Autobiography of My Dead Brother

  “Yeah, Benny called me. He said he couldn’t make it but Calvin and Gun are going,” C.J. said.

  “Yo, man, I got a call from Sidney, and he said he heard there was going to be a throwdown between the Counts and the Diablos,” I said. “I don’t know how we’re getting involved in this thing. They got guns and doing drive-bys and stuff.”

  “Well, that’s the way it goes,” C.J.’s voice was almost a whisper.

  “You’re not alone?”

  “I’m alone,” he said.

  “Why you talking so low?”

  “It’s the way I feel.”

  “If this thing is going to be a fight or something, why you going?” I asked. “You’re no banger.”

  “I just decided I can’t be limping all my life,” C.J. said.

  “Is this about that thing in the church with Little Man?” I asked. “Because he’s the one that’s jive, not you.”

  “Maybe it’s about who I am,” C.J. said. “Somewhere along the way you got to decide. It’s like, there comes a time and you got to put a name on things. I can’t be hiding in church all my life.”

  “Why not? It’s what you do, isn’t it?” I said. “Not the hiding part but the being in church. All of a sudden you don’t think that’s cool?”

  “It’s cool, but there’s more stuff out there that we got to deal with,” he said. “You know, there’s a time for every purpose, man. So this is my time to check out the meeting. You coming?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If I don’t come, will you think I’m weak?”

  “You know, Jesse, a guy once said to me that you don’t know if you can really get into some music unless you sit down and do it. You can’t look at the notes on paper and say, ‘Hey, it’s easy.’ We here talking about getting into life and I don’t even know if I got the heart for the part,” C.J. said. “You see where I’m coming from?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Or can I catch a maybe?”

  “You got the maybe,” C.J. said.

  “C.J., look, if something does go down, maybe we can look out for each other,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” C.J. answered.

  What I had hoped for was C.J. to feel the same way that I did. We would both say no way and that would have been the whole game, with us backing each other up. I didn’t think I was going to go, but I was looking for somebody to help me say the words.

  I took a bite out of the tuna sandwich, but I wasn’t in the mood for it and put it up. I got out the book I was doing on Rise and laid out some pictures I had of him on my bed.

  I thought about what other pictures I could use instead of just photos of Rise and me and his family. I remembered a time when we were small—Rise was seven so I must have been five—and were on a church picnic to Van Cortlandt Park. We all had to wear badges with our names on them. One kid had a badge that read Junior, and a counselor asked him what his real name was. It was Richard, the same as his father’s name. Rise took the kid’s badge and wore it, and the kid was crying. The counselor made him give it back, and Rise made his own badge that said Junior because he wanted to have one that said he had a father.

  The real badge was square, but I drew it round and then didn’t have enough room to write the whole word junior,so it came out JUNIor. I figured I would redo it later and put the pad away.

  I had come up with an answer to what I should do. I just hoped that he was home.

  My hands were sweaty and I wiped them on my pants legs as I dialed. The phone rang twice and Rise picked up.

  “Look, Rise, I got a call from Rock and he thinks the Diablos are planning some kind of confrontation.” I let the words tumble from my lips in a rush because I needed to get them out quickly. “And if anything goes down, you’re going to be the one they’re going to try to waste.”

  “Ain’t no big thing,” Rise said. “Me, the prophet Enoch, and the prophet Elijah go walking hand in hand. They’re the Saints and I’m the Man. Nothing to it, schoolboy.”

  “You’re not worried that they might try something?” I asked.

  “Chill, bro,” Rise said. “Sidney don’t know everything. He just wants to pretend he does. That’s his job. When’s the last time anyone arranged a gangbang and ran it by the po-lice?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “See you tomorrow, man.”

  The phone clicked and went dead. My eye started hurting again, and I switched off the light and lay across the bed.

  In my head I ran the tape of the telephone conversation. Rise hadn’t sounded scared at all, not even nervous. I thought about how C.J. had sounded and how I felt inside. Then I had another thought. Maybe it wasn’t that Rise was sure that nothing would happen at the meeting. Maybe he just wasn’t afraid of dying.

  Chapter 20

  I walked downtown, realizing how nervous I was as my stomach started cramping. My head was heading for the meeting, but my feet were having other ideas. Earl’s window was piled high with leftover stuff from life along Malcolm X Boulevard. There were old lamps with colored globe shades, photographs of black boxers who didn’t look that tough, and small piles of gold and silver costume jewelry. A few blocks up was Striver’s Row, still pretending it was cool, still pimping on its Harlem Renaissance props. The truth was that the whole neighborhood was a little bit of a hustle. Some of the hustle was hardworking folks chasing their behind-closed-doors dreams. Others were the people who had blown their dreams and were just chasing whatever life they could get at.

  Earl would give you a couple of dollars for a radio in good condition, or a quarter for a flashlight that still worked. Once in a while something valuable would find its way into his store. Earl knew everybody and he was decent to them all, which is why I liked him.

  “You always have to add seventy-five cents to the price of the crack to cut the deal,” Earl said.

