High Price (14 page)

Though his mom blamed us for being a bad influence, much of our misbehavior was, in fact, instigated by her son. He was tall and very thin, with the close-cropped hairstyle we all wore at the time. We thought the more flamboyant eighties hairstyles like Jheri curls were uncool. Like the rest of us, Derrick dressed in tightly pressed high-water pants and short-sleeved Izod shirts. He was constantly trying to show how tough he was.

In this case, though, it was probably my idea to mess with the white guy. As usual, Slick joined in and no one dissented. We didn’t consider any possible consequences or even think at all about what might happen if things went wrong. We just thought that the guy was out of place. He was on the border of our turf and this particular intrusion by a white man was something that we didn’t have to tolerate. We had the power here.

As we came up from behind him, I slowed the car to a crawl. By then, Richard had positioned the gun in a menacing position, rolling down his window and sitting as though he was taking aim. “Put yo’ hands up, muthafucka!” he shouted. The dude froze.

I will never forget the complete look of terror on that man’s face. His eyes opened wider than I thought it was possible for eyes to go. He was standing still but clearly shaking. His heart must’ve been pounding out of his chest. He was probably just heading home from work, an ordinary guy in his twenties, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I’m sure he never expected anything like this. Looking back, I realize it must have been incredibly traumatic.

At the time, though, we thought it was hilarious. The four of us started laughing when we saw the look on his face. I’m sure he thought we wanted to rob and/or kill him. But that was not our intention: we thought we were just messing around. Our laughter must have seemed stone cold. In retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how we could have done it, given the terrible toll we’d all experienced from gun violence. Still, we had nothing particular in mind. It was just an impulse, one that could have had terrible consequences but fortunately didn’t. Richard stared at the dude, keeping the gun aimed squarely at him. After a few more seconds, the guy’s instincts must have taken over and he ran like hell. We just drove away.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute, but the image of that man’s fear and the sense of power we had—as well as, I see now, our heedlessness—has always stuck with me. I can see the world from other perspectives as an adult, but back then, I really couldn’t. My concerns were entirely focused on the respect of my peers and whatever was necessary to maintain my status. I just didn’t see that white guy as human; he wasn’t one of us. We kept laughing and going over what we thought were the funniest parts of his reaction.

“You saw that muthafucka’s face?”

“I bet he nutted on himself.”

“Damn . . .”

As I grew up, I maintained a complicated relationship with the street. First and foremost, I saw myself as an athlete. Sports and girls kept me busy at many times when cousins and friends were getting into troubling incidents that didn’t end as well as that one did. Sports also gave me the typical “jock” perspective of skepticism about things like smoking that might interfere with performance. First football and then, for most of high school, basketball were the primary reasons I went to school: while I practiced intensively and with great commitment in sports, I did only the bare minimum schoolwork needed to keep up the 2.0 average required to stay on the team.

My expectations about school had always been low, but not as low as most of the educators’ expectations were for me, with a few conspicuous exceptions. Here’s one example: My senior year, one of my classes was parking patrol. Just as it sounds, we just sat there and watched cars in the parking lot. I’m not sure what it would have taken to fail that class but virtually anything would have required more intelligence than it took to pass it.

Shooting a layup during a high school basketball game.

Another example involves the end of my engagement with real math in high school. In ninth grade, I’d actually been placed in one of the highest-level math classes. I had continued to do well in math throughout elementary and middle school, despite my refusal to do homework. But then I tore up my knee playing football and had to have surgery. It was after this that I switched from football to basketball. Before my injury, I’d excelled at algebra. However, because I’d missed so many classes when I was in the hospital, school officials told me I didn’t need to finish out the semester in the top class. Instead, I could take business math, which was basically addition and subtraction, third-grade-level stuff. That completed my math requirement—and therefore my math classes, period—for high school.

Rather than challenging me to learn, they gave up, figuring that it didn’t matter because I was just one more nameless black kid who would never go to college anyway. And of course, given an easier option and no reason to challenge themselves, almost any teenager—and most adults, too—will take it.

And so other than two to three hours of daily basketball practice—and of course, games—I barely spent any time in school. I’d been put on the “vocational-tech” track, which meant that I received school credits for working as a busboy at the café at Walgreen’s. I’d have class from eight to eleven; then I’d go to work. One-third of the time I spent in supposedly educational programming consisted of classes like parking patrol. But I always worked as many hours and as many jobs as I could get, following my parents’ example of being hardworking.

Still, none of this meant that I didn’t sometimes engage in the same types of petty and ultimately not-so-petty crimes that people so often falsely attribute to the influence of drugs. The incident with the gun was only one of many criminal acts for which, luckily for me, I did not get caught. Starting at about seven, for instance, I’d been tutored in shoplifting by cousins Amp and Mike. Although a large proportion of the people in the neighborhood where I then lived were on welfare and receiving food stamps, no one wanted to be seen using them.

In fact, we mercilessly teased people who were caught showing the multicolored bills when they were sent to the store to get milk or other groceries. There weren’t any supermarkets in the neighborhood, so we shopped at a strangely named chain of convenience stores called U’Tote’M, which was bought out by Circle K in 1983. They were usually owned by whites or Middle Eastern people. They hired white staff, usually bored teenagers who didn’t care much about their merchandise or their jobs. That worked in our favor.

