Seven years ago my best friend Greg died. Shot down in the street. Seven years ago I fired a gun for the last time. Seven years ago I vowed never to live that type of life again, I vowed to change. And I did. I’m not that angry young man I used to be.
The guy with the gray hoodie was following me again. His pants sagged low, past his hips, so you could see his red-and-white Calvin Klein boxers—and the gun in his waistband. He kept his head bent down, staring at the sidewalk beneath his old-school black-and-white high-top Nikes. His face was hidden by the hood, enshrouded in shadows. Hands shoved deep into the pockets of his faded black jeans, which were at least two sizes too big. He kept a respectable distance, but this was the second day I’d seen him following behind me. It wasn’t a coincidence. He was after me.
Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream like a blast of crack cocaine. My heartbeat quickened. I could hear it. Feel it pounding against my chest, trying to free itself from the prison of my ribcage. My breath came fast and hard. The edges of my vision began to close in, narrowing to a fist-sized window. I hadn’t felt this in years. It was the fight-or-flight response, my body preparing itself for danger. I used to get this feeling four or five times a day when I was younger. Before I changed.
Seven years ago, I was a street thug, a gangsta. I sold drugs, carried a gun, even used it a few times. I was headed for destruction. Then I decided I wanted to go to college. Now I’m two months away from graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a neuroscience degree—unless I get shot first.
The guy behind me looked over his shoulder. His head swiveled, looking from one side of the street to the other, scanning for witnesses. Making sure no one would be able to identify him once whatever he had planned for me went down, and scoping out his exit route. I knew the routine. I’d done it many times myself. I even knew what he was thinking, all the psychological games he was playing to push his conscience to the side, lower his inhibitions, and silence his fear. Telling himself he was a “bad motherfucker,” that this would be an easy mark. I was determined not to be. I needed a weapon.
This area of town wasn’t like the hood I grew up in. There were no broken bottles or pieces of rubble and debris from buildings that had crumbled, burnt out, or been looted. No random car parts sitting on someone’s front yard or just lying there on the sidewalk. This was Society Hill. I worked at a clothing store here during the week to help pay for my books and supplies. It was all brick homes with manicured lawns, opulent apartment buildings with doormen, five-star restaurants, and extravagant boutiques. Mercedes, BMWs, and the occasional Cadillac or expensive SUV passed me on the street, always within a mile or two of the speed limit. It was clean, and safe. At least it was normally. That left few options for improvised self-defense weapons. I didn’t like my chances of taking on an armed assailant with nothing but my fists. I hadn’t thrown down with anyone in years. Not since I got my life in order and enrolled in college. I couldn’t remember the last time I had to bust some fool’s grill with nothing but my fists. That wasn’t who I was anymore.
Changing the entire trajectory of my life hadn’t been as simple as waking up one day and deciding I wanted a better life for myself, but then again it was. It was Sunday morning, seven years ago almost to the day, when the idea to do something different with my life first came to me. I had attended my best friend Greg’s funeral the morning before. I watched his mother wail and scream over his coffin, repeating “Why?” to the listless air above the church and crying out for her baby, insane with grief. I imagined my own mother grieving over my coffin the same way. My death would ruin her. But I knew that’s how my life would likely end. Few young black men made it out of the ghetto alive. That’s just something I grew to accept like corrupt cops stopping me on the street and searching me without probable cause, bill collectors calling all hours of the day, white Jesuses, and black Republicans.
Greg had been sitting right next to me at the bus stop when he got shot. A drive-by. A guy in a black Cutlass Supreme leaning out the passenger-side window with a red scarf wrapped around his face, black sunglasses, and an AR-15 on full auto. For all I know, those bullets had been intended for me. I dove behind a car, landing facefirst on the concrete, busting my lip, chipping my front tooth, and gashing open my forehead. Greg landed directly in front of the bench we’d been sitting on. Half his skull was missing. Blood poured from his ears and nose like a fountain of red wine gushing down into the gutter. He was gone. A kid I’d known since kindergarten, who I’d just been laughing with moments before, was now a bleeding sack of meat. That’s when I knew I had to change my life. Still, it was almost another month before I actually took action. My high school science teacher, Mr. Sumpter, was the one who finally convinced me to do something about my future.
