I left the United States for Nigeria on a jet plane, a small skinny kid with an attitude. I came back two years later a few inches taller but just as skinny and quickly developed the same attitude that got me sent away in the first place. If my mom thought Nigeria would scare me straight, she was wrong. At best it just got me out of her hair for a while. The lessons I learned there, the experiences I’d had, went deep underground somewhere and wouldn’t reemerge until nearly a decade later.
Returning to the Bronx felt like stepping back onto a stage and into a character I knew well. Ibusa was a stage too, of course, but with a different cast, a different audience, and very different scenery. I had been a bit player there, traveling through. I was the kid from America, the obi’s grandson from the Bronx, Noodle Boy. I didn’t get into trouble much those two years; in Nigeria I was too insecure in my own position to rock the boat much. But as soon as I got back home, virtually from the moment I landed, that old rebellion flooded back.
When I got off the plane and walked past security, my mother greeted me with a wide smile and a big hug. “You’re so much taller, Kwame!” she said, holding me close as I wriggled away. “C’mon, Mom,” I said. “Let me go.” Yet despite the preteen awkwardness, I was so happy to see her. For the first few moments our conversation was stilted—a lot of “How are you doing?” over and over again—but she was my mom and soon we were chatting away as effortlessly as we always had.
Despite the show of joy, I had returned in what was a difficult period for her. Catering by Jewel was going well but my mother just wasn’t making enough money to survive. Especially now that the house included not just Westley and Tatiana but me too, what she took home every month simply didn’t cover what we needed. She worked herself to the bone, getting up early to prep for events during the day and hustling for dinners at night. Still it wasn’t enough to make the rent. So when I returned that fall, home was a moving target. In the space of five years we moved eight times, bouncing from the South Bronx to 135th Street in Harlem—our apartment overlooked the Abyssinian Baptist Church and we could see, every Sunday, busloads of white tourists standing patiently outside for their opportunity to sway to “Wade in the Water”—and back up to the Bronx. We lived in a purgatory between packed and unpacked, here and gone.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but a lot of our financial insecurity had to do with me. Just as she had before I left for Nigeria, my mom scrounged together monthly tuition to send me to a private school. Now she did it again, this time to Cardinal Spellman, a Catholic high school up in Baychester, Bronx, where tuition was $8,000. Spellman had a reputation for turning tough kids around. It was strict—it was Catholic, so that goes without saying—but with a staff that really cared about the students. The first time I visited, a few weeks before classes started, I was so excited about the well-kept building with its interior courtyard, and a full-size football field, that I really thought I’d found my place. Compared to Santa Maria College in Ibusa, this was like a resort.
Every morning I’d transfer from the 2 train at Third Avenue to the 5 train to Baychester. That’s where I met Jaquan. It wasn’t hard to spot fellow students. Who else would be wearing a maroon polo shirt and khaki pants at 7:20 in the morning? I was used to people scowling at me on the train or just ignoring everything, listening to their music. So when Jaquan immediately nodded when he saw me and said, “What’s up, man? My name’s Jaquan. What’s yours?,” I noticed. At age thirteen he still had fat baby cheeks, and he wore thick glasses. He was not, to say the least, intimidating. In fact, his nickname on the block, he told me shortly after I met him, was Urkel, after Steve Urkel. That first morning, after he introduced himself I slid over to sit by him. Next to Jaquan was his friend, soon mine, named Marquise. He was slight, very studious and quiet. Marquise’s mother was a corrections officer at Sing Sing, and you could just tell looking at the kid that he was kept on a tight leash.
Like Jaquan, Marquise was disarmingly friendly. He didn’t bother with macho posturing or intimidation. We immediately got along. I was new to the school and in need of friends. We’d eat lunch together in the cafeteria, play basketball at recess, and goof off. It was like me and the Gallagher twins all over again. Sort of.
Because we all got on the train at different stops, I didn’t know exactly where Jaquan or Marquise lived. And because we all wore the same school uniform, there weren’t that many outward indicators of their backgrounds. Except sneakers. That I remember. Growing up, I wasn’t used to sneakers being an indicator of anything. All my friends in the Gifted and Talented program wore scruffy New Balances or whatever their parents happened to buy them. But Jaquan and Marquise were both obsessed with Air Jordans, devoting endless energy to keeping their rotation of crisp black-and-white shoes spotlessly clean. I assumed, naïvely I guess, that their backgrounds were like mine: lower middle class perhaps, but not poor.
That changed when Jaquan invited me over to play basketball at his home at Webster. The Webster Houses are one of the toughest housing projects in the Bronx, and I’m not ashamed to admit that the first time I visited him there, I was scared. Although I was thirteen and grew up in the Bronx I had never set foot in the projects before. The apartment buildings I lived in always had carpet in the hallways, plaster on the walls, and succulent plants in the lobby. They were part of the community. But where Jaquan lived, in Section 8 of the New York City Housing Authority, the projects—or whatever you want to call them—looked like warehouses, not homes. They were huge and sprawling, set apart from the world by their sheer mass. One of the first things I noticed about Webster were the surfaces. They were hard: concrete and brick and metal, scuffed linoleum floors and blue-tiled hallways. I wasn’t used to it, to how loud it was, how sound ricocheted from surface to surface.
I tried to play it cool, but in our school uniforms Jaquan and I were easy targets. Or at least I was. Walking through the courtyard—really just a dusty grassy area—I noticed a guy staring me down near the entrance to the building. He was wearing black jeans, a black jeans jacket, and a red flat-brimmed New York Yankees cap, with thick gold chains hanging around his neck. I was looking at him because, well, he was interesting to me. As I got closer, I saw that his pupils were brown, with bloodshot whites around them. His skin was light brown and taut against his bones, and a thin scar ran along his cheek. Tattoos snuck up over his collar and out of his sleeves onto his hands. He looked like such a bad motherfucker he should have come with a theme song.
Looking at people had never seemed a problem to me before, but when we were a few feet away from him and my eye contact had lasted more than a millisecond, he growled, “What the fuck you looking at, man?”
