Mason Grier is seventeen, a year older than Calvin and two years older than me and C.J. The dude is definitely on a 24-7 hostility tour. The way he sees things is that there’s him and there’s the rest of the world. He’s being righteous and the rest of the world spends all day trying to mess with him. When he heard about the Counts and wanted to get in, we said okay, because there weren’t any real rules or anything, but nobody was digging him too tough.
Mason didn’t do anything I could tell but hang around the block, but like one of the old West Indian dudes said after he and Mason got into an argument—he just felt like trouble.
That was true. When we heard he had been picked up for robbing a bodega on Lenox Avenue, two blocks up from the Schomburg, it was news but it wasn’t a surprise.
“So this is what’s going down,” Calvin said, after calling the meeting of the Counts together. “We’ve got to talk about dues, about Mason, who you all know is in the slam, and about taking in a new member.”
Calvin, Benny, Gun, me, and C.J. were at the meeting, and Benny reminded Calvin that we didn’t have any dues. Calvin said he knew and that maybe it was time for us to start collecting a dollar a week dues just so we would have some backup cash. Everybody thought that was all right, so we had a vote and it passed 5–0. Then Rise showed and we had a new vote and it passed 6–0.
“Let’s deal with the new man next,” Calvin said. “He’s outside, and I’ll call him in and we can make a decision.”
“We need to get some women into the club,” Benny said. “Somebody call up the army and see how they recruit their chicks.”
We had a quick vote on that and appointed C.J. to make the call. Then Calvin went out and got the new kid. Calvin explained that “Mr. Montgomery,” as he called him, was applying for membership in the Counts.
“How old are you?” Benny asked.
“Old enough to get down.” Mr. Montgomery looked like he could have been in the fifth or sixth grade.
“Lay some numbers on us.” Rise eased into a chair.
“Fifteen,” Mr. Montgomery said.
“What they call you?” Gun asked. “Baby Face Nelson?”
“My friends call me Little Man” was the quick answer. “Ain’t nobody else supposed to speak to me.”
The kid was showing hard, but nobody was down with it and you could tell.
“We’ll let you know,” Calvin said. “Give me a call sometime next week.”
“That ain’t good enough,” Little Man said.
“Yeah, it is,” Rise said. He got up and opened the door. “Now pretend your butt is a sail, and get on in the wind.”
Everybody cracked on that, but I could tell that Little Man didn’t go for it. He turned and gave each of us a dirty look and then tried to glide out the door, but Rise gave him a push and slammed the door behind him.
“We need a rules committee to figure out who we’re taking in this club,” he said. “They got to be at least weaned from their mamas.”
We talked some more about collecting dues, and Rise said it was okay but maybe we should give a dance or something and try to raise some stash with some flash. That was all good, too, and we voted to collect a onetime dues payment of ten dollars and then plan a jump-and-bump to raise some more.
“We could have a dance and a ball game,” Gun said.
“Yo, check it out!” Benny Gonzalez put his hands in his lap the way Gun does all the time. “We can have a dance anda ball game. If Gun ever gets married he’s going to want to have a wedding—”
“Anda ball game.” Calvin finished Benny’s sentence.
It was true. Gun could play some ball, and that’s all he wanted to do. He was so serious about playing ball, he even studied to make sure he got into college so he could play on the next level. Plus the dude had made the All-City Team and the All-State Team, and was MVP in the Catholic Midnight League.
“There’s nothing wrong with basketball,” Gun said, sounding kind of hurt.
“Gun, I’m thinking of taking you on in some one-on-one,” C.J. said, leaning forward and drawling his words like he had something going on.
“C.J., if I wasn’t so good to black people, I wouldn’t even let you saybasketball, let alone get your slow self on the court,” Gun said.
“You mean C.J. can’t hoop?” Benny asked. “I thought my man was an all-star.”
“All-star?” Gun shook his head slowly. “I played C.J. some ball one day, and we couldn’t finish the game because he played so bad, the ball got embarrassed and left.”
I looked at C.J. and he was smiling.
“On a serious tip”—Calvin held his hand up—“there was one thing more that Mason asked me about.”
“He’s out of jail?” Rise asked.
“No, but his trial is coming up soon,” Calvin said. “He told me that he wants the Counts to rough up the bodega store owner. Send him a message.”
“He wants what?” Benny put his soda down. “And what did you say behind that?”
“The only witness against him is the store owner,” Calvin said. “He said that if we went over and pushed him, you know, scared him, he probably wouldn’t testify.”
“Yo, man, that is so not together,” Benny said. “The dude’s in jail and looking for company. He ain’t getting my mama’s child for a roommate.”
“He said he didn’t do it,” Calvin said. “He said the Man is jacking him up and the store owner is going along with it.”
“I’m not messing with it,” Benny said. “You can bet on that.”
“I didn’t even hear what you said,” Gun said.
