Shithole Nation
Jim St. Germain
You broke the ocean in half to be here. Only to meet nothing that wants you.
—Nayyirah Waheed
1. Haiti. Then.
Some of my earliest memories are from the top of my father’s shoulders. There was no infrastructure in La Plaine, where I spent my early years, where hurricane season felt like the only season, and flooding was a way of life. It’s just what happens in Haiti.
When the flooding started, Dad would throw a few of us on his shoulders and take the family to higher ground. One time, as we were running upland, my father realized my older brother Enrico was still on the other side of the road, an avalanche rapidly approaching, taking everything in its way. My father ran back just in time, and he grabbed Enrico before the floods did. There was nothing heroic about it. A father’s duty. And after the ordeal, our house would be either destroyed or uninhabitable for weeks. The first decade of my life, this was my world.
I was born in La Plaine, a town a hundred miles north of Port-au-Prince, and light years away from the busy and touristy capital. Areas like mine have suffered the brunt of the country’s stagnant economy, brutal regimes, and foreign intervention. We were surrounded by so much poverty that I didn’t notice it. Except for on the days of excruciating hunger, which was most days.
Haiti is a place of rich heritage, of strong black men and women, and home of the only successful slave revolt in history. It’s a place of exquisite beauty that’s closed off to its inhabitants because most of us don’t have the month’s salary required to watch one of its sunrises while lying on its beaches. For two centuries—before an earthquake opened the world to its plight—Haiti had been ruined by American and French policies, while most of their school kids couldn’t identify it on a map.
Our house was a shack: one room, dirt floor, no electricity, no plumbing, and a thin metal roof that let the rain in. It welcomed the water in, unable to flush it back out. We shared this shack with my aunt and her family, ten of us living in this space.
The average worker in Haiti makes a dollar a day, but we didn’t make anywhere near that because the average person in Haiti is unemployed. Public school is rare in Haiti—there’s simply not enough infrastructure or tax revenue to sustain it. The schools are private, and those without means, like us, aren’t welcomed.
Prior to moving to Brooklyn, at eleven or so, I had attended one year of school in total. My father’s friend, Mr. Eddie, set up a makeshift school in his yard called Aji Pepe, where we’d go sometimes, a few benches and the outer wall of a neighbor’s home doubling as a blackboard. Sometimes Mr. Eddie would come over to the house and tutor us in reading or math. There was nothing to read in our house: not a book, not a magazine, not a newspaper.
My favorite time in Haiti was mango season. I would wake up at dawn, scouting to find the mango tree ripe enough for me to scale or assault with rocks. On any given day a group of us, barefoot, shirtless, and full of boyish energy and hunger, assembled under a particular mango tree and let the rocks rain. Often we would target the trees that weren’t in people’s yards as a way of avoiding an ass whipping. Some of us were particularly skilled at hurling rocks, targeting the thin string between the mango fruit and the branch. This method expended less energy, and the likelihood of destroying my meal before it reached me was drastically decreased. Often I hit a mango within the first few tries only to see it land in the filthy mud below the tree, and I would wipe it on my shirt before it felt the wrath of my hungry teeth.
I got by in other ways too, running errands for family friends, delivering food to grandmothers, helping Uncle Joslin as a mechanic’s assistant, or fetching water for neighbors. I washed dishes and collected funds for neighborhood taxi drivers for a few gourdes or a plate of food known as arokan.
These were my hustles.
My father used to wake us up at dawn to take care of our hygiene in the back of the house. One day he was extra thorough, which for him meant rough. It was our big day. And he bathed us and brushed our teeth using a single bucket of water, then combed our beautifully nappy hair. Gentle isn’t a part of his fabric, and the brute force of his handiwork elicited many cries of “Ouch!” from me and my siblings. Often, as he combed my brother Colin’s hair, I’d sneak around the house hoping to avoid the wrath of his comb. Finally clean, we were dressed in our only decent outfits, sent by my grandparents in Brooklyn for the special occasion.
My father’s best friend, Kesner, pulled up near the house in his old beat-up Toyota. This was as luxurious as cars got. We jumped into the back, and he sped through the dust along the bumpy road to Port-au-Prince. The city itself is organized chaos: people everywhere selling fruit and bags of water, artisans selling painted wood- and metalwork to tourists, fried plantain and pork vendors, sugarcane in wheelbarrows, Barbancourt shots in small measuring cups, secondhand clothes from the States spread all over the street, because the street and the sidewalks are the same.
We were dropped in front of a building, white, beautifully painted, and stately with EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES written in gold letters. We took our place in a long line, were given a number, and waited. Big news was on its way. After ten years, we had finally been granted visas to join our grandparents in the States. My father’s smile was accessible to us. He cracked open and let in a ray of sunshine. On the drive back, the usual hunger and frustration were replaced by hope and optimism. I didn’t know those feelings could fill up empty stomachs.
