Mike, Chuck, and their friend Alex were shooting dice on the wall of the elementary school. It was approaching midnight and quite cool for mid-September in Philadelphia. Between throws, Chuck cupped his hands together and blew heat into his fingers.
Mike usually won when the guys played craps, and tonight he was rubbing their noses in it, shrugging into a little victory dance when he scooped the dollar bills off the ground. After a pair of nines, Alex started in on Mike.
“You a selfish, skinny motherfucker, man.”
“Niggas is always gonna hate,” Mike grinned.
“You think you better than everybody, man. You ain’t shit!”
Chuck laughed softly at his two best friends. Then he yawned and told Alex to shut his fat ass up before the neighbors called the law. A short time later, Chuck called it a night. Mike announced he was going to get cheesesteaks with his winnings and asked if I wanted to come with.
“Can I get a cheesesteak?” Alex interjected.
“Man, take your fat ass in the house,” Chuck laughed.
“Oh, so I’m walking?!”
. . .
Mike and I were halfway to the store in his car when his cell phone started ringing. When he picked up I could hear screams on the other end. Mike shouted, “Where you at? Where you at?”
He screeched the old Lincoln around and headed back to 6th Street, pulling up in front of the corner store. There in the headlights we saw Alex, all 250 pounds of him, squatting by the curb, apparently looking for something. When he glanced up at us, blood streamed from his face, down his white T-shirt, and onto his pants and boots. Alex mumbled something I couldn’t decipher, and then I realized he was looking for his teeth. I started searching on the ground with him.
“Alex,” I said, “we have to take you to the hospital.”
Alex shook his head and put up his hand, struggling to form words with his mangled lips. I kept pleading until finally Mike said, “He’s not fucking going, so stop pushing.”
At this point I remembered that Alex was still on parole. In fact, he was quite close to completing his two years of supervision. He feared that the cops who crowd the local emergency room and run through their database the names of Black young men walking in the door would arrest him on the spot, or at least issue him a violation for breaking the terms of his parole. If that happened, he’d be back in prison, his two years of compliance on the outside wiped away. A number of his friends had been taken into custody at the hospital when they sought care for serious injuries or attempted to attend the birth of their children.
Mike took off his shirt and gave it to Alex to soak up the blood from his face. Chuck had come back around by this point, and carefully helped him into the front seat of Mike’s car. We drove to my apartment a few blocks away. We cleaned Alex up a bit, and then he began to explain what had happened. On his way home from the dice game, a man in a black hoodie stepped out from behind the corner store and walked him into the alley with a gun at his back. This man pistol-whipped him several times, took his money, and smashed his face into a concrete wall. Later, Alex found out that this man had mistaken him for his younger brother, who’d apparently robbed the man the week before.
Over the next three hours, Mike and Chuck made a series of futile calls to locate someone with basic medical knowledge. Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, was in school to become a nurse’s aide, but she hadn’t been speaking to him lately—not since she’d caught him cheating and put a brick through his car window. Finally, at around six in the morning, Alex contacted his cousin, who came over with a plastic bag full of gauze and needles and iodine, and stitched up his chin and the skin around his eyebrow. His jaw was surely broken, she said, as well as his nose, but there was nothing she could do about it.
The next afternoon, Alex returned to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and young son. Mike and I went to visit him that evening. I again pleaded with Alex to seek medical treatment, and he again refused.
All the bullshit I done been through [to finish his parole sentence], it’s like, I’m not just going to check into emergency and there come the cops asking me all types of questions and writing my information down, and before you know it I’m back in there [in prison]. Even if they not there for me, some of them probably going to recognize me, then they going to come over, run my shit [check for his name in the police database under open arrest warrants]. I ain’t supposed to be up there [his parole terms forbade him to be near 6th Street, where he was injured]; I can’t be out at no two o’clock [his curfew was 10:00 p.m.]. Plus, they might still got that little jawn [warrant] on me in Bucks County [for court fees he did not pay at the end of a trial two years earlier]. I don’t want them running my name, and then I got to go to court or I get locked back up.
At this point his girlfriend emerged from the bedroom, ran her hands over her jeans, and said, “He needs to go to the hospital. Better he spends six months in jail than he can’t talk or chew food. That’s the rest of his life.”
. . .
Alex’s attack occurred over ten years ago. He still finds it difficult to breathe through his nose and speaks with a muffled lisp. His eyes don’t appear at quite the same level in his face. But he didn’t go back to prison. Alex successfully completed his parole sentence, a feat of luck and determination that only one other guy in his group of friends ever achieved.