Writing My Wrongs Read online

  “That’s the problem now, so shut the fuck up!” This led to more laughter.

  I sat on the corner of my bunk and listened to the inmates argue back and forth as the sirens continued to blare. It felt odd, listening to two strangers speak with so much authority about something I had been accused of doing. It had been a week since Gigolo, Gee, White Boy, Jabo, and I were placed in the hole and charged with attempting to escape from the sixth floor of the Wayne County Jail. With no evidence other than a confidential statement made by another inmate, we were found guilty and sentenced to fifteen days in solitary confinement.

  Two days after being thrown in the hole, we were each called out by an officer from the Internal Affairs Division. He threatened us with lengthy sentences and then promised us the world if we snitched on one another. One by one, we refused to answer any questions regarding the escape attempt, and the matter was dropped as far as Internal Affairs was concerned. But the Wayne County hearing officer, who was basically an internal, autonomous judge and jury, found us guilty. It was an irony that vexed us to no end. In jail and in prison, when a confidential informant makes a statement against an inmate, it’s enough to find him or her guilty of any charge. But when we have witnesses who are capable of exonerating us, their testimony is no good.

  The Wayne County Sherriff’s Office had suffered great embarrassment from our almost-successful escape attempt, but it turned out that the sirens had been sounded for a much more sinister occasion.

  After half an hour of blaring, the siren suddenly cut off, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. Within moments, we could hear keys jingling and the urgent crackling of deputies’ radios. For us, those noises would become the soundtrack of chaos.

  A team of deputies, better known as the goon squad, burst through the door of our tier and began snatching us out of our cells, one at a time. The officers wore an assortment of expressions: astonished, sad, angry. The officer who came to remove me was one of the few we all considered cool. Unlike most guards, who thought it was their personal duty to add to our misery, he understood that for the most part we were all miserable, and he would come to work cracking jokes and talking shit to lighten the mood. Some days, he would leave the entrance door to our tier cracked and turn on the radio to FM 98, Detroit’s hip-hop and R & B station. It was a small gesture, but it went a long way to break up the monotony of the hole.

  But today was different. When he ordered me to step out of my cell, he had a look of total disbelief on his face. I could sense that something was seriously wrong, so I asked him what was going on. He hesitated before he spoke.

  “Somebody shot and killed Sergeant Dickerson,” he responded solemnly.

  “Do they think we had something to do with it?” I asked, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

  “No,” he whispered as another officer approached with handcuffs. “They’re just taking precautions.”

  It wasn’t until later that we would find out what had happened, and when we did, we were as astounded as the officers. By the administration’s account, an inmate had attempted to escape by smuggling a gun into the county jail. Allegedly, he had thrown a handmade rope out of the window and gotten someone on the street below to tie a gun to it. Then, later that day, he was on his way to court when he pulled out the gun in an attempt to liberate himself. A scuffle ensued, and when the dust settled, Officer Dickerson lay dead.

  I had been at Wayne County Jail for six weeks, following my arrest and conviction for second-degree murder. In those six weeks, I had witnessed everything from rape and robbery to murder, and this was one more reminder that inmates had no shortage of creativity when it came to inflicting harm on other men. Little did I know, this was just beginning my education in the true meaning of violence.

  2

  POLICE HEADQUARTERS

  Detroit, Michigan

  Six weeks earlier

  Six weeks earlier I was sitting in a dingy cell at the police headquarters on Beaubien. It was my second arrest as a young adult, and by far the most serious in my short career as a street hustler. The days of going to the precinct or youth home only to be let right back out were over. This wasn’t a drug rap or assault charge—the kind of thing I was used to getting into. This time, it was murder.

  One month after my nineteenth birthday, I had officially graduated to the big leagues. There would be no more slaps on the wrist or warnings from an irate judge, no bailouts from a counselor who saw potential in me. If I lost this one, it could cost me the rest of my life in prison, but that was a reality that my young mind wasn’t ready to accept.