I didn’t know the right answer. “You, because you have a very interesting face and also because I’m intrigued about that scar, and, finally, I’m curious about your tattoos. Did they hurt?” didn’t seem to be the right answer. So instead I just mumbled, “Nothing, man” and looked away as fast as I could. I didn’t want to get messed up before we even made it to Jaquan’s place.
Thankfully, the guy knew Jaquan. “Urkel, tell your boy to stop looking at me!”
We made it into the lobby. It smelled like old piss, and a sign over the elevator bank reminded everyone that assault was a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. Jaquan didn’t bat an eye. This was, after all, home. And I didn’t want to betray my shock or insult him, so I didn’t say anything one way or the other. He lived on the fifth floor with his mother, Ms. Peggy, and his grandmother, Grandma, who teetered on the edge of dementia. His father had died when he was three years old, so it was just the three of them in the large apartment. Ms. Peggy was home the afternoon we arrived, but since she worked the night shift as a nurse at a nursing home nearby, she was on her way out. In my memory she was always wearing scrubs with cheery prints on them, like bunnies or rabbits wearing shower caps. I wondered if it made the old dying folks she cared for any happier.
Jaquan’s place was much bigger than anywhere I had lived. The sprawling apartment was full of heavy wooden armoires, plush sofas, and framed photos. And the kitchen was full of food. Always. Before Ms. Peggy went to work every evening, she’d make plates of ribs, corn bread, mac and cheese, and yellow rice, cover them with Saran wrap, and leave them on the counter for me and Jaquan and his grandmother. That was a welcome shock to me, a warm, well-stocked pantry in the middle of the projects. These were the years of cheap sandwiches and hunger at my mother’s house. My mom made just enough money to be ineligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and she refused to apply for NYCHA housing. Though I never asked her exactly why, I knew my mom well enough to know that she was enormously proud, and I think she saw relying on the government in any way as an admission of defeat, proof that we were actually poor. However, what that meant in practice was that whereas Jaquan’s mom was paying $200 a month for rent, we were paying $2,200. Add to that, tuition at Spellman, a Metrocard, and all the other living expenses for me and my sister, and we were struggling to cover basics like heat, electricity, and food.
That wasn’t the only difference between my life and Jaquan’s. When I was growing up, the N-word was strictly forbidden in my house. That word was a cudgel, a lash, a curse. Even worse than the f-word, it was the taboo. I had, of course, heard it in music and from the kids I hung out with just before I’d gone to Africa. I even used it when I was with them. But at home it was literally the worst word you could say. Since I had returned from Nigeria, I had stopped using the N-word at all. I was proud to be black, proud to carry the name Kwame Onwuachi, an African name, a black name. I was nobody’s Negro and I was nobody’s nigga.
But one day, over at Jaquan’s, just as he and I and Marquise were heading outside to play basketball, Jaquan’s mom called out, “Put on a sweater!” Jaquan, like most teenagers would, ignored her. Ms. Peggy yelled again, this time a little louder, “Nigga, put on a sweater.” I remember that moment clearly. I had heard the word said by people my own age. I had heard it thousands of times, in songs and movies, whatever. But I had never heard a middle-aged woman shout it at her son. I’m not on some self-loathing trip or a holier-than-thou soapbox, and I know how much Ms. Peggy loved Jaquan, but in that moment I just felt sad. Sad for Jaquan. Sad for his mom. Sad that this word, even though it had been “reclaimed,” still stuck in our backs like a dagger and in our minds like a poison.
Just like the noise bouncing around the hallways, there was an undercurrent of violence at Webster. The Webster Houses are actually made up of the 1200, 1300, and 1400 blocks. Like most of the Bronx these blocks are Blood-affiliated, but especially between the 1300 and 1400, which are controlled by rival crews. The 1300 block, where Jaquan lived, is controlled by a crew called B.A.B.Y. I never found out what it stood for.
Even though I didn’t live there, I had spent enough time at Webster that I knew that opting out of gang involvement just wasn’t an option. It’s unavoidable, like income tax, and whether I laid my head down there or not, I spent at least 51 percent of my time there. Jaquan was naturally cautious and risk-averse, not prime gang material. And I, I wasn’t even from Webster, I was just passing through. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that he and I would get sucked in. For me it started when I was sixteen. I had gotten kicked out of Spellman after one prank too many. I had shown up on the first day of twelfth grade, fresh-pressed khakis and laundered shirt, only to be asked by the dean what I was doing there.
“Um, going to school?” I said, like a smartass.
The dean hotfooted me to his office. “Did you not get our letter?”
“What letter?” I asked.
“You weren’t invited back,” he said. “You need to leave.”
“But my grades are fine!” I protested, because they were.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll never change,” he said. “You need to leave. Now.”
I was confused and humiliated. I was actually looking forward to this year. But the dean was adamant.
“You need to go,” he said, pushing me out of his office. And that was that. The Bronx Leadership Academy, a public charter school a few blocks from Webster, was the only place that would take me on at such short notice, and so I began my senior year in a new school, with no friends but the people I knew from the projects.
I had been around long enough to know a few guys from B.A.B.Y. indirectly. Plus, I was cool with Jaquan and Jaquan was cool with B.A.B.Y., and, therefore I was cool with them too. B.A.B.Y. may have been a Blood-affiliated crew, but it was pretty small. The guy who ran it was named Cyrus; he was the guy I had seen the first day at Webster. The other main character was a quiet guy named Barshawn. His dad wasn’t in the picture, and we used to joke that his mom met a guy at a bar named Shawn. Barshawn had nothing to lose and everything to prove, and was, therefore, crazy. We’d all be hanging out at Webster and Barshawn would just snap. “Watch this!” he’d say, then he’d hop off the fence he was sitting on and start beating on whoever was walking by. It didn’t matter if he knew them or not. Then, after they scampered away, he’d come back over and pretend like nothing had happened. It was crazy to watch and scary too.
Besides Barshawn, the main enforcer of B.A.B.Y. was a big kid called Ruger, named after the Ruger pistol he always carried tucked in his waistband. Finally there was Mikey, the runt of the B.A.B.Y crew. He was small and even poorer than everyone else.
