Brother Are You Dying?

Yesterday evening I sat at my computer and attempted to type up a novella I had written while in Lisbon. It's one of those stories that just spilled forth, where I stayed up all night wrote straight into my journal, and woke up early to continue. Not out of discipline but because I had to. But then last night I finally had to admit to myself that it is this aspect of writing I like the least: Moving my handwritten text from my journal by typing it up into an electronic file. The problem is that this is an integral part of my writing process, a part of the revision and also a step towards getting it out there, to you, the reader. This is where the discipline is needed.
So anyway, I'm really struglling to type up this story and focus, which I did a bad job at, cause of course at some point I checked my email, so EAGER for a distraction was I. And I saw that I got an email from my brother.
I'm psyched because my brother Gerry is really cool. He's like the quintessential older brother: He has always been protective and providing. Once I got beaten up (well, actually, I got beaten up more than once, but that's another story) and he and his friends went looking for the other party as my back-up (yes ya'll, that's how shit rolled back in Brooklyn). While my sister discovered the Village and life outside Brooklyn, my brother and I shared the same friends: a motley crew of kids from the building and from the Block. His friends were like Caribbean rude boys and southern gentlemen who wore silk shirts and side parts that burrowed, like a road, into the bushiness of thier flattops. A gold tooth was a cool thing to have, and a man was judged by the shine of his Clarks or the whiteness of his sneakers. We listened to Sister Nancy, Yellow Man and Kurtis Blow.
Gerry was a really good break-dancer and used to break-dance in Manhattan for money. He also became a very accomplished NYC dj and I remember when I was at Irving , getting into Mars for free. Mars was this multi-leveled Club housed in an old warehouse in Manhattan's meat packing district. I used to go with my two friends Ruhiya and Dorian, and our math teacher would usually tag along. Gerry played reggae on the reggae floor, and we had the whole building to explore for the entire night. Imagine: three 15-year old girls in a night club, fumbling around in darkness, through maroon curtains and dancing our butts off. It was fun. That’s when blue jeans with white t-shirts and black shoes were in style.
Gerry was also the first person to take me to the legendary Paradise Garage--It’s still the best time I’ve ever had in my life. We danced until 6am: I remember doing the wop with this tall, thin chocolate brother like ALL night. It was the first time I had ever partied like that. I was only 12. That night we partied with the mother of his child, Shannon, who wore gold bamboo earings and tight, stonewashed jeans with Reebok sneakers. Together, they lived in a broken down apartment on Herkimer Street and attempted to walk into life, child in hand, without ever really learning how to crawl. And they did it.
Gerry was also the person who taught me how to ride a bike. I learned late: I must have been 8 or 9 and was the only person in my building who still didn’t know how to ride a bike. Every one had ten speeds, banana seat or huffy bikes but since I never had a bike, I never really learned. And it wasn't like it was high up on my parent's list either. Daddy was too busy running from his own depression and my mother escaped us through a myriad of jobs that were needed to pay bills.
Gerry was a wiz at making his own bikes. He and his friends built their bikes from scratch and they had the nicest bikes. He taught me a lot about fixing bikes too—how to find if an inner tube had a hole in it, putting a chain on, how to see if the axis was not bent. So yeah, my big brother taught me how to ride a bike, a skill that came in really handy after moving here to Denmark since it’s the best way to get around.
Gerry became a daddy when he was like 17 or 18. By that time he had dropped out of school. They tried to put him in Special Education but he told them that if they did, he wasn’t coming back to school. “They’re kids in there who are setting the class on fire.” He would say but no one listened. He ended up dropping out.
A little before this time in his life, I had already been sent to Trinidad to live with my grandparents. I’d live there for four years, and I’d see Gerry on the few times I visited Brooklyn. No matter how long it had been since we last saw each other, we’d ease right into our usual relationship as if were still hanging out in front of the building on Ocean Avenue with the summer sky hanging lightly over us. Boys popped wheelies and girls popped gum. People went away to college and some got locked up. Many girls made it into adulthood and some girls raised babies—theirs, with the help of their families, of course.

So I was psyched when I got an email from him. I have been wanting to call him, but in between not having a phone card and trying to be disciplined and work (not talk on the phone)-- I just kept faith that the timing will occur. His was the first message I opened, and I was a bit disappointed when the email appeared to be blank. I was hoping to hear about his new job that my mom and Aunt had been telling me about. They said he had gotten a good job in a hospital kitchen, preparing food. My brother has a talent in kitchens, so it made sense. I was happy to hear that things were looking up for him, especially since a few years ago he not only lost his bar Kings and Queens, but his marriage as well. My brother is a fancy kind of guy—he likes gold rings and fast cars, but he’s got the soul of an old man. In short, he’s a romantic, and I know that all he really wants in life, really, is someone to love and to love him, someone with whom he could lay his weary body next to, late at night, someone to wake up with to start yet another day. I always look at my brother and my sister in awe: Monogamy fits them.
But the email didn’t say anything in it. I scrolled down and finally my eyes saw his name, address, telephone number, then “goal and objective.” It was his resume—we’ve been down this road before.

