by Kate Stewart
Chapter Four
Grip
12 years old
“SEXUAL CHOCOLATE!”
I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve watched Coming to America. My cousin Jade, my boy Amir, and I know just about every line by heart. Every week, we watch this bootleg copy Ma bought at the barber shop, and not even the shadows of people’s heads in the shots or the sometimes-unsteady camera work make Eddie Murphy as Randy Watson and his band Sexual Chocolate less funny.
“’That boy good,’” Amir quotes when Eddie Murphy does the infamous mic drop and leaves the stage.
“’Good and terrible,’” Jade and I finish the quote. We all crack up laughing like it’s the first time.
“Ya’ll and this movie.” Jade’s older brother Chaz walks through the living room in his jeans, no shirt.
His body is like one of the graffiti walls off Largo Avenue, inked with five-pointed stars declaring his Bloods gang affiliation, “186” scrawled on his chest signifying the code for first degree murder. His other passion, the Raiders, vie for equal space on his arms and back. Ink stains every available inch of skin, but he left his face clear. Ma says thank God the boy is vain, otherwise he would have ruined that handsome face of his with tattoos. A teardrop or something.
Everyone says we look alike, me and Chaz. Ma and his father were brother and sister, but my uncle died before I was even born, so I never met him. Ma sometimes looks at Chaz with sad eyes and says if you’ve seen Chaz, you’ve seen his daddy. You’ve seen her brother.
“How many times ya’ll gon’ watch this movie?” Chaz’s bright smile flashes before he pulls his Raiders T-shirt over the muscular framework of his upper body. “If it ain’t this, it’s Martin.”
“Wasssssup!” Amir, Jade, and I parrot Martin’s signature phrase on cue, laughing while Chaz rolls his eyes.
“Ya’ll little niggas a trip.” The pager on Chaz’s hip beeps, and he plucks it off his waistband to read the message. I love that we made him laugh before we lost his attention.
Jade’s other brother Greg is LAPD, but we don’t trust cops, so they aren’t our heroes. Chaz is our hero. He may be a gangbanger, and he slings, but he’s cool. He always has the latest Jordans, the freshest clothes, and the sound system you hear before you see his car bouncing around the corner, hydraulics on point. His mom, my Aunt Celia, doesn’t ask where the money comes from when he pays her rent every month. She turns a blind eye, but Ma won’t take Chaz’s money, no matter how tight it gets at our house.
“Shit,” Chaz mutters, a frown puckering his eyebrows. He usually walks slowly so everyone can see his fresh kicks, to make it easy for what Ma calls “fast tail girls” to catch him, but he runs to the back of the house like someone’s chasing him.
“What’s up with Chaz?” I ask Jade.
“Mmm-hmm.” Jade shrugs, her attention already back on Coming to America. “No telling. Trouble probably.”
Chaz has been nothing but trouble for a long time. Like most kids, he thought he’d be a baller, get drafted one day. If it isn’t rapping, it’s sports. In the hood, those are a boys’ dreams when anything seems possible. Most dreams don’t last long on this block of rude awakenings.
Our three sets of eyes stretch wide at the sound of a helicopter overhead outside. The cops have been cracking down lately. Sometimes it feels like they’ve forgotten us here in Compton, like they give up on trying to regulate the violence and death we’ve become numb to. One minute, you’re on the playground swinging, hanging on monkey bars, and the next you’re dodging bullets. The cops come on their terms, usually when they’re looking for somebody. That bird in the sky tells us they’re looking for somebody. I don’t say it, but Chaz’s response to the pager and the helicopter that sounds like it’s right on top of us has me wondering if this time they’re looking for him.
“Amir.” Ms. Bethany, Amir’s mom stands on our front porch, her usually pleasant face stern through the bars over the screen door. “Bring your narrow butt home right now.”
“But, Ma.” Amir gestures to the television. “We coming up on the barber shop scene where Eddie Murphy plays all the different characters.”
“And I’m coming up on that butt if you don’t get to that house like I told you.” She sends a worried look up to the sky. “Go to the closet.”