  The sound of bars rattling made me snap to attention. I removed the shirt that had been covering my head, and a light-skinned officer was standing at the cell bars with a no-nonsense expression on his face.

  “Get up and get dressed,” he barked. “You’re being transferred to the county jail.” He turned and walked down the tier, repeating the same order to a handful of other unfortunate souls.

  “Wayne County Jail”: three words every hustler and street thug in Detroit feared hearing. The stories of violence, corruption, and desperation in WCJ were legendary. The seven-story building on St. Antoine looked inconspicuous enough, but inside, the law of the jungle prevailed. In the early eighties, during the heyday of Young Boys Incorporated—one of Detroit’s first major drug rings—the jail’s reputation for violence skyrocketed. Among the tiers named after characters from the Transformers TV show, few inmates could count themselves safe from unprovoked attacks, mostly from other inmates. From robberies to beatings and rape, anyone entering was considered fair game.

  I pulled myself up from the small, cramped bunk, slipped into my shoes, and walked over to the bars. I looked out onto the dusty tier as I slipped on the shirt I had been wearing for the last three days. I smelled like I had been sleeping in a garbage Dumpster.

  The sound of clanking metal shot down the hall as officers opened and shut the cells of other inmates, herding the guys down the tier and into a holding cell, in preparation for their transfer to the county jail.

  Soon, it was my turn. The officer opened my cell, and I shuffled down the hallway slowly, holding up my shorts and doing my best not to lose my shoes. (They had taken my belt and shoelaces when I entered the precinct—their way of making sure we didn’t hang ourselves or choke someone else.) When I reached the intake desk, they returned my shoelaces, belt, and the knot of money that had been in my pocket when they arrested me. The thick wad of hundred- and twenty-dollar bills was a reminder of the city streets I had left behind, and the weight of it in my hand made a current of excitement shoot through my body. But the feeling soon evaporated as I realized I might never see the streets of Detroit again.

  At the end of the tier, an officer pushed me inside the holding pen, where a dozen or so other inmates were waiting. Most of them were in their early to mid-twenties, and from the looks on their faces, it was clear that they were thinking the same thing I was thinking. How had our lives come to this? And what would we find waiting for us on the other side?

  As I stood there in cuffs, my thoughts wandered back to my childhood. I thought about the first time my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had told her that I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to help people get better, to mend their broken bones. I wanted to be the kind of doctor who gave children balloons and lollipops anytime they had to get a shot.

  But the image of me with a white coat and a stethoscope faded as my thoughts returned to the present. I stood with my back against the wall of the dingy pen, wondering if there might still be a way out of this. All I needed was one more shot at freedom, one more chance to turn my life around.

  It wasn’t the first time I had told myself that. There was the time I was charged with felonious assault and drug possession and sent to the Wayne County Youth Home. I promised my father that I would turn my life around when I got out, and for a few months, I did. I went off to Job Corps in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, got my GED, an
d started working as a carpenter. But I hadn’t relinquished my old ways. The entire time I was there, I sold six-dollar joints and ran a loan-sharking ring. When I was caught, I was sent back home on the next Greyhound, to my father’s great disappointment.

  Then there was the case I had just beaten in Monroe County. I had been driving back from one of my drug-selling trips to Ohio with a car full of cash and a trunk full of guns when a policeman pulled us over and arrested us for receiving and concealing stolen property. After the arrest, I told myself that this was it. I was tired of the streets and all that came with them. But as soon as we beat the case and returned to Detroit, it was business as usual.

  That was the routine. As long as there was a threat to my freedom, I acted like I was ready to change, but the moment I got free, I didn’t care anymore. It would take ten years and a lot misfortune for me to understand that real change comes only when you are completely and thoroughly disgusted with your actions and the consequences that they produce. As the Honorable Elijah Muhammad once said, “One hundred percent dissatisfaction brings about one hundred percent change.” And in 1991, I was only about 40 percent dissatisfied.