I officially joined B.A.B.Y. after two fights: one I lost, the other I won. The first fight was with a kid from my new school. A few months before this all went down, when I was the new kid and still mysterious, I had slept with his girlfriend. We had sex at my mom’s house and it was great, for the two seconds it lasted. At any rate, this guy found out, and naturally he wanted to beat me up. We met a few blocks from Webster at a public park in early October. The fight was to start at 4:00 p.m. I remember, because it felt like an old Western.
The kid was tall and skinny, with arms like ropes. I was not as tall and just as skinny, but game. Anyway, there was no getting out of it even if I wanted to. Had I been wiser, I might have brought Jaquan or Marquise with me. But I rolled up to that park alone and found my adversary standing with a group of kids from our school.
“You fucking ready?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound confident, “let’s go.” This was the first actual fistfight I’d ever been in. I had, just so we’re all clear, absolutely no clue how to fight.
The circle of kids screamed in anticipation, holding up their phones to record whatever went down and post it to YouTube or WorldStarHipHop or whatever.
Because the other guy was taller than I was, with at least a five-inch reach advantage, I didn’t want to stay on the outside. It was a sloppy fight: no jabs, no level changes, no grappling, just wild haymakers. To my surprise, I was acquitting myself well. I caught him with a looping overhand right that stunned him. I heard someone yell, and briefly contemplated what victory would look like. But the kid came back hard and caught me with a hook. It was a glancing blow but put me off balance. I tripped over a tree root and landed on my back. I expected him to pummel me with punches, but instead he started kicking me hard, first in my chest and then my head. I curled up in a ball to protect myself as best I could, but it was no use. The rest of his friends, who had been lurking in the crowd, began kicking me too, and the last thing I remember before losing consciousness was seeing the bottom of a sneaker as it came down on my face.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Mikey from B.A.B.Y. was watching the whole thing. I wasn’t a member of B.A.B.Y. back then, but I spent so much time with Jaquan that I was an honorary resident of the 1300 block of Webster. I was entitled to some defense. That Mikey was in the park during the fight and neither stepped in nor called for help was a serious violation of gang etiquette. By the time I stumbled back to Webster, my shirt bloodied and ripped, two things had already been widely shared. The first is that I had been jumped, and the second was that Mikey did nothing.
I knew Cyrus only tangentially at this point, but as I was walking to Jaquan’s apartment, he stopped me from his perch in the lobby. “Oh, you’re Kwame, right?” he said. “Mikey told us, like, you were getting jumped.”
“How did Mikey know?” I asked.
“He was there the whole time,” said Cyrus.
“And he didn’t do shit?” I asked.
“Nah,” said Cyrus, “he didn’t, the little bitch.” Then he paused and said, “Now you gotta fight Mikey.”
Getting into another brawl, especially over something that felt like a technical violation with someone with whom I had no personal beef, made no sense to me at all.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t want to fight him. I get why I should be upset but I’m not.”
Cyrus looked at me hard for what felt like an hour.
“Nigga,” he said, “either you fight Mikey or I’ll fuck you up right now. And after I’m done fucking you up, I’m gonna fuck up Mikey, out of respect for you. And I’m gonna fuck him up every single day. So you choose what you want to do.”
“I guess I’m fighting Mikey,” I said unenthusiastically.
Cyrus gave me the night to recover but said my fight with Mikey had to go down the next morning. Jaquan and I stayed up talking over my options. Of which there was only one. I told him I didn’t want to fight Mikey, but as he explained it, it was no longer a personal issue. “There’s a system, man. You look out for each other. Mikey fucked with the system and he has to be punished.” I went to sleep that night full of dread and with a terrible headache.
I found Mikey at Webster the next morning looking just as miserable as I was.
“Hey, Mikey,” I said in a not unfriendly way. “I guess we gotta fight. Look,” I started to explain, “I’m upset with you, but not that upset. I don’t want to fight you but…”
“I get it, I get it,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”
We took the elevator up to the fourth floor, where Cyrus hung out. There were a bunch of B.A.B.Y. kids already there, Jaquan and Ruger and a guy named Boobie, and, of course Cyrus, plus a few other guys I didn’t recognize. As we stepped out of the elevator, they immediately formed a tight circle around us. “Fuck him up,” said Cyrus. Jaquan watched but didn’t say anything.
There was no escaping it. I had to fight Mikey, and the sooner I did the sooner it would be over. I stepped back to give myself space and put up my hands. I could see his face through my guard. Although his hands were up too, he was just waiting to get hit. Pathetic, I thought, and even I was annoyed. I didn’t want to fight him either, but at least I was making a good show of it. He was already beaten and I hadn’t thrown a punch. I made a fist with my right hand and decked him with a heavy cross to his chin. His head shot back and his chin raised up, so I followed that with a left hook. Mikey’s head spun to the side, blood streaming from his lip. That sparked something in him, and he came back with a wild haymaker that caught me square on the nose. Now I was bleeding too. I could feel the warmth of the blood as it ran down the back of my throat. Cyrus and the rest of the crew were closely packed around us in front of the elevators, but they were quiet. In fact, unlike the fight the day before, this whole thing felt somehow solemn and more serious. I wiped the blood from my nose and squared up again. My heart was racing, and I could see that Mikey was jacked up too. I wondered how this was going to end and who was going to end it. I feinted a few times with my left and backed Mikey up to the tile wall. I didn’t know what he would do once he got there or, for that matter, what I would do. Blood was dripping from his mouth and my nose onto the linoleum floor. Any sympathy I had once had for the kid had been drowned out by adrenaline. If he had been smarter he would have pivoted out of the way, but he didn’t. He just kept backing up until his back hit the wall. When he turned to see what he’d hit, I took advantage of his distraction and smashed him across the cheek with a straight left. I felt first cheekbone and then his head as it bounced off the wall. His body went slack for a moment and he began to slide down. He turtled, trying to protect his head, but I didn’t stop hitting him. I wasn’t even hitting Mikey anymore. He didn’t exist to me. My knuckles were swollen and split. I would have killed the kid if I hadn’t heard Cyrus behind me.
