Next part of the story, and don’t give up on it just yet.

Music? Slack Hands, by Galliano. Yeah, you heard right. Just go with it. Maybe put it on repeat while you read, maybe try something stronger than tea this time, too. Round this out with some Summertime, just because Wakeman does it better than just about anyone these days.

So right, off we go, into the second of three parts.

Part II: Temperance

He wasn’t a little kid anymore, but he still wasn’t exactly a teenager, not quite. At 12 years old, Damarius King was at a crossroads and he wasn’t really up to making decisions like this – yet he was smart enough to know it. He’d seen a lot already, more than someone his age should have. He was living with his grandmother right now, and he had been for a few months, but she wasn’t much better than his mother. And he was smart enough to understand that, too. The thing is, he didn’t want to end up like his mom, or his grandmother, or like any other people he knew around the ‘hood.

He’d actually done pretty good in school, until this year, anyway. A couple of good teachers along the way had gotten through to him, got him to look past the gangs and their drugs, the gangs and their guns, and the gangs and the way the new cartels were shaking things up. There’d always been gangs in The Five, as this part of Pittsburgh was called, but for the most part, it had been a Bloods and Crips deal. Maybe a few members of the Vietnamese gangs were still hanging on, but those gangs were old school now, almost gone and hardly anyone remembered them. The Latino gangs had never really been a factor – until recently. Yet for as long as Damarius had been around, the cartels had been right in there, too.

Never really organized, though, not on Hamilton Ave. But that was starting to change.

Gangs were usually neighborhood affairs, at least they used to be, and to Damarius King that was exactly what they were. No more, no less. A few kids worked the block, protection money, running bets to bookmakers. Making sure young girls were kept busy. That’s the way it had always been. And that was true enough now. Gangs had always been around. In Ireland and Sicily. In Londontowne and Shanghai. Osaka, Edo, Saint Petersburg. New York and Philadelphia, then Chicago, where a new twist emerged. Gangs that formed in these states prison systems remained intact, and a few of them merged with the Vice Lords Nation, a ‘charity’ ostensibly operating as an anti-poverty outreach program in and around the slaughterhouses clustered around the rail yards found in Chicago’s South Side.

There was a saying back in the sixties, a euphemism popularized by black radicals, that goes something like this: ‘The whiteys who came to America landed on Plymouth Rock, but Plymouth Rock landed on us, and we’ve been carrying it ever since.’ There’s a lot of anger and frustration tied up in those words. Maybe some nihilism, too. And it’s important to understand where that anger comes from. It’s too easy to just say that some people are racists and leave it at that. It’s also too easy to say that the Africans imported to the Americas simply could not, or would not integrate into mainstream society, for whatever reason racists, and racists not just limited to the American South, implied.

More than anything, for these African Americans all the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment was as yet unrealized, and all the blood spilled in the American Civil War did not lead to a just resolution, yet by the time JFK came along American society seemed – seemed – ready to close the deal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was crafted to be the instrument that finally shattered the last shackles of slavery. LBJ, with his background teaching migrant farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley, fully enjoined this War on Poverty. Yet within a few years, as prominent African American leaders were being gunned down or lynched, more wars loomed on the horizon. Vietnam first, then Nixon’s War on Crime, which led to waves of mass incarceration. This was followed by Reagan’s War on Drugs, with even more people being incarcerated. More people meaning African American men. From the late 60s through the early 80s, the basic premises of the Civil Rights Act were whittled away, and the generational idealism of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream devolved into a spirit of revolutionary suicide as dispirited young black men faced down police wherever they went.

And, not coincidentally, that period marked the emergence of the first two organized black gangs in North America, with the formations of the Bloods and the nearby Crips in South Central Los Angeles. And, again not coincidentally, these gangs first formed on the neighborhood level, just as almost all gangs always have, yet these two new gangs were being politically and militarily energized by a constant stream of young men being released from prison.

My, how the pendulum swings.

In simple mechanical systems, the momentum of any given part of the system is conserved unless acted upon by some external force. In practical terms related to gang warfare, this is best expressed as action equals reaction, or, to put it in more succinct terms, if you fuck with me I’m gonna fuck with you.

In this worldview, The Man is the system and the system has declared war on you. And in this war, local police officers are the foot soldiers of The Man’s occupying army. So…action, reaction.