  I loved living in the streets. I loved the fast money, fast cars, and fast women. Above all, I loved the reputation I had earned in the ’hood. People knew me as a crazy motherfucker who would shoot as soon as I detected the slightest threat to me and my crew. When I drove or walked around the ’hood, people acknowledged me out of fear or respect, and that was the greatest feeling in the world. It was the one thing that made me feel like I was somebody, like I had power, like I had control over my life. I was the embodiment of what noted Black psychologist Amos Wilson argued: that the young Black male has perfected the art of being the best at being the worst.

  Back in the holding pen, I was pulled out of my train of thought by the feeling that I was being watched. Sure enough, when I looked up, a tall, slim guy was staring at me. I returned his stare, then went over to ask if he had a problem. That’s what you did in the ’hood, jail, and the prison yard. If you and another male exchanged glances, you’d better be up to the challenge, or you would be considered weak. And in our world, the weak became prey.

  When I walked up to the guy, a smile creased his face, and he told me he remembered me from over on a street named Savannah, where my sister had lived back in the day. His name was Jimmy, but I barely recognized him because he had grown several inches since I had last seen him. We kicked it about the old neighborhood for a minute, then he told me that he had overheard the officers talking about my charges. They were disturbed that such a violent act could have been committed by such a young kid.

  Some of the older brothers nearby began to sidle up, listening to snippets of our conversation. They were intrigued by my youthfulness and the callous manner in which I boasted about how I was going to beat a murder rap. In a twisted way, all of this attention made me feel like a celebrity.

  This kind of thinking is common among marginalized Black and Latino males. In the ’hood, the villain is the hero, the guy people look up to. So we hang out in front of liquor stores with plastic bags in our boxers and semiautomatics tucked into our waistbands, living out our version of the American dream.

  Jimmy and I continued to talk about the old days until two deputies came and took us away. They herded us out of the building and into a white Wayne County Sheriff’s van along with eight other inmates. On the drive to the jail, most of us grew quiet and looked down at the van’s metal floor. We all felt the same nervous energy, but we kept it concealed under the stoic masks we had worn standing on the corners in our respective ’hoods. From the streets of Detroit to the organized-crime families of Chicago, from the dirty South to the gang-infested neighborhoods of L.A. and New York, we all wear the mask. It is the one that says, “I am fearless, I don’t care, and I will destroy anything in my path, including myself.” But all of us know that beneath this mask is a vulnerable boy whose heart has turned cold.

  —

  THE NAUSEATING SMELL of spoiled ass, funky armpits, and crusty socks punched me in the nose as soon as I stepped into the cramped bullpen at Wayne County Jail, where intake processing was underway. The stench made my eyes water, and the antiquated ventilation system was doing nothing to help. Before me was a hodgepodge of inmates from all walks of life. I saw veterans of lockdown who had grown accustomed to life behind bars. I saw heroin addicts sprawled across the hardwood benches and urine-soaked floors—some curled in a fetal position, others shaking like scared puppies as they fought the pain of withdrawal. And I saw a few young brothers like me, wide-eyed and waiting for whatever would come next.

  Every ten minutes or so, deputies would call another three or four guys into a room and make them exchange their street clothes for the vomit-green uniforms of the jail. Meanwhile, I leaned against the wall in the back, listening to the inmates tell stories—stories in which the storyteller always happened to be the hero. To hear these guys talk, no one here was an addict, and no one was a cheat or a failure. They were badass drug lords. They were the ruthless titans of whole cities who didn’t have a worry in the world.

  There’s a reason why so many inmates use storytelling as a coping tool. Being in prison and stripped of your freedom is painful and degrading, and each day is a fight to maintain your sanity. In order to cope, some inmates make up entirely different lives for themselves, saying anything that might help them seem different or one notch above the rest of us poor, wretched souls. Some have perfected the art of bullshit to the point where they could probably convince George W. Bush that he was Black and only made it through college because of affirmative action.

  As I listened to the tales going around the room, I would have traded anything to be back in the ’hood, hustling and drinking with my homeboys. But my reverie was soon interrupted by the sound of an officer calling my name. It was my turn to get dressed out in Wayne County’s finest.

