Living and Dying in Brick City (26 page)

There was something about being home again for the interview that restored my confidence. I knew this place. I knew the people. I’d sat in the same waiting room outside the E.R. at Beth Israel many times as a kid when child’s play got too rough and ended in
a broken bone or a gash. When the administrator showing me around the hospital opened the doors to the emergency room, I got goose bumps. This was it. Somehow, I just knew. Unlike the other interviews when I’d stumbled over my words and my insides had felt like a bowl of quivering Jell-O, I was sure that Beth Israel was the place for me. I looked my interviewers in their eyes and told them what my heart was telling me: This was where I wanted to be, where I belonged and felt confident I could thrive. After a second interview, I got an offer, and against the advice of my medical school advisers, I talked my way out of the agreement with the University of Maryland. Then, with deep gratitude, I headed home to start my career. The community service that I’d tried to make sense of in all those failed interviews made sense here. This was my community, a community filled with good kids who never make the news—kids like Kenny Malique Bazemore.

I met Malique in 2003 at a book signing event near Newark after the paperback release of
The Pact
. During the question-and-answer segment, his mother, Monica Bazemore, rose from her seat in the crowded bookstore. “I’m here because of what you’ve done for my son,” she said, as her son, then ten, sat beside her and blushed. She explained that Malique had reminded her every day all week about the book event and had even brought pen and paper to take notes. At their home in Bloomfield, New Jersey, he had removed the sports posters on his bedroom wall and replaced them with photos of Rameck, George, and me that he had clipped from magazines. Monica asked for a few words of encouragement for Malique, but George, Rameck, and I were so touched and impressed that we got to know him and became like his big brothers. We brought him along to community events and introduced him to some of the celebrities we met, including radio host Wendy Williams and superstar Bill Cosby.

Malique was small for his age, wore glasses, and had an innocent
face and an easy, shy smile. The book had inspired him to want to become a doctor, his mother said. I learned later that part of the reason he wanted to pursue a medical career was to find a cure for his then five-year-old sister, Kennedy, who had been born with a severe and rare disease of the central nervous system. Easily identified by a large mole that had grown down her face, the disease caused facial deformities and left Kennedy unable to walk, talk, or do anything for herself. After her birth, the children’s father had left the family, staying in touch only sporadically, so Monica was raising both of them alone. Even at age ten, Malique had learned to help take care of his sister, handling such medical tasks as suctioning fluid from her breathing tube.

In some ways, Malique reminded me so much of myself. When I was in medical school, my desire to ease my sister Fellease’s suffering from AIDS motivated me through some of my darkest days. I wanted to help him achieve his dreams. The two of us talked on the phone regularly, hung out when we could, and his mom didn’t hesitate to call when he needed a little male guidance.

Once, she emailed and asked me to talk to Malique after he got into trouble at school for being disruptive in class. The next time I saw Malique, we talked about it. He told me that he was bored and that his antics—laughing and talking loudly—hadn’t seemed like a big deal. I saw no need for a long speech. Malique was generally a serious kid who recognized the importance of excelling in school, keeping a clean record, and choosing his friends wisely. I just listened and told him that acting like a clown wasn’t cool and that I expected more. I wanted to do for him what others had done for me: let him know that I cared, that my expectations for him were high, and that the easiest thing for him to do was behave. It was as simple as that. I knew he looked up to me and would try to meet my expectations.

By his junior year in high school, Malique was struggling. His
grades had slipped, and he was no longer sure he wanted to be a doctor or even go to college. I recognized his teenage angst and rebellion and stayed close. He called me often to express his frustrations or ask for advice, and I called, emailed, and texted regularly to check in with him. I also offered moral support when he decided that he wanted to reconnect with his father. Malique located his dad in Delaware, went to live with him in his junior year, and graduated from Glasgow High School. While there, he joined the Junior Air Force ROTC, which helped him regain the discipline, organization, and focus he needed to move confidently into his future. Malique now attends Delaware State University, where he is a movement science major (similar to sports science). Though he no longer wants to be a medical doctor, he is pursuing his dream to someday have a career in medicine. He hopes to be a physical therapist to help children with special needs—like his sister—and wounded soldiers.

In my relationship with Malique and the others I mentored, I was the fortunate one. My life felt more meaningful every time I had a chance to spend time with a boy yearning for fatherly attention and affection, or to help piece together the shattered confidence of a medical student who had failed her board exams, or to offer hope to a mother raising children alone in a tough city. In them, I saw the huge difference that one person can make in another’s life. I could offer healing and perhaps even help save lives (and dreams) beyond the emergency room. Maybe inspiring a kid to go to college or to get serious about school could even lessen the chances that I’d see him down the road in the emergency room with a bullet in him. Inspiring kids to dream bigger than what they could see was exactly our hope when George, Rameck, and I established The Three Doctors Foundation in April 2000. When the three of us returned home to Newark-area hospitals for our residencies, newspaper stories about the friendship that had helped three poor inner-city boys become doctors resulted in speaking
invitations throughout the region. We were giddy for the opportunity to share our story, and rather unexpectedly we amassed about $3,000 in gifts from those engagements. That was a lot of cash to us. I had returned to Newark with less than $30 to my name and, despite being a doctor, was still trying to get past living from paycheck to paycheck. But each of us felt a tremendous need to use the money to create something that would benefit the community. Many people had given of their time and resources to us along our journey, and we wanted to give some of it back, even though we didn’t know if we’d ever have that kind of extra cash again.