  Earl made his money mostly from white antiques dealers who came to Harlem looking for bargains. They paid good money for costume jewelry, old photographs, pieces of people’s lives that had died or had just got too tired to hang on to anymore.

  Earl came to our church from time to time. Sister Essie called him a red-number Christian because he came to church only when the number on the calendar was red, showing that it was a holiday like Christmas or Easter.

  I nodded and asked if Rise was there, and Earl pointed toward the back room.

  “Don’t you go to that church off 145th Street?” he asked, knowing that I did.

  “Yeah, sometimes,” I said, trying to make it sound more casual than I felt inside.

  Earl’s back room was a surprise. The front of the store was piled high with junk, but the back was clean and neat. Rise, C.J., Gun, and some girl I had never seen before were sitting around an enamel kitchen table. There was an old record player against one wall and a couch against the other. On the wall was a picture of Malcolm X over an advertisement for Ray’s Barber Shop.

  C.J. avoided looking at me. Gun put his fist up and we brushed knuckles lightly.

  “Yo, Jesse, this is my old lady.” Rise pointed to the girl. She was too young for him. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if he was trying to remember something. Then opened them and nudged the girl. “Uh, go on and tell him your name, baby.”

  “Rise, you know my name!” the girl said, embarrassed.

  “Yeah, but I want you to tell him,” Rise said.

  “It’s Junice,” the girl said.

  “Yeah, Jesse here is writing my life up,” Rise went on. “I’ve been telling him there’s three important times in a man’s life. The first was when he’s born. That’s about the circumstances he got going for him. Then when he dies. That’s about what he’d done with his days. But there’s one minute in his life where he makes the big D to take over his life. That’s what most people don’t do, take charge of their lives. Ain’t that right, Jesse?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right,” I said.

  “So what’s going down with the Diablos?” Gun cut to the chase.

/>   “You know—and Jesse can back me up on this—the Diablos have been checking out their press, and now they’re thinking they can blow themselves up huge if they get the right coverage.” Rise had slipped out of his OG voice and was talking like he did before he started hanging uptown. “Their crew got to the point where they’re putting all their business in the street. They got shorties running around talking about how the Diablos did this and how they did that.

  “Now, if shorties are running up and down the Avenue laying out your thing, you know the police and everybody else is checking you out too. Ain’t that right, Jesse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why Jesse and Gun were worried about what they were going to be doing,” Rise went on. “It’s like ‘Hey, the revolution is going to be on television tonight at eight thirty—bring your own piece.’ You know what I mean?”

  “They’re supposed to be revolutionaries?” Junice asked.

  “Naw, I’m talking history,” Rise said. “The Counts are some heavy dudes. They dig where I’m coming from. So what I’m saying is that we got to walk away from the Diablos and let them do their little gang thing on their own turf and deal with whatever business they got to be dealing with away from us. You see what I’m saying?”

  “We got to fight them to put them out of the hood?” C.J. asked.

  “No, man, we just got to walk away from their game, away from their press conferences, and be who we are in our own quiet way.”

  Junice asked Rise if the Diablos really had press conferences, and he gave her a look and started explaining again how they put their business in the streets so they might as well call the television reporters down and run their whole game for the public.

  What I was thinking was that it was cool to stay away from the Diablos, but I still didn’t have the whole 411 because the way Rise was running it down, the words didn’t sound like they fit the melody. A year before, Rise had been just an ordinary dude; now he was sounding like Moses coming down from the mountainside, passing out commandments, signing autographs, and blowing kisses to his fans.

  He ran his mouth some more about how we were more mature than the Diablos, and I could see C.J. and Gun relaxing. Gun was even bad-mouthing Calvin and Benny for not making the meeting.

  “They’re reading the same press as the Diablos,” Rise said.

  I was feeling better too. Before I had come into Earl’s, I was so uptight I couldn’t think. Now the pain in my stomach was easing up and I was trying to figure out what was coming next.

  Something came to me saying that the set was too easy. And when Rise was checking his watch and wondering aloud what had happened to the Diablos, it didn’t feel right. Gun wondered how come they were late.

  “They ain’t got their handle down,” Rise said. “Mostly they’re young dudes with more rep than weight.”

  “So all we’re going to do is chill, right?” C.J. was saying.

  “And stay beautiful,” Rise said, turning to the girl. “Ain’t that right … baby?”

  “Junice!” The girl pushed Rise playfully.

  “So Jesse’s writing about you taking charge of your life?” Gun asked.

  “Yeah, I’m telling him what it’s about, and he’s putting it all down in words and bringing it to life on the page. He’s like my P. Diddy, orchestrating my thing and bringing out the best in me. And let me explain that the brother’s words and images are just righteous. Righteous!”

  “Jesse is good,” C.J. said.

  “Maybe we can have a party when the book is done, and me and him can sign copies like the white folks do,” Rise said.

  Earl came into the back room and asked us how much longer we were going to be because he wanted to go and get something to eat. Rise said our business was finished and we just had to wrap things up a bit.

  “Two minutes, Earl.”

  Earl nodded. He had eyeballed the whole room and sniffed to see if there was any weed in the air. Everything was cool, and I was glad the meeting was ending.