Whenever my brother is searching for a job, he always calls me to, as he puts it, “hook my resume up for me.” So then it dawned on me: My brother has lost his job. The one he had just gotten, and that my family had recently told me about. My heart sank. I emailed him back. “Did you lose your job?” “Yes”, he replied, “They did a background check.”
I called him up. “It was a good job too Lesley. It was sweet. They deposited my check in the bank, the money came out to pay for the car, and my rent was getting paid. It was good. I was set.”
My heart sank even more. See, my brother is the nicest hustler ever, a gentle gangster.
I remembered the last time we saw each other in New York, this past summer. The first thing he said to me, as he always says was, “Damn Les, you still ain’t gain no weight?” Cause to him, skinny black girl is sin.
“How am I supposed to pay my bills and stay out of trouble when nobody gives me a chance? It’s like I feel like I don’t have a choice. It’s not like I killed somebody or that I’m even in contact with the patients in the building. And it’s preparing food—I could do that. I like that.”
“I had a car—I was going to get me a Cadillac CTS, but I couldn’t get that so I got a Nisson Altima instead…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, “I don’t know anything about cars.” At 35, I still don’t have my license.
“I’m stressed now.” He let’s out a sigh. “What you doing now, anyway?”
“Chillin’”
“Chillin’” he repeats, saying after me. “Damn Les, you gotta say that shit with more soul. What they doing to your soul up there?” We laugh. He continued, "I was reading up on Denmark the other day. You guys are like ten years behind on shit." I start to type up my story. I realize it’s much easier for me to type it in without rereading it—otherwise I stop too many times to edit myself. Right now, I realize, I just need to type the story in, and as I speak to my big brother, I realize that I can focus on him while I absently typed from my journal.
“How they expect someone to get their life together? And that shit that turned up, that was more than 7 years ago…”
My brother had done a couple of stints in jail—He’s had even more brushes with the law. In fact, most of our mutual friends who are male follow pretty much the same pattern: In and out of jail. There’s Stanley who was the first one in the building to get locked up at Rikers. He was the first one to wear a doo-rag and let his pants slack over his underwear. There was Andrew, the Jamaican gangster from across the street. There was Keevin from the 4th floor who I had heard, but can not confirm, is (was?) on death row somewhere in the South. There was Glen, my friend India’s brother. There was Andre—the most beautiful man I have ever seen and he’s in jail so much that every time I ask my brother about him I kid you not: Andre is locked up. It’s like there’s this entire parallel world that these men participate in.
“I need a job man. A j-o-b.” My brother begins again. “Man, all you need to do is get a job, work there, get benefits. All I really need is to pay my rent and my car note. I don’t need anymore than that. I ain’t trying to be no gangster…”

As I write this, I can’t stop thinking about that Angela Davis video and what she says about guns. Guns. I hate guns, I really do. I’ve been in the middle of shoot-outs where I could sense it was coming: the Brooklyn air taking on this static feeling, as if a storm was about to break. I’ve seen close ones shot, rode in Ambulances with them and had to be the one to tell their boyfriend (who coincidentally is my brother) that their girlfriend just got shot in some basement reggae party. I’ve had boyhood friends press guns into my hands, telling me, “Here you go Les—take this, you’ll need it.” And I would press it back into theirs and say “No thank you.” I’ve had a gun pressed to my back by a New York City cop as he marched me through the West Village to the local precinct, a feeling I will always carry with me: That feeling of your stomach as it curls up to your heart when you are in fear. I’ve lost childhood friends to bullets over a parking space, over a girl. I’ve written it a million times and I will never stop writing it: My high school was the first High School in the NYC area to get metal detectors. We were on the front page of the New York Post that morning as if that was something to be celebrated. And people complain about Airport Security these days. Try having that shame shit in your high school, every morning. How were we supposed to learn?

I think one of the things I value about my brother the most is that we shared our Brooklyn childhood together. We survived it and in a lot of ways, my brother represents another path that although I could have been on I am not. When I see him and our old friends together, I experience the opportunity to be completely myself in a way that only sharing a common past could conjure.

My brother belongs to the culture of not being able to live life beyond survival mode. When you can’t even keep a roof over your head or hold a job you are under stress. I’m not a sociologist, I’m just a sister whose brother is not only experiencing some of the consequences of past decisions, but at the same time merely looking for a break. He is 40 years old and has two kids. Although he has made some very stupid decisions in the past, I’ll tell you without hesitation that my brother is not a stupid human being.

What are the prospects for my brother? How will he get himself out of this? How can I help him? He lights a Newport. I exhale. I wish he’d stop smoking. “I’m stressed.” He says. “That’s why I tell Wah he need to go to school. He need to get himself a vocation. He needs to get a job.” He continues now about his son. “He need to get out of that rap game and get himself a skill. It’s all about a job.” And I think about my fancy college education and the way my brother spins Yellow Man and Buju Banton. I think about all the book projects I have yet to write, much less publish and I think about him and how my son’s face lit up like a sun-drenched beach whenever my brother was around him this past summer. I remember how my brother thought he was Jamaican and how one day he took me to Campus Quarters with him and how he put my initials “lab” in for the high score (Centipede, I think was the game) and how we discovered together what it had spelled. I remember how one of my classmates had told me on my way home from P.S.152 that my brother had killed a boy and how one day I saw him and my mother, dressed in black go off to a funeral. I remember his words, the same even to this day, “He said he could swim. I think he caught a cramp. He was in too deep. I ran out to help and the next thing I know they was doing resuscitation on him and the ambulance was there…” And I wonder what it must feel like seeing someone die in front of you, someone you want very much to live, but no matter how much you will it, it does not happen.
“Awright Les.” He exhales, “I gotta go. Imma go take a shower, go to the store…”
“What store?” I asked, confused.
“The store, you know, I gotta pick a few things up.” And I laugh at my own confusion.

In the end, I can’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes. It may have nothing to do with anything, it might have to do with everything:
“Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust etc. …Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will…”
--Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx

And I am again filled with hope. I hope that there are human beings out there who will see the beautiful human being that my brother is and give him a chance. I hope that they will be able to do what my brother, then only a child, could not do to his friend on that day. I hope that they will give him a chance before the stress takes over and asphyxiates him. Except I know that in this version, there are very rarely passersby who can be called upon to resuscitate a man who dares to still hang on to a life that seems, by all intents and purposes, not to have been designed with him in mind, at all.