by Lisa Fenn
As Vanna White doled out prizes, Leroy rounded the corner. “Hey. I got a new game today,” he said to me sternly, looking right at me for the first time. “You wanna see it?”
I nodded slowly, understanding the deeper significance of his invitation. As Socrates wrote, sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down. I had proven enough to get in. I didn’t know just how much I was in for.
CHAPTER 6
DESTINED FOR GREATNESS
Every coach at Lincoln-West can recall the moment he realized Dartanyon Crockett just might be the real deal. For Kyro Taylor, the Wolverine football coach, the moment came at the start of the 2006 school year, when a new student sauntered past his open door and out of view. A few seconds later, the same kid arched backward, poking his head through the door. “Uh, what sport do you coach?” he asked.
Taylor quickly sized up the boy’s athletic build. “Son, whatever you want to play, I’ll coach it,” he answered. Taylor had the chiseled charm of Deion Sanders, the heart of Mother Teresa, and a coaching record of lopsided losses. He salivated, thinking about handing the ball to this truck of a boy and running him up the middle all day long. Taylor invited him to practice that afternoon, but the kid seemed uncertain, shifting in his stance.
“You ever play football?” Taylor asked.
“No,” he answered.
“What’s your name?”
“Dartanyon.” Though his answers were short, Taylor noticed that the moments between them were prolonged by the unusual hitch in Dartanyon’s stare.
“Well, Dartanyon, we’d love to have you,” he said. “The bus heads over to the practice field at three.”
Dartanyon lined up for the bus that afternoon, and when they reached the field, Taylor tossed him a football from about fifteen yards away. “Glad you came, man,” he said. The pass deflected squarely off Dartanyon’s face mask and onto the ground.
“Don’t worry about it,” Taylor called out. “Here’s another one.” He lofted a perfect spiral toward Dartanyon’s numbers. This one bounced off his shoulder pads and through his arms, as though Dartanyon had never seen it coming. Yes, he’d make him a running back, Taylor thought.
As the team gathered to stretch, Dartanyon quietly revealed his secret. “I am legally blind,” he told Taylor, “but I can still play football.”
“You ever play before?” Taylor asked.
“No,” Dartanyon answered.
Taylor puzzled over this predicament, if only for a moment, before walking Dartanyon over to the linemen. The Wolverines had been winless the previous season; sight or no sight, Taylor couldn’t afford to leave a strapping body like Dartanyon’s on the sideline. Instead, he’d turn him into a nose tackle—the defensive lineman directly across from the center. Never mind that nose tackles are usually the largest players on defense, clogging the middle of the line to stifle the offensive running game and to allow the other defensive players to make plays. Dartanyon was at least three inches shorter and seventy-five pounds lighter than the other lineman in his conference, but Taylor figured that at nose tackle, Dartanyon would know exactly where the ball was at the start of a down and could listen for the snap. And what the boy lacked in girth, Taylor hoped he’d make up for in agility and quickness.
Taylor’s instincts proved correct. Dartanyon easily darted around behemoth opposing centers and wreaked havoc in their backfield. He started every game that season, and the Wolverines miraculously pulled out four wins. And when they were far enough down in their losses, Taylor had his quarterback hand off the ball to Dartanyon, who rumbled and tumbled down the field for a bit of fun.
“Looking back, I am amazed he played football,” Taylor said. “He played for two years, and each year, I was more in awe of the talents he had. How do you play football when you can hardly see? At that point, I didn’t know he was hardly eating either.”
After Dartanyon’s first football season, Taylor invited him to train with the school’s powerlifting team, which many Lincoln football players used as their off-season lifting program. Dartanyon quickly fell in love with the sport, finding weights to be a great equalizer. One hundred pounds weighs one hundred pounds for the visually impaired and the sighted alike. Dartanyon didn’t have to be the “blind lifter.” He could simply be the strongest, with no asterisk.
