Living and Dying in Brick City (3 page)

L
ike so many black boys growing up in Newark, Legend dreamed of making it out, and he knew his ticket would be sports. He was one of those dudes who could do just about all things sports, but he was particularly good at basketball and football. His talents had earned him all-city honors in both sports a couple of times. He received a scholarship to play Division III football at a well-respected university, but to everyone’s surprise, he lasted just one semester before returning to the old neighborhood. There he built the drug-dealing empire that ultimately would consume his life. He had ruled the neighborhood without challenge until his mysterious disappearance about a year earlier, when he was a suspect in a high-stakes murder that had occurred in Newark a week before his sudden departure. Police didn’t have enough evidence to make a case against Legend and his crew. The no-snitch policy is real in the hood, and often a matter of life and death. You grow up hearing “snitches get stitches,” you see evidence of it all the time, and you keep your mouth shut. It’s not ideal and not the least bit courageous, but for folks who’d learned the hard way that those hired “to protect and serve” were no match for the thugs on the streets, it’s just a matter of survival. The case went unsolved.

“Out of sight, out of mind” is how a relative of Legend’s, who was also one of his lieutenants, explained the reason Legend left town. While Legend passed the time at a family member’s house in the deep South, there was a rush to claim his highly profitable drug arena, prompting a chain of shootings and stabbings. As I listened to this account of the drug war, I pinpointed the time period instantly. It had been the previous fall, when gunshot victims began showing up in the emergency room every day—so often that we’d felt it necessary to heighten our security.

Legend returned to Newark in early spring 2001 to reclaim his turf. He’d been warned that a new generation, “the young’uns,” had taken over, and that they’d earned their ruthless reputation. In
their minds, his reign was a thing of the past. Legend was unfazed by his young rivals. He figured he could battle them
and
chop down the former friends who’d become swollen with power in his absence. But the old gangster wasn’t coming back to the same streets he’d left. His generation had grown up with a street code that allowed them to return from jail or trips away and reclaim their old spots without much trouble. Others who’d filled the space understood that it was just temporary, and out of respect backed away.

Not so with the young’uns. It was every man for himself. They weren’t giving up anything without a battle. They were quick to pull the trigger, and they terrorized Chancellor Avenue with their shooting sprees, killing folks for sport. So they resisted when Legend began to occupy one of the corners with his cadre of runners, lieutenants, deliverers, and lookouts. At first, his return seemed uneventful. He’d gone to school with many of his workers and customers, and he’d spent time in practically every apartment in the neighborhood. Even the police didn’t pose much of a threat; Legend knew the officers and their patrol patterns. Some of his young rivals also showed him deference; they’d been groomed by him, after all. They’d grown up running errands for him, back in the day, fetching snacks from the store or chicken dinners from the neighborhood restaurant. In return, they got a few dollars, snacks, chicken dinners for themselves, and, most of all, bragging rights at school the next day.

Before long, Legend had carved out a small niche for himself in his old drug empire and figured the young’uns had just backed away. But on the hot, breezeless day when I met him, the young’uns showed him he’d figured wrong. As the streets tell it, two people on a black motorcycle came rolling down the block where Legend stood talking to his runners. Faceless in black helmets, they pulled up to the corner and opened fire, striking Legend all over his body.
The shooter on the back of the bike then hopped off, walked up to Legend, and taunted: “Where’s your lookouts? Know who you got working for you.” He then hopped back on the bike and they sped off, leaving a trail of blood on the ground and the smell of burnt rubber in the air.

God only knows how he managed to pull himself up from the sidewalk that should have been his deathbed and stumble to the hospital. For weeks after our lives collided in the E.R., I felt haunted by his confused gaze. His pleading eyes seemed to ask:
How come my cards got played this way?

It wasn’t unusual that I stayed up nights wondering what I could have done differently. Every time I lost a patient, I lost sleep, scrutinizing the lifesaving steps my team had taken, asking myself whether I could have done something better. But Legend’s death tore me up like no other. When I saw him in my dreams, it was as though I was looking at myself. I’d wake up sweating … and realize that somehow I’d tricked the gods. I’d managed to escape it all—the drugs, the dangerous pursuit of street fame and wealth, early death.

