A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  It’s like a competition. Fernando, Trini, and a few others crowded in, circling around me and hyping me up, calling out “Oh!” “Yo!” “Damn!”, their hands covering their mouths. The girls’ side had women doing the same thing. The hoses were showering the crowd every few seconds, spraying us while we traded dubs. I took my shirt off, showing off my lifting work, the one thing people could see.

  About an hour or so in, I looked up and noticed Fernando and Trini were gone. Realizing I was alone in this chaotic space, I instinctively stopped dancing, a trace of panic rumbling up my nerves. With the pounding beat, the crowd hollering, the spraying water, it was impossible to spot my friends.

  As I turned to watch one of the reggae bands, I felt something hit my chest—sharp and quick, like a tap. I didn’t even notice what it was. Adrenaline was rushing through my body and I was soaking wet. Then I felt warm liquid trickling down toward my stomach. Looking down, I saw my chest cut open. The white meat of my flesh was poking out and blood was gushing from the hole.

  It took a beat for my brain to catch up to what had happened.

  Then I spotted it: a broken shard of a Hennessy bottle in the shiny grass at my feet. Someone in the crowd had stabbed me and taken off, blending in with the crowd. This is it, I thought. I’m dead. I couldn’t believe I had come so far only to be killed at some party by a ghost. Then my brain shifted into crisis mode: Get out of there. I didn’t make a scene, I didn’t show emotion; I just walked straight for the exit. Time was precious and in a crowd that size any scene would’ve made it worse.

  I covered my chest with my tank top, pressing it down over the wound. Just get to the hospital, I thought. Just get out and to the hospital. I tried to stay calm, weaving through the crowd toward the exit. At the gate up ahead I spotted a security guard. As I walked up to him, a beefy guy with a walkie-talkie, we locked eyes.

  “What’s up?” he yelled over the noise.

  I didn’t say a word; I just pulled my shirt away and showed him my chest, cut open and pooling out blood. The shirt was a deep, dark red. His eyes popped and he snatched me by the arm, pulling me through the crowd and the gate. He rushed me over to a medic, who took me into one of the ambulances parked out front. They loaded me into the back, taped a thick patch over my chest, and sped off to Kings County Hospital.

  As the sirens blared, I lay my head back on the gurney. My breathing was forced and I tried to still my pumping heart.

  I didn’t spend too much time or energy trying to figure out why. It could have been retaliation for something from years back, I could’ve been mistaken for someone else, or it could’ve just been a random act. Knowing wasn’t going to solve anything. All it would’ve done was loop me backward, plant the thirst for revenge in my mind. It was a rabbit hole I wanted nothing to do with.

  The medics rushed me into the emergency room at Kings County and everything was scary fast, triple-timed and hectic. My vision was blurry and everything was fragmented and confusing. I was like an emergency object. I got wheeled into a tight room crammed with boxy equipment. A doctor, a light-skinned back woman, began talking in a clipped tone.

  “Okay, tell me what happened,” she said. Faceless doctors in green scrubs scattered around, wheeling beeping machines, flinging curtains open and closed. Like a slab, I was moved onto a steel table.

  I went through what I remembered. “Not sure . . . I was dancing . . . then I felt something like tap me.” I felt the thin paper sheet rubbing against my back, the cold metal underneath. I started to jerk upward.

  “Don’t get up,” the doctor said. She put a firm hand on my shoulder, guiding me back down. The doctor’s eyes were focused but I could tell she had trains running inside that head. “Something sharp? Did you see what it was?”

  “A bottle, I think? Like glass?” Talking required more air than I had.

  “You got stabbed,” she said.

  “I think so.” My voice felt far away, like someone else’s.

  “Oh, you did. The wound is right below your heart,” she said. “You’re lucky.”

  I must’ve looked up at her like she was crazy. “Yeah?” I said.

  “If this thing had gone a few inches deeper, it could have punctured it.”