The sport of powerlifting is comprised of three events: squat, bench press, and deadlift. Athletes are allotted three attempts in each category, strategically increasing their weights based on who is ahead of them. Individual winners are awarded in each event, as well as an overall winner for the combined highest totals for all three categories. Dartanyon, like most kids who are new to the sport, initially thought powerlifting involved throwing around as much weight as he possibly could. He was unfamiliar with nuanced techniques and competition strategies, as well as the mental aspects of powerlifting. More important than strength is patience, because progress is incremental. Taylor told him that good lifters see increases of five pounds or maybe ten pounds in a three- to four-week span. Dartanyon, however, was an anomaly, known to jump fifty pounds in a week.
“Dartanyon was definitely unique when it came to the word progression,” Taylor remembered. “He seemed to accomplish what he wanted, when he wanted it.”
Mark Julius, Lincoln’s track coach, was the second coach after Robinson to drag Dartanyon out of the weight room. “Look, Muscles, as strong and explosive as you are, you should be sprinting,” Julius told him. Though Dartanyon was already wrestling and powerlifting, he joined the indoor track team for his in-between moments. And while three-sport athletes are not uncommon in high school, no sane person takes on three sports in the same season.
“Had I told him he should be running marathons, he probably would have said okay to that too,” Julius said.
Dartanyon was instantly Julius’s top sprinter—at times too fast for his own relay teams. As he awaited the handoff, Dartanyon would burst forward on his “go” command. And yet often, his oncoming teammate could not catch him in time to pass the baton before Dartanyon reached the end of the exchange zone. If Julius started Dartanyon off the blocks, he would overrun his handoff to the second leg. He was disqualified from as many relays as he finished. But Julius never troubled himself over winning and losing. His philosophy was that if his kids were running laps, they weren’t running the streets.
Dartanyon’s crash course in high school sports concluded at the Senate Conference powerlifting championships in the late spring of 2007, where he deadlifted five hundred pounds—a 66 percent increase from the three hundred pounds he’d lifted at the state competition just a few weeks earlier.
Coaches marveled, asking Taylor how this kid was lifting so much as a sophomore. Taylor shrugged and forced a smile. He knew that when you’re already carrying around the weight of the world, piling on a few more pounds hardly makes a difference.
DARTANYON LOST NOT only his mother at that funeral but all of his brothers and sisters as well. As the burial luncheon wound down, a group of reluctant fathers circled around Juanita’s children and—as if at an awkward middle school dance—tried to figure out who should go with whom. Dionna, then twenty-five years old, had a one-bedroom apartment and a baby girl of her own, so she took her two teenage siblings, Darlene and Darnell, to crowd in with her. Dominique, age ten, was pretty sure that Irquois Crockett was his biological father because his mama always threatened to hand him over when he misbehaved, and so the boy, in an act of surrender, walked over to Irquois. Then Irquois and a man named Curtis, who Juanita had gone with on and off, both declared the rights to Davielle. Davielle looked on, wondering why either of them had waited nine years to take notice of him. As their squabbling escalated, Davielle looked at Curtis, then looked at his brother, standing sunken next to Irquois, and settled it himself.
“I’ll just go with him,” Davielle said, pointing at Dominique. “There’s really no winning either way, so we might as well stick together.”
Irquois hotfooted the boys to the car and sped away. Curtis walked out clutching new baby Danielle instead. No one disputed Arthur taking Dartanyon. Despite Arthur’s issues, he was considered the most reliable father of the bunch by virtue of having shown up every other weekend to see his boy. Still, minding a child every day was a challenge Arthur had already failed.
In 1978, when Arthur’s oldest son, Lil Arty, was six months old, the child’s mother left him in Arthur’s care and never returned. Arthur carried the boy up to the church, where his grandfather was the pastor at the time. “I asked him to pray over Lil Arty because I knew he was going to have a hard life,” Arthur said.
At the time, Arthur worked as a dairy manager at the Pick-N-Pay grocery store during the day while his own mother watched Lil Arty. But Mr. Life of the Party suited him better than Mr. Mom. His love for fast living and fast women led him to father two more children around town. The ensuing stress caused him to escape deeper into nightlife. Arthur routinely missed work, and what little remained in his paychecks went to feeding his three children.