And yet Damarius King knew absolutely nothing about this. Rather, he had been taught to distrust authority, any and all authority, and so with that worldview drilled firmly into his mind, about the only authority he ever saw could be found driving around the ‘hood in a Ford Explorer, and the whiteys inside those police cars apparently liked to fuck people up. Give ‘em an excuse and they’d kill you, too. Damarius knew that was true because he’d seen it happen, and more than a few times.

This is a worldview, of course, that is completely at odds with popular perception, the popular perception of mainstream America, anyway, because most people in America cannot relate to that earlier idea about Plymouth Rock. Most people learn all about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their arrival in the New World, and starting in first grade, too, and those happy early lessons focus on rosy images of peaceful coexistence with friendly natives culminating in a joyously big Thanksgiving meal, with the ‘Indians’ being the invited guests of honor at the party. The idea that from the very beginning these settlers brought slaves with them seems foreign, out of place, and so probably, on some level, just not true, so the very idea that a kid like Damarius King might be carrying around a chip of Plymouth Rock on his shoulder seems inconceivable. Besides, that kid probably doesn’t even know where Plymouth Rock is. Ya know?

Damarius lived in a red brick row house on Hamilton Avenue. The windows on the ground floor had been boarded up with plywood for so long the wood was covered with black mold. Windows in the two upstairs bedrooms were covered with aluminum foil in the summer, to help keep the heat out, and with trash bags and blankets in winter, to keep the snow out. He slept with his grandmother in the rear bedroom because bullets peppered the bedroom up front from time to time. When his grandmother’s check came from the government they bought food; if there was enough left over she paid the electric and water bills. Neither had seen a real doctor in years, just a nurse at the free clinic. Many of their neighbors died during the Covid thing, whatever that was, but they didn’t get sick.

She’d made sure he went to school, too, even after Covid, and Damarius could read some, and write a little, too. When the police drove by they looked at him from time to time, but they didn’t smile, and they sure didn’t wave, and he didn’t understand. He’d asked his grandmother once and she didn’t want to talk about it, so he asked his teachers at school. Again, he just didn’t understand why they turned away from his question. One of them, Miss Millet, even cried when he asked.

He liked to go fishing with Mr. Jenkins. The old man had fishing poles and sinkers, and those red and white things that bobbed up and down when a fish bit the hook. On Sundays they’d catch the bus and ride over to the water; Mr. Jenkins called it the Monongahela River, and they’d walk down the steep banks, careful of the snakes that rattled, then fish all afternoon. Mr. Jenkins shared what he caught with Damarius so he and his grandmother could enjoy some fresh caught fish, and those days were the best he’d ever known.

There were other kids in the neighborhood, of course, but most of them had guns and didn’t seem like they were interested in baseball or football or the other things Damarius liked, but that was okay. They didn’t bother him if he didn’t bother them, and besides, his grandmother told him to keep away from kids like that. They were trouble, she said. And she was usually right about stuff like that.

Things got weird after the virus. 

The police had gone over to some man’s house over on Garfield Street and the man shot at the police, then the police shot at the man’s house. According to something in the newspaper, the police shot that house 4,000 times, and they killed the old man in the house. He was wrong in the head, too, at least that’s what Damarius heard. He’d seen that before, too. Lots of times.

Police cars didn’t come to Hamilton Avenue often. In fact, they only seemed to show up after something bad happened, usually when someone was shot or after a ‘drive-by.’ Drive-bys were the worst, and that’s how the boards on the front window got shot up and why his grandmother stayed off the front porch, and maybe, he thought, that was why the police didn’t wave at him when he waved at them.

Maybe because it wasn’t easy to keep score on Hamilton. You could always find the Blood Gang (Gangster Bloods) working the area, which meant the Crips would be there too. But you could find members of Pirus working the corners on weekends, but Damarius knew that the Black Disciples, and the Renegade Black Disciples, not to mention the Blue Fin Disciples, the Gangster Disciples, the King Cobras, the Renegade Gangster Disciples, the Renegade Insane Racine Boys and the Renegade Insane Campbell Boys showed up too, and that’s when the action picked up. But every now and then the Insane Black Souls would turn up, or the Almighty Latin Stones, or maybe the Arkhos Flip City Kings or the Convict Gang, or even the Law Gang which, believe it or not, was an actual gang and not related to the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, which was a different kind of gang. 