“I got to decide.” Rise had draped his sweater over a box and now picked it up and started putting it on. “Maybe we should be the no-Counts instead of the Counts. I don’t know, if we’re not willing to stand up for each other, maybe we should forget about the rest of the thing and just move on in our separate ways. No big thing. Eventually you reach manhood, then you got to go through or turn around and go back.”
“This isn’t about manhood,” C.J. said. “This is about crime.”
“Oh? Is Mason guilty?” Rise asked. “You know that? Or you just figure if a black man is arrested, he’s automatically guilty?”
“Suppose he is guilty?” Gun asked.
“If it gets down to the word of the store owner against Mason, are they going to find him guilty?” Rise asked.
“Probably,” C.J. said. “If he says that Mason was the one who stuck him up.”
“So you’re thinking about going along with him?” Calvin asked.
“Like I said, I got to decide,” Rise said. “Same as you guys got to decide just how scared you are.”
We were quiet as Rise left. I felt my heart beating a little faster as I tried to wrap my mind around what Rise had just said.
“Jesse, Rise is your dog, man,” Calvin said. “Is he tripping?”
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“I thought you were tight with him,” Calvin said.
“I thought so too,” I said.
So I’m home chilling. Facedown on my bed with the door open listening to the television in the next room. I was listening to a cartoon channel and imagining what the images were when Rise called.
“Why don’t you come over for a while?” he asked.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thought we could hang for a while.”
“Yeah, okay.”
We only lived a few blocks apart, but I took my time to get over to his place. When I’m going to talk to somebody serious, I like to have practice conversations with myself first. The whole thing with him talking about dealing with Mason was weird. When I thought about it, I knew we had drifted apart some and I hadn’t spoken to him about it. As I was walking down the block, I realized that I didn’t even know how to talk about something like that.
“Look, man, this bodega thing is not cool.” That’s what I was going to say. And I needed to have a hip way of saying i
t so that I wouldn’t just sound like I’m laming out.
Or maybe: “Look, man, you’re biting Mason’s style but he’s in Iron City, you dig?”
Mom would have told me to not worry about how I sounded, just come on out and say it. That sounds good for a woman but that’s not me.
The guy who takes care of Rise’s building is always mopping the floor down with disinfectant. He says it keeps down the germs. Maybe it does, but it smells so bad in the summertime, you have to hold your nose going up the stairs. Which I did.
Rise’s grandfather, brown-skinned and thin except for a very round potbelly, answered the door.
“Hey, Rise!” he called out. “There’s a tall, ugly stranger at the door!”
“Hello, Mr. Johnson.”
“Come on in here, Jesse,” he said, standing to one side. “And tell me how things been on the other side of the world. You have been on the other side of the world, haven’t you?”
“No, sir.”
Rise came up, and Mr. Johnson—he was Rise’s mother’s father—asked him if he knew me. Rise said no and they pretended they were going to put me out for a while until Mrs. Johnson, Aunt Celia, came out of her bedroom. You had to be careful around her, because she didn’t understand things too tough.
I said hello to Aunt Celia and she smiled. She has a truly beautiful smile that makes her whole face light up. Whatever light is in a room is just fine for her face. The way I figured it, she must have been a stone fox when she was young. Rise and I went into his room, which is fixed up like a den, and he told me he had a jam he wanted me to hear. He put it on and it didn’t sound like much to me.
“That’s Coltrane,” he said. “You ever hear of him?”
“I think so,” I answered. “I didn’t know you liked that kind of jazz.”
“I’m moving on,” Rise said, turning the music down. “Dealing with new sets, new issues.”
“Like what?”
“Like what’s coming down the street,” Rise said. “What did Pastor Loving say? ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’”
“Whatever.”
I didn’t like getting into the I’m-older-than-you rap, so I just let it slide, figuring he was coming back to it anyway. We talked a bit about what was going on in the hood, and Rise was talking about how school should be useful when mostly it wasn’t. I was as chill as I could be and thinking about what I wanted to say about the bodega bit when Mr. Johnson knocked on the door. He opened it soon as he knocked on it and stuck his head in. I noticed that his eyebrows were mostly gray.
“Sidney Rock is out here,” Mr. Johnson said. “Says he wants to talk to you.”
Me and Rise went out to the kitchen and saw Sidney sitting at the table.
Sidney Rock was a cop, but he was okay with everybody on both sides of the Ave. He had grown up on the same block where I lived and hung out there a lot of the time. Everybody knew he was a cop even though he was young and dressed like an OG. He kind of looked out for all the brothers that he knew and that were straight with him. He’d also bust you if he had to, but at least he did it with respect. I had never seen him pull a gun but I knew he had one.
“What can I do for you?” Rise asked.
“Yo, Rise, what’s up?” Sidney asked.
“I’m all good,” Rise said. “How you doing?”
“Pumping strong.” Sidney touched his chest over his heart. “I thought I’d run some thoughts by you and my man Jesse here just to clear up a few things.”
“Run it,” Rise said.
“These boys in any trouble?” Mr. Johnson asked.
“No, sir,” Sidney said. “They know me—I don’t make trouble and I don’t look for it.”
