T he meeting I’d had with Sharif had resulted in a bartending job, but I wasn’t sure if taking the job had been a good decision. My shift had started at six p.m. and so far, the bar was dead. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be getting the generous tips I’d counted on. I should have known better than to listen to Sharif. Sharif could spin a tale better than a bestselling novelist. During our meeting, he’d convinced me that the small bar called The Dive was raking in cash.
“It’s a hole in the wall, but don’t let the aesthetics fool you,” Sharif had said. “There’s an eclectic mix of customers: corporate executives, blue collar dudes, rich college kids, doctoral students, professors, surgeons, poUticians, hood chicks, gangsters...you name it. It’s the kind of environment where people working stuffy jobs and living fake lives get to hang out with the common folk. When CEO’s and hood rats get to mixing it up and drinking together, all kinds of craziness starts to pop off. There’s never a dull moment at The Dive, but it’ll be worth it when your tip jar is overflowing with twenties and fifdes.
I’m serious Jag, you can make five or six hundred in tips on a bad night!”
Sharif’s sales pitch was intriguing, and as I considered the offer, I began to imagine the possibility of not only surviving the summer, but also making a dent in the enormous debt I had accrued over the past seven years.
“So, why are you leaving? You find something that pays more?” I had asked inquisitively.
“Some associates of mine put me on with a new job— something that allows me to fully utilize my talents,” Sharif had replied with a secretive smile. Sharif always had some kind of hustle going, and since I wasn’t interested in anything remotely illegal, I didn’t pry.
There was irony in the fact that I had recently acquired a law degree, while Sharif, who had never finished high school, was in a position to discard a job and pass it down to me.
After graduating from law school, all my college buddies had headed to Cancun for two weeks of fun in the sun. But I couldn’t afford that luxury. I was deep in debt and had to find an internship that paid decent wages, but obtaining an internship that paid anything in New York had become an exercise in futility. Apparently, most firms were only interested in interns that would provide them fi:'ee labor. It was bad enough that interns were only given grunt work, but to not even offer the minimum wage for said grunt work was reprehensible. It wasn’t merely my ego that didn’t allow me to accept any of the
non-paying positions I’d been offered, I simply couldn’t afford to work for free.
So I tossed my resume into a national database, and ^ out of all the fifty states, the only offer for a paid internship came from a mid-sized law firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—my hometown—the place I’d fled.
Blame it on miscommunication, or an overeagerness to get my career started. Whatever the case, I gave up my cramped apartment in New York and arrived in Philly with my bags packed only to discover the internship wouldn’t be available until September. Finding myself in a desperate situation, I sought out Sharif.
From the time we were in middle school, Sharif had always been the go-to guy; the fix-it man. Sometimes, he was true to his word, but he also had game. Like I said,
I had turned to Sharif only out of sheer desperation.
I glanced at my empty tip jar and sighed heavily. Surviving the night, let alone the summer, didn’t seem likely at this point.
Many of the dudes that Sharif and I grew up with were dead, doing time, or were messed up on drugs. My main man. Curt, was serving a twisted life sentence. I couldn’t even think about Curt without getting choked up.
I haven’t been an angel; I’ve done my share of dirt. When you start hustling at age thirteen, you grow up fast. I’ve been around and seen a lot, and by the time I was twenty, I’d cheated death at least five or six times. The last straw for me was the day Curt almost got
smoked. It sounds cold, but I can’t help thinking that somehow Curt would have been better off if he hadn’t pulled through.
It had been a sunny day and Curt and I were having fun, enjoying the wind against our faces as we sped along Girard Avenue on dirt bikes, laughing as we outran the cops. Zipping on and off the pavement, we gave the cops the finger as we whizzed off Girard and cut down the wrong way of a one-way street. Those lames couldn’t catch us...not with our skills.
We’d bought the bikes from some South Philly dudes. Cash. No ID or paperwork required. Making back-alley deals was the way business was transacted in the hood. We were young and getting it, and if our bikes got confiscated by the cops, we’d turn around and buy four more the next day.
Flexing for the chicks that were grinning and waving at us, we felt superhuman and invincible as we zoomed through the neighborhood. The noise from the bikes was so deafening, I didn’t hear the gunshots. I saw Curt pull back the handlebars, throw a leg up, and do a twelve o’clock. But when my man flew off the seat and sailed through the sky, my first thought was that there was a mechamcal problem with the bike. My mind immediately began cooking up retaliation schemes for those South Philly suckers that had the audacity to sell us a defective bike. My plan was to make sure Curt was all right and then go find those suckers; leave them facedown in the same alley where the deal had gone down.
It never dawned on me that some hating-ass punks, hiding in the cut, had opened fire on Curt.
Everything became a blur after that. One minute I was stunting and doing wheelies through the streets, and the next minute, I was hovering over Curt, screaming for somebody to call an ambulance. The front of his white T-shirt was sprayed with bullet holes, and the back of his head was caved in with globs of blood and brain tissue oozing onto the asphalt. Witnesses said I lost it for a minute. They said I was rambling incoherently as I tried to scoop up portions of Curt’s brain with my cupped hands. But I don’t remember.
Thankfully, my subconscious blocked out that part of the tragedy. Still, after experiencing something so unimaginable, it’s a wonder I’m sane. Then again, maybe I’m not. Who knows what a psychiatrist would uncover if I ever let one poke around inside my mind?
It didn’t make sense for someone so young and fun loving as Curt to be laying up in a nursing home. Seeing him helpless and paralyzed, wearing diapers, and being fed through tubes made me rethink the way I viewed the world. Doctors said Curt was brain dead, that he was a vegetable, but I didn’t buy it. Curt was still there. Trapped in that motionless, atrophied body, my boy was aware of his miserable situation. I could see awareness brimming in his eyes. And I was tortured by the fact that he knew what was going on. I would have felt better if he wasn’t conscious of the fucked-up way his young life had been altered.
The last time I saw Curt, he was gazing at me pleadingly. Like he was begging me to help him. When the male nurse came into his room and began the process of flushing his trachea tube, Curt’s eyes latched onto mine and were wild with panic. The procedure seemed painful, and Curt’s watery eyes seemed terrified.
Yo, that’s enough, man,” I yelled at the nurse. “You’re hurting him.”
“Oh, he’s fine; he doesn’t feel anything,” the nurse replied casually, like Curt was nothing more than a house plant that he’d come in to water. Meanwhile, Curt’s eyes had started rolling into the back of his head. I lost it. Something inside me flipped, and without planning, I found myself charging toward the nurse and yanking him off Curt.
Foul-smelling, milky fluids sprayed from the trachea tube and onto the walls, the bed, and on my shirt. And Curt nearly asphyxiated. Security was called and I was permanently banned from the facility.
I was a basket case after that incident, and mad at the world. I had been taking random classes at Community College, merely to keep my grandmother off my case. As long as I was in school, she didn’t harass me about getting a real job, and a real job would have interfered with my hustle. But after what happened to Curt, my heart wasn’t in the game anymore. I saw it for what it really was a trap. The game was all smoke and mirrors. None of us were making any real money. We were young
and gullible, and easily influenced to risk our freedom and our lives for a pair of sneakers, clothes, cheap jewelry, and a knot of cash that was large enough to impress naive, young girls.
Through the neighborhood recreation center where I went to shoot hoops from time to time, I found out about a scholarship. That’s when I decided it was time to turn my life around. Curt had gotten an unfair life sentence and I felt an obligation to make something of myself.
But after four years of undergrad in Virginia and three years of law school in New York, I ended up right back where I started, unsuccessful and broke. Working in a hole-in-the-wall bar seemed like a cruel joke.