The three of us exchange glances. The violence has been so bad lately innocent people have been getting caught in the crossfire. Just last week one of our neighbors caught a stray bullet sitting in his kitchen. Drive by. After that, Ma and Ms. Bethany told us we should go to the closets when we hear gunfire or even helicopters. Most times, those birds are looking for guys who run and shoot first, not caring where the bullets land until later.
“Hey, Bethany.” Ma walks up the hall from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Everything all right?”
“That bird.” Ms. Bethany flips her head up toward the sky. “They looking for somebody.”
She aims a careful glance at Jade, pausing before going on.
“Word on the street’s they’re looking for Chaz.”
Jade’s troubled eyes meet mine. Chaz bounces between our houses sometimes. I’m not even sure Ma knows he’s here.
“For Chaz?” Ma looks down the hall. “Chaz, you back there?”
The answering silence tells me he’s gone. Probably snuck out through my bedroom window. My heart starts banging on my ribcage, dragging back and forth like on prison bars. My breath goes short. Mama says we have extra senses, things the streets teach us to survive. We smell danger. Feel trouble disrupting the air. In just seconds, an invisible hand is choking our whole block as that bird hovers, and none of us can breathe.
“Amir, I said come on.” Fear adds a few lines around Ms. Bethany’s tight lips. “Now, boy.”
Amir drags himself to the door.
“I don’t want to leave,” he gripes. “Ain’t fair.”
“Fair?” Ms. Bethany pops his head with her palm. “Get your fair butt ’cross that street.”
She glances over her shoulder at my mother. They watch out for each other. Amir eats at our table as much as I eat at theirs.
“Mittie, let me know if you hear anything about Chaz.”
With that, she’s gone, retreating into the house to seek shelter until what we all feel coming passes over. Ma grabs the remote and turns off the television, standing to block the screen. She points back down the hall to my bedroom where we hid the last few times.
“Get to the closet.”
Before we can groan and complain like Amir did, a tall figure in uniform at the screen door distracts us. My cousin Greg takes after his mother. He and Jade share the same almond-shaped eyes and walnut complexion, where Chaz and I have skin like deep caramel, like Ma and her brother.
“Aunt Mittie, I need to come in.” Greg’s face is sober. He darts looks around our small living room, alert. “Hey, Jade. Marlon.”
I flick my chin up like I see the older boys do, trying to be cool. Jade just stares at her brother. His decision to become a cop divided our family, and she doesn’t know from one day to the next whose side she’s on.
“To that closet,” Ma repeats, her lips set in a line. She opens the door for Greg, not checking to make sure we obeyed. We walk down the hall but linger to eavesdrop as soon as we’re out of sight.
“What’s going on, Greg?” Ma finally allows the worry to seep into her voice now that she thinks we’re out of earshot. “This about Chaz? They say ya’ll looking for him.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Greg’s heavy sigh covers all the scrapes and trouble Chaz has been in leading up to today. “He’s wanted for questioning in that shooting yesterday off Rosecrans.”
“Shooting? The kid?”
“He was sixteen. He was a Crip, Aunt Mittie.”
That’s all he has to say. Between Crips and Bloods, color is the only offense needed.
“He ain’t here.” Ma’s voice goes harder. “And your mama is working a double shift, so she
ain’t home yet. Greg, you look out for your brother now.”
“Aunt Mittie, I’ve been trying, but he never listens to me. He’s always tripped about me becoming a cop. A lot of folks here in the neighborhood did.”
“I understand, Greg. You wanted to change things. I get that, but you know cops haven’t made friends here. It’ll take some time, but folks will come around.”
A shot cracks the air beyond the front porch.
“Go!” Ma’s voice becomes urgent. “If Chaz did what they think, he’ll have to deal with the consequences. Just protect him, Greg. Just . . . for your mama. Okay?”
“I gotta go.”
Jade and I slide down the wall, faces turned toward each other, connected by our fear and worry.
“What’d I say?” Ma stands in front of us, her eyes fired up with frustration. “Get in that closet. Now.”
She points to my bedroom, looking from Jade to me.
