Synergy (12 page)

“
So...if you ain’t
know already me and Kara been fucking”
he
started, and before he could get any further, Dee
gasped.

“
No
!” she said in disbelief, but Tip
ignored her shock and carried on.

“
Yeah. So, I
thought we was getting back together, you know? So the other night
I’m in the club and some bitch is grinding up on all these dudes
and, turn out, it’s Kara
.”

Once more, Dee said ‘
No
!’ as she got stuck into his
story.

“
Yeah. So I’m like, the fuck? Then
she see me and she all over me like a rash, like I ain’t just see
her with all these other dudes.”

“
What did you
do?”
 Dee asked, swigging on her beer
as she leaned on the other counter.

“I 
tol’ that bitch where to go,
ain’t nobody playing me like that. I’m her kids father or I’m her
dude, I ain’t try’na be sharing with nobody.”

Dee
shook her head before giving her two cents.

“I would have slapped that bitch if she did that in front of
me, she the one that acted like she ain’t want nobody but suddenly
she want all these other dudes? Hell no, you can’t play that grief
card
 forever.”

“
That’s what I
told her
,” Tip started, sipping his beer.
“
But ever since she been blowing up my
phone everyday leaving me messages and shit.”

“You gonna get back with her?”
 
Dee asked with an air of
curiosity. Even if Kara was playing crazy, Dee knew Tip loved her.
However, after a second of debate in his own head on how to answer
that question, Tip simply shrugged.

Chapter 10 – Locked Up

Dee

Jarell
Thompson was known in his neighbourhood for selling the best kush
in the area. From the age of 16, he started selling weed as a means
of some extra money, but by the time he was 18, he realised to
stand out, he needed to have the best product available. Now, at
the tender age of 26, he had the best of anything anyone could
want. A few months after his 18th birthday, he made a few new
connections and started to sell heavier drugs, mainly crack and
heroin. It was sad to see the crack fiends so helpless and broken
when they were hammering his door down at 3am but he was only doing
what everybody else was doing, making a living, and surviving. He’d
left school with no education and he’d never had a real job.
Growing up, young boys looked up to the hustlers, admiring and
respecting their grind, knowing that it was a serious choice for
them when they left school. Jarell had dreams like everybody else
when he was a kid, but as the years went by, they diminished day by
day. He looked around and saw the type of people in his
neighbourhood and knew there was nothing great to be had there. He
knew nobody ever got out of the hood, and decided he was stupid for
thinking otherwise. His mother had been a drug addict growing up,
and he’d seen what they could do to a person and their family, but
still, he did it because he didn’t have any other choice, other
than to lose his home and be broke.

As a
young teen, Jarell wanted to make it in the music industry. He and
his friends would rap on the streets, making beats and freestyling
to anybody that would listen. They’d tell each other that it would
only take one of them to make it, and then that person could bring
all the others on board, take them and their families out of the
streets. They really, truly believed it would happen. Jarell was a
twin, and he and his twin brother Mario would be running round the
streets all night writing songs and spitting bars, dreaming about
what they would buy when they got rich. At thirteen, Mario’s life
was cut short, and Jarell’s dream died with his
brother. 

Though
Jarell now tried his best to keep out of the eyes of the law,
keeping the police off his back wasn’t always easy in his town.
There was often police sniffing around those areas to try and catch
someone doing something wrong. He truly believed there was still a
lot of police racism and he would hear stories of young black men
who had been arrested or beaten or even just stopped on the street
for no reason at all. Detroit had a huge history of racism and
police brutality, homing the race riots in the 1940’s and again in
the 1960’s. Today, Jarell could see the everyday divide still
existing between races in the city, not only with the police but
with everyday members of society.

In the
early hours of April 21st, Jarell was sitting outside a friend’s
house swigging a beer after partying through the night. He was sat
with around five men, all African American, laughing and joking,
when a passing group of Caucasian men stopped outside the house and
began spouting abuse at Jarell and his friends. Unfazed, they
retaliated with the abuse, assuming the men would keep on walking
and leave them be, however, one man with a skin head and a tattoo
on his neck started hurling racial abuse at the men, stepping onto
their porch. Jarell stood up to confront the man before he was
punched to the nose, charged into the wall and threatened with a
knife. Jarell’s friends managed to grapple the guy to the floor
before the other men charged toward them, and a violent fight
ensued between the two groups. When the police showed up to the
incident, they pulled Jarell off the skin head and proceeded to
handcuff him before anybody had dealt with the skin-head. While he
was being handcuffed, he was punched a number of times by the
skin-head with no fast reaction by the police. All the men at the
incident were subsequently released with most of the Caucasian men
being released without charge. Jarell had numerous previous
convictions, so he was arrested and charged with
assault.

Dee had
seen her brother arrested before, and she had been to visit him in
jail, but it was only a matter of months. This time around, Jarell
was sentenced to a year’s minimum sentence. His four year old
daughter was forbidden to visit both by her mother and Jarell
himself; he didn’t want his daughter to visit a place like that. As
far as his daughter knew, daddy was working away. Dee had told this
line to her own son too, as a way to protect him. She didn’t think
it was right that a child so young should know about jail, or the
bad in the world. As much as her brother could annoy her, she loved
him immensely, and was extremely close to him. His being in jail
was a hard pill to swallow, especially as she knew her brother was
not a violent man. If anybody should be arrested for assault, it
should be her. She had punched a customer only a few weeks ago for
touching her up at the club. Though Jarell was the one who taught
her to fight as a child, he didn’t go looking for a fight, they
seemed to come to him. Regardless, he always seemed to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time, and this time, his family would pay
the consequence while they waited a year for his
release.