On the day of our departure, Auntie Michelle was up earlier than usual, preparing breakfast. The smell pervaded the air and replaced the sound of an alarm clock. Flavored with burning charcoal, the spaghetti with boiled eggs, anchovies, and green onions demanded attention. Normally, if we were fortunate enough to have breakfast, it would be a piece of locally baked bread with Haitian coffee. Peanut butter was extra, and we called this “pain avec mamba.” But today was special.
Auntie Michelle’s cooking started the day, then came the early-morning well-wishers, and family members we hadn’t seen in months, and unlimited smiles, and small gifts from neighbors with less than us, and my father’s friends exchanging folktales. Even my mother was there to hug us goodbye.
I was lost in thoughts as my ten-year-old eyes began to trace the tire marks on the dirt road.
2. Brooklyn. Then.
We arrived on September 11, 2000. The unfamiliar light made the night look like daytime. The future didn’t seem like a dangerous place, at least not right away.
When we arrived at our new home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. In some ways this place was reminiscent of back home. I recognized the smell of blunts burning everywhere, and the rap and reggae music blasting out of stationary cars. Everything seemed transactional, which was familiar enough. My father and his friends were chain-smokers and drunks; I’d had my first drink by seven and my first smoke by nine.
But my American dream was Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, forgotten in his two-million-dollar mansion on the west side of Chicago. The reality was closer to The Wire. There were parked cars on both sides of the streets and two brightly lit bodegas adjacent to each other. The streets weren’t as clean as I had envisioned, and unruly teenagers seemed to exert whatever agency they had over the four corners of their world, and each other. The girls revealed more skin than I had ever seen before and appeared to have more control over their own affairs. The boys’ style mirrored that of my diaspora cousin Rodlin when he’d visited us back home: fashionable do-rags, baggy pants over yellow boots that seemed more appropriate for a battlefield than for chilling on the block. Before long, my face would be introduced to the bottom of one of those boots.
Outside the school building the battle intensified. Small disagreements or ice grills could easily lead to someone asking you to square up, run your shit, get stabbed, or even get shot. I got it. I got the survival guide faster than most because I was an adaptable kid. It was my best asset. I transformed into whatever I needed to be to survive; I was amorphous. I began fighting classmates left and right, but unlike in Haiti, fights don’t end in Brooklyn. It was a snowball effect. And soon I would be fighting sisters, brother, cousins, friends, acquaintances, foes, and, periodically, parents. Mothers and fathers weren’t that far apart from their kids, mentally speaking, and had no qualms about busting another kid’s lip if it meant protecting their own. The rules were blurred and perhaps invisible, so we took stake in each other.
As one of my favorite rap duos put it, “survival of the fit, only the strong survive.” I was tested time and time again, on my way to school, on the playground, in front of my apartment building, in the lobby, at the door, walking to the bodega, in the classroom. No immunity.
Where I lived on Crown Street, between Nostrand and Rogers Avenues, it was a three-minute walk to my junior high school, its entrance facing the 71st Precinct. The short distance between the two didn’t close the gap between terror and safety. Why would it, when we never got the sense that the cops were there to protect us?
High school was where it was all happening. Where I took an interest in girls, revealed through a toxic sense of teenage masculinity. “Money, clothes, and hoes” was the mantra then. I began to carve out my space and pursued the girls the only way I knew how: “Damn, shawty, you gotta fat ass. Can I hit that? Do you mind if I walk with you?” Or a quick “You have a beautiful smile,” which was the peak of my chivalry.
During one of our smoke sessions on the “Jewish steps,” my homie Gutter, who was massaging his girlfriend’s genitals, asked me to sit close to him to get in on the action. I was excited and huddled with all my other homies to tell them how loyal he was and didn’t mind sharing.
Often we skipped lunch so we could play football, even though most of us were starving. The game was useful to the image we wanted to portray to the girls we wanted to get. I came from a place where a piece of bread was a luxury, but eating the free lunch now came with a social price, so I stayed hungry.
Once, during a game of two-hand touch football, I accidentally bumped into a girl while she was jumping double Dutch. I tried to avoid her swinging cord while running full speed in my Heisman swag, but I crashed into her and we both hit the gate. I didn’t apologize. I didn’t inquire about her well-being. And by the time school let out, her older brother was waiting outside with his entire clique. These guys were established in neighborhood beefs and already hardened by the street. They had earned their status, proven by the whispering around school describing what they were going to do to me. More important, her brother was known to be strapped.
I could see them from the window before the bell went. My heart dropped. I was sweating, but I couldn’t show it. Not long after, seven guys pounded on my thirteen-year-old body. But through it all I held one kid and pounded on him, refusing to let go. It was the best way to get a beating and survive. The other students quickly turned into spectators. As they watched, they yelled variations on sympathy and amusement: “Damn,” “Ouch,” “They’re fucking him up,” “He’s dead,” “That’s fucked up”—all euphemisms for “Welcome to America.”
