The Best American Essays 2014 (16 page)

Charm got took over by the Myth, which had a couple of ingredients. The Myth meant crazy outrageous athleticism in every activity. It helped the style of it if the head of your thing went past your navel, but it all came together in an attitude of defiant obdurateness that we called Hard. I would try to cool him out, because I was being taught something different at school, but every time I wasn't around, he would trip the fuck out. At a party he shucked off all his gear and swung around ill until he got what he was looking for. One night Charm fouled a catatonic girl's mouth to stop niggers from running a train on her, but she still had to leave the city. He was getting known and some people were afraid of him. He had mastered the art of drilling any girl, no matter her look, no matter her size, at any time. Like, Pretty Ricky had written a book on the art of seduction. He had this snakelike way of peering into the eyes of the slinkiest, the trickiest, the flyest—the LaShawns, Letitias, Sheilas, and Keishas—the girls who had had so much exposure to slick that I didn't even know what to say to them. I only tried to win by light touch. But Charm didn't work in a whole lot of small talk or eye contact or hand-holding. He went on the Mandingo principle. He knocked down big China up against the freezer in my basement and she clawed grooves into his back. It took years for me to know what he did to make her cry out and lose control like that. She was so wide open every time we went with armloads of Guess apparel to the department store counter where she worked, it was like cashing a check.

I got a strong dose of the Myth too, the dreamworld life of super-nigger. One night of the dream me and Charm drank a couple of quarts of Mad Dog and picked up some wild ill broads from the Brook down at the Harbor. I only had one condom, used it on the girl I knew was out there, and ran raw in Sheba, thinking the odds were better because it was her time of the month. I thought another threshold of existence was at hand. Even the girls laughed about it, lil Lair happy cause he trimmed twice. The ill vibe kept clicking, though. At a party in the Junction Charm hit this boy in the face and broke his nose, and the jam was at the house of the broke-nose boy cousin. We had to fight Charm to get him out of there. Then, sitting five deep in a two-door Sentra trying to cool out, two hoppers came up on us. One skinny boy was on the street side, and a bald-headed light-skin boy with a shimmer in his mouth stood in the back. Skinny boy tapped the window with something metal. I heard a crack and the glass breaking, and we were all shouting to Pretty Ricky, “Drive!” “I'm hit!” I was pushing Charm and Knuckles so hard to peel away from that hot one searching for my ass. Decades of nightmares about that gunman.

About a week later, Sawyer and Sonny were throwing a cranker on Maryland Avenue, the little club district anchored by old-school Odell's
(
You'll Know If You Belong
, the T-shirt used to say), house music Cignel's, and citywide Godfrey's Famous Ballroom. All the young hustlers and fly girls hung out in that zone. I was a little late getting to the jam.

I'd get the feeling of supreme confidence and contentment, just walking up the street and wading into a real players' crowd. Hundreds deep with hustlers and fly girls—herb bumping—passing quarts of Mad Dog and Red Bull malt liquor. Knowing my hair was faded right and I was getting dap from the players and intimate touches from Sheila, Kim, Lisa, and Tanya. “The Sound” by Reese & Santonio filling the air with our versions of the djembe, dundun, kenkeni, and sangban. Taking everybody way back. It's better than caine. Demerara. Ouagadougou.

Mighty Joe Young and me was nice, dipping up Murlin Avenue, near the bridge, gandering over to the zone from the Armory subway stop. All of a sudden, Ed from Bloomingdale drove by us and shouted, “Sonny got shot!” Old school, we ran the mile or two down the street. Ten minutes later we're outside the operating room at University Shock Trauma, screaming on the state trooper and the young Asian lady doctor who said, “Your friend didn't make it.” She spat out that shit to me like I put the gun on Sonny.

I felt like the hospital was run by people with the slickhead mentality, that mentality that claims a nigger ain't shit. Me, I always wanted to redeem a nigger. The state trooper, a brother who understood, saved that bitch's Chinese ass. I wanted to do something. Sonny's parents came in a few minutes later. Crushed. Crying scene. Me and Mighty Joe Young walked down to the central police station where they were taking Sawyer's statement. We were amped up, spreading the word at hangouts like Crazy John's and El Dorado's, where we ran into some of our people.