It wasn’t the first time Jarell had been in trouble with the
law, and his family wondered whether it would be the last. Even as
a child, trouble seemed to follow Jarell around. Some stuck up mom
at Dee’s school had told her mother that there was no such thing as
trouble following somebody around. ‘
Trouble don’t follow people, trouble gets
invited
,’ she’d said, as she walked her
son away from the school. As Monique watched the stuck up woman
walk away with a scowl on her face, the woman turned around once
more and added ‘
bad kids cause
trouble
.’ Monique had never been good with
words, though she had always been good with her fists, so when the
woman decided to turn back around and make her snide comment,
Monique had charged toward the woman shouting ‘
Oh, you gon’ find some trouble
!’ For
once, Jarell stopped a fight by holding his mother still and
telling the woman and her son to leave.   

Dee had
had her fair share of trouble too, aside from the fights and drunk
nights of being a teenager, she also had some intervention from the
police. When she was around sixteen she was cautioned for
possession and later put in a jail cell for the night for being
drunk and disorderly. Now, at 22 she had a suspended license for
Driving under the influence. She wasn’t proud of her run-ins with
the police, but she didn’t let it phase her either. She knew as far
as some people were concerned, she was stupid for those things, but
she knew she was doing a lot better than most of her neighbourhood.
After all, she’d never really caused any harm to
anybody.

Though a
year wasn’t the worst sentence that could have been handed down,
Dee knew she would miss her brother while he was gone, and planned
to visit if she could. Though the two of them could argue like any
brother and sister, she really did love her brother. Growing up, it
was always the two of them running things, and with her sister
being a lot younger, Dee and Jarell were always closer than Kiki
was to her brother. Kiki had a different father to her siblings,
and while Dee would never regard her sister as a half-sister even
though genetically she was, she wondered if this contributed.
Jarell was also regarded highly in their mother’s eyes. As her
first child and only son, he held a special place in her heart.
Even though he was all grown up with a family of his own, she
worried about him like he was still her little boy, and she knew
she had reason to.

Jason

It was D-day for Jason and Tom as they got ready to leave
home and head back to Detroit. His mother had already shed a tear
as she hugged him and his grandmother had made dishes for him to
take back to the hotel with him. She didn’t want him eating
‘
any of that nasty hotel
food
.’ Though there was nothing wrong with
the hotel’s food, he was pleased she’d made him some dishes; it was
like taking a piece of home with him. Tom’s grandmother had also
packed him some dishes to take with him, and the boys would
probably share them out once they got to Detroit; they had often
eaten at each other’s Grans house. Being that they grew up in the
same era, their food was almost alike, both equally delicious with
slight differences.

As the
pair of them sat in the car which was heading to the airport, there
was a sombre energy in the air. Neither of them really had anything
to say to each other; they knew they would both be thinking and
feeling in unison about what it meant to head back to work. They
both loved their jobs, but leaving home was always hard. Tom was
slouched down in the seat with his tablet in his lap, playing some
stupid game that was frustratingly addictive. He sighed and scoffed
everytime he failed the level, but he continued replaying quietly.
Jason on the other hand was talking to one of the producers back in
Detroit. He told him of the ideas he had for a new song and the
producer was enthusiastic to get to work as soon as he landed. For
now Jason had titled the song ‘Beautiful Mind’, about a girl who
was stunningly beautiful on the outside, but had more going on
inside that intrigued him.

As Jason
sat waiting for a reply, he browsed his social media accounts, not
really reading people’s ramblings properly, but skimming to see if
he’d missed anything exciting. As soon as he saw Dee’s name, he
stopped to read what she had written. A short status, though
informative all in one. “Year’s countdown starts today #freejarell”
Jason raised his eyebrows as he read the status. Jarell, the
brother he had met only a few weeks ago, had been arrested? Jail
for a year? He realised it was silly to be surprised as he couldn’t
know somebody he had only met once and briefly at that, but he
remembered him coming across perfectly nice. He wasn’t somebody he
would consider to be locked away for a year; still he knew he
couldn’t know what goes on behind closed doors.

“
What you looking
surprised at
?” Tom asked, as he caught his
friend’s expression between levels.

“
Dee’s brothers in
jail
” Jason replied, barely looking up
from his phone.

“
Oh
” Tom replied, letting the
information sink in as he concentrated on his game. After a minute
he asked “
Didn’t you
know
?”

“
No, he wasn’t
when I met him a few weeks ago. Seemed like a nice
guy
.”

“
Guess you don’t
really know people
” Tom mused, as he
failed level 36 again and decided to close the case on his tablet
sitting it down on his lap.

Jason
nodded in agreement, taking Tom’s lead and putting his phone back
into his pocket. He sunk down into the comfortable car seat and
rested his head back, closing his eyes for a second.

Jason
thought about what he would do when he got to Detroit. He imagined
recording the song he had written and imagined the type of music he
would help write for it. He already had an idea of the melody but
just needed to get his hands on the instruments to test it out. He
had always prided himself on writing his own lyrics and music. He
learnt to play the piano as a young child and when he got to around
ten, he asked his mother for guitar lessons, to which she instantly
agreed. She loved the fact that her son had so much ambition, that
he wanted to learn new things. Unlike some of the other children
his age, he would take up something and then stick at it. He didn’t
give up when he was struggling, though he did threaten to
sometimes. He started to sing when he got his guitar and he never
stopped. He would write songs about what he was having for his
dinner that night, or how hard his math homework was. When he
turned thirteen and got his first girlfriend, he wrote a song about
her, and then played it to her. He got teased by some other boys in
his year but the girl loved it, and told all her friends, meaning
he was a hit with all the other thirteen year old girls, despite
his skinny frame and teenage acne.