Living and Dying in Brick City (2 page)

We looked up to Snake. He was a mysterious dude, about five feet ten inches tall and two hundred pounds of solid muscle. He was smooth on his feet, although he moved through the neighborhood with a huge walking stick. His friends knew its real purpose: It would double as a whipping stick for the fools who dared to try to catch him off guard. He usually wore baseball caps to cover a patch of missing hair from a permanent scalp injury, which probably happened during a street fight. Snake was always down to fight. But his allegiance was flighty at best. He’d scrap one-on-one against a neighborhood rival or battle with a group targeting another gang. But he’d sometimes do an about-face and attack guys I thought were his boys. You never knew what to expect from Snake or how far he would go. During battle, the dude seemed to have no emotions; he’d beat an opponent mercilessly, past the point where even a little bit of human empathy might have said, “That’s enough.” In that sense, he was a real warrior, and back then it felt good to be on Snake’s side. There was a fun part of him, too. He was the first to pull a prank or talk music and girls, but even then he never revealed much about himself. I sometimes saw him with his sister, but he never talked about his family or home life.

I don’t know whether Snake ever finished high school, but neither he nor Duke worked a real nine-to-five; they mostly hustled drugs and did odd jobs to keep cash and make themselves appear legitimate. The summer before my senior year in high school, the four of us were hanging out in the schoolyard one night as usual, when Duke came up with a moneymaking scheme to rob drug dealers. I knew it was wrong, but we wouldn’t be hurting anybody, I reasoned. They were just drug dealers. And something about the idea made me feel powerful and strong. At fifteen, Manny already
had some prior arrests; he was game right away. Part of me was becoming as comfortable as my friends with this thug life, but there was another side of me, too.

As quiet as I’d kept it, I was also an honor student at University High School, where I’d become best friends with two other guys, Rameck and George. We’d ended up in some of the same classes and clicked right away because all three of us did well in school and still managed to be popular and cool. At the end of the previous school year, our junior year, George had talked Rameck and me into applying together to a scholarship program that would provide almost a full ride to college
and
medical school if we wanted to become doctors. None of us could have afforded college otherwise (even if the medical school part still seemed iffy for me), and so we’d taken the leap, sure of just one thing: Whatever we didn’t know we could figure out together. I hadn’t dared to mention any of those plans to Snake and the boys, though. They would have laughed me off the stoop: Marshall, going to college? Becoming a doctor? Who did I think I was? Some rich white dude or one of those Cosby kids on TV? Around my way, it was all about the here and now. Tomorrow wasn’t promised, and you did what you had to do today to survive.

For the moment, robbing drug dealers was the plan. What happened next seemed part of some bad dream—from us jumping out one night on the young Montclair drug boys to Snake and Duke brandishing the firepower to my patting down pockets and snatching jewelry and cash. All four of us had dressed in black to blend in with the darkness. We were just about to make our getaway when I noticed a brown four-door Chevy Citation pull up to the curb on the street in front of us. Two men in jeans and polo shirts shouted some questions about being lost. I moved discreetly toward the car and noticed a police radio on the floor. I immediately began backing away from the scene, yelling: “21 Jump! 21 Jump!” Undercover
cops. We’d taken the code from the name of a popular television series.

Within seconds, we were practically surrounded by police cars. My ten-second jump-start helped me distance myself from the scene and appear more like a spectator. The police focused on my three friends. As Snake sprinted past me, his sweaty face glistening, his gold chain bouncing on his chest, he looked shocked and desperate. It had never occurred to us that we might get caught.
Keep your head straight, Sam
, I told myself.
Keep walking. Don’t run just yet. Blend in with the surroundings. You’re seconds away from freedom
.

All three of my boys were arrested that night, and their loyalty ended there. Police found my ride, the would-be getaway car, at the scene and put out the word that they were coming for me. I turned myself in the next day. Because of their ages, Snake and Duke were taken to jail. Manny and I were transported to a juvenile detention center. To this day, I thank God that I was only seventeen and a half. If this had occurred a few months later, my future would have been a very different story. Since all three had serious priors, Snake was sentenced to seven years, Duke got five years, and Manny four. With just a misdemeanor shoplifting charge to my name, I got probation and, after four weeks in juvenile detention, another chance.