But now there were some new kids on Hamilton, and these new guys were mean as snakes. They weren’t black but they worked the night, and they weren’t playing around. The usual kids that worked the corners, the usual black kids, were disappearing. Sometimes their bodies were found and sometimes they weren’t, but the word was when a body was found there wasn’t a head attached anymore. Word was, well, someone was collecting skulls.

One of the Crips in the neighborhood lived in the house next door, the row house on the end, right next to the boarded-up store on the corner of Hamilton and Collier. The crips in the ‘hood looked up to Benny Broadway and he sort of ran this part of Hamilton, and the vacant lot across the street was his. He kept a couple of girls in the old store, and even a couple of old mattresses for guys not content with some head, so Benny had a couple of kids working as lookouts and at least one kid picking up new product, leaving him to keep an eye on the street. You never knew when the competition would show up, or what kind of crew might be in the next car, so Benny had guns stashed all over the place, just in case.

But Benny had lost kids recently, to that new gang working the end of Hamilton, out where it ran into Oakwood. There were good trees on Oakwood, good places to hide – if you could handle the rattlesnakes – but now this new group was inching closer to Benny’s territory. So Benny dialed up the chain of command, pulled in some reinforcements, and last weekend Benny and this crew drove out to Oakwood and shot up a couple of these new guys, and they brought one of them to Benny’s house.

Of course Damarius heard everything.

There were two new groups looking to push the Crips off Hamilton. One was MS-13, and even Damarius had heard of those guys, but the second group? Damarius hadn’t heard the name before, but Benny seemed shaken when he heard the name, and even listening through the walls, Damarius could hear the fear in Benny’s voice. In fact, he sounded scared.

The name was Tren de Aragua, and Benny’s informant said they liked machetes, and that they liked to look their victims right in the eyes as they killed them. The kid also said he knew where they kept the skulls.

+++++

Dos Hermanos. That’s what they went by. The two brothers. César and Porfirio Limones. The Lemon brothers and they were mean, even by the usual standards on Hamilton Avenue. Word on the streets was they’d taken a girl and used her for a few days, then cut her tits off before they took her head. In order to become a part of their gang you had to do the same, so now the cops were investigating a bunch of disappearances of girls all over the east side.

So far they’d left BennyB alone. Benny was small time, not worth the trouble, but now the word was the Lemon Brothers were planning on moving in, so Benny was on to his brothers in the Crips. A war was shaping up, and Benny was looking for kids on Hamilton, new blood to take the place of the kids he’d just lost. 

“What about Damarius?”

Benny Broadway wasn’t sure about Damarius. The kid seemed smart enough, but in a way he seemed slow, slow like he was a retard, ya know? Still going to school, and who the fuck did that? Damarius wasn’t the type you could count on when things got bad, and he didn’t need that kind of trouble. Then again, if the brothers moved in they tried to recruit him, and if Damarius didn’t go along, they’d probably kill him.

But he was already running low on shit. That meant he needed to get some bucks together, try to line up some product from his brothers uptown. Out here on Hamilton, meth and cocaine were done; what he needed now was some Chinese food and brown sugar, what others called fentanyl and heroin. If he was flush, he tried to keep some footballs on hand for whitey in his BMW, which was also known as Xanax, because whitey loved that shit, couldn’t get enough of it. If whitey had some trim up front, he might want to get out of the car and try to score some ‘roofies,’ otherwise known as Rohypnol, to mix with some booze to put the girl out, guarantee an easy score. He sold a lot of that shit come Friday night, all year too.

See, Benny Broadway was just a businessman, just trying to take care of his customers – the best way he knew how. And like any other businessman, he needed shit to sell, and a network of people to help make it go down easy.

Benny looked at his phone, checked the time. Damarius would be getting off the bus soon, up at Homewood, and he’d try to get to him on his walk home. It was time to get the kid involved.

He saw the school bus, saw Damarius struggling with his book bag, and that was perfect. He’d go down and help him carry the load, because wasn’t that exactly what he was about to ask the kid to do? To help carry the load? To start carrying product from the drop-off to his crib?

+++++

César Limones looked out the window, looked right down Hamilton, and even from here, in this shitty old house on Oakwood, he could see that shithead Benny Broadway walking up to a little kid. Kid was carrying something, too. Probably loading up for the weekend. So Broadway already had a new soldier? Too bad for the little kid.

