want to know him anymore. She said she loved him but she never kissed him, never hugged him, she was never intimate. He couldn’t live with it anymore so he had to leave. He could still be a dad to his girls in another house.

  As Dee pulled two cold bottles of beer out of the fridge and proceeded to open them, Tip told her of his latest drama. Dee listened intently as she handed him a beer and then bribed Tushaun with the TV remote so he would leave the room for the remainder of the conversation. She didn’t want her young son listening into something that was bound to be messy. Tip leaned against the kitchen counter after he put Tushaun down and swigged on his beer before starting.

  “So...if you ain’t know already me and Kara been fucking” he started, and before he could get any further, Dee gasped.

  “No!” she said in disbelief, but Tip ignored her shock and carried on.

  “Yeah. So, I thought we was getting back together, you know? So the other night I’m in the club and some bitch is grinding up on all these dudes and, turn out, it’s Kara.”

  Once more, Dee said ‘No!’ as she got stuck into his story.

  “Yeah. So I’m like, the fuck? Then she see me and she all over me like a rash, like I ain’t just see her with all these other dudes.”

  “What did you do?” Dee asked, swigging on her beer as she leaned on the other counter.

  “I tol’ that bitch where to go, ain’t nobody playing me like that. I’m her kids father or I’m her dude, I ain’t try’na be sharing with nobody.”

  Dee shook her head before giving her two cents.

  “I would have slapped that bitch if she did that in front of me, she the one that acted like she ain’t want nobody but suddenly she want all these other dudes? Hell no, you can’t play that grief card forever.”

  “That’s what I told her,” Tip started, sipping his beer. “But ever since she been blowing up my phone everyday leaving me messages and shit.”

  “You gonna get back with her?” Dee asked with an air of curiosity. Even if Kara was playing crazy, Dee knew Tip loved her. However, after a second of debate in his own head on how to answer that question, Tip simply shrugged.

  Chapter 10 – Locked Up

  Dee

  Jarell Thompson was known in his neighbourhood for selling the best kush in the area. From the age of 16, he started selling weed as a means of some extra money, but by the time he was 18, he realised to stand out, he needed to have the best product available. Now, at the tender age of 26, he had the best of anything anyone could want. A few months after his 18th birthday, he made a few new connections and started to sell heavier drugs, mainly crack and heroin. It was sad to see the crack fiends so helpless and broken when they were hammering his door down at 3am but he was only doing what everybody else was doing, making a living, and surviving. He’d left school with no education and he’d never had a real job. Growing up, young boys looked up to the hustlers, admiring and respecting their grind, knowing that it was a serious choice for them when they left school. Jare
ll had dreams like everybody else when he was a kid, but as the years went by, they diminished day by day. He looked around and saw the type of people in his neighbourhood and knew there was nothing great to be had there. He knew nobody ever got out of the hood, and decided he was stupid for thinking otherwise. His mother had been a drug addict growing up, and he’d seen what they could do to a person and their family, but still, he did it because he didn’t have any other choice, other than to lose his home and be broke.

  As a young teen, Jarell wanted to make it in the music industry. He and his friends would rap on the streets, making beats and freestyling to anybody that would listen. They’d tell each other that it would only take one of them to make it, and then that person could bring all the others on board, take them and their families out of the streets. They really, truly believed it would happen. Jarell was a twin, and he and his twin brother Mario would be running round the streets all night writing songs and spitting bars, dreaming about what they would buy when they got rich. At thirteen, Mario’s life was cut short, and Jarell’s dream died with his brother.

  Though Jarell now tried his best to keep out of the eyes of the law, keeping the police off his back wasn’t always easy in his town. There was often police sniffing around those areas to try and catch someone doing something wrong. He truly believed there was still a lot of police racism and he would hear stories of young black men who had been arrested or beaten or even just stopped on the street for no reason at all. Detroit had a huge history of racism and police brutality, homing the race riots in the 1940’s and again in the 1960’s. Today, Jarell could see the everyday divide still existing between races in the city, not only with the police but with everyday members of society.

  In the early hours of April 21st, Jarell was sitting outside a friend’s house swigging a beer after partying through the night. He was sat with around five men, all African American, laughing and joking, when a passing group of Caucasian men stopped outside the house and began spouting abuse at Jarell and his friends. Unfazed, they retaliated with the abuse, assuming the men would keep on walking and leave them be, however, one man with a skin head and a tattoo on his neck started hurling racial abuse at the men, stepping onto their porch. Jarell stood up to confront the man before he was punched to the nose, charged into the wall and threatened with a knife. Jarell’s friends managed to grapple the guy to the floor before the other men charged toward them, and a violent fight ensued between the two groups. When the police showed up to the incident, they pulled Jarell off the skin head and proceeded to handcuff him before anybody had dealt with the skin-head. While he was being handcuffed, he was punched a number of times by the skin-head with no fast reaction by the police. All the men at the incident were subsequently released with most of the Caucasian men being released without charge. Jarell had numerous previous convictions, so he was arrested and charged with assault.

  Dee had seen her brother arrested before, and she had been to visit him in jail, but it was only a matter of months. This time around, Jarell was sentenced to a year’s minimum sentence. His four year old daughter was forbidden to visit both by her mother and Jarell himself; he didn’t want his daughter to visit a place like that. As far as his daughter knew, daddy was working away. Dee had told this line to her own son too, as a way to protect him. She didn’t think it was right that a child so young should know about jail, or the bad in the world. As much as her brother could annoy her, she loved him immensely, and was extremely close to him. His being in jail was a hard pill to swallow, especially as she knew her brother was not a violent man. If anybody should be arrested for assault, it should be her. She had punched a customer only a few weeks ago for touching her up at the club. Though Jarell was the one who taught her to fight as a child, he didn’t go looking for a fight, they seemed to come to him. Regardless, he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this time, his family would pay the consequence while they waited a year for his release.