  I stepped into the hallway with a handful of other inmates and followed the deputy to the dress-out room, which smelled like an ass had just exploded. As I entered, I nearly buckled under the stench.

  We were all placed in a line and told to strip. The deputies ordered us to hand them our clothes one article at a time, and when we did, they shook each item methodically, searching for contraband.

  Once we had stripped naked, we were ordered to raise our hands above our heads, then lift up our nuts, turn around, and spread our ass cheeks. It was then that I understood why the room had such a horrible smell—it must have been subjected to the exposure of thousands of unwashed assholes over the years. (And I’m not just talking about the officers.)

  Soon enough, I was handed my county greens and returned the underwear and socks I had been wearing for days. They were the only personal clothing items we were allowed to keep, and putting them back on reminded me of how much of my life I had forfeited. But the chipping away at my humanity had just begun. Like Dante journeying through the inferno, my life would forever be changed by the things I would witness and take part in—the violence of oppressed against oppressor, predator against prey, and the insane against the criminally insane.

  The slamming of the steel doors was a signal that the iron monster had once again been fed. My journey began.

  3

  East Side Detroit

  1986, five years earlier

  “Come up off that shit, li’l nigga!” Tiny raged, holding the nickel-plated pistol to my head.

  My heart fluttered like the broken wings of a bird. I was terrified. The cold, steel barrel pressing into my temple pressed into my consciousness a colder reality—at fourteen, I was about to die. The odor of the streets poured from Tiny’s body, mingling with the sickly sweet smell of Wild Irish Rose wine, and I struggled to breathe as Tone, Tiny’s partner-in-crime, wrapped his crusty arm around my neck. Tiny gripped the gun with his right hand, which was bloated with open sores that bulged with pools of festering, greenish-brown pus. He was a heroin addict and a crackhead, a dang
erous combination in a stickup man.

  On the streets, it was a well-known fact that dope fiends wouldn’t hesitate to kill in order to get their next fix. When crack was added to the mixture in the 1980s, it gave birth to the super-predators who roamed inner-city jungles all around the country, filling the newspapers with stories of unspeakable violence.

  The fact that I was young enough to be these guys’ son didn’t matter to them. All they cared about was the small, white rocks concealed in my underwear. Murdering a child would have been all in a day’s work if that’s what it took for them to feed their addiction.

  Only weeks into my short career as a drug dealer, I had made several crucial mistakes. For one, I had let Tiny and Tone convince me to come outside the safety of the crack house. I had been crazy to trust someone who was one of many victims of the most potently addictive drug at the time, and I hadn’t paid attention to my gut instinct, which whispered Danger, Danger, Danger. Now I was at the mercy of two desperate men, too numb with fear to scream or plead for my life.

  When the initial shock passed, I went into survival mode. I retrieved the plastic bag from my underwear and handed it to Tiny. He then reached into one of my pockets and retrieved a small knot of cash, nearly ripping my pocket off in the process. He stuffed the crack and the money into his pocket and gave Tone the signal to let me go.

  I knew what would come next. They were going to shoot me and push me down the basement steps. A week later, one of the tenants would find my decomposed body when the smell became too strong to ignore. I could see the headline of the Detroit News: 14-YEAR-OLD FOUND DEAD IN CRACK HOUSE ON JEFFERSON AND CHALMERS.

  But instead, Tiny led me to the door of the building, prodding me forward with his pistol. “Get your punk ass away from here,” he ordered, shoving me out of the door and onto the cracked sidewalk of Chalmers Street.

  A flood of emotions overtook me. I was relieved that I hadn’t been killed, but my thin teenaged body trembled with fear as I walked to the Coney Island restaurant on the corner of Chalmers and Jefferson. I was disoriented, unclear as to what I should do. I felt like everyone in the restaurant could sense what had just happened to me. I looked from one unfriendly face to the next, hoping that someone would see the fragile child I was. But all they saw was a designer-clad kid trying to act grown before his time. As I look back on that day, I wonder if what I read as angry glares was really the puzzled faces of people wondering why I didn’t have my ass in school.