Benito Navarro, though he was called Navi by close associates, pulled up across the street and parked his ride, a shiny new Chevy Tahoe, on the sidewalk. The truck was white as a cloud, all the glass blacked out but chrome everywhere, even the wheels. César watched Navi carefully, looked at his coat, especially up by the armpits, looked for the bump that meant he was carrying. Usually a ghost, but sometimes a blade. Navi had a source, someone printing up Glocks with no serial numbers, and he was supposed to be bringing some today. These ‘ghosts’, or ghost guns, had really changed things because they made guns easier to toss. Spray some silicone on the grips and trigger and no fingerprints, too. And yeah, Navi popped the tailgate and grabbed a gym bag, then looked around before he turned and walked over to the new house.

Big concrete steps led up the steep little hill, and afternoon sunshine was flooding the broad front porch with warmth. Porfirio was out there, basking. The brothers missed home, missed the sun and the warmth, and right now Pittsburgh was anything but warm. After two years in Florida, Pittsburgh was fucking hell. But Pittsburgh had money, and Pittsburgh had kids. Lots of kids with money, and all those kids wanted what the brothers had.

César and Porfirio had grown up on Venezuela’s north coast, above the small fishing village of Puerto Cruz. The family had a farm along the river, the El Limon, but when opportunity called the brothers listened. Soon they were selling to the sailors at the naval base in Puerto Cabello, then they hit the big time, selling cocaine in Curaçao and Aruba. During some time in Tocorón, they made it into Tren de Aragua. Now they were Navi’s enforcers, his captains. 

They were supervising the construction of a network of tunnels in the hill that ran alongside Oakwood, and up the hill to more houses on Sickles and Fargo. Many of them were boarded up, condemned, and perfect to stash product that was always coming in. This area was perfect. The alleyway behind the house was an overgrown mess, a tangle of vines and shrubs, and a couple of the houses along the alley had garages in back and they were moving stuff in during storms, backing right into the garages and moving shit down into the basements, and then into the tunnels for distribution. The trick was to never let the Five-O pick up a pattern, always keep ‘em guessing. If they got too close, well, too bad for them.

Navi had a girl in the basement, some kind of payback going down. Girl’s mother was a judge, but a stupid one who ignored warnings. She didn’t have protection, not even for her family, so the girl been an easy mark, no problem to pick up. They’d had her for a week and so far there hadn’t been anything in the papers or on TV. Then a spoofed call from a house out by the airport, a botched rescue attempt by the locals and the FBI, and Navi had watched from afar, smiling. They’d tried to fuck with him, so now it was time for some payback.

When Benito Navarro made it up the steps he greeted Porfirio and handed off the gym bag to César before he went down to the basement. They had a bench grinder set up down there, and other tools, too, but Navi started in on his favorite machete, working the edge until the cold steel was as sharp as scalpel. Then he went into the tunnel to start in on the girl.

It took about an hour, and the only thing left was one of the girl’s hands. Navi mixed up something he said he’d learned from an Israeli spy, something he called caustic soda, and he’d chopped up the girl and put her in a vat of the stuff. In a few days, there wouldn’t be anything left but brown fluid and bone fragments, but you could turn the bones into sand just by rubbing them between your fingers. He took the girl’s hand and later that evening mailed it to the judge at her home, using the judge’s favorite restaurant’s address on the shipping label.

+++++

Dre’ Loos was an imposing man, and in more ways than one. At six feet six inches, he was considered tall, and he carried his almost three hundred pounds on a frame of solid muscle. Most people remarked that he looked like a professional football player, but that was probably because he had been, once upon a time. He’d played for the Oakland Raiders then the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the 90s, and after Andre Lutz retired, in ’05, he stayed in the city. He was bald now, his head the kind of shiny bald you could spot from across a crowded room, and only the beard he wore gave away his age. These days it was turning a little white, you see. Not that it mattered.

Dre’ had grown up in the city so coming back to the Steelers had been like a dream come true, because, he liked to say, what most people didn’t get was that Pittsburghers loved their city, and with a passion most people just didn’t get, and never would. He’d gone to Penn State where he developed into a formidable middle linebacker – most considered him downright mean – so he was a perfect fit for the Raiders’ brand of football. When he began to slow down he found himself back in Pittsburgh, and while he managed to play five more years everyone still considered him mean as a snake.