“That’s enough, man,” he said.
I kept raining punches down on Mikey.
“That’s enough!” he said again, louder and with menace.
I turned around to see that Cyrus had his arm out and his hand up. He grabbed my hand to shake it.
“Welcome, man,” he said.
“To what?” I asked.
“To B.A.B.Y., nigga,” said Cyrus. “You’re one of us now.”
After that I spent more and more time on the block. That fight had awakened something in me, namely power. In a way I had never felt before, I could finally control my world, and the mechanism to do that was violence. I fought often. With disputes between the 1300 block crew and the 1400 block crew ongoing, there always seemed to be a brawl to get a piece of.
Violence became part of my everyday life. Sometimes it was harrowing, sometimes it was exhilarating, but it was always real. You could always test your mettle; you knew your place. Just about every other day we’d get jumped coming back from school in the afternoon. I learned to walk with my hands free, headphones off, just in case. I learned to pack two pairs of shoes, nice ones for school and other ones for walking home. I learned which blocks to walk down and which ones to avoid, and to pack my Marmot jacket in my backpack, no matter how cold it was, so it wouldn’t get lifted. But just as often as we were jumped, Jaquan and I and the rest of the B.A.B.Y. crew jumped other kids. We were constantly fighting, and I came to view this violence as natural as air. As Jaquan told me, “This is just practice.”
Unlike most of the other kids who lived at Webster, I had another home to go to. The other thing is that I could slide from B.A.B.Y. Kwame to bourgeois Kwame with ease. I have always cared about how I look. For as long as I’ve dressed myself, I’ve been the best-dressed kid in my class. (Even at Spellman, I was the kid with the designer shoes.) I’d do anything I had to to afford the clothes I wanted, to look how I wanted to look. When I was younger, after my mom taught me how to wash her hair, wrap it in curlers, and blow-dry it, I turned around and charged her $20. “It’s same as around the corner at the beauty salon,” I told her. On snowy days, I took the subway up to Pelham and shoveled driveways for $15 apiece. I squirreled my lunch money, my allowance, until I had enough to take the train down to Century 21. While other kids were wearing Air Jordans and Air Max and Pèpè and Enyce, I rocked Prada shoes and Seven7 jeans and Ralph Lauren glasses. I didn’t look street and I didn’t sound street when I didn’t want to. And what this meant is that to the NYPD, a constant if lazy presence at Webster, I wasn’t a suspect. In all my time on the block, I was never patted down, never arrested, never even viewed with suspicion. Looking good made me invisible, damn near invincible.
So I could do anything. I bought my first gun, for instance, when I was sixteen years old. It was an old 9mm pistol that I got in a crumpled-up brown paper bag from a varsity football player at Spellman who moonlighted as the coke dealer for the teachers there. He was a bad dude. The gun was shockingly cheap and easy to come by; $60 with a magazine full of bullets thrown in for free. I didn’t plan on using it per se, but it was good insurance. When we’d roll up at parties in different neighborhoods there’d almost always be a problem. Having a piece was an instant confidence booster. Talk about power—this was power. And it immediately upped my cachet with the crew. It was a good thing I never had to use it, because the thing always jammed, though even that turned out to be fortunate. One night after we’d all been partying pretty hard, Boobie grabbed the gun and pointed it at my chest. I have no idea whether he thought it wasn’t loaded or just didn’t care. But he pulled the trigger. Click. He pulled it again. Click. And again. Click. He started laughing, and I did too, but I had never felt death so close. I didn’t know what to make of it.
Violence, actual violence and the threat of it, permeated Webster. I saw my first murder when I was sixteen. I was up in Jaquan’s crib, smoking a joint and blowing the smoke out the window at two in the morning or something, when I saw a couple of guys arguing on the stoop across the street. I thought they were playing dice or just drunk, or both. That wouldn’t have been unusual. All of a sudden, one of the guys just pulled a gun on the other and shot him point-blank in the chest. The guy ran into the building and I put out the joint as fast as I could. I didn’t need to be a witness. After a few minutes I cautiously crept back to the window to watch the parade of police, then EMTs, then forensic photographers, and gradually a crowd of onlookers. I went to sleep and by morning the scene had been cleaned up, like nothing had happened. Then a few days later, as I was buying a Vanilla Dutch before school, I saw the guy who did it at the bodega. I was terrified he had somehow seen me see him. But he just gave me a nod, I gave him one back, and that was that.
Another time, I was watching Friday at Jaquan’s when Barshawn banged at the door.
“Kwame, open the door,” Barshawn shouted.
He ran inside holding a black .45-caliber gun.
“Did you just shoot someone?” I asked.
“Nah, man,” he said. “These niggas from the 1200 side ran up on us. Everyone is brawling downstairs. I need to scare them away and air this shit out.”
I don’t know why, but suddenly I had an urge to air it out myself.
“Can I do it?” I asked.
Barshawn looked at me strangely for a second, then said, “Yeah, take the ratchet quick. Go, man!”
I ran to the window and looked out. Below us, true to Barshawn’s word, an all-out war was under way. I held the gun out of the window, pointing upward. I didn’t want to hit anyone on the other side.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Five quick shots. Five flashes of light. The figures on the ground paused for a second, then scattered. I was shaken. I had wanted to take the gun, I had wanted to shoot, and yet I couldn’t believe that this was somehow normal.
I heard Barshawn laughing behind me.
“Man,” he said, giggling, “give me my gun back. You look shook.”
I was. I couldn’t stop wondering where those bullets had landed.
My ability to slide through two different worlds was my greatest asset in those years. It made me invisible when I had to be and visible when I wanted to be. And it landed me jobs. The neighborhood’s biggest employer was the McDonald’s at 173rd and Claremont Parkway. But the pay was embarrassingly low, of course, and having to serve your friends—and worse, your enemies—$1 Big Macs was humiliating. Especially with the corny-ass visor you had to wear. I did eventually spend some time working there, but first I got a job at the McDonald’s inside the Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street, far away from the projects, away from the possibility of running into anyone I knew. It was a chance not only to make some money but to get out of the Bronx, away from the battlefield, out of my mental armor, a few times a week.