That experience changed me. I wasn’t familiar enough with the world outside Dayton Street to know for sure what I wanted out of life, but after my time in juvenile detention, I realized jail wasn’t it. All of the warnings from my parents, teachers, and others suddenly had become real.
Never again
, I told myself. Never again would I spend a night sleeping behind bars on a razor-thin cot that smelled like piss. Never again would I have to listen to dudes being raped while constantly watching my own back. Never again would I look into my mother’s eyes and see the pain and disappointment
that I’d put there. When I got out, I returned to University High for my senior year and started hanging out more with Rameck and George.

I was playing basketball at the schoolyard one day during my probation when I ran into Snake and Duke. They were out on bail and hadn’t been sentenced yet. We shot hoops together for a while like we used to and tried hanging out in our old spot, but it was too uncomfortable. None of us mentioned our arrests, but the air was tense. They probably had heard I’d received probation and resented that I wouldn’t have to do serious time. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Things were clearly different. I was different, and I knew then that the friendship was over. I never saw Snake again. I later heard that as soon as he got out of jail, he returned to the streets. And then I hadn’t heard or seen his name for years—until now.

T
he half hour in the conference room zipped by in a blur. As soon as it ended, I asked a colleague to point the way to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit and ran down the hall in search of the room number that had been listed next to Snake’s real name on the board. I rounded the corner and noticed a small group of people gathered in the hall outside the room. Some were crying. A few of the faces looked vaguely familiar. When one of the women glanced up at me, my heart stopped. The lump in my throat felt like a boulder. It was Snake’s sister. I could see in her red, puffy eyes that she recognized me, too. What was she thinking? Did she resent me because I hadn’t gotten jail time like her brother had? Guilt washed over me, and I felt a sudden urge to explain. I wanted to tell her that I’d needed to let her brother go to find my own way. The family members’ eyes followed me. I could hear their voices inside my head:
Wasn’t he the one who used to hang out with Snake? Who does he think he is, coming here now? He thinks he’s so special
. I
wanted to pull up a chair, grieve with them, and assure them that it was me, the same old Marshall. I wanted to show them that I hadn’t abandoned Snake, that I hadn’t abandoned them, that if I hadn’t made new friends, if I hadn’t gone to college, I would have ended up here, too, right beside Snake. As I ambled up to Snake’s sister, I realized that I never even knew her name. I fumbled for the right words.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Snake’s sister nodded kindly. He had died the night before, she confirmed. I wondered for a moment whether I should hug her, but it felt too awkward. I asked her to pass along my condolences to the rest of the family, and I excused myself. I slipped past the crowd and into the room where Snake had been. It was empty and a bit eerie. The covers on Bed 6, where he once lay, were still pulled back, and a host of medical machines—ventilator, cardiac monitor, IV pump—sat motionless. Snake’s body had been taken to the morgue, but I still stood there in silence, looking around the room, thinking,
This so easily could have been me
.

The swell of emotions was confusing: pain, regret, gratitude, guilt. I remembered Snake’s cool laugh, his witty remarks, his collection of baseball caps. I wondered if beneath all that bravado and rage he’d had dreams, like me, but had been too afraid to share them, or whether life had choked every bit of hope from him from the start. I wondered if I could have said something that might have made a difference. I wondered about all the things I never even knew or thought to ask him—what his mother was like, whether his father was part of his life, whether he’d ever had a teacher or counselor who’d told him he was smart. Kids aren’t born without hope. But it’s easy to grow up where we grew up, seeing death and destruction around us all the time, and think it’s normal. And it’s also difficult to hope for a life you’ve never seen beyond the television screen, to believe it is truly within your grasp.

Like a survivor pulled from the wreckage over a pile of dead bodies, I stood in that hospital room wondering:
Why? Why me? Why had I survived? Why had I made it out?
The guilt felt so overwhelming that I couldn’t think clearly.

T
he brothers kept coming. Night after night. Week after week. Young men, wasting their skills and smarts on the streets, young brothers who reminded me of the person I used to be. Then came one whose physical appearance made me do a double take.

It was an uncharacteristically hot day in April 2001 when I heard a commotion in the ambulance entrance outside the hospital.

“We need a stretcher over here!” a security guard yelled.