I was sitting in science class, thinking about Greg, anxious for the lunch bell to ring so I could sell the ten vials of crack in my coat pocket before the school police decided to single me out for a “random” search. I had been daydreaming about a conversation Greg and I had right before he’d gotten his skull hollowed out. It was the last time Greg and I had laughed together.
“I read this article the other day that has me trippin’. That shit was deep, yo.”
“Hold up. Hold up. You mean, your ass can read?” Greg joked.
“I’m serious, man. Listen!”
“All right, all right. What’s up?”
“So, it was this article about how every seven years each cell in your body is reproduced except for like a few neurons in the center of your brain, your cerebral cortex. You become like an entirely new person. You still got all the memories of the person you used to be. Same personality. Same perspective on shit. You look the same, act the same, got the same scars, same fears, same hopes. You might be like a little taller, or fatter, or skinnier than the dude you were seven years ago. Maybe your hair is longer or grayer. You know I’m sayin’? You still feel like you, but you ain’t you. You’re like a whole different you. You know I’m sayin’? You share hardly any cells in common with that that dude you were seven years ago. So what happens to that motherfucker you used to be? Where do they go?”
Greg smiled. His fat cheeks exploded with dimples. I knew he was about to say something ridiculous.
“I don’t know, fool. Maybe they go to your momma’s house!”
We had both fallen over, holding our sides as we laughed our asses off.
I couldn’t help letting out a little chuckle as I recalled the moment. Mr. Sumpter cleared his throat and I looked up to see him standing above my desk. Mr. Sumpter was six-eight. He’d been a basketball star at Temple University back in the eighties. Now he was in his fifties, a head full of salt-and-pepper dreadlocks, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, but he could still dunk a basketball and outrun most of the guys on the school track team.
“ ’Sup, Mr. S.?”
He slapped my science mid-term down on the desk in front of me. I gawked at the grade: 100. Mr. Sumpter looked down at me and just shook his head like it was the worst possible score rather than the best. He walked past me, handing out a few more tests. Then he paused and looked back at me.
“You know what gets me, Mr. Brown?”
Mr. Sumpter always called us by our last names, adding “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “Sir,” and “Ma’am” as if he were addressing peers rather than a bunch of badass, hardheaded students.
“What up, Mr. S.?”
“You’re one of the smartest kids in this class. You pass the tests without even trying. I know you don’t study. But you have the worst grades in the class because you don’t do your homework. You don’t turn in your papers when they’re due. You hardly come to class. You just don’t care.”
“At least my grades ain’t as bad as Tyrell’s. He can’t even spell his name right.”
All the other kids in the class began to laugh. A big, thick-necked kid with biceps the same size as his head jumped up, knocking over his desk.
“Fuck did you say ’bout me, nigga?”
I met his eyes. Not getting out of my seat, but reaching into my jacket, where I would have normally been carrying my Glock nine-millimeter. It wasn’t there. It was in my car. They had metal detectors in the school now. But it didn’t matter. Tyrell got the message.
“I said you stupid as fuck. But if you think all them muscles can stop a bullet, go ahead and do sumpin’. Otherwise, you betta sit your big ass down before you get put down.”
Mr. Sumpter let out a long sigh then just shook his head again.
“You know, Mr. Brown, you’re a junior. Next year you’ll be graduating and doing what? Do you even know what you’re going to do after high school? Hang out on the street with your hoodlum friends doing nothing? Selling drugs? Fighting? You could be going to college in two years on a full academic scholarship. You know that? You’re smart enough. If you spent half as much time doing homework as you do trying to be hard and intimidate everybody, you’d be school valedictorian. Instead, you’ll probably wind up dead or in prison.”
