Paper Chasers (15 page)

I lay as limply as an impotent man. My eyes were closed and I was in shock. My forearm and my back felt as though they were on fire. I was in extreme pain, but yet I refused to scream. Instinctively, I wanted to fight back. I was ready to grab hold of the person who was now rummaging through my pockets. I wanted that four Gs that they were stealing from me, but I knew that my life was much more important than four Gs. I remember thinking,
Holz, if you flinch, you're dead! Just chill. God is watching over you.

I wouldn't let myself breathe 'cause I was too scared that they would see that and kill me.
Never say die, Holz. Never say die. Mark, don't let yourself die.
I desperately wanted to open my eyes to see what was going on. Being left in the dark was torture in and of itself. I was silently panicking. I felt like I was drowning and choking on my own globs of blood. I wanted to cough up the blood, but I didn't 'cause I knew if I did, I would be standing face to face giving an account of my life to God.

I continued to feign death. Then PI repeated his words from earlier.

“Yo, make sure all of those cats are dead! A'ight!?”

I fervently started praying.

“Yo, you got everything outta the kitchen and the bedroom right? Well, come on. Let's get up outta this piece,” PI calmly said to the rest of his boyz.

The stereo was lowered and a very
loud
silence quickly filled the room.

I was still afraid to open my eyes. Certainty wasn't upon me. I thought the gunmen might still be in the apartment. I felt blood all over my body.

Why didn't they shoot me again?
I wondered. They must have thought that they'd shot me in the head and killed me. The shot came extremely close to my head, but fortunately it wasn't a direct hit. I knew that if I or anyone else in that apartment was gonna live, I had to do something immediately.

“Now or never,” I said. “Get help. Holz, get outta this apartment.” As I staggered to my feet, I scanned the room with my eyes. My vision was very blurry. One by one, I managed to see Earl, Xavier, Donnie, Bunny, and another guy and a young lady sprawled out on the floor. Ironically everyone had their eyes open, but it didn't look promising. They were all lying in their own bright, prostitute-red blood. Pools and pools of blood were everywhere. None of them were attempting to move. I wondered if they'd all died with their eyes open.

I tried to yell, but all that came out of my mouth was a painful and vague gurgling yell which was mixed with blood that I was simultaneously throwing up.

“Donnie! Xavier! X! Answer me! Got damn it! Come on, y'all, let's get outta here. We gotta hurry up. Come on!” I pleaded.

No way on earth did I want to believe it. I didn't want to believe that they were all dead.

“Earl, get up! Come on, y'all, let's go before they come back!” I urged.

I was feeling very, very weak and dizzy. I was so weak that I dropped to my knees. Miraculously, and with my blurry vision, I was still able to crawl to the telephone and dial 911.

“Hello,” I said.

“This is nine-one-one. What's your emergency?”

“I've been shot,” I mumbled.

“Excuse me,” the operator said.

“I've . . . We got killed. I've been shot . . . they're dead,” I vaguely mumbled.

“Sir, did you say you've been shot?” she asked.

“Yes. I've . . . been shot,” I mumbled.

“Sir, what's your address? I'll send the police and an ambulance right away . . . Hello . . . sir, are you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Sir, we need your address so that we can help you.”

“Uhm, East 110th Street in Harlem,” I whispered. With that, I had no more energy to even hold the phone. I was beyond weak. My hands were ice cold. I remember thinking of my family and of Sabine. I wondered if I would ever see them again.

Don't die, Mark! Hold on!
I pleaded with myself. At that point I closed my eyes and I blacked out.

I vaguely remember being wheeled into the trauma unit. I remember opening my eyes and seeing doctors all around me frantically trying to save me. I had all kinds of tubes and bags attached to me, and needles stuck into my veins. I was face down on some type of table or stretcher. I closed my eyes and just lay there.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital room. I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that I was butt naked with a gown on, and I had bandages all over my body.

No more than ten minutes had passed since I woke up, and before I knew it, I had detectives asking me all kinds of questions.

“Leave me alone! What's going on?” I recognized my mother and father, who were also in my room.

“Mom, what happened? What's going on?”

“Mark, you were shot,” my mom explained. “Just relax.”

She then instructed my father to get the detectives away from me so that I could gather my thoughts. As my room began to clear out, I started to remember what had transpired. A gruesome picture popped into my head. It depicted Bunny and Xavier and the rest of them sprawled out dead on the floor.

“Mom, I wanna sleep.”

“OK, Mark. Just relax, close your eyes, and go to sleep. You're OK. You'll wake back up,” she promised.

During the next four days I had many visitors. Friends, relatives, and people that I didn't even know had come by the hospital to see me. My room was covered with balloons, flowers, candy, and cards. On Sunday my room was filled to the brim with Fourth Crew members and associates, all of whom had managed to sneak past security guards and make their way up to my room. Fourth Crew members were the only ones who I was willing to tell what actually happened. In full detail I recanted all that had happened and why I thought it happened.