  “So we’re not going to wait for the Diablos?” I asked.

  “They ran their mouths about me not being late, and it’s after seven now. The lames are gaming, so we might as well check the breeze. I’m going to try to get cell phones for all the Counts.” Rise stood up. “That way we can stay in touch easier. We can still have our meetings once a month.”

  “You can get me a phone too,” Junice said as we started out the door.

  Rise flagged down a gypsy cab and asked if any of us needed to be dropped off. Gun went with him, and me and C.J. started walking uptown.

  “So what you think?” C.J. asked.

  Bob Marley’s voice came out of a loudspeaker mounted over a small incense store. He was singing “No Woman No Cry,” and it sounded as good as it always did. “Rise is so many people,” I said. “One minute he’s talking about the Diablos going big-time and the next he’s getting us all cell phones so we can stay in touch. I guess it’s all right.”

  “Everybody is more than one person,” C.J. said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You just said that,” C.J. came back. “You said that Rise is so many people.”

  “I know what I said,” I answered. “I said that because he keeps changing the direction he’s coming from. But what did you mean when you said it?”

  “Everybody changes the direction they’re coming from,” C.J. said. “I change the direction I’m coming from all the time.”

  “I don’t change my direction,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re not as smart as me,” C.J. said. “You know I’m a genius, right?”

  “Yeah, you probably are, man.” I could tell that C.J. was as relieved as I was that nothing had happened. We started kidding with each other as we walked uptown. C.J. stopped to buy a soft-shell crab on a bun from a wide-faced old woman who was mostly bald and had a wig on that had slid toward the back of her head.

  “What you want on it?” she asked. “All I got is hot sauce.”

  “Then why you ask me what I want on it?” C.J. asked.

  “Don’t play with me, boy.” The woman pushed a stubby finger under C.J.’s nose. “I don’t need your two dollars that bad.”

  C.J. started to protest that the sign read -1.75 when we heard the first sirens. People on the street turned to look, saw that the emergency vehicles were passing where we were, and went on with whatever they were doing. I looked and saw that there were three regular police cars and two unmarked cars with blue lights on top. They were all headed uptown.

  “It’s a stickup,” C.J. said. “The store owner pushed the silent alarm and the cops are trying to catch the stickup dudes in the store.”

  “I think it’s a liquor-store stickup because they’re the only ones that pay off the police,” I said. “That’s why the cars are hustling uptown. Either a liquor store or a fast-food place. Probably a fast-food place, because the liquor stores all have that bulletproof glass and you can’t get to the money.”

  “You can if you take a hostage,” C.J. said.

  We got to 144th Street, and we saw there were about nine police cars, some emergency vehicles, and cops all over the place. We asked a man what happened and he said he didn’t know. A girl, about ten, heard us ask and came over right away.

  “There was some shooting and people was running all over 144th Street. One guy got shot in the stomach, and he was holding his stomach and hollering, I’m shot! I’m shot!’ and he didn’t even need to be hollering that because you could see his butt was shot. They were shooting people from their cars, and the people they were shooting at was shooting back at them. A bullet just missed me!”

  “You were right there?” C.J. asked.

  “Not at first, but I ran up the block to see what was going on because my cousin lives on that block—in 216—and I went up to her house on the first floor, and we were all looking out the window and we could see them shooting. One of them had an Uzi, and he hit a pregnant lady in her foot and s
he was screaming. It was terrible.”

  “Anybody get hurt bad?” I asked.

  “You know the one I said got shot in the stomach?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think he was dead, because he was sitting on the sidewalk and not even moving and his hand was like this across his lap and his head was back like this and one leg was kind of up but it wasn’t moving and my cousin said he looked like he was dead.”

  The police were moving everybody off the street, and C.J. said that we had better get home before our parents heard about it.

  “No way we get home that fast,” I said. “Look, channel two is already here.” I got home and my parents were watching television. Dad looked at the clock on the mantel but he didn’t say anything.

  “Night, folks,” I said.

  Mom said good night and Dad kind of grunted. It was good to be talking again.

  Chapter 21

  I went to sleep thinking about Tania. It was funny how she kept showing up in my thoughts even though I was so nervous when I was around her. At first I tried to keep my thoughts on drawing her and away from sex, but after a while I just gave in and wondered about what it would be like to be with her. I wasn’t really worried about it, because I didn’t think we were going to get married or anything super serious, but I didn’t want her to think I was a goofus, either. Thinking about Tania led me into thinking about C.J. He and Tania were the ones I wanted to be with. C.J. because he was easy and we had the art thing going on, and Tania because she was a girl. I kept remembering the way she looked at me when she told me that she was going to tell Rise that we had done it. Yikes. Yes, Mami, you definitely got it going on.

  When Mom woke me, I thought it was morning. But when she put her arms around me and started whispering something about Sidney, I knew something was crazy wrong.

  “Remember, you don’t have to say anything to him or to the police,” she whispered in my ear. She was in her bathrobe. Her arms were around me, holding me close.

  “What’s up?”

  “That detective is here,” she said. “Sidney.”