When my parents were together, we’d had no need for food stamps. But after they split up, I would be sent to buy groceries with them. It wouldn’t take long to find the few items like milk or eggs that were needed. What did take time was making sure I wasn’t seen checking out without cash. I’d hang back and wander the aisles, trying to make sure no one I knew was around. When the coast was clear, I’d pay. After my cousins taught me to shoplift, however, I started using what I’d learned taking candy bars and potato chips, to do the household shopping, too. This was another way I showed my cool—and got some much-needed extra loot.

Our techniques weren’t exactly sophisticated. We’d wear baggy clothes and have someone distract the cashier while the rest of us tried to surreptitiously slide what they wanted under their shirt or down their pants. If the clerks had cared at all, they probably would have caught us, but I always got away with it. The only time I saw a kid get caught was when my cousin Bip slipped a comic book under his white T-shirt. The bright red of Spider-Man was clearly visible through the fabric. The clerk saw it and opened his mouth to start shouting at him.

Immediately recognizing what had happened, Amp took charge. He began lecturing Bip himself. “I’m going to tell yo momma!” he yelled. “You know that’s wrong, what were you thinking?” He went on moralizing, while the clerk glowered, distracted by Amp’s speech from calling the police, searching the rest of us, or continuing his own lecture. He had no idea that Amp had put Bip up to it; nor did he know that we had our own stolen items concealed in our clothes. When Amp finished his performance, the clerk just glared at us and said, “Out.” Bip was thoroughly embarrassed.

Outside later, we gave him even more hell, not just for getting caught but also for stealing something as useless as a comic book. Other than my sports books, none of us read anything, so we thought that stealing something to read, even a comic, was the height of hilarity. But Bip was so shaken by the whole event that I don’t think he ever stole with us again. He would later, in his twenties, serve time in prison for cocaine trafficking.

Several other kids in my family also shoplifted from time to time. One of my sisters had a particular knack for changing the prices on items to get expensive items for almost nothing. This was before electronic tagging and inventory systems rendered her method obsolete. I was much more circumspect in what I’d do. It really had to be a sure thing for me. I had no intention of ever getting caught. For instance, when I was in middle school, we’d often hang out at a mall that was at the transfer point for the bus home. I never shoplifted there: too many cameras and security guards.

In my own life, then, it was very clear that crime wasn’t always, or even very often, driven by or even related to drugs. Most of my peers shoplifted, whether or not they took drugs. Guns, similarly, had little connection to drug use or dealing in our lives. For us, shoplifting was not a matter of “stealing to support a habit” and we didn’t carry guns to “protect dealing turf.” We stole because we didn’t have what we needed or wanted; we stole to resist, to not be suckers. We kept guns to be cool. It was much more about necessity and poverty, about power, not just pleasure.

At the time, I didn’t think critically about any of this. And so, when crack cocaine came along, I completely bought the party line about its connection to violence and disorder. I had similarly accepted without thinking the idea that drugs like heroin and even marijuana caused violence. I was soon seeing crack the way everyone around me did: as a scourge, the source of all our problems. I thought the drug itself was what made our neighborhood into a war zone.

But evidence from research tells a different story. It is true that addiction and crime are correlated. People involved in crimes like burglary, larceny, and robbery are more likely to be addicted to drugs than those who don’t commit such crimes, and vice versa. However, around half of all people with drug addictions are employed full-time
¹
and many never commit crimes that aren’t related to the fact that their preferred drugs are illegal.

The U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics examined the connections between drugs and crime in prisoners, analyzing data from 1997 to 2004. It found that only a third of state prisoners committed their crimes under the influence of drugs and only around the same proportion were addicted.
²
That means the overwhelming majority were not intoxicated or addicted during their crime—and only 17 percent of prisoners reported committing their crimes to get money to buy drugs. Violent offenders were actually less likely than others to have used drugs in the month prior to incarceration.
³

The real connection between drugs and violent crime lies in the profits to be made in the drug trade. The stereotype is that crack typically causes crime by turning people into violent predators. But evidence from research shattered this misconception. A key study examined all the homicides in New York City in 1988, a year when 76 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine. Nearly two thousand killings were studied.
⁴

Nearly half of these homicides were not related to drugs at all. Of the rest, only 2 percent involved addicts killing people while seeking to buy crack cocaine and just 1 percent of murders involved people who had recently used the drug. Keep in mind that this study was conducted in a year when the media was filled with stories warning about “crack-crazed” addicts.

Thirty-nine percent of New York City’s murders that year did involve the drug trade, however, and most of these were related to crack selling. But these killings were primarily disputes over sales territories or robberies of dealers by other dealers. In other words, they were as “crack-related” as the shoot-outs between gangsters during Prohibition were “alcohol-related.” The idea that crack cocaine turns previously nonviolent users into maniacal murderers is simply not supported by the data. When it comes to drugs, most people have beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.

M
y own drug use was completely dissociated from my other criminal behavior. I didn’t slow my car to let Richard point the gun at that white guy because I was crazy from being high or wanted money to get high. And we didn’t keep the gun on hand because of drugs, either. I never shoplifted or sold marijuana because I needed money to smoke it. In fact, I actually didn’t like marijuana much. By sixteen, I’d tried cigarettes, reefer, and drinking but, as always, my main goal was staying cool. That meant low to moderate use: I didn’t want to feel out of control, ever, and I could see how getting drunk or really high could interfere with this desire.