After, my grandmother blamed me for my own beatdown. She gave me warm salt water and a cloth, telling me to apply pressure to the wounds. “Adding salt to a wound” wasn’t just a figure of speech; it was a typical Haitian remedy for most injuries, including bullet wounds.
Fights didn’t end here. Everybody wanted a piece of the new kid, so I had to adjust and survive: two words that played in my head, a record on repeat. Like this, I began earning respect.
But money was the ultimate form of respect and protection, and I had no access to it. I tried the traditional route for a while. I wasn’t afraid to work. I packed bags, delivered groceries, stocked shelves, and took out the garbage. Eventually my homie Big Head advocated for me to get a job at Food County Supermarket. It was located twelve blocks south of Crown and Nostrand, the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a working-poor Caribbean American neighborhood with mom-and-pop fruit stands, Chinese food takeouts, laundromats, barbershops, beauty salons, and check-cashing places attached to liquor stores. A relatively short distance, but anywhere outside the eight-block radius around where I lived increased the likelihood of violence.
Good or bad, I was liked by most of the OGs on my block. One, a well-respected hustler, approached me with an enticing opportunity. An ounce of regular greens—aka Arizona, or Ari—converted into dime and nickel bags could bring a 100 percent profit margin.
I had been unaware that, in America, there were conditions imposed on black and brown people that I would be subjected to simply because of my environment. We were surrounded by chronic poverty, and we used an affinity for materialism to mask our sense of powerlessness. Our schools were segregated and under-resourced, our homes, dilapidated buildings due to redlining—the federal government’s way of ghettoizing brown communities—and our streets, heavily patrolled by the 71st Precinct. Easy access to both liquor and guns didn’t help our causes. Drugs were the most viable economic path.
In retrospect, we were deprived of faith in our own upward mobility. We were downtrodden young men, full of hopes and dreams but with no access to social capital, therefore no access to any capital. We sought alternatives, but they were accompanied by heavy consequences: arrests, deportation and the breaking of families, never-ending court dates, bloodshed. The grinding machine of poverty was omnipresent, and it crippled many of us, some beyond repair.
The need to be resourceful was just as important in Brooklyn as it was in Haiti. On Crown Street, I would take out the garbage for Khalid, the gentleman from Yemen who owned one of the corner stores. I requested a milk crate from him and used my pocketknife to remove the bottom of the plastic crate, uncoiling a hanger to use as the wire. This was our basketball hoop. And the crates were our outdoor chairs.
One of my childhood idols, the late, great Biggie Smalls, said this about where we are from: “Shit, it’s hard being young from the slums, / eating five-cent gums, not knowing where your meal’s coming from.”
These weren’t just bars to us. Madison Square Garden was a mere twenty-minute train ride away, but it might as well have been a different world. The chopped-up concrete sidewalks were merciless, and there were no celebrities sitting courtside cheering for us. No one was cheering for us. It didn’t take long to recognize that hoop dreams weren’t going to be our way out of this bullshit life.
The blood of many of my friends stained these very same sidewalks. People like Jigga, who was gunned down by Damien, someone he’d known almost his entire life. It happened in broad daylight too. Right on the busy avenue. My younger cousin Breeze suffered the same fate just a few months after his eighteenth. I had been the first to introduce him to the streets. I carry that guilt like a heavy chain. Then it was Dread from up the street. Thrown off the roof to his death, brain splattered on the sidewalk for “disrespecting” a young cat who felt that Dread was stealing his clientele. And my friend Nate, gunned down while attending the funeral of another friend. He was pronounced dead before the paramedics even arrived. Or my friend Reggie, who was stabbed while sitting on the “Jewish steps” playing dominoes. And Patrice, who was shot in the leg over a game of dice. I can still see Shawn’s face with his magnetic smile, revealing his flashy gold teeth, which were the envy of us all. Shawn had dark chocolate skin, a chiseled jawline, and stood at five feet six, stocky, with a goatee and designer braids. His ball-handling skills made Allen Iverson look like an amateur. He was gunned down too. And I can’t shake it.
A young lady he was involved with got into a heated argument with another woman. I was sitting in the barbershop on Nostrand Avenue and Montgomery when I heard the commotion. I stepped out, and there was Shawn in the middle of it.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “These bitches tried to front on my shawty. Ain’t nothin…”
I gave him a dap and went back into the barbershop. Because arguments like this were the air we breathed. But ten minutes later I felt something in the air. I walked out. Police cars and ambulances were now everywhere. I hurried up Nostrand Avenue to Carroll Street, where Shawn lived and hung out. I arrived as paramedics were wheeling his body into the back of the ambulance. Blood everywhere: the sidewalk, mailbox, bicycle, running down the drain. The entire block stood there stunned. The verbal