Sawyer had been standing next to Sonny when they got stuck up. Sawyer's antsy brother Chester had a few dollars on him and gated up the alley, so Sawyer and Sonny, on the other side of the car, booked for it too. Rodney, Birdman, Dern, and Rock could only stand with their hands in the air while the runners gave it up. Sonny and a guy sitting on some steps got shot by a .22 rifle.

A lot of people blamed Sawyer for Sonny's murder, but I told him I was happy he had made it. He was my boy. We had been lightweight wilding up until then. No QP, no Z, no eight-ball, no stick-up, no home invasion, no pop tool, no cold-blooded train. Sawyer, James Brown, and Rock had taken a white boy for bad once. And Sawyer had been seen running down the street with a television, which had kind of got the police looking. Omar had taken a girl's telephone and her father's horse pistol. Sawyer and I had run a couple of gees on some wild young girls, and one time a grown woman did start fussing, but it was his cousin. I remember, because I left my high school graduation watch at her house. I thought if you were going to do the do, you had to take off everything. One night a little boy who had connections had tried to kill James Brown with a bat down at Cignel's, and we beefed over our heads, but James Brown let the thing go. I don't know how many times I got in a car with folk I ain't really know, on their way from or to do I don't know what. It was all right there. Rock, Darius, Worly, Chucky, Taft, Fats, Paris, Wood, Flip, Yippy, Champ, Ringfrail, Hondo, Reds. A whole lot of people got caught up in the mix.

What really hurt everybody was that Sonny had a whole lot of heart. He was a stand-up cat who had the will to make a difference. Shirt-off-his-back type of cat. Break a bottle over a big nigger's head for you cat. If the police looked for the killers, three men and a woman, they never found anybody. I had been in the Five-O palace on Baltimore Street and seen them lounging like they were on the whites-only floors. I had seen an office with a Confederate flag in it and some other of that old-timey, Frederick County shit. They always acted like Sonny's murder was “drug-related,” like half of three hundred other murders that year. It hurts to think about his unsolved killing, twenty years later.

After Sonny's funeral, we started linking with cats who had hurt people, hoping to luck up onto that stick-up boy with the letter
G
on his hat who had gunned him down. The night after they shot Sonny we ganged into a dark room lit by the dutchy going around. A powerfully muscled old head addressed the mourning circle. “I gits a nut every time I pull the trigger.” None of us ever forgot his sincerity. He said it to us like he was confessing something deep and personal, something that came out of the soul. I believed him.

Since Sonny had finished a year at Morehouse, the less stand-up guys figured that life wasn't worth struggling for. They started to get ill after the funeral like it was a paying job. I knew I didn't have as much heart as Sonny, so I did my share in the dim rooms. The morning after the funeral me and Clifton tried to run a gee on a young girl with a glass eye, not knowing she was five seconds from tricking on the corner—and Clifton months away hisself from the cemetery. Sometimes you would even pity a cat and bip half that bag of dope so that they wouldn't get hooked. One reason I stopped getting high was that Rock, my man from the bus stop days, pulled me up strong about looking weak, chasing. Sometimes you need to see yourself through the eyes of someone who has looked up to you. Then he got caught with a package and sat down at the Department of Corrections at Jessup, so I really tried to pull my pants up. After about eighteen months, overdoses began and cats started heading out of state to get away. Then there were the guys among us who thought that joogy wouldn't get to them, since they weren't shooting it up. But next thing they started flashing pistols to the countergirl at Roy Rogers. That gets you a seven-year bit at Hagerstown, or you could get lucky and go to Jessup where people at least can visit you.