“I was an iffy employee at best,” he remembered. “Finally I grew sick and tired of being sick and tired.” In 1984 Arthur, then thirty-two years old, saw a commercial for the US Navy and enlisted. He packed up six-year-old Lil Arty and drove west, where the San Diego sea air felt like it could wash his slate clean. Left to his own, he had never been one to tend to fine details, but in the navy, with multiple levels of oversight, he was forced into the kind of success that results from seeing a task through. And his commanders treated him with a respect he’d never found stocking milk jugs and battling baby mamas.
Arthur might have made a career out of the navy had he not been introduced to methamphetamine, also known as crystal meth. He quickly became hooked, and it wasn’t long before he went from second in command of his line to meth addict. The navy sent Arthur to rehab for three months. Though he emerged clean and determined to regain the respect of the uniform, he could not cope with graveyard shifts and the pressures of parenting. Arthur began drinking heavily, trading one vice for another. Lil Arty, ten years old by then, bore the brunt of his father’s rage. “I started whupping him hard like my father used to whup me,” Arthur said. “I couldn’t control my anger.” Arthur drove his son to the police station and requested they put the boy into foster care. Lil Arty wailed and hung onto his father’s leg, pleading with him not to leave, but Arthur saw no other choice. “I don’t want to hurt you any more,” he told his son. “You will be safer this way.”
Arthur was honorably discharged from the navy one year later, in 1990. He left Lil Arty in foster care and hopped a Greyhound bus back to Cleveland, wondering how many times a man had to start over before he could finish right.
Not much had changed in Cleveland, although after a few months back home, Arthur did make two life-altering discoveries at the corner Laundromat: Juanita Crockett looked awfully fine folding clothes, and outside in the parking lot, crack cocaine sold for a lot less than crystal meth. All Arthur had to show for the years that followed was a disabling drug addiction and a blind son.
Now, as Arthur drove off from Juanita’s funeral with eight-year-old Dartanyon sitting heartsick beside him, he dug his nails deep into the vinyl steering wheel and prayed a different sort of prayer than the one he prayed for Lil Arty.
“This time, I prayed ‘Lord, don’t let me screw this one up,’” Arthur remembered. “Help me do the best I can.” Fraught with regret over his previous parenting failures, Arthur knew raising Dartanyon on his own was going to require a holy intervention, for they were both in need of some saving.
Arthur and Dartanyon settled into the top half of a two-family home on Kinsman Avenue, situated in an area of Cleveland’s east side known as Mount Pleasant. Arthur had spent a period of his own youth in this neighborhood, at a time when Kinsman was lined with regal homes and manicured yards. But by the 1990s, Mount Pleasant had devolved into a crime-ridden urban wasteland. Crack was readily available on just about every corner, and as Arthur faced Dartanyon’s earnest brown eyes each day, he leaned on that one feeble prayer: Don’t let me mess this one up.
Arthur handled his business for their first year on Kinsman, walking the straight line of a full-time parent. He earned decent money as a server at the Beachmont Country Club and paid the rent. Dartanyon waited alone in the apartment after school, playing video games and watching cartoons until his father returned around ten o’clock with a meal for him. Together they watched Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies. Arthur taught him to play Connect Four and chess. He enjoyed his son’s inquisitive nature and grew to understand Dartanyon’s challenges. Previously, Arthur had heard Juanita use the term visually impaired in passing, and he had detected a twitch in Dartanyon’s eyes, but beyond that he had given it little thought. Now that they were together every day, he noticed Dartanyon walking into walls as he turned corners and sitting up close to the television.
“Sometimes I wanted to grab him and help him, but I didn’t, because the world is not like that,” Arthur remembered. “When I saw him fumbling around or trying to find something I see right there, I had to sit there and wait. Might seem like a cruel lesson to some people, but he had to learn that the world don’t help you. I never let him feel sorry for himself.”
But eventually Arthur began to pity his own single-parent plight. As the late movie nights caught up with Dartanyon, his middle school teachers sent homework plans to address his poor grades and contacted Arthur for parent meetings. Only functionally literate himself, Arthur buckled under the pressure. Though he had quit seeking out crack, it never quit looking for him.
“It hit me that I got this little kid now. What am I supposed to do with this little kid?” Arthur said. “So I go do the coward thing and relapse again. Sometimes I would be cool. Most of the time I wasn’t.”