  It wasn’t the first time Jarell had been in trouble with the law, and his family wondered whether it would be the last. Even as a child, trouble seemed to follow Jarell around. Some stuck up mom at Dee’s school had told her mother that there was no such thing as trouble following somebody around. ‘Trouble don’t follow people, trouble gets invited,’ she’d said, as she walked her son away from the school. As Monique watched the stuck up woman walk away with a scowl on her face, the woman turned around once more and added ‘bad kids cause trouble.’ Monique had never been good with words, though she had always been good with her fists, so when the woman decided to turn back around and make her snide comment, Monique had charged toward the woman shouting ‘Oh, you gon’ find some trouble!’ For once, Jarell stopped a fight by holding his mother still and telling the woman and her son to leave.

  Dee had had her fair share of trouble too, aside from the fights and drunk nights of being a teenager, she also had some intervention from the police. When she was around sixteen she was cautioned for possession and later put in a jail cell for the night for being drunk and disorderly. Now, at 22 she had a suspended license for Driving under the influence. She wasn’t proud of her run-ins with the police, but she didn’t let it phase her either. She knew as far as some people were concerned, she was stupid for those things, but she knew she was doing a lot better than most of her neighbourhood. After all, she’d never really caused any harm to anybody.

  Though a year wasn’t the worst sentence that could have been handed down, Dee knew she would miss her brother while he was gone, and planned to visit if she could. Though the two of them could argue like any brother and sister, she really did love her brother. Growing up, it was always the two of them running things, and with her sister being a lot younger, Dee and Jarell were always closer than Kiki was to her brother. Kiki had a different father to her siblings, and while Dee would never regard her sister as a half-sister even though genetically she was, she wondered if this contributed. Jarell was also regarded highly in their mother’s eyes. As her first child and only son, he held a special place in her heart. Even though he was all grown up with a family of his own, she worried about him like he was still her little boy, and she knew she had reason to.

  Jason

  It was D-day for Jason and Tom as they got ready to leave home and head back to Detroit. His mother had already shed a tear as she hugged him and his grandmother had made dishes for him to take back to the hotel with him. She didn’t want him eating ‘any of that nasty hotel food.’ Though there was nothing wrong with the hotel’s food, he was pleased she’d made him some dishes; it was like taking a piece of home with him. Tom’s grandmother had also packed him some dishes to take with him, and the boys would probably share them out once they got to Detroit; they had often eaten at each other’s Grans house. Being that they grew up in the same era, their food was almost alike, both equally delicious with slight differences.

  As the pair of them sat in the car which was heading to the airport, there was a sombre energy in the air. Neither of them really had anything to say to each other; they knew they would both be thinking and feeling in unison about what it meant to head back to work. They both loved their jobs, but leaving home was always hard. Tom was slouched down in the seat with his tablet in his lap, playing some stupid game that was frustratingly addictive. He sighed and scoffed everytime he failed the level, but he continued replaying quietly. Jason on the other hand was talking to one of the producers back in Detroit. He told him of the ideas he had for a new song and the producer was enthusiastic to get to work as soon as he landed. For now Jason had titled the song ‘Beautiful Mind’, about a girl who was stunningly beautiful on the outside, but had more going on inside that intrigued him.

  As Jason sat waiting for a reply, he browsed his social media accounts, not really reading people’s ramblings properly, but skimming to see if he’d missed anything exciting. As soon as he saw Dee’s name, he stopped to read what she had written. A short status, though informative all in one. �
��Year’s countdown starts today #freejarell” Jason raised his eyebrows as he read the status. Jarell, the brother he had met only a few weeks ago, had been arrested? Jail for a year? He realised it was silly to be surprised as he couldn’t know somebody he had only met once and briefly at that, but he remembered him coming across perfectly nice. He wasn’t somebody he would consider to be locked away for a year; still he knew he couldn’t know what goes on behind closed doors.

  “What you looking surprised at?” Tom asked, as he caught his friend’s expression between levels.

  “Dee’s brothers in jail” Jason replied, barely looking up from his phone.

  “Oh” Tom replied, letting the information sink in as he concentrated on his game. After a minute he asked “Didn’t you know?”

  “No, he wasn’t when I met him a few weeks ago. Seemed like a nice guy.”

  “Guess you don’t really know people” Tom mused, as he failed level 36 again and decided to close the case on his tablet sitting it down on his lap.

  Jason nodded in agreement, taking Tom’s lead and putting his phone back into his pocket. He sunk down into the comfortable car seat and rested his head back, closing his eyes for a second.

  Jason thought about what he would do when he got to Detroit. He imagined recording the song he had written and imagined the type of music he would help write for it. He already had an idea of the melody but just needed to get his hands on the instruments to test it out. He had always prided himself on writing his own lyrics and music. He learnt to play the piano as a young child and when he got to around ten, he asked his mother for guitar lessons, to which she instantly agreed. She loved the fact that her son had so much ambition, that he wanted to learn new things. Unlike some of the other children his age, he would take up something and then stick at it. He didn’t give up when he was struggling, though he did threaten to sometimes. He started to sing when he got his guitar and he never stopped. He would write songs about what he was having for his dinner that night, or how hard his math homework was. When he turned thirteen and got his first girlfriend, he wrote a song about her, and then played it to her. He got teased by some other boys in his year but the girl loved it, and told all her friends, meaning he was a hit with all the other thirteen year old girls, despite his skinny frame and teenage acne.