  They put sixteen stitches in my chest. It all took less than an hour. When the doctors were done, they rolled me into the hallway with the rest of Brooklyn’s wounded all parked on top of one another. I was weak and woozy from the blood loss. I tried to stand but my vision was blurry; I made out patches of white and whirling blue and green.

  Then they released me. That’s how they have to do things there. Kings County Hospital was the first Level I trauma center in the United States: through those doors come a lot of gunshots and stabbings, a lot of blood and gruesome wounds. And that’s how they’re seen—as injuries, not as people who have them. It’s the only way for doctors and nurses to keep going. They need to clear the beds, so they patch you up and send you back out—like in a war zone.

  When I walked into my apartment, stitched up in gauze and bandages, my dad, aunt, and Roothchild went crazy. My aunt started screaming about Jesus, and Roothchild cupped me under my arm and helped me inside. I mentioned Wet Fete, getting stabbed, the hospital. My dad just stared at me. He waited a beat, then began ranting in Creole.

  “You don’t listen!” he yelled. “You never listen!”

  “Dad—” Roothchild interrupted.

  “What the hell you going to a place like that?” Dad’s temper was unraveling.

  My brother brought me a glass of water. “Dad, just let him—”

  “Of course that’s what happens!” Dad yelled. “What do you expect? So stupid!”

  My father’s words started to drift and float. The stitches were coming apart and I was still bleeding through the seams. The blood had soaked through the gauze and was leaking down my stomach, onto my shorts, onto the floor. The walls started to close in and I got out just enough breath to say “ambulance” before fainting on the hallway floor.

  Paramedics careened me back to Kings County where the doctors patched me up again. They still sent me home again at about four in the morning. I begged the nurses to hold me there, but there was no space. They were in battle, after all, and I could stand up.

  I made a hard rule after that: No more outdoor parties, no more house parties, no more scenes where things are loose and off the rails. Some people go to those parties just to take it off the rails. Some people get a rush from it. I know because I used to be like that.

  Now I had a physical reminder of what could happen: a three-inch scar just below my heart. It was there when I looked in the mirror, when I got dressed in the morning, when I got with a girl. It told me my past wasn’t behind me: it was still hovering, ready to strike if I slowed or let my guard down.

  14

  Through

  If the situation or the context where you make the decisions don’t change, then second chances don’t mean much.

  —THE OTHER WES MOORE8

  Society doesn’t accept young black men—formerly incarcerated ones, especially—with open arms and the resistance goes both ways. Re-entry is slow and brutal; it’s obvious to me why so many people don’t make it. It’s work, from the moment you wake to the moment you go to bed. You’re still in that constant state of alertness demanded by your environment, compounded by an extra level of self-protection. You’re keeping your eyes fixed forward and blocking out all the forces hell-bent on taking you off track.

  In the movie version of my life, getting out of Boys Town and into college would have been the happy ending. But there’s more than one kind of wall in this world.

  I had to transition on my own into something new, but I wasn’t a typical college kid who could blend in with the others. I had just been released from the system and perceptions form based on that first interaction. No matter what I did, I felt like that’s who I was to them. It was where I drew my strength from—but it also felt like a cross to bear.

 
; My outside world was colliding with my inside world. I had a foot in each, but wasn’t planted in either, so I floated in a kind of purgatory. The disconnect was heavy. In one of my English classes we read a Robert Frost poem and one line cut me close: The best way out is always through.

  It came down to an issue of time, how I spent it; and space, where I went. The solution was simple. Eighteen or so waking hours in a day and I’d compact and condense my time on Crown Street down to the necessities—sleep hours—where it could cause no trouble. I started going to the gym on the BMCC campus, some days traveling out there hours before class or when I had no class at all. When I had reading to do or papers to write, I’d stay in the computer lab, go to the school library, or work in different coffee shops in downtown Manhattan.