Dartanyon noticed changes in his father, like how he stopped coming home every night, giving Dartanyon no advance warning as to when he’d be going to bed hungry. When Arthur did return, it was usually with a can of Colt 45 in his hand. Eventually he told Dartanyon that he’d lost his job. He said that he and his boss didn’t agree on some things, but he was really sorry and would find another job soon. Dartanyon sympathized with his father, because he loved him. He was too young to recognize the patterns of an addict.
One day Arthur told Dartanyon to get his things together; they were moving into the downstairs first-floor apartment with Arthur’s brother, Marcus, so he could help them out with rent. Marcus made Dartanyon skittish. He was an alcoholic in a backward sort of way. When he staggered around drunk, he danced and sang and told Dartanyon jokes. But when Marcus sobered up, he grew inexplicably mean, and once they were living together, Dartanyon became a preferred target. If Dartanyon used a spoon, Marcus threw it away in disgust. One morning Dartanyon woke up ill and tried to call his sister for help; Marcus ripped the phone out of the wall, berating him for using a service for which he was not paying. Another time, Marcus swung at Dartanyon for “looking at him with those funny eyes.” Arthur blocked the punch but promptly excused it.
“Marcus did not like Dartanyon,” Arthur admitted. “I think he thought Dar put a gap between me and him getting high together.”
Dartanyon wished he had that sort of influence, but he hardly grasped what was happening himself. All he knew for certain was that he missed how his mother’s hands smelled like shea butter when she held him after a day of braiding hair. He missed her famous soul spaghetti and the way she’d bring home a birthday cake from the grocery store even when no one was having a birthday. “Some days you gotta make your own fun,” she would say. He missed clean clothes and talking smack with his brothers. And as he crawled into the bed he shared with Arthur each night, twelve-year-old Dartanyon whispered his own scared prayer: Mommy, please come back.
Most kids in Dartanyon’s class were from single-parent homes, but that parent was never the father. None of his friends understood the pain of losing a mother. Darta
nyon cried in the bathroom when it came time to make Mother’s Day crafts, and he tackled classmates for making “Yo Mama” jokes.
“Even though it wasn’t personal, it made me feel like I was the only kid without a mom,” Dartanyon remembered. “Kids already teased me for my eyes, and this was just another thing that made me feel different from everyone else.” The school counselor tried to get Dartanyon to open up and also tried to involve Arthur. But Dartanyon remained tight-lipped, and tracking down Arthur was like trying to catch a wave between your hands.
“When I got home from school, my dad was either at a job or drinking somewhere with Marcus,” Dartanyon said. “I’d go to the corner store to get food on credit or go to sleep without eating.” He learned to stretch kitchen staples to new lengths. Potato chip sandwiches with hot sauce. Fried bologna with mayonnaise. And steam-ironed grilled cheese when the gas bill was past due. “As long as the electricity was still on, I could put the sandwich in a paper bag, run the clothes iron over it, and melt the cheese,” he said. “Tasted pretty good.”
And so it was always a treat when Arthur said they could get take-out from Captain Mike’s Shrimp Boat restaurant at the top of the street. Shrimp Boat served up authentic New Orleans shrimp, gumbo, scampi, and lobsters, although Dartanyon’s order never changed—a jumbo catfish sandwich for his dad and a sausage po’ boy topped with coleslaw for himself.
Father and son would split up to fetch dinner—Arthur went down to the corner store to get his beer while Dartanyon picked up the food. One of those outings, when Dartanyon was thirteen years old, would take his life in a new direction. He started back with the sandwiches around ten o’clock on a brisk fall night. Halfway home, he heard a voice come up from behind, on his left. “Hey, you got a lighter?”
As Dartanyon turned to answer, a second man blindsided him from the right, bashing him with a blunt object—one blow to the side of Dartanyon’s skull, followed by another to the jaw. Dartanyon slumped to the pavement. He held on to just enough consciousness to realize that he had been struck by the back handle of a revolver, and now the barrel jabbed cold and deep into his temple. “Empty your pockets,” the man growled, leaning over Dartanyon’s chest. His cheap gold chain swung back and forth over the top of Dartanyon’s nose. “And don’t move, or I’ll kill you.”