I thought back to a trip I’d taken to the Bronx when I was seventeen, just before the robbery and my time in juvenile detention. My friend Duke—the same Duke who’d masterminded the robbery—had convinced me I could do better than what I was earning working two part-time jobs—one at McDonald’s and another at IKEA. Even with both, I never seemed to have enough money to buy the things I needed; of course, I didn’t understand then how warped a seventeen-year-old’s definition of “need” could be. I’d managed to buy a used Audi 5000, which got me to and from work, but it needed repairs. I didn’t have the money, and in the irrational mind of a teenager, fixing my car was a need worth whatever risks I had to take to fulfill it. Duke’s nonsense was starting to make sense. We could pool our money and take over the Dayton Street drug
trade in no time, he said. If we didn’t, someone else would. And so, a short time later, there I was, being patted down inside an Uptown apartment by dudes with Uzis strapped across their chests. Stacks of money and bags of cocaine covered a coffee table. The scene looked like one from a gangster movie, but it was real. So, too, were the risks I hadn’t considered before doing this, and the possible consequences. I wanted to turn and walk away, but given the Uzi-toting brothers at the door, I didn’t think that would be wise. Duke and I bought the drugs and made a quick exit. A light rain was falling outside, but the droplets felt like slaps across my face. I thought:
What the hell am I doing here?

The drive back to Newark was nerve-racking. Every time a police car got near us, my heart rate spiked, and I had to remind myself not to speed or draw attention to myself.
How do dudes live like this?
I wondered. It definitely wasn’t what I wanted for my life. When we reached home, I told Duke he could have it all. I had no interest in taking over Dayton Street or anywhere else. Drug dealing just wasn’t my thing. It would take the robbery and the trip to juvenile detention for me to make a clean break with the thug life, though. Duke, unfortunately, stayed out there, and landed in and out of jail as I struggled through college and medical school.

B
y the end of my second year of residency at Beth, I was weary of all the bloodshed, weary of pronouncing one young black man after another dead of gunshot wounds, weary of losing to the streets. So when one day in 2001 I encountered yet another young gunshot victim, I’d had enough. He was unconscious, breathing through a tube that had been inserted by emergency medical technicians on the way to the hospital. I cut off his bloody clothes and was peeling away the remnants of his shirt when I noticed a twelve-inch scar. The sight stunned me. It was unmistakably a laparotomy scar, snaking from the pit of his chest to just below his belly button.
He had been cut open before. The surgeon standing next to me, Dr. Baker, noticed the scar, too.

“Holy cow!” he exclaimed, moving in to examine it closer. “That’s my work.”

Baker seemed as certain as if he’d just discovered a long-lost Picasso.

“You took care of this guy before?” I asked, feeling an odd emotion rising inside me.

“Yep, last summer—that’s my scar,” my colleague replied.

Suddenly, I was ashamed. Most times, I felt empathy for the young brothers, hanging on to life by the thinnest hair after a score had been settled on the streets. I never excused their reckless behavior, but I understood it. Not this time, though. This dude had been shot the previous summer and had experienced a lifesaving operation. Now he was back, in the same position. Dr. Baker, who is white, didn’t say another word, but in his silence I heard the judgment of white people (and “bourgie” black folks) everywhere:

“What’s wrong with those people?”

Many times I’d found myself explaining to white folks that poverty and crime are not a factor of skin color and that there is nothing about being black or brown that makes a person inherently violent. I’d argued that desperation and hopelessness often make poor people careless about their actions and the consequences. Change the conditions, I’d said, and their lives would change. But as I stood there patching up that guy, my patience and understanding were gone. I wanted to shake him, knock some sense into him, make him really hear me.

What will it take for you to get it, man?
I thought.
We don’t have to live like this
.

O
ften in the early years of my residency I wondered:
What had made the difference between me and the many friends I’d lost to
drugs and gang violence?
I’d known the same craving that Snake, Duke, and even the repeat offender must have felt for material wealth and respect. I’d known the kind of poverty that often makes a man in that situation feel justified in his wrongdoing—
a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, take care of himself and take the load off Moms, by any means necessary
. And I’d known the impatience many young brothers feel in a wealth-driven society that they believe is designed for them to fail. In their minds, it’s useless to even try playing by the rules. And so they create their own definition of how to win and earn respect.

Consider these disturbing facts: Homicide is the leading cause of death for black men ages fifteen to thirty-four, and most of those murders are committed with firearms, particularly handguns. According to a Bureau of Justice analysis of homicide trends in the United States from 1976 to 2005, African Americans—who made up just 12 to 13 percent of the population during that time—were disproportionately represented among both homicide victims and killers. Nearly 47 percent of all people murdered in the United States in those years were black, as were 52 percent of the killers. And 94 percent of the black victims were killed by other black people.

Even as the homicide rate stabilized nationwide between 1999 and 2005, the number of African American men ages twenty-five to forty-four who were killed by firearms in large cities and suburbs increased a third. And there’s more:

This long-standing crisis is beyond what law enforcement can handle alone. Children growing up in poor urban neighborhoods aren’t programmed by their DNA to run around with guns, killing one another. Violence is learned behavior. And I know from my own experience that the negative lessons learned in an environment saturated by drugs and violence can be unlearned. I also know that so many of our kids who are caught up in this cycle want better. Somehow, we must help them find it.