  Some of these places were like Mars to me: mostly young white people meeting up or with laptops and headphones, spending hours at small tables. When I sat down I often feared that they’d ask me to leave, just by virtue of standing out so much. But I felt no compunction about taking a seat. I had just as much right—if not more—to intrude on these spaces of ten-dollar words and five-dollar coffees. My struggle was actually a strength. I was not a victim of my background, I was armed with it. I wasn’t supposed to be there at all; as far as I was concerned, I was playing with house money. So I felt free to make mistakes and embarrass myself. As long as there was a chance for growth, I had no fear from judgment. That felt like the most effective weapon in my arsenal.

  I would wander alone around downtown Manhattan, or head uptown to Central Park or to the museums the Canadas introduced me to. I’d roam the Guggenheim or the Met, taking in the art, the bronze-plaqued history, the echoed footsteps on wood floors. I liked the silence, the air-conditioned calm, the vast open space of those buildings. But walking those streets brought its own loneliness and depression. Coping was even harder because I had sworn off marijuana and alcohol, the outlets I once used to numb the pain.

  As the stitches in my chest reminded me, I may have changed but the neighborhood hadn’t: the drugs, violence, hopelessness, and death all continued, a raging current sweeping up people in its path. Every morning I woke up to the place where I once was a street kid. Every night I had to pass old friends who still were in the same places talking about the same things. Dudes who didn’t know any other way because they had never seen any other way.

  When my boys first saw me back, they crowded around me, psyched to tell me what the game was like, what the new hustles were, what drugs were selling where, who was dead, who was locked up, where the new hangouts were. I ran into Devon, eighteen years old and driving a brand-new Lexus LS 600h. He had picked up speed in the game since his stint on Sixth Avenue and showed no signs of slowing. He and I were like passing ships in the night.

  “Yo, Buff, why don’t you come by my new crib?” he asked me.

  “Where at?”

  “I got this place up the way, on President.” I knew it was a trap house, a place he hustled out of. A place I wanted nothing to do with. But I couldn’t say that.

  I knew I could go in there for five minutes for a quick conversation and the cops could barge in, or a stick-up kid could hit the place. The possibilities unspooled in my head as I thought of new ways to say no every time I saw him. The line is very thin, almost invisible. One small decision can have ripple effects, as Iza always emphasized to me. Even talking to Devon out in the open, I was vulnerable—cops or shooters don’t care that we’re passing ships.

  “C’mon by, man, we’ll be chillin’.”

  “All right, we’ll see,” I’d say, until the next time we passed.

  In our own little world, going into the system is honorable, like a rite of passage. It’s like you graduated from college and returned home with a degree. “My boy just went to gladiator school!” my old friends would brag, announcing to anyone in earshot, raising my arm up like a boxer. They all put a cloak of respect on me that I didn’t really ask to wear.

  It soon became obvious to my friends that I’d gone through a transformation. I can’t remember a single explicit conversation I had with anyone. It was all in the subtext, and in the signs. My clothing changed a little bit, and my hours shifted. They’d see me waking up early for school, carrying books, or coming home late from work. I’d spend less time chatting with them, carrying the vibe of someone who had somewhere to be. They let me be, though. They wouldn’t have cared or even understood that being in the system had changed my life. That kind of transformation was rare.

  The pulls came to a head during the Labor Day parade at the end of that first summer. I was making my way through the crowd with Trini when I spotted an unmistakable face. I skidded up short on the pavement.

  “What’s up?” Trini asked.

  The face carried the same sneer below that same flat-brimmed Yankees hat. It was definitely him. The dude who pulled a gun on me at the basketball courts in Park Slope. We met eyes, his non-reaction telling me he couldn’t place my face. But his was seared on my brain.

  “Buff, all good?” Trini asked again.

  Lying on the couch in the Achievement room, I had often thought of this guy, picturing taking him out if I ever saw him again. Now his reappearance, a phantom in a huge anonymous crowd, was a gift. The universe had lined up in my favor.

  The choice to walk away wasn’t easy. I thought about getting someone else to take him out but my better judgment prevailed. Even though it was the right decision, it still nagged at me for months. Old habits are resilient enough that they’ll take you down with them.