One summer I answered a job on Craigslist to work at Calexico, a Mexican street food cart started by three brothers. I got a job for Barshawn there too. He had dropped out of school that year and was clearly flailing. He had never had the respect of the guys on the block, and didn’t have anything to offer, like I did with my cop-friendly elocution and tight jeans. He was getting pushed to commit increasingly violent crimes—robbing people outside of Webster, that kind of thing. For whatever reason, probably because I didn’t live at Webster, Barshawn opened up to me. A year or so before, I asked him why he was dropping out. He said to me quietly, his long dark face looking down, “I’m not shit. I’m never going to be shit.” It was heartbreaking at the time to hear it and heartbreaking to see it play out. I thought I had gotten him a ticket out of Webster with this Calexico gig. The job was great for me. I learned how to grill chicken and steak, how to roll burritos and make quesadillas. Everything we made was from scratch, from the guacamole to the famously addictive “crack sauce,” and so between this and McDonald’s, I was exposed to two very different models of fast food. Calexico was the first time I had worked in a kitchen, even though in this case there was no literal kitchen.
I don’t think Barshawn shared my passion for cooking, but it was at least a job, and the spirit of Soho was so different from Webster I thought it would open his eyes, give him some hope. To get to Prince and Wooster we’d embark on a public transit odyssey: first the Bx41 bus to Third Avenue, then the 5 train to Fifty-Ninth Street, before transferring to the downtown R to Prince Street. It was a shlep.
I had spent plenty of time in Manhattan, as a kid going to parties with my parents in Chelsea and as a family as we passed through a series of apartments in Harlem. But Barshawn had never left the Bronx. He had never made it to Manhattan. Of course I didn’t know this at the time. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could be so close yet so far away. The first couple of days we spent in training, so we took the journey together. He sat on the train with his eyes wide open, and by the time we got to Soho, with its cobblestone streets, expensive boutiques, and tourists, he was gobbling everything up.
But because our shifts didn’t always overlap, about the second week he had to do it on his own. I could tell he was scared, so I carefully drew him a map of where to go and how to get there. But it didn’t help. He couldn’t do it. After a few days showing up late or not showing up at all, he got fired. The next time I saw him on the block he said, “Sorry, Kwame. But I told you, I ain’t shit.”
Back then McDonald’s paid about $7.25 an hour, which barely covered the subway fare to get there and back. Luckily, there were other jobs—an entire economy, in fact—that were much more lucrative and easier to enter: drugs. Saying you sell drugs is like saying you sell cars. There’s a world of difference between selling Maseratis and selling used Hondas, just like there is between moving a few grams of weed and selling massive amounts of cocaine or heroin or pills. Everyone has to come to their own conclusion—as I did. But from where I stand, saying something is bad because it’s illegal and good because it’s legal breaks down when the color of your skin pretty much makes you a criminal to begin with. The guys at Webster had all been in and out of lockup. I was in fact the only one who hadn’t seen the inside of a jail cell. Even when they weren’t serving time, the guys from Webster were constantly hassled by cops. This was at the height of Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk years, so it wasn’t uncommon to be thrown against a wall and searched a few times a week. And even when they weren’t being pushed into the backs of cars or holding cells, they were still in the prison of no opportunity. The projects are like a social science experiment to see which crabs could crawl out of a bucket. It’s a feedback loop for hopelessness. The guys from Webster see only other guys from Webster, so they end up looking up to the drug dealers and gang leaders. And since so many of those guys, people like Cyrus and Boobie and Ruger, end up either dead or in jail, they lose hope. The world outside doesn’t want them. The market outside doesn’t need them. They’re on their own, trying to build a life on the (literal) black market.
Although I had options I was still enamored with the bling of the dealers. And I have to give credit where it’s due. Denzel Washington was really my drug-dealing godfather. I, like a lot of my friends, fell in love with his character in American Gangster, who outfoxed or outright bought the cops. I wouldn’t say the movie made me start dealing drugs. I was definitely already thinking about it, but American Gangster pushed me over the edge.
Drugs were not hard to come by at Webster, but I wasn’t about to mess with heroin or crack. I wasn’t trying to do twenty years for a Class D felony. I basically just wanted to subsidize my own habit. Man, I loved Kush and Purple Haze. The market was just there waiting. Everyone smoked weed. I mean everyone: kids, their parents, their grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, security guards. As the lowest-level dealer on the block, I moved small amounts of product. I bought weed for $70 an ounce, which I’d divide up into smaller bags and sell for $5 a gram. All I had to do to stay cool with the gang was give them a nic, or a nickel bag, a week. It wasn’t even a rev-share, so it was a good deal. Soon I was turning that initial $70 investment into nearly $140—that’s one gram per bag—and using that profit to reinvest in buying more product.
By this time I was a senior in high school, and the prospect of college loomed. In my family, this wasn’t optional. My grandfather had been an academic and taught at historically black colleges and universities. My father was a college-educated architect. Before she became a caterer, my mother was an accountant. And Tatiana went to school at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Even when the pull of the block was strongest, there was a part of me that knew I would end up at college. It was the thing I had that others didn’t, and it would have been foolish not to take advantage of it.
It was different for Jaquan. Very few people in his family or that he knew had gone on to higher education. He wasn’t sure he should, either. This isn’t to say that Jaquan wasn’t ambitious or was in any way lazy. But his ambition was to survive. He didn’t struggle like Mikey did or like Barshawn did. His approach, as he told me thousands of times, was to “stay in his lane.” It was both an effective and savvy strategy. He kept his head down with his mom, at school, with B.A.B.Y. He wasn’t a pushover or a wallflower, but he was always a wary watcher. By the time we were teenagers, he had long outgrown the rambunctiousness that had first drawn us together. By sixteen, he had learned not to draw any attention to himself. The problem with that, as I told him, was that you can stay in the lane if you want to, but you can’t ignore the road, either. Was a life of not being noticed in Webster really what he wanted? Evidently not. We both applied to the University of Bridgeport, a small liberal arts college just over the Connecticut border whose student body is made up of a lot of city kids like us. It wasn’t a prestigious school at all. It wasn’t an Ivy League or even a bush league school, but it was college, and an affordable one at that, and for us it meant an escape from the Bronx.
