by Chayala Friedman
He’s sitting on the very edge of a library chair in the Children’s Public Reading Room looking at his black hands, so close to the edge of his seat that any slight movement will cause his unfortunate contact with the hard-wood floor. He’s the once a week show in my homeroom class at Secaucus High, the guy in the suit-vest, baggy pants on marble knees. When I remember, I give him home-baked chicken in refrigerated tin pans from my mother. We do our little exchange by the parking-lot gate behind the school building so the other kids won’t see. He identifies himself as Abraham when he speaks up in class two desks away from me and that’s all I really know. But we’re sitting on public library stools meant for kids much smaller then us, which in turn makes us look like two bummed football players sitting on rusted paint cans in a children’s park.
“I don’t know what to tell my friends,” he breathes out slowly. “When winter comes, I gotta give them an answer.”
I pounder what significant role winter plays in the tale he’s spinning, but he guesses my ignorance in the matters of crime and settlement and fills me in before my thoughts become words.
“When it gets cold they can wear ski masks and no one sees who it is, y’know, ‘cause it’s cold and no one suspects you covering your face with a scarf or a ski mask. They’ll get away with it in the winter.”
He is explaining that he is a brother of a Jamaica street in Queens. That every corner in his neighborhood has a police watch tower on it because gang-related hits run as ramped as fire-escape graffiti and jumped subway turnstiles. He inches forward on the chair if that’s even possible. I’m making bets with the floor on when he’ll fall. He tells me he’s been shot twice and that back in the day he was the hitter.
“I was real violent back then. Crazy. Where I come from, you look at someone funny and you’re gone.”
I turn my head sideways towards the mural of children’s faces in the backdrop of the New York Public Libraries logo, giving the allusion that I am contemplating his last point, maybe even feeling sorry for him. Sorry that he was born with his feet slammed against a gum-stained sidewalk on the wrong side of the street where the pay phones are only used for shooting up and the meters curb hoarders’ stolen shopping carts instead of cars.
Sorry that I call my grandma each weekend just to say hi and that we have thanksgiving dinners in Jersey every year by my cousins.
His last meal was at a food pantry.
Maybe, I’m most sorry because where I’m from, kids are meant to make mistakes like 50-dollar traffic tickets for parking on the street during alternate side hours simply because they forgot to check the signs.
He’s at it again, shifting in his chair like he’s got thirty more seconds on the clock till recess.
I try reasoning with him. I tell him he is the only one in control of his life and that if his friends are threatening him for hit-names, they’re not really his friends.
“I know that” he says, “I know. But these, these guys, I mean, we grew up together. We were little kids playing in the street together. We always played basketball in the street, I mean, God! The fun I had with those guys.”
I realize just how hard this is going to be, that telling him to leave these bangers is like trying to separate a wick from a fire. I ask him if he has anywhere else to stay, a friend’s house, a grandparent out of Jamaica where he’d be away from the watch towers and the no-parking-zone signs that run the perimeter of the metal cage of his broken city. He says he doesn’t, that the only family he’s ever known is there in Jamaica and on the streets of Queens planning their next hit as a revenge job for one of their own being falsely accused of lifting hats and wallets from a coat room here in Secaucus. They know he goes to school here, know he mingles with the white kids on the nice side of town. They want the names and addresses of the people who called the cops on their guy and they know he has them.
“These guys,” he explains and he puts his hands out all formally, like he’s at a congressional meeting explaining to the House why poverty rates have sky-rocketed this year, “they just want pay back. That’s all they care about is respect. You show them any sort of disrespect and they’re gonna come for you. They’re gonna make you pay.”
Some kid behind us let’s out a scream, which I’m sure will, at last, send him bottom’s down on the hard-wood floor. He holds his ground though, as a tall woman drags the kid to the other side of the room where she sets him tightly on her lap and lets him squeeze what looks like a foam toy ball tightly in his fists.
“Disrespect is the worst crime in my neighborhood. Lotta guys get beat up just for that. And they guys who beat ‘em, they don’t care. They get caught, they don’t get caught, it’s all the same. And no one on the street who saw anything will snitch or they’re next. No one talks. But they all see. We all know who’s done it.”
For some reason, in that second, I feel alone in that children’s room in a public Library despite the kids turning picture books one table away and the kid on his mother’s lap in the corner with his foam ball and the fact that I’m being spoken to by the brother of a Jamaica street in Queens who’s about to perform what I can only imagine is the first library-style nose dive onto a hard-wood floor.
But he hasn’t waited for me to catch up to myself and he’s still talking fast and moving his hands like they’ll burn off if he leaves them in the same place for too long.
“I’m not like them. But these guys are my friends and I havta help them. I needa give them an answer by the time winter comes. It’s all about the respect. You do something wrong to them and they’ll getchya back for it.”
I tell him it’s not worth it. I tell him he’s worked so hard to get out, to go to school, to make the basketball team’s cut. I tell him guys who stew on other guys for a hit aren’t the good guys.
He jerks his head around while he listens. He squirms like a dancing lady in his seat. I tell him that it’s not good for him to keep going back to these same people. He rubs the back of his crew cut with one black hand. Finally, I tell him that these guys are low-lives, that their nights revolve around the next job, the next bum who disrespects them, who they feel have has wronged them in some miniscule way. They’re impulsive children that let off steam with blows rather than foam balls.
More head jerking, his hands have stopped moving now.
“But y’know what,” he finally says, “they’re right too. Nobody wants to be disrespected and I don’t either. If someone disrespected you, I’d get him. I’d die for you, y’know? I don’t like people disrespecting me or my friends and I love you man, I’d give my life for you.”
The brother of a Jamaica street who calls himself Abraham shifts forward in his stool as if just to spite the physical impossibility of it. He’s so close to falling that from where I sit, he resembles a creature sitting on an invisible tight-rope caught between a children’s stool and a hard-wood floor.
And I realize that some people try so hard to shield themselves from ever getting hurt that they lose themselves to it and in the end, they still get hurt, they just don’t know it. These boys, all the brothers of Jamaica streets, they try so hard to be in control, running around trying to be God and ensuring nothing bad ever happens to them. After all, they have nothing to lose, living and dying, it’s all the same. Maybe they just don’t realize that fielding the blows are just as much a part of living the good life as dealing them. Sometimes, it’s the agony that reminds us we’re still breathing.
I’m amazed at just how tightly that kid in the corner is fisting his ball and just how off the edge the boy who calls himself Abraham is on the stool.
I think about my grandma in her house in Montauk and how the last time I spoke to her she hung up on me accidentally while I was still telling her about the math test I’d aced. She called back a few minutes later to apologize and I just waved it on and told her how Mr. Davids said that at the rate I’m going, I’ll be in honors math by next fall.
And I allow myself for the briefest second to imagine my grandma in the middle of Jamaica Queens and what they do there to Grandmas who hang-up phones in their ears by mistake when they call on the weekends just to say hi.