  My old crew might’ve been cool with my turnaround, but the streets do not care if you’ve changed. The streets don’t even know that you changed. It wasn’t a physical prison, but it was a social one, defined by broken institutions, joblessness, and poverty. It all swirled around me and I was vulnerable to getting caught in the crosswinds. People talk about “just saying no” as if it were a onetime thing. But to really break free, you are saying no constantly, in the actions and choices you make, over and over again, in a million different ways. You have to re-create a new identity; one that shuts out parts of your old self and your familiar world, that takes what you have left and wraps it tight in protective armor. I said no to everything and everyone I knew.

  Then I got arrested for saying hello to them.

  One night after work, around midnight, I came up the subway steps from the 2 train at the corner of President Street and Nostrand Avenue. Standing there were some of my old crew. These were once my friends—some of them like family—so I stopped to say hello. A few handshakes, a few pounds, some bullshitting and then I’d be out. I was exhausted from a double shift and ready to hit my mattress.

  Not a minute after I got there, an unmarked detective car screeched up President Street in the blackness. We froze in the blazing lights. It didn’t matter who was hustling and who was coming home from work. We all blended into one. That’s how they get you.

  Two uniformed cops popped out, and immediately got physical with us. Amped up, they asked for our IDs, and searched everybody. They lined us up along the metal gate with our backs to them, kicking our legs to spread them out. Our palms lay flat on the gate as they patted us up and down. I tried to let them know they made an honest mistake.

  “No, it’s all good,” I said. One of the cops was crouched down patting at my legs.

  He looked at me—registering that I spoke, but not responding. A bulky guy with a square head, he had a dead face, not reacting at all.

  “I’m just coming home from work,” I said. “I’m heading home.” I pointed up the street, as if I could will myself that last block and up through my window. He worked his way back up to my waist.

  “I can show you my college ID,” I said. “I’m over at BMCC,” I continued, flashing a brief smile. “I’m a college student.”

  “Yeah?” he said, light-years away. He’d heard shit like that a thousand times that day. It was like I wasn’t even talking. We were all one thing: young bla
ck guys out at night. As the cop was feeling me up, he came to the bulge in my front pocket: my box cutter. A stock worker depends on these. But the cop didn’t care why I had it, nor that it was legal.

  “That’s for work,” I said. “I’m a stock boy. I need that for work.” He held the knife up to show his partner, almost like, Jackpot. They exchanged a look. “I literally open boxes all day,” I explained. I made a downward cutting motion with my hand.

  “Turn around,” he said. He snapped the cuffs on me, the cold metal bracing my skin, and walked me over to the car, guiding my head as he put me in the backseat. Sitting there already was one of the other guys who had a warrant out. As we rode to the precinct, I wouldn’t shut up:

  “That’s for my job. It’s not a weapon. I’m a college student. I was just coming home from work. I’m not in the streets! You can call my job and ask them. You can ask this guy. C’mon, man, you can ask anybody!”

  Unsurprisingly, they ignored me. I might as well have been behind glass. Police officers in New York City are often measured on how many arrests they chalk up. That’s how they’re evaluated, how they get overtime, and how they get promoted. There’s no reward for giving a college student a break. I was wasting my energy. The other kid looked at me like I was crazy, talking to two walls like that. What the hell you doing, man? his eyes were saying. What’s the point?

  At the precinct I was fingerprinted, photographed, and processed. Then I was transferred downtown to Central Booking, my first taste of the adult system. The Bookings is where everyone goes before the judge decides who’s going home and who’s going to Rikers. It’s a drunk tank and death row and everything in between.

  I spent a long night in that sprawling cell: dirty yellow walls with a concrete floor, stainless steel benches, a small metal toilet up against the center wall. Over a hundred grown men lying down or puttering in circles. Across from us was another identical cell—like a giant mirror. The only sounds that first night were the hollow clank of the cell doors, some addict trying to jimmy the bars open with his bare hands, random scuffles between guys over two feet of bench, and the occasional deathly scream. It would all echo across that space, as I sat there and stewed.