That summer I was living large. I had bought a beautiful white 1992 Coupe de Ville with a rich brown top from Jaquan’s cousin for $2,000, the most money I had ever held in my hand, and I rode around Webster, windows open and Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III playing so loud it set off alarms on parked cars. Even Cyrus seemed to finally take me seriously and would toss me the occasional nod of respect. When I thought of how scared I’d been when I first arrived at Webster versus now, when I was about to leave, I was proud of myself. I’d been thrown into a world I didn’t know. I could have sunk or swum. From the low-slung seat of my Caddy, I knew I had swum.
Now it was on to the next challenge, the next world, a new deep end: Bridgeport. My tuition was only partially covered with scholarships and the rest was paid for with my savings from selling weed. I had a place to stay—a dormitory whose small double bedroom I shared with Jaquan—but no money for food. Thankfully, Jaquan’s mom used to send him care packages full of Hawaiian Punch and Gushers and Snickers. We both waited for that shipment like prisoners do their mail. One day, as we were tearing open the weekly box, I had an idea.
Back in the Bronx, during the summer, there were two things you would always see on the street. Fire hydrants pried open, letting loose torrents of water to the delight of kids, and someone pushing around a shopping cart with a cooler in it, calling out, “Nutcrackers! Nutcrackers!” A Nutcracker is the hustler’s cocktail, usually a mix of rum and some juice. They’re sweet and potent and always homemade. They’re the summer drink in the Bronx. I couldn’t believe no one had thought to export Nutcrackers north of the New York border, but as far as I could tell, there was no one selling them in Bridgeport. Jaquan and I were sitting on a potential gold mine. Although I was only seventeen at the time, the good folks at the local grocery store didn’t seem to care, and I returned to the dorm room having spent my last $20 on a handle of Bacardi.
Immediately we got to work, pouring out half the Hawaiian Punch and replacing it with an equal amount of liquor. Now all I had to do was sell my latest experiment in mixology. The University of Bridgeport has a diverse student body with a lot of African Americans, many of whom were as familiar as I was with Nutcrackers. And the appeal of Nutcrackers, I quickly learned, crossed international lines. In the Bronx, a bottle typically goes for $5, though this increases with demand and can soar to double that on hot days. This was Connecticut, so I figured $10 was a good starting price. And I was right. Working my way down the dorm hallway, I quickly sold out my stock without having to leave my floor. That night, I returned to the grocery store and bought $50 worth of Bacardi and more Hawaiian Punch. Kwame’s Nutcrackers were born.
I didn’t rest on my laurels. I experimented with Bacardi Dragon Berry, Bacardi Black Razz, Bacardi Limón, and with the entire flavor range of Hawaiian Punch. It was the closest I came to cooking.
Officially I was studying business administration at the University of Bridgeport, but I seldom attended classes, and anyway, I was administering business just fine on my own. And I was still in start-up mode. After a week or two selling Nutcrackers, Jaquan—who with his donation of Hawaiian Punch had become an angel investor—and I had made $500, enough money to move on to the harder stuff. I headed down to the city to the 1400 block of Webster and used that money to buy two ounces of the highest quality Kush I could find. Still inspired by Frank Lucas, Denzel Washington’s character in American Gangster, I focused on marketing. After I picked up the weed, I bought the biggest baggies I could find. I was packaging only about a gram into each dime bag, but the surface area made it look like much more. Back in Bridgeport, I was cleaning up. I’d go door to door in the dormitory, offloading product so fast that in three days I returned to the Bronx to re-up. This time, I needed more, so I drove across the Harlem River to Washington Heights. Back then weed grew like wildflowers in the Heights. I drove down 181st Street with my window open, asking guys who was selling.
“Who got that Loud?” I asked. We called the best weed Loud because it spoke for itself. A guy on the corner jerked his head to the right, so I followed him.
He leaned through the window. “Go see Zappos.”
“Where’s he at?” I asked.
The man pointed down the block to a rowhouse with a few guys hanging out on the stoop. “That’s his crib,” he said.
I parked the car and walked up the stairs to meet Zappos. For a kingpin, he looked like a schlub. A middle-aged Dominican guy wearing a tank top, he sat in his small and cramped kitchen. In the living room there was a plastic Playskool set.
That day I bought four ounces, what we called a QP, or quarter pound. Driving back to Bridgeport, the windows of my Caddy open, I felt I was finally living the life I deserved. The QP in Saran wrap hidden underneath my seat, I was an American Gangster.
Back in our dorm room, Jaquan and I set up a full-scale operation cutting and parceling out the weed into nickel and dime bags. We were in business. Because we established ourselves so early in the year, we became the one-room party supply store for the whole university. Acceding to demand, I added pills—Ecstasy, mostly—to my inventory while Jaquan grew our weed operation. We recruited a friend from the dorm, a big bear of a kid named Gianni (we called him G), who despite the Italian name was a six-foot-tall black dude from Miami with a goofy smile and a nose for trouble, to help move product. Everyone knew that Room 204 was the recreational pharmacy. By the end of the first semester we were doing nearly $3,000 in revenue in weed and pills a week. It was the first time I never had to worry about money.
We had everything we wanted, could buy anything we wanted, could eat at Burger King three times a day every day. I could afford all the Prada I could possibly wear but I tried to keep a low profile. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for the school authorities to suspect our extracurricular operation. There were a lot of close calls.
I had learned about lookouts from Web and the guys in B.A.B.Y., and because I knew campus security was already suspicious about the foot traffic in and out of the room, I paid G a few hundred dollars to switch rooms with me. I paid his roommate too to find another place. Soon enough I had turned G’s room into a full-scale operation, with stacks of cash, glassine bags, and product on all surfaces. In one close call, I was bagging up in G’s room when I saw campus security head straight for mine. I threw a couple thousand dollars into my backpack and the QP of inventory I had, and ran down the back stairs.