Dead or in prison.
I’d heard some variation of that shit all my life. It was the destiny of all young black males, according to the media and our so-called mentors. I’d always accepted it as fate. And once accepted, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dead or in prison.
But now, after seeing Greg die, it was like it finally sank in, and I didn’t want to die. That night I did my homework. I flushed all the crack vials I had left down the toilet and didn’t re-up. From then on, I dedicated myself to schoolwork. Four months later I made the high school honor roll. The next year, as a senior, I made honor roll all four quarters. I didn’t make valedictorian, but I did get that academic scholarship to University of Penn and moved to Philadelphia. From a Baltimore ghetto to an Ivy League campus. The culture shock felt like an electrocution, but I adapted. After I graduated from Penn, my plan was to go straight to med school. Then, two nights ago, I saw that guy in the gray hoodie standing on a street corner, watching me. I knew it was the same guy. He was dressed exactly as he is now. Same walk. Same shifty, suspicious mannerisms.
I crossed the street, casting a glance over my shoulder in time to see the guy in the hood cross also, less than half a block behind me. I wished I had a gun with me, too, but I had given up that type of life. The nine-millimeter I used to carry was in a Nike shoebox in the closet of my old bedroom back at my momma’s house in Baltimore. Violence was my past. If I wanted to be a different person, it meant leaving all that shit behind. You can’t live in two worlds at the same time. But it would have been nice to have my gat at that moment.
There was an alley ahead. One thing I had learned on the streets long ago was that the only way an unarmed man had a chance against someone who was strapped was in close quarters. Close enough to grab the guy’s gun or hit him with something and hope to knock him unconscious. Distance favored the guy who could spit bullets. I needed to draw him in close to survive this.
I ducked into the alley between two apartment buildings and pressed myself against the wall, trying to blend into the shadows. Taking one last look around for something I could use as a weapon, I spotted a dumpster. There was a chain on it, but it was unlocked. The lock was just dangling there. In three long strides I was across the alley, pulling the chain and the lock free, feeling now like I actually had a realistic chance of surviving this. I returned to my spot on the wall, trying to make myself invisible again, hoping the guy in the hoodie would just pass right by the alley and keep walking, but knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t.
The last time I’d been hiding in an alley, waiting to ambush someone, was when Greg and I had planned to rob a kid, a mule who carried drugs and money back and forth to a stash house in my old neighborhood in Baltimore. It had been Greg’s idea—kinda. Greg told me about the kid. I was the one who suggested gankin’ him, just runnin’ up on him and sticking a gun in the kid’s face when he was on his way back to the stash house after making his rounds. When he’d be flush with either drugs or cash. We didn’t care which. We’d snatch his backpack and disappear before he knew who or what hit him.
We both had on ski masks despite the hot-ass, eighty-five-degree May weather. I can remember the kid’s face when I put the barrel of that Glock against the bridge of his nose. He was barely a teenager. Thirteen? Fourteen? Maybe just a twelve-year-old who was big for his age. He had a face full of pimples, and baby fat on his cheeks. His eyes had gone from wide with shock to furious with rage. No fear. It wasn’t what we’d been expecting.
It all happened so fast. Isn’t that what they always say? Victims and perpetrators alike? It all happened so fast. As if things might have been different had they transpired at a slower pace. As if a few seconds might have spared that kid’s life.
The kid lifted his shirt, reached into his waistband. I saw the handle of his pistol, a Glock nine-millimeter. Just like mine. What the hell was a kid that age doing with a Glock and not some shitty little secondhand revolver? This kid was carrying a brand-spanking-new nine-hundred-dollar semiautomatic handgun. I watched his bony little hand seize the hilt, and then I pulled the trigger…and just a few hours later, Greg was dead, too. Maybe the kid following me had something to do with that night? Maybe he’d come all the way from Baltimore to find me? Revenge on that pimple-faced mule’s remaining murderer. He might even have been the same one who’d murdered Greg. Maybe that kid we’d killed was his brother or cousin or part of his gang? I know that if someone shot one of my family members in the face, driving a few states away to find his killer and end his life would have been nothing at all, even seven years later.