The Steelers public relations department got Andre hooked up with the local United Way chapter, and he got involved with crippled kids, then sick kids. Kids born with club feet or cleft palates, kids with cancer, kids that had been burned in terrible accidents. He used his fame to help the United Way raise money for these kids, and the experience changed him. Pretty soon, most people could see Dre’ for what he really was: a real gentle giant and one with a heart of gold. 

Yet a lot of people saw Dre’ as an angry black man, a radical with that chip on his shoulder.

While at Penn he took a sociology class and the subject interested him; after a few more classes he declared Sociology as his major. He took psych classes too, enough to take a minor in Psychology, and he graduated with high honors before heading out west. Right after he retired he went over to the Graduate School Admissions Office at Pitt, and, of course, everyone there knew who he was. And everyone there was shocked when he told them he wanted to go back to school. He had a degree in Sociology with a minor in Psych and, he wondered, how could he best put his skills, and his interests, to use. To best use, he said, because he wanted to get involved to stay involved.

Social Work, they said. Start there. Maybe go for LCSW certification, as in Licensed Clinical Social Worker. He could go onto any number of organizations from there, and he could go into policy planning or get involved with people in need – in one-on-one settings. There were tons of opportunities, more for someone like him. He started classes when the next term started, and everyone in his classes, even his professors, knew who he was. Some wanted autographs, some even brought jerseys to class, asked if he’d sign them – and he always did. With a smile. Because he really was just a gentle giant.

Dre’ kept working out, taking care of himself just like he always had, and every afternoon, right after class he went to the gym on campus and lifted for a while, then went for a five-mile run. Pretty soon he recognized a guy from one of his classes, a little younger than him but another guy really in shape. TJ Warren. He’d gone to Pitt and right after 911 had gone into the Army. Picked for Ranger School, he was chosen to go through further training, first for Special Forces, then the 18D program, to become a Special Forces medic. Soon everyone was calling him ‘Doc,’ and most everyone still did.

And pretty soon Doc and Dre’ got to talking in the gym, sharing experiences. Working out together, running. Working on classwork, soon becoming friends. Then best friends. When Dre’ hooked up with a girl and marriage was on the way, he asked Doc to be his Best Man, because that’s how close they’d become.

Doc was Catholic, and Catholic with a capital C. He wasn’t sure what path he’d take but he was pretty certain he’d end up going to seminary, sooner or later becoming a priest, one way or another. Dre’ started going to church with his friend, started getting into it. The God thing. Doc said he wasn’t looking for answers, that life was a mystery, and that God was just one way of looking at all those mysteries, and of maybe trying to understand your place in the grand scheme of things. Doc never talked about girls, at least not like most guys talked about girls, but he wasn’t gay, either. 

“Dude, you celibate or something?” Dre’ asked one afternoon while they jogged up what would have given pause to a mountain goat.

“No, of course not.”

“You ain’t gay, and you ain’t got no girl, so what’s the score?”

But Doc had just shrugged. “If the right girl comes along, then…who knows?”

“You been with a girl, right?”

“Do my mother and sister count?”

“Fuck no, mother fucker!”

“You mean, like a girlfriend?”

“I mean doin’ the deed, the hunka-chunka, gettin’ down and dirty, man.”

“Oh. That.”

“So?”

“Yeah, Dre’, I’ve done the deed.”

“And, like, you liked it, right?”

“What’s not to like?”

“So, shouldn’t you be out there perpetuating the species? Maybe havin’ some fun before you take them vows?”

“Like I said, if the right girl comes…”

“Man, you fucked in da head. You, like, know that, right?”

Doc pulled ahead, his legs churning like pistons. “As long as I got you here to remind me,” Doc tossed off over his shoulder as he sprinted ahead, “I’m pretty sure you’re not going to let me forget.”

+++++

Benny walked up to Damarius and they exchanged hand signals, acknowledging they lived in the same hood, and Benny reached out and took the heavy book bag off the kid’s shoulder.

“Man, what you got in here? Feels like bricks or rocks or something…?”

“Just books.”

“You ain’t got no stuff? No Bombers? You ain’t carryin’ for nobody?”

Damarius wondered where this was going. BennyB never, ever acted nice unless he wanted something, so Damarius was already on guard. “No, just books.”

“So, you still learnin’ what the man tell you to?”

“Miss Murphy is my teacher.”

“Okay. So, you learnin’ what this bitch tell you?”

“Benny, I got to get home. I got to give my grandmother her shot.”

“Man, what you shootin’ her up with? I hear there’s some Mexican Brown comin’ in…”

Damarius shook his head. “Insulin, man. I give her insulin shots.”