Despite the close calls, I, who should have been extremely cautious in calling any attention to myself, felt invincible. I smoked weed all the time and everywhere. I’d be sitting in an Intro to Macroeconomics class, receive a text message asking me to meet for a sale, duck out, come back ten minutes later, then my phone would buzz and out I’d go again. It was a busy time. Besides arranging for product, traveling down to Zappos’ now on a weekly basis for a half a pound, I had to manage the division and packaging of the product and also, when I had to, the collection of payment in arrears. When a customer stiffs you, you have to collect, otherwise you just keep on getting rolled. It’s the same reason I had to beat up Mikey. There are codes, and those codes need to be enforced. So when money was owed to me, I collected. And if that meant cornering a guy in an elevator and telling him I’d beat him up if he didn’t pay, so be it. If it meant following him back to his dorm room and taking every single cent he had and all the food his mama had sent him, I’d do it. If it meant stalking two guys through campus in my Cadillac until they were alone, then jumping out and stomping them both—here I had help from G—I was going to do it. Who were they going to complain to, the campus cops, the real cops, their moms in Riverdale? What were they going to say, my drug dealer beat me up?
Darting in and out of class, high all the time and pocketing $3,000 a week, not caring was part of my persona. But it was only a matter of time before I was caught.
When the undergraduate dean called me in to talk, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. And it wasn’t. Walking into his office on the afternoon of our appointment, I saw a nasty, dangerous smile plastered on his face.
“Good afternoon, Kwame,” he said. “How’s your semester going?”
“It’s great,” I said, affectless.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he purred.
“Bridgeport is a blast,” I dead-toned.
“Kwame, do you remember what you were doing last Thursday night, by chance?” He said this with a fake casualness that sent alarm bells ringing in my head.
“Studying, of course,” I told him. “I have Intro to Accounting on Friday morning.”
“That’s interesting,” he said, turning to his computer, “because this certainly looks like you.”
And true enough, there I was on the screen, standing outside our dormitory beside Jaquan and Gianni. A grainy spark of flame flared as I lit up a blunt and took a deep inhale. Soon our heads were encased in a cloud of smoke. The dean paused the video and looked back at me.
At that moment I knew there was nowhere to run and nothing I could do to wriggle out of trouble. That was me in the video, and I knew I had to play my hand right. Here was a guy who had probably seen hundreds of kids like me, a guy who, stuck in his role as an administrator, clearly delighted in playing detective. However, after getting into and getting out of trouble my whole life, I knew how to handle his kind: Appeal to his mercy in the most pathetic way possible. Flatter his power.
“Oh my God,” I said, burying my head in my hands, “I’m so ashamed.” I kept my head hidden and made quiet simpering sounds. “I’m so ashamed,” I repeated. “My mom is gonna kill me if she saw I was smoking weed.”
I raised my head and near tears said, “I promised her before I left for college—you know, I’m the first one in my family to go—that I would stay away from the drugs!” Again I buried my face in my hands.
The dean was wavering. “Kwame—” he said, his tone gentler now.
“No, no, no,” I cried, “I’ve tried so hard to make something of myself, and I let you down.” I lifted my head, wiped away nonexistent tears, and gave him the five-star deluxe treatment. I told him about my father. I told him about poverty. I told him I had nothing but the projects if I got kicked out, that where I came from you don’t get second chances. I painted a pitiful portrait. Who wouldn’t feel charitable after seeing my display?
Finally, after a half-hour monologue, he relented and said, “Kwame, I know you’re a good kid. If it’s true what you say, I’ll let you stay enrolled, but you have to pass a drug test.” I thanked him profusely and promised I wouldn’t let him down. I had survived Round 1. Now all I had to do was find a way to cheat on the test.
It turns out I was the last of the three of us to be called in. Jaquan and Gianni had denied everything, which, as I had anticipated, did not go over well with the dean. They were in deeper trouble than I was, but regardless, we all had to report for a drug test that Monday. Thus began three days of drinking water and peeing in constant rotation. But we knew it wasn’t enough. We had a virtual pharmacopeia in our systems. Jaquan and I went to GNC and bought a detox kit that promised clean piss in twenty-four hours. Gianni, on the other hand, ordered a device called the Whizzinator online. At $139, the Whizzinator, a realistic veiny rubber dick, came with a few ounces of synthetic urine called “Golden Shower,” a cotton belt, discreet leg straps, and a few heating pads to give the fake pee the right body temp. I had to admit I was jealous of Gianni’s plan. I wish I had thought of it.
The Whizzinator arrived the morning before we had to report to the medical center for the urine test. Well, it was a dick all right. But perhaps G should have read the online description more carefully. The Whizzinator comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black. Gianni was black and the dick he held up was the whitest I’d ever seen. I don’t even think white dudes’ dicks are that white. Now he was stuck with a dick as white as James Van Der Beek’s. We all cracked up, but there was no question: G was in trouble.
The next morning the three of us showed up at the medical center like men condemned. Jaquan went in first for his test. He was escorted to the men’s room by an unenthusiastic middle-aged female nurse. When he emerged a few minutes later it was with a grim look on his face. I didn’t have a chance to say anything to him before I was summoned. The same nurse led me into the men’s room, handed me a plastic cup and, to my surprise, entered the stall with me. “What are you doing?” I said. “I’m watching,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “It’s protocol. I have to see your penis as you pee.” I shrugged and began to pee. As I did, I understood why Jaquan had been so glum. My urine was the bright green color of antifreeze, a telltale side effect of the kit that I hadn’t anticipated. The nurse looked at me, looked at the pee, and rolled her eyes. I was caught, red-handed and green-peed.
“G,” I whispered, when I made it back to the lobby, “she’s going to watch you pee.” I had only a moment to glimpse his face before he was called inside; it was white as a sheet. G was in there for much longer than Jaquan and me. Perhaps the Whizzinator was malfunctioning, I thought, giggling at the idea of him fumbling with the rubber dick. Yet when he emerged it was with a big grin on his goofy face. He flashed Jaquan and me a thumbs-up and waved a jolly goodbye to the staff as we left.