“I know you’re scared for Chaz, but be scared for yourself. A stray bullet could take you out. Now, get in there.”
We stand and start down the hall. Ma grabs my elbow, pulling me around to face her. At twelve, I’m almost as tall as she is, but I’m straddling childhood and adolescence. Half the time I think I know best and don’t need her. This is the other half of the time when I want my mama to hug me and tell me it will all be okay. That we’ll all be okay.
“Remember what we talked about?” she asks softly. “You go in that closet and don’t be scared.”
“You can’t make yourself not scared, Ma.” I stuff my hands into the pockets of my jeans.
“That’s true, but you can distract yourself. You’re a sharp boy. You got a memory like an elephant. Recite some of them poems you’re always reading in Ms. Shallowford’s class. Sing a song. Say the pledge of allegiance. I don’t care. Just don’t leave that closet until I say so.”
I nod and enter my room. Michael Jordan, NWA, Tupac, and the LA Raiders plaster my walls. Other than a small bed and dresser, that’s all the decoration the room requires. Jade isn’t in the closet. She’s standing by the window Chaz must have left open when he snuck out.
“In the closet, Jade.” I walk in, expecting her to follow. For a second, her face defies the order. She glances through the window and out to our front yard. Both her brothers are out there. On opposite sides of the law, but both at risk.
“There’s nothing you can do.” I make my voice certain like I hear Ma’s even when she isn’t sure at all. “Get in here.”
As soon as Jade sits beside me in the tiny closet, the wail of approaching sirens splinters the air. Fear widens her eyes, and she clenches skinny arms around her legs. She presses her forehead to her knees and quietly cries. Jade is more sister than cousin to me. Nobody messes with me if she’s around, and nobody messes with her if I have anything to say about it. Her tears, I can’t take.
What Ma says is true. My head is like a vault. Poems, lyrics, all of it gets locked in my head. Ms. Shallowford’s class is the only place I’m rewarded for remembering poems, for loving poetry. For writing my own. I do it only in class because I don’t want to catch it from the other guys, but for Jade, whose hands tremble as the sirens come closer, I’ll do it.
I start with the question that launches Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem,” asking what happens to a dream deferred.
When I quote the line, when I ask the question, Jade lifts her head. I feel stupid. I usually do this alone. I’m usually in my bed when the sound of bullets rips through the air, and the words that calm and comfort me, I’m the only one who hears. But Jade’s with me now, and I taste her fear. It’s bitter like aspirin dissolving on my tongue as I continue, posing Hughes’s questions about dried-up raisin dreams. Jade blinks at me, her tears slowing. She swipes at her running nose. Feet scamper past my open bedroom window, a chase underway. Angry voices bounce off the walls.
“Hands in the air!” Greg’s voice reaches us in the closet. “Chaz, man stop. Come on. Put the gun down.”
Jade’s chest expands and contracts with breaths like she’s about to hyperventilate, her eyes round as plates.
I continue with the lines of “Harlem,” comparing the delayed dream to rotten meat and syrupy sweets. The words barely penetrate my mind, but they keep my heart from falling out of my chest.
I’m not sure if it helps Jade, but the words anchor me, give me something to focus on besides the chaos on the front yard. Besides the threat of violence chilling the air. I blink back tears, but Jade’s flow freely down her cheeks.
“Chaz, no!” Panic and pain wrestle in Greg’s words. “Don’t make me do it!”
Pop!
It’s a silly word for the sound a gun makes. Ms. Shallowford taught our class about onomatopoeia last week, but none of the sounds she used for gunfire seem right.
Pop! Crack! Bang!
If you’ve heard shots as many times as we have, if you live with it, you know the sound a gun makes when it’s fired is a moan. The moan of a mother, a father, a daughter, or son losing someone they love. It’s the sound Jade makes when she runs to my window, her eyes scanning the front yard for both of her brothers. We find them there together. Chaz’s lifeless head rests in Greg’s lap on the patch of grass. Greg’s face crumples, the brows bent with pain, his mouth stretched wide on a wail. He’s covered in the blood spurting life from his brother’s chest.