At first, we talked about giving the money away as a college scholarship to a needy, deserving student, but then what? The more we talked, the more we realized we wanted to do something more expansive, more hands-on. We wanted to give kids in neighborhoods like the ones where we grew up what we didn’t have: close and personal access to the array of professionals out there—doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, business owners, and others who could share their paths and offer one-on-one guidance. We could sponsor fun events to bring them all together, raise money for scholarships, and use our expertise in the medical field to educate the community about the array of medical problems killing us disproportionately. Kids might walk away from our events still believing they were the next Jay-Z or Kobe (and who knows, maybe they are), but we could show them early on that they had options.

George, Rameck, and I were by far the poorest philanthropists we knew, but at least we had a structure and a little cash in place for a small grassroots operation. We began mentioning the foundation in speeches, and volunteers stepped forward to help us get set up legally, establish a website, and plan events. One of our first big activities was Mentor Day, where we recruited professionals from all over the community and matched them as closely as possible with students who had similar aspirations—the boy who
dreamed of opening a business someday and the CEO; the girl who played school with her baby dolls and the real live teacher; the kid who was good with numbers and the accountant; the poor student who never thought college was a possibility and the university counselor.

For another of the foundation’s events, the Positive Peer Pressure Challenge, Malique placed among the winners. The purpose of the challenge was to flip the way peer pressure usually works by rewarding young people who were positively influencing their peers. We asked students to write in and tell us about their efforts, and we awarded prizes—laptops to the top winners and iPods and gaming systems to those who placed second and third place. Malique had volunteered at a nursing home and chronicled his experience poignantly with photos and a journal. For his efforts, he won his first laptop.

I’ll never forget another of the foundation’s events, its first Healthy Mind and Body Summit on July 3, 2003. It was held at the Boys and Girls Club on the same block where my parents first lived when they moved to Newark. The event drew about five hundred people throughout the day for a roster of activities that included free blood pressure and diabetes screenings, guest speakers on a variety of motivational and health topics, as well as live performances. Among the most memorable were three little dudes, ages from thirteen to fifteen, who dressed up like George, Rameck, and me, in white lab coats over their sagging jeans and T-shirts, and did an original rap to one of rapper 50 Cent’s beats. But they weren’t boasting about criminal exploits, degrading women, or dogging one another. They were telling another kind of story:

It was so much fun to watch them, full of energy and enthusiasm, delivering their own interpretation of our message that education is the most permanent way off the streets. Their performance earned them their own fan club. Swooning girls wanted to take pictures with them. And I walked away feeling great, thinking,
These little dudes get it. They really heard us
.

Young people like the teen rappers I met that day are why I—and all of us who want to be part of finding solutions to the violence and health crises in our country—can’t give up. We know that young people are listening and watching. And we believe that when we provide them with the information they need to make responsible choices and help them to recognize their own power, we save lives.

T
hough I grew up less than a half hour away from it, New York City seemed about as distant as the Milky Way. It didn’t matter that Newark sat just on the other side of the Hudson River. After struggling every day to make ends meet, my parents didn’t have the money, the time, or the inclination to take us kids sightseeing in the Big Apple. As a boy, I never stood at the Statue of Liberty, saw the lights on Broadway, or strolled through Central Park. The first time I ventured to Times Square, I was in high school. My older sister Fellease, my brother Andre, and their spouses at the time allowed me to tag along one cold winter evening when they took the train into the city. I tried to play it cool, to pretend that the skyscrapers, bright lights, and fast-moving crowds didn’t faze me. But on the inside I was like a giddy elementary-school kid, savoring every minute of his first field trip. Everything seemed larger, brighter, and faster than I’d imagined.

By the time I finally made it to Radio City Music Hall, I was twenty-seven and nearly a year into my residency at Beth Israel.
Essence
magazine had chosen George, Rameck, and me to receive its 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award. I was crazy excited about the award, not just because of who was singling us out
—Essence
magazine, one of the premier black publications—but also because
of what this recognition represented. Three young doctors would be center stage before a star-studded crowd on national television alongside the community’s much-heralded music, entertainment, and sports idols. This would definitely help with our foundation’s goal of glamorizing education and bringing academic stars out of hiding, particularly in urban schools where wannabe pro athletes and rappers reign. The ceremony didn’t disappoint. Suddenly, my family and I were right in the middle of the New York glitz that I’d only seen on TV. It had been tough trying to decide how to divvy up the tickets among my family and closest friends, but in the end I was joined by my mother and father; my father’s wife, Thelma; my brother Andre and his wife, Makeba; my lifelong friend Will (whose daughter is my godchild); and my then-girlfriend. I sent limos to pick up my family, and I don’t think I’d ever seen my father, all five feet nine inches of him, walk as tall as he did into Radio City Music Hall that night. He was beaming, and my mother couldn’t stop saying how proud she was of me. There we were, the Davis clan, breathing the same air as Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey.

I’d wanted Fellease to be there, but by then she was too sick. She had, however, felt well enough to help Moms prepare for the event. The two of them had gone shopping together, and for a rare moment, they were just mother and daughter, enjoying life in its simplicity, without the angst caused by addiction and disease. The two of them chose a pants suit—a white evening jacket with black slacks—for Moms, who relished the fact that Fellease had arranged a hair appointment for her. “You know your sister picked out my outfit, helped me with my makeup, and made me get my hair done,” she bragged to me that night—this from a woman who would choose to wear a wig over her own hair any day.

When Fellease died the next year, I dropped by to see Moms one summer day and was stunned to find her bald. She had shaved off
every inch of her hair. She read the shock in my eyes and responded before I could even speak: “It was too hot, Marshall, and so I had to cut it off,” she said matter-of-factly. To this day, I believe that this small act was her way of regaining control of her life after Fellease’s death. I’m no psychologist, but I know this: Moms couldn’t do a thing about her daughter’s addiction, or the suffering it caused, or the AIDS that finally killed her, but it was hot, and her hair was sweaty, and she didn’t want to be bothered with hot, sweaty hair, and she certainly
could
do something about that.