He was the first to notice the guy who had somehow lifted himself from a nearby sidewalk and stumbled around the corner to the glass doors of the ambulance bay. He was pounding on the door with the little energy he had left. His bloody hand streaked the clear glass a dark red.

“We need help now!” the guard persisted.

I grabbed the first free stretcher I saw and dashed with other hospital workers toward the noise. Outside, the patient I would come to know as Legend lay slumped against the door. His tattered flesh oozed blood from quarter-sized holes all over his body. We lifted him onto the gurney and ran at top speed toward the resuscitation bay. I was glad I’d worn my Nike sneakers with my scrubs that day. Comfort was important, and so was the ability to move fast.

“Doc, I’m going to die,” Legend uttered, spitting up blood. He was determined to get the words out: “Please tell my family, my kids, I love them.”

I looked down to reassure him and was startled by what I saw: His face resembled mine. Legend appeared to be in his late twenties, like me, with the same muscular medium build, the same
honey-colored complexion, and the same neat, short haircut. He seemed dazed, and his eyes followed my every move. He reached up for my hand and attempted to speak. Instead, more blood spurted out.

“Hang in there, man,” I said. “You are not going to die.”

But who was I fooling? The more clothes we cut off, the more bullet holes I counted. Legend had taken two gun blasts to the abdomen, another two to the chest, and there were two superficial wounds. The high-caliber bullets had torn through his vital organs. The floor in the trauma bay was now slippery with his blood, and I struggled to keep my footing as I maneuvered quickly around the bed and hooked him to a heart monitor. His blood pressure was low and his heart rate high. Another member of the team inserted an IV to deliver a saline solution and blood. He was struggling for air, so I hurriedly inserted a breathing tube in his mouth to connect him to a ventilator. With obvious bullet wounds in the chest and trouble breathing, he most likely had a collapsed lung. I needed to insert a chest tube, and quickly. I’d done it only twice before, but I knew better than to hesitate. My years of street sports always helped me through tricky times like these. Back then I’d had the confidence I needed to go for the winning shot in pickup basketball. I talked myself into that same zone now as I grabbed a scalpel and made a two-inch incision on the side of his chest:
You’ve got this. You can do it. Stay calm and steady
.

Next, I probed the cavity with a blunt instrument, trying to make my way to the lung. It took only a few seconds to puncture the connective tissue and reach it. A whoosh of air and then a rush of blood spurted out of the hole. The lung had collapsed and looked like a crumpled wad of paper. As the built-up pressure inside the chest cavity escaped, the shriveled lung began to re-expand. I placed the chest tube, which looked like a small garden hose, into the chest cavity and hooked it to the vacuum. The reinflated
lung adhered to the inner chest wall, as it should have, giving Legend more time. But blood was pouring into the tube quicker than the vacuum could suction it out.

In a last-ditch effort to save his life, we cracked open his chest to see if we could close a hole in or near the heart by clamping off damaged blood vessels, but when we reached the heart, we discovered that there was no more blood. All four chambers were empty. There was nothing more we could do.
Damn!
I snapped off my bloody plastic gloves, took a moment to steady myself, and headed for the waiting room. The look on my face must have spoken before I said even a word. Legend’s mother screamed for God and fell to her knees. A clump of hospital workers gathered around to comfort her. That’s when I realized she was a hospital employee herself, part of the Beth Israel family. This kind of news, never easy to deliver, was even tougher now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We did everything we could.” Legend’s mother was inconsolable. A crowd of about fifty people kept vigil outside the hospital. They stood around the ambulance bay in tight clusters, retelling the story of the gun battle that had taken Legend’s life. I quickly gathered that Legend had been a prominent drug figure on nearby Chancellor Avenue. I knew the turf well. Homicide detectives who came to investigate were familiar with Legend and they filled me in on his long drug-dealing history. I’m not often surprised, but this news shocked me. Nothing about his wholesome appearance had said drug dealer—no flashy jewelry, no gun, no rolls of money were found when we cut off his clothes. And Legend’s dying words were a profession of love for his wife and children. For days, his death was the talk of the hospital. Several of the orderlies, EKG technicians, and nurses knew him or his mother well, and they helped me piece together the legend surrounding Legend.