Jade scurries through the window, rushing across the yard and hurling herself into the grief, pummeling Greg’s shoulders, slapping his head, screaming obscenities. Ma jerks her off, pulls her back and into her arms, eyes full of pain locked on the blood-covered brothers. My Aunt Celia runs up the street and into the small crowd gathering. A cop restrains her, but you can’t hold back a mother’s anguish. We all watch Aunt Celia’s face collapse, her eyebrows buckling over eyes streaming devastation. Her mouth, a gaping hole of torment. She strains, arms outstretched for her dying son, hands clawed to scratch the other. Sobs rack her body, and she is a world of pain.
“You killed my boy!” Aunt Celia’s voice, a dirge, booms over the eerily still street. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you, Greg!”
His mother’s mournful litany bounces off Greg’s head and shoulders as he cradles his brother, rocks him, imprisoned by his own guilt and pain.
I can’t move. My shoes stick to the thin, cheap carpet in my bedroom. The smell of death invades my nose like an enemy, and my heart trills in my chest, hammering a rapid beat. My breath wheezes from my throat, and my head spins. I grasp for consciousness, searching for the words that calmed me moments ago. Moments before a bullet split our world right down the middle.
I mumble the final lines of “Harlem,” even though I’m the only one listening, and I reach the same conclusion Hughes does.
So here in these streets, in my neighborhood, what happens to a dream deferred?
It explodes.
Chapter Five
Grip
IT’S AS QUIET as a morgue when the song ends. I have no idea what the Prodigy team sitting around the table thinks. Verse one of “Bruise” is written from the perspective of a young black man, verse two from that of a cop. I’m the only black man in the room. As much as I love Rhyson, as close as we are, I’m not sure he can understand the indignity of being stopped for no reason by cops on the regular. Being forced to lie on the ground and get searched without explanation. Targeted. Profiled. Made to feel second class. It isn’t his experience, but all my life in my neighborhood, it was mine. I infused every line of that verse with the pain and frustration and resentment brimming over in my community. I hope I told Greg’s story, too, my cousin who became a good cop. Who had to shoot his own brother and probably saved lives that day. I admire him as much as I admire anyone. Instead of running from the police force, he ran toward it and decided to do his part to make things better.
“As much as I think it’s a great social commentary,” Max finally speaks first. “Are we sure this is what we want to bring up given how divided o
ur nation is right now? I mean, will you be alienating half your listeners? I’m not sure it’s the right song for the Target Exclusive.”
I shrug like it doesn’t bother me, but it does. Should I push? The song is special to me. I didn’t even realize how much until now when it sounds like it might not make the cut. I wrote it to unite, not divide.
“I agree with you, Max,” Bristol says, her tone all business and brusque. “It isn’t right for the Target Exclusive.”
“I’m glad we can agree on something this morning,” he says with a chuckle.
“It belongs on the wide version of Grip.” Bristol has that defiant look she gets when she digs her heels in. “If it’s on the Exclusive, fewer people will hear it, and everyone needs to hear that song.”
She meets my eyes for a second before blinking away all softness.
“I agree,” Rhyson says quietly.
My best friend and I stare at each other for moments elongated with the things we haven’t talked as much about. We have so much in common—our passion for music, the video games we play, the books we read, our acerbic sense of humor—that we often haven’t discussed the ways we’re different. But the lyrics of “Bruise” paint a picture he’s never seen up close.
“So what do we need to do to make that happen?” Bristol has shifted from any sentimentality she felt for the song to battle plan, figuring out how to make it happen at this late date.
Rhyson and I break down every step we must go through to get the song on the album in time. She doesn’t blink, but Sarah scribbles frantically, jotting it all down.
“It’ll happen.” She looks at Rhyson and Max before her eyes land on me. “I promise I’ll get it on there in time.”
This is what I keep falling for over and over. Bristol is passionate and determined, one of those rare people who never accepts no for the ones she cares about. And whether or not she wants to admit it, she cares about me a hell of a lot.
We listen to three more songs. Bristol loves them all, but she likes everything I write. I’m not being conceited. I can’t think of one song or poem I’ve ever shared with her that she didn’t love.