Fourth Crew went on to tell me that when they heard that we'd been shot, they bugged out. They couldn't believe it. They told me that they didn't find out about the killings until Saturday afternoon. My first guess was that they'd heard about it in the news. I shockingly listened as they told me that the killings were never reported in any of the newspapers, much less on the TV news.

“Word,” Latiefe said. “We found out from Xavier's mom's. She was flippin' out! Yo, she was crying and screaming like she'd lost her mind. The cops that came to tell her the news couldn't control her. She just kept kicking and screaming and yelling, ‘My baby! My baby! They killed my baby!' ”

I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised to find out that such a tragic incident hadn't appeared on the news. After all, who cared when blacks murdered each other? Even though it was a sextuplet execution style slaying, it still wasn't worthy of making the news. To the world, black urban life wasn't worth a dime! Why? Black, that's why. If blacks were killed and it happened to be reported, it rarely was the lead story.

Just about all of the members who came to see me were visibly shaken. Dwight told me how they'd gone on a mission throughout Harlem on Saturday night. They went in search of the perpetrators who'd shot me. He told me how they randomly licked off gunshots at any and all drug dealers that they saw. But in reality, I knew in my heart that the crew wasn't wild or brazen enough to really hunt down PI and the rest of Mob Style and shoot it out in an all-out war of revenge. Although we didn't say it, we knew that the idea of seeking real revenge was probably water under the bridge.

The most shocking thing that Dwight told me was that Cory, the same Cory who killed Richie just before the start of the summer, had been released from jail. Yup, he was set scot-damn-free! With all of the eyewitnesses that were at the scene of the killing, I couldn't believe it. Actually, I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to believe that the justice system would let him walk just like that.

Throwing salt on the wound, Dwight informed me that not only had Cory been released, but he had been released without ever having to post bail. Don't ask me how, 'cause I don't know. My first inclination, and probably the most accurate, was that Richie's black life just didn't mean anything to the system. The system probably just viewed him as some other worthless nigga.

Dwight also told me that on the same night the crew went out and shot whatever drug dealers they could find, Fourth Crew did a drive-by shooting and shot up Cory's house. He informed me that they also threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window of Cory's house, which set the place ablaze. And Randy talked about taking the law into his own hands.

“Yo, word is bond, if I see Cory on the street, I'ma kidnap and torture that nigga. I'll straight up chop his fingers off one by one, then pour gasoline on him and set him on fire. I want that nigga to feel the same pain that I'm feeling right now!”

The crew was basically trying to lift my spirits as well as lift their own. Talking about how they'd gotten revenge or street justice was equivalent to a grandmother talking about how she'd received edification and encouragement from going to church and listening to the pastor preach.

Fourth Crew, well, I guess I'd only be justifying our mentality by saying, “You can't blame the clay for what the potter has made.” We were products of our environment. We never benefited from a
normal way of living
; therefore, our actions manifested themselves in abnormal ways. Case in point, the system would never see to it that Cory did twenty-five years behind bars. The system would never catch and convict the guys who shot me and murdered my friends.

As a crew we knew that injustices like these would go on forever. That type of abnormal thinking became normal to us. So I guess it became abnormally normal for us to seek refuge in hideous acts of violence, violence in the form of violating Cory's crib, trying to kill every “innocent” drug dealer in Harlem, and violence in the form of good ol', down home, black on black crime.

My roommate, who was a mad cool cat, had been wheeled out of the room for surgery. It was a good thing because it meant that we didn't have to worry about someone eavesdropping on our conversation. The crew stayed in my room for hours and we discussed a million and one things.

Despite all that had happened, we surprisingly decided that we would continue on with our drug crusade. But obviously we all realized that certain changes had to be made.

We were now going to pay someone to go on drug runs for us. We were also going to hire females to work for us. The females would take over the responsibility of preparing and bagging our drugs. As a crew, we were now going to be the bishops of an entire drug operation. We were gonna be like the head honchos on Wall Street. You know, they're the ones who never do anything, never get dirty, but yet they call all of the shots and make the most money. So like Wall Street executives, our only job now was gonna be to collect our money. Latiefe still held that position.

After a big shooting incident like the one I lived through, we all agreed that those close to us were bound to think that it was drug related—those close to us, meaning our parents and the people who lived on our block.

“So what should we do?” I asked.

Well, to start, the eight of us that remained in the drug operation decided to get an apartment to share amongst ourselves. An apartment would be good because that way, when we all started driving our new cars and the big money that we were gonna continue to make started becoming evident, our new neighbors, not knowing our mediocre past, wouldn't have reason to be suspicious. The apartment could also be used for our female workers.

Randy was the only one in the crew who stated that he would rather just stay on the block and live with Ma Dukes. None of us gave him a hard time about his decision. We just figured there would be more room in the apartment for the rest of us—seven instead of eight, so there was one less head to worry about.