A couple of the cats really tried to make a fortune. If Sawyer was my right hand, then Muhammad was my heart. When I decided to make a break for school in 1990, after my father went back to Guinea, Muhammad told me soberly, “Lair. Imma make a million dollars this year.” The hustler thing was in the air. All of the rap music was trying to help you know the I Ching of Rayful and Alpo and our hometown man Peanut King. We all knew by heart the DC anthem “Stone Cold Hustler” and G Rap's “Road to the Riches.” But I was so deep into reading about the COINTELPRO thing and what they did to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that none of the stories about stacking chips could reach me. Besides the fact that all the New York cats at school would be flipping out over the Bodymore stories I was telling, or the time my homeboys fell through for a visit, joogy-deep. Anyway, Muhammad acted hurt when I looked away from him.

For about two years we didn't have that much rap for each other, a homeboy blood problem. Meanwhile Muhammad tried to get water from the rock with Rodney Glide. They stretched out until they tripped. Eventually the state of Pennsylvania took the wind out of Glide's sails for eight years, twenty-nine miles west of Philly at Graterford. I remember reading the newspapers about the old crew when I was in graduate school in California, a million miles away.

Sawyer turned the Myth in a new direction. He laid up with a Jamaican sister, got back in school, and earned a degree. He won an internship with a congressman from the streets who knew where he was coming from. He started working with the hoppers at George B. Murphy Homes high-rises, before it got blown up to make way for condos and the university hospital, where they work on getting the bug out. Just going down to Murphy Homes was a trip to us back in the day, where life and death, crime and punishment was wide open, like at my cousin's house on Myrtle Avenue, where Carmello's from. “Fat Boy's out! Fat Boy's out! Girl on green. Girl on green,” is how the touts would run it down.

Sonny dying like he did definitely motivated me to finish graduate school and teach at the university level. But going to college for eleven years was no doubt the most sterile experience I had known. It was feeling all balled up like an English walnut. An experience that seemed designed to make me question who I was, if I was a man or not, if I was doing something worthwhile or not. On top of it all, it trained you to appreciate everything about old master and them, right down to studying their trifling distinctions, which is why I guess not that many brothers, when they know this thing about the war, bother with school.

After some years in the trenches, Sawyer got hooked up by George Soros. Now he has a company trying to help “at risk” young people. I guess he helped himself. Sawyer stood for one thing, and I got down with him on it. “Just put it out there. No matter who it hurts, whether it's a lie or not, right or wrong, good or bad. Never stop putting it out there.”

FROM
Harper's Magazine

 

F
OR PAUL, IT STARTED
with a fishing trip. For Lenny, it was an addict whose knuckles were covered in sores. Dawn found pimples clustered around her swimming goggles. Kendra noticed ingrown hairs. Patricia was attacked by sandflies on a Gulf Coast beach. Sometimes the sickness starts as blisters, or lesions, or itching, or simply a terrible fog settling over the mind, over the world.

For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange ailment, and no one—or hardly anyone—believed them. But there were a lot of them, reportedly 12,000, and their numbers were growing. Their illness manifested in many ways, including fatigue, pain, and formication (a sensation of insects crawling over the skin). But the defining symptom was always the same: fibers emerging from their bodies. Not just fibers but fuzz, specks, and crystals. They didn't know what this stuff was, or where it came from, or why it was there, but they knew—and this was what mattered, the important word—that it was
real.

The diagnosis originated with a woman named Mary Leitao. In 2001 she took her toddler son to the doctor because he had sores on his lip that wouldn't go away. He was complaining of bugs under his skin. The first doctor didn't know what to tell her, nor did the second, nor the third. Eventually they started telling her something she didn't want to hear: that she might be suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, which causes a parent or caregiver to fabricate (and sometimes induce) illness in a dependent. Leitao came up with her own diagnosis, and Morgellons was born.

She pulled the name from a treatise written by the seventeenth-century English physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne, who described

 

that Endemial Distemper of little Children in Languedock, called the Morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh hairs on their Backs, which takes off the unquiet Symptoms of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.

 

Browne's “harsh hairs” were the early ancestors of today's fibers. Photos online show them in red, white, and blue—like the flag—and also black and translucent. These fibers are the kind of thing you describe in relation to other kinds of things: jellyfish or wires, animal fur or taffy candy or a fuzzball off your grandma's sweater. Some are called goldenheads, because they have a golden-colored bulb. Others simply look sinister, technological, tangled.