Benny didn’t have all day so he pressed his case. “Look, D-mar, you wanna make some hard cash, like a lot of it?”

Damarius shook his head. “You mean like Bobby, don’t you?”

Bobby was the mule who’d disappeared last week. “Yeah. You know about that shit?”

Damarius nodded carefully. “Everyone around here knows, Benny, but…”

“But what?”

Damarius looked down, still not sure he wanted to tell Benny, but what he’d overheard might save his life, so that decided it. “There’s some shit going ‘round school. I heard some of it at lunch. You know those Tren guys? That new cartel?”

Benny started to turn and look up Hamilton to Oakwood, but Damarius was quick to stop him. “Don’t be lookin’ up there man, ‘cause they lookin’ right at you. The red brick house, right up at the end of the street, they in there and they watchin’ everything you do. Guy I know lives just down the hill and he’s seen ‘em. They use them glass things, them things you hold up to your eyes to see far away and they been watchin’ you for a while.”

“You shittin’ me, D-mar?”

Damarius frowned. “Another dude, white kid, he live up on Singer, like right behind them, and he seen ‘em doin’ weird shit in da middle of da night, and his old man has seen some of this shit too. ‘Bout a week ago, middle of the night, he seen ‘em takin’ Bobby in they house, and he was all fucked up, Benny. I mean like dead fucked up. His father thinks they diggin’ under the house, like they got trucks comin’ at night haulin’ dirt out of the house. I mean like in da middle of da night, and why would they be doin’ that, Benny?”

BennyB looked at the kid with mean, angry eyes. “You ain’t fuckin’ wit me, is you? You ain’t fuckin’ wit my head?”

Damarius looked at Benny, looked him right in the eye as he shook his head. “No way, man. I ain’t gonna haul no shit for you, but that don’t mean I want something bad to happen to you…”

“Alright, D-mar. We straight, we straight. You say you know both these kids? Like from school?”

Damarius nodded. “Das right.”

“Okay. Thanks, bro,” Benny said as he gave Damarius his book bag. He looked away, then spun around and walked off. Damarius walked to his grandmother’s but once he was inside he looked at Benny in the vacant lot across the street. He was behind some bushes, between a dumpster and a concrete block wall, talking on his phone.

He knew it then. There was going to be another drive-by tonight. The Crips were going to hit those Trens, and that meant there was going to be another war. How many this time? How many kids would die this time? Didn’t anybody want to stop this?

Well, it was time for him to start watching the street again. Just like he always did. Watching and listening. Watching and waiting kept you alive. If you stuck your head in the sand you died, simple as that. And that meant it was time to move some more stuff between the walls and where his grandmother slept. Anything to stop the bullets, ya know?

He went into the house, the same red brick row house he’d lived in since his mother got killed in a drive-by. He went to the fridge and picked up a fresh vial, then walked upstairs to her room. She was in an easy chair, snoring gently. He went over and got her meter, then bent over and got to work. Get a test strip in the meter, swab a finger. She hardly stirred as he went about it, so used to his kind, gentle ministrations that now she almost took his easy-going kindness for granted. The lancing device popped and he got the sample on the test strip and waited for the little meter to do its thing, then the results popped up on the tiny display.

“325, Grandma. What you have for lunch…a candy bar again?”

She nodded and he grumbled as he looked at the sliding scale, drawing her insulin then swabbing the soft part of her upper arm. He knew how to do it so the needle didn’t hurt and she hardly felt it this time, too. A minute later she was snoring again, asleep in the same old recliner she almost lived in these days.

He looked around, then started stacking whatever he could between the walls and her chair.

+++++

Last semester. Internships. Dre’ working at an outreach center on Garfield, working the work with kids already fallen through the cracks, livin’ low on the street. Girls turnin’ tricks at twelve, boys too. Anything to make a buck, maybe buy something to eat. Or something to shoot. Didn’t much matter, the hole in their stomach never really went away. Meth was the thing on these mean streets, little burglaries still an equal opportunity employer.

Still runnin’ with the Doc, too. Now Doc was working with some Catholic charities, doin’ pretty much the same shit. Three times a week they got together and lifted, ran the hills. Dinner, usually with the three of them. Beverly, cool woman, lawyer. Now she was his wife. She loved the Doc too, was always tryin’ to find him a woman. Said he’d be a good dad. The dude was takin’ philosophy classes now, gettin’ all intellectual but he was still grounded. But wound up tight, ya know? Like real tight.