I was sweating, breathing like I’d just run a marathon. My hands were shaking and things were getting blurry. I was about to pass out. I took long deep breaths to slow my breathing and heart rate. This was the wrong time for my first panic attack. I had to pull my shit together.
Then the guy turned the corner into the alley—and reached for his gun. I swung the lock and chain and caught him on the temple. The gun fell from his hands and he went down hard, falling backward against the brick building, bouncing off and dropping to the filthy concrete floor on his side then rolling to his back. But he never dropped the gun. I was preparing to swing the lock again when he raised it and pulled the trigger.
The sound was deafening. Like an explosion rather than a gunshot. The walls of the alley echoed the sound like a mini-amphitheater. The blast buzzed in my ears, an angry hornet stinging my eardrums. I felt the punch of the bullet as it struck my chest, a raindrop through tissue paper, tearing straight through my torso without resistance. My next breath gurgled with blood and burned like I was breathing ash. The bullet had struck a lung. I was fucked.
I looked down at my assailant, my murderer. The impact of the lock had left a large bloody gash from above his left temple to the center of his forehead. His left eye was almost glued shut from all the blood dripping down his face, but I recognized him.
At first, I thought it was that same kid Greg and I had murdered seven years ago. Somehow, that’s who I had been expecting it to be. A vengeful spirit here to drag me to hell with it. But ghosts don’t bleed. This was no spirit. It wasn’t the mule we’d shot. It wasn’t Greg come back from beyond eternity to seek his own revenge against the one indirectly responsible for his untimely death. My unresolved guilt had almost welcomed such an end. I was certain his death and the robbery/homicide I’d dragged him into were connected.
The face looking back at me, grinning triumphantly through a dripping red mask, was almost alien in the way that mundane creatures can appear exotic and bizarre when placed in incongruous environments. A crow flitting through the halls of a hospital. A stray dog wandering from classroom to classroom. An infant in a strip club. A nun in a crackhouse. My own teenage face looking up at me from the alley floor. I had killed me. It made no sense.
“Why?” I mouthed, unable to get enough air into my punctured lungs to form words. The kid smiled at me. My smile. The one I’d had seven years ago, before I’d gotten the chipped tooth in the front capped.
“Dead or in prison,” he replied. My fate, spoken to me without explanation, because none was needed.
They say that every seven years each cell in your body is reproduced except for a scant few neurons in your cerebral cortex. You become an entirely new person. You may have all the memories of the person you used to be. Same personality. Same perspective on the world. You may be similar in appearance, share the same scars. Maybe you’re a little taller, or fatter, or skinnier than the person you were seven years ago. Maybe your hair is longer or grayer. Perhaps you have acquired new scars or wrinkles. You still feel like you, but you aren’t. You share hardly any cells in common with that person you were seven years ago. So, what happens to that person? Where do they go?
You may have become an entirely new person. But the old you, the one that knows your secrets, your sins, never goes away. And sometimes he catches up with you. I thought I had escaped my destiny. That I had changed from the killer I used to be. But that killer had found me.
With the dimming embers of my vitality, I swung the heavy lock down onto that motherfucker’s skull, once, twice, and a third halfhearted swing with no strength behind it that splashed down into the bloody pulp the first two impacts had made of my murderer’s brain pan and stuck there. The lock fit neatly in the yawning fissure in his skull like a bizarre cosmetic accessory. An extreme piercing or surgical body modification glinting in the moonlight.
My lungs were collapsing, filling with blood, but I managed to squeak out a few hoarse words before losing consciousness. The same words my younger self had said to me before blowing a hole in my chest. The same words I’d heard all of my life.
“Dead or in prison.”
I knew my limits, and there was no way my sixteen-year-old self would have survived prison.