“What happened?” we wanted to know as soon as we got back to the dorm.
“Well,” he told us, “the nurse did follow me into the bathroom stall. But I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and when she said, ‘I’m going to watch you pee,’ I told her, ‘You can’t. I’m too embarrassed.’ I told her that, even though I didn’t seem like it, I was actually half black and half white. But the only part of me that was white was my dick. She gave me a look like I was full of shit. I said, ‘No, I’m serious. I’ve been made fun of for it in the past, so I’m sensitive about it.’ She promised me she wouldn’t laugh, and so I pulled out my fake white dick and she almost cried. She said, ‘Oh my god. I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. It is white!” The Whizzinator, despite the mixup, had been his salvation. G was jubilant, but Jaquan’s and my fates were sealed. Sure enough, as soon as the test came back positive for marijuana, Jaquan and I received letters informing us that we were officially no longer students at the University of Bridgeport.
What should have been a wake-up call wasn’t. I had gotten letters like this my entire life, warnings and warnings and warnings, then I was gone. And yet I was fine, or so I thought. My life was heading down a dangerous path, but at that point I didn’t care. G stayed at Bridgeport while Jaquan returned to Webster.
For me the party continued. I was making too much money to give it up. Plus, my mother had moved to Baton Rouge, and I no longer had a place to land in the city. So I simply moved my drug-dealing operation to a two-story house I rented off-campus. I had always dipped into my own inventory—that was part of the initial appeal of dealing. But when I didn’t have to bother with classes, I started hard into Ecstasy. Alone in my new apartment, I ate almost nothing but pills. I dropped from 165 pounds to 120. With Jaquan gone and G pretty much out of the picture—we were warned not to interact—I surrounded myself with new friends. And when you’re a dealer, your friends are fiends. I hardly remember the names of that small, transient crew, only that they would never say no when I dumped a bagful of pills on the table and said, “Let’s party.” We’d smoke as much weed as we could, sitting around until smoke filled the house and the ceiling fan just pushed the haze around. I pictured myself as a benevolent king, ruling over a debauched court. In some ways I did act like a lord. The binge party would start around eleven one morning and not finish until the next. After smoking a few grams of weed and ingesting a handful of pills, I felt immortal. I was the best rapper in the world. I was a brilliant mind. My feelings were deeper than a river. I was as baller as a gangster. I had cash. I had girls. The world was mine. I was fucking girls one at a time, two at a time, names I don’t remember, in poses I had only seen on the internet.
Then, one morning, a cold cloudy day in November, I awoke from yet another binge with a stranger in my bed and a headache the size of a tree. I emerged from my room to find the apartment in absolute chaos. What furniture I had—futons and beat-up tables—was toppled. Empty liquor bottles rolled on the floor. A bong had spilled, leaving a puddle of water and ash on the carpet. Everything stank of weed and old smoke. The kitchen sink was filled with trash and ashes. I found a few of my “friends” passed out in the hallway and another nestled in a pile of dirty laundry behind the couch. Someone had left the television on in the living room and I foggily remember pushing a bunch of empty red cups to the floor and sitting down to watch it. It was right after the 2008 election, and on CNN some commentator was talking about how historic the victory was. The commentary was cut with footage of Obama, all smiles and hope and change.
I had never felt so alone or so rootless. I was hungover, strung out, and depressed. When I looked at what my life had become, at who I had become, I felt a total estrangement. Something about seeing Obama on the television and, when I turned the set off, seeing myself in the reflection, brought my situation into clear focus. I felt the world was moving forward without me.
For the past year the closest I had come to cooking was mixing the Nutcrackers in my dorm room. That morning, though, I felt an irresistible need to make something, I didn’t care what. I raided my kitchen to see what, if anything, I had. The truth was, not much. A few dried herbs, a bag of basmati rice. I threw on a coat and a pair of boots and stumbled to the grocery store around the corner. It was around eight; I hadn’t been outside this early for months, and I marveled at all the people I saw. I grabbed a cart and squinted at the harshly lit aisles. I bought five pounds of chicken breasts, ginger, Scotch bonnets, curry powder, a head of garlic, a few onions, a bunch of scallions, and oil. It was a strange time to make chicken curry, but that’s what I wanted. It reminded me of home all those years ago, when my mom stood next to me at the counter, teaching me how to chop and slice, onion tears rolling down our cheeks. I had made this recipe hundreds of times before with her and with her stepdad Papa Winston, who had taught it to her, and it reminded me of real love, not the chemical highs of Ecstasy. I came back to the house, cleared a space in the kitchen, and began to work. The old rhythms of cooking came back to me. The click of the gas stove and the purr of the flame, the sizzle of the oil and the chicken as it browned. The comforting softening of onions and garlic as they released their sweet aromas into the apartment. Everything was predictable; everything made sense. I wasn’t just cooking a recipe, I was regaining my sanity.
The smells of home filled the house. The kids passed out in the hallway and behind the sofa woke up and like groggy zombies came into the kitchen. “Kwame,” they said, “that smells delicious. What is that?” We cleared the table, just shoving all the cups and bottles into a trash can, and sat down. It was the first time I hadn’t started the day with a handful of pills in a very long time. It was the first real meal I’d had in a very long time. Sitting around, spooning the chicken and mounds of rice, it was the first time these strangers I called my friends and I actually talked. When they stumbled out into the sunlight I was left, finally, alone, I knew what I had to do. I called my mother down in Baton Rouge. “Mom,” I said, “can I come stay with you? I gotta get out of here.”
It was as if I had wakened from a dream. It was as if I realized I was drowning. When I looked at what I had surrounded myself with, I felt like an idiot. I made a reservation to fly from JFK to Baton Rouge as soon as I could. I didn’t even stick around long enough to offload my inventory. Thousands of dollars of pills went down the toilet. There was at least a pound of weed hidden in the bedroom closet, a farewell to my so-called friends if they found it. I left that afternoon with two duffle bags and nothing else. And when I closed the door on the apartment, I hoped I had left my habits and my addictions behind.