You didn’t find a kid that needed help; the kid found you. Some kids wanted help, wanted off the street, and knew there had to be a better way. But there were boundaries, maybe too many boundaries, and never enough money. He’d put his money away, too. All that money from twelve years of football, invested, then in ’08 came the crash, and that hurt. Hurt big. He had his house, nice house, nice neighborhood, and Bev was making decent money downtown in the D.A.s office. Prosecutor. Tough job, hard money, but they kept their head above the water.

Graduation. Both he and the Doc with highest honors. Which way to go now? United Way wanted him and was offering good money, but Dre’ wanted to keep on goin’. Get his doctorate, maybe teach. But every time he thought like that he saw those kids, the kids that wanted help, and weren’t they the reason he’d started down this path? Did the system really need another teacher when he was so good with the kids? It wasn’t like the work made him happy, because when you lived with these kids happiness was rarely part of the deal. Maybe he was satisfied. Satisfied when he pulled a kid up just enough to teach them how to help themselves. One life at a time.

Too many gangs. Like maybe a thousand just here in the city. Some no more than a few kids on a block, but they were gangs. Some had links to national gangs like the Bloods and the Crips, some were just extended families fightin’ to survive in their little corner of the universe. One thing they had in common, though. All these kids had fallen through the cracks of a system that didn’t know it was broken, and there weren’t nobody tryin’ to fix what needed to be fixed. Only way to fix this shit was from the inside. 

“One city, one ‘hood.”

That was it. He had to get these kids together. Rebuild the city, one neighborhood at a time. Get everyone together, on the same page. These kids needed more than drugs. They needed a new reality, not a way out. Hope. The kind that ain’t just a slogan you hear every four years.

He and the Doc, lifting one day, then getting ready to run.

“What would you say if I told you I wanted to run for office?” Dre’ asked his best friend in the world.

Doc stood up straight and nodded. “I can see that happenin’, man. You’d be good.”

“Would you vote for me?”

“Fuck, bro, you were a Steeler. Everybody’ll vote for you.”

“But would you?”

“As long as you keep up with the whole deodorant thing, then yeah, maybe.”

“Doc. I’m bein’ serious man. Be straight, alright?”

Doc turned and looked at him, shook his head. “Man, you need me, I’ll be there. Alright? Like any time, anyplace.”

Dre’ swallowed hard, nodded then turned away. “Yeah man, I hear you. What about you? What you gonna do now? Still thinkin’ ‘bout going to med school?”

Doc shook his head, looked down at the city. “You ain’t gonna like this, Dre’, but I’m taking a different path this time.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Doc shrugged. “I started lookin’ into it a few months back, took the civil service test, went through the process. I got into the police academy, Dre’. I think I’m gonna go that way, see what I can do on that side of the street.”

Andre nodded. “Yeah, I can feel you doin’ that. You’re a warrior, man, always will be, I guess.” Dre’ looked at his friend and smiled, and in a way he felt happy for his friend, despite all the shit he was about to go through. “Yeah, you’ll be a good cop. I feel that, ya know? When you start?”

“Three weeks. Then 33 more in the classroom. I think three months more after that, riding shotgun with a training officer.”

“So a year? Man, you down with that?”

“I’m spinnin’ my wheels, Dre’. Gettin’ nowhere fast. I don’t understand what’s happenin’ out there, but things are broke. Broke bad. And I know one thing now.”

“What’s that?”

“I ain’t no social worker, Dre’. And neither are you.”

“I know. I’m feelin’ it too. This is, hell, I don’t know, like takin’ Band-aids to a knife fight. Ain’t no way to put things right. Still, I was hopin’ you’d do the medicine thing. You’d be real good at that, Doc.”

“I’m keeping up with my ratings, only through the fire department now.”

“So, you’ll like be a cop – and a paramedic?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Yeah. That fits. All you be needin’ is that red cape and all.”

Doc sighed, shook his head as he grinned. “And I’ll never be a Pittsburgh Steeler, Dre’. Don’t be telling’ me about capes, ‘cause you wore the biggest there is. You can make a difference. Hell, you will a difference.” 

They ran longer than usual that afternoon. Their twelve-mile run, down to the river…

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but. (gang names, drug slang both from DEA source material, not classified)