Fourth Crew wasn't my only steady visitors. My mother and father visited me every day. With each passing day, they were growing more and more skeptical as to why I had been shot.

“I don't know the reason why I got shot!” I would always tell them very resoundingly. “Listen, I was in the apartment and two guys with masks and guns came in and shot us. They ordered us to get down on the floor and they shot us, and, Mom, that's all that happened. I'm sayin'! Man, y'all act like I'm hiding something. Don't y'all think I would tell y'all and the cops what happened or who did this if I knew? I mean, I do want the people who did this to get locked up! Besides, I'm just thankful that I'm all right. I'll worry about everything else when I get home.”

Detectives, who were constantly in and out of my room, would continually ask me to recant what had happened.

“I don't know! I don't know!” That's how I repeatedly responded to the detectives' persistent questioning. Each time the DTs visited my room, they would go through this big song and dance, telling me how they would never be able to find the people who shot me and my friends unless I cooperated with them.

Yeah right
, I kept thinking. I knew that I would have to get justice on my own. See, I had a problem talking with detectives. Number one, I didn't really care for the police. And number two, I wasn't no damn rat! Even though it was my head that nearly got blown off, and even though my friends got killed, I knew that the code of the street had to be followed, which was to keep my mouth shut and under no circumstances should I or anyone else for that matter be talking to the cops. That would make me the biggest hypocrite in the world. Plus, the cops got a paycheck every week so they could solve crimes. So all they had to do was stop being lazy and earn their money. I'm sayin', dust for fingerprints and then run those fingerprints, speak to people in the building and see what information they could get. And shouldn't that apartment have already been on some kind of watch list? Heck no, I wasn't gonna bail out the cops on this issue. They didn't pay me a salary for that, and if I was dead, then what?

In reality, those detectives wanted information so that they could make their arrest and make themselves look good. Then a month later some judge would let the same guys that almost murdered me walk scot-free. Yeah, right! I didn't think so! I knew that those cops could care less about me and my thug life. So why should I have cared about them? If they didn't give a damn, then I didn't give a damn!

“I don't know!” I screamed at the detectives. “And even if I did know who shot me, I wouldn't tell y'all anyway! Please, just leave me alone. I don't know what happened! Now please, a'ight? I'm sayin', I don't like y'all anyway! Now outta here, beat it, scram, be out, get lost, BYE!”

Talk like that not only embarrassed my parents, but it really made them suspicious. All I knew was that I wasn't gonna cooperate. Again, like I already said, I knew that I had come within a hair of being murdered, and that some of my closest friends had in fact already met God. Even though I did love them dearly, I have to reiterate that even that wasn't enough to get me to cooperate with an unjust organization, an organization that was supposed to uphold justice in all communities equally.

Sabine was also one of my many visitors. She came to see me on Monday. And the moment she walked through the door of my room she began to cry. She gave me a kiss and a hug and very compassionately asked if I was all right. She was genuinely concerned as to how I was doing.

I had expected her to lash out at me with the third degree, along with the “I told you sos.” Astonishingly, she didn't do that at all. Not once did she mention anything about my involvement with drugs. She didn't even ask me to tell her what had happened. But I guess it wasn't too hard for her to figure out.

As she sat down next to me on my bed, I wiped away her tears. As the day went along, we talked, joked, and watched television. Visiting hours quickly came to an end, and as Sabine prepared to leave, she promised to cook me many different Haitian dishes when I came home. Although I wasn't Haitian like she was, I loved the food. I knew that some good home-cooked food would surely help me replace some of the weight that I had lost as a result of being in the hospital.

I hated for Sabine to see me all bandaged up. All I wanted was to be able to get up out of that bed and walk out of that hospital with Sabine. I knew that was very wishful thinking. I had brought this on myself, so now I had to deal with it.

Finally Wednesday came and I was well enough to leave the hospital. My left arm was in a sling. As for the rest of my body, considering what it had been through, it was in reasonably perfect condition. A person would never have been able to tell that I'd been shot, not unless I told them or they happened to have seen the two scars on my back. Despite my weight loss, I felt good. The doctor told me to expect some dizzy spells at times, but he told me not to get alarmed by them. He said something to the effect that the dizziness would be due to the bullet that had punctured one of my lungs before exiting my body.

My ride home from the hospital was very pleasant. I rode with my parents and my sister. It had been a long time since we all actually did something together as a family. On the way home we stopped at Burger King. I laughed to myself because it reminded me so much of the times when I was an innocent, carefree youngster. Every Sunday when I was a little kid, we as a family would always stop at Carvel or McDonald's after church just to spend some quality family time together. My ride home from the hospital reminded me of those times. Deja vu, I guess.

After we left Burger King we got back in the car and didn't stop until we were home. When I stepped foot into my house, I whispered real softly, “Thank you, Lord,” for I knew that it was the grace of God and his spirit living in me that had actually saved me.