“Y’all need anything, I’ll be in the next room,” Mr. Johnson said. “And let me tell you something, Mr. Pidney—”
“Sidney, sir. The name is Sidney.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Johnson had his serious look on. “I know your folks.”
“Yes, sir, I know you do.”
Mr. Johnson went into the other room, and Rise said we should go into his room, which we did.
“Coltrane! All right!” Sidney recognized the music right away.
“So what you want, man?” Rise asked. He sat on the end of the bed.
“Bam!Just like that? Yeah, okay,” Sidney said. “The word on the street is that Mason is trying to put out a hit on the bodega store owner, Mr. Alvarez.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“Nothing at all,” Sidney said, smiling. “‘Cause none of you are that dumb. I was just letting you know what the word was.”
“How many snitches you got in your jail, Mr. Police-man?”
“Too many, my brother,” Sidney said. “We got too many snitches, too many nonsnitches, and way too many young brothers trying to figure out how they got there.”
“We all trying to figure out where we are,” Rise came back.
“Jesse, you weren’t planning to go down to the bodega, were you?” Sidney asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s about all I had to say.” Sidney had been leaning against the wall, and he straightened up. “Glad to see you young brothers listening to some classical music. You know, I think I’m getting too old for rap.”
“Whatever,” Rise said. “Whatever.”
“Yeah, well, you know me,” Sidney said. “Why don’t you give me a call if things start getting too heavy out here.”
Sidney left, and Rise started cracking on him, imitating the way he spoke and stuff. I asked him why he was laughing, and he asked me if I didn’t think he was funny.
“Sidney?” I asked. “I think he’s a righteous dude.”
“That’s what he wants you to think, and he’s got your mind all wrapped up in his act,” Rise said. “Anyway, I called you over here to tell you I’m not going for Mason’s play, either. He’s out there on his own and we’re going to leave him out there.”
“I can hear that. That’s what Sidney was saying, more or less.”
“You ain’t hearing what I’m hearing, Jesse.” Rise put the palms of his hands together and brought his fingertips to his lips. It looked almost as if he was going to pray or something. “What I’m hearing is that Mason thought he was a big man because he could run into the bodega and do his little number. But that’s exactly what it’s all about—a little number. The only real getover in the world is to be bigger than life. You know what I mean?”
“Like a superhero?”
“You’ve probably got the best brain on the block, man,” Rise said. “Maybe I’ll hire you to do my biography. You can start with a portrait of me and then write about what you see in it, like that nun on television. You can see my strength right in the picture. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I guess so.”
“Thing is, when these street dudes do their muscle hustle, they got to lose, because sooner or later they’re going to run into something stronger than they are,” Rise said. “Mason is sitting in Iron City trying to figure out how he’s still being strong. He sees the lines, but he just don’t get the picture. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said.
What Rise was saying about Mason was heavy. I was sure I was seeing all the lines, too.
Chapter 3
“So what makes you think Rise is different?” We were sitting in the church at the organ and C.J. was doodling over the keys.
“I guess it was more about how he was talking about being different,” I said. “You know how he used to wear his hair long, but now he’s into dreads and silver cord in his hair.”
“Silver cords?”
“Braided into the dreads,” I said. “It looks all right, but it’s different.”
“Maybe he’s just getting old.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s changed a lot in the last year or so. I used to know everything about him. We were real close.”
“Rise probably thinks he has to act differently because he’s taking over the Counts,” C.J. said.
“He’s not taking over the Counts,” I said. “I mean, we’re not like something you take over, anyway.”
“That’s not what he told Calvin. He told Calvin that from now on, Mason can’t tell us what to do and if he sends any messages, he should send them to him. That sounds like taking over to me.”
C.J.’s mama came from the church basement carrying a plate of something. She stopped and looked at me and asked how hungry I was.
“And I know you’re hungry because it’s the nature of boys to be hungry,” she said.
“No, I’m okay,” I said.
“What are you and C.J. up here plotting?” she asked, putting the plate of potato salad and sliced ham down in front of C.J. “I know it must be the Lord’s work.”
“C.J. was just sitting here working on some blues he was thinking about playing at service next Sunday,” I said.
“Jesse Givens, how are you going to sit here in church and lie like that?” C.J. had this big grin on his face.
“Now one of you is lying,” Mrs. Europe said. “And it doesn’t matter if I know which one it is because God knows and He will deal with you gentlemen.”
“You know it must be Jesse,” C.J. said, “‘cause I don’t even like the blues.”
“I was telling C.J. that the blues are the devil’s music, Mrs. Europe,” I said, “but I don’t think he was listening.”
“You know, there was a time when I sang the blues.” C.J.’s mother put her head to one side. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“But then I got a regular job in the post office and gave up singing because it wasn’t paying any money,” she said. “And if I thought playing the blues could lead to a good job, I wouldn’t mind C.J. playing them.”
Right on cue C.J. started playing some blues on the organ and Mrs. Europe gave him a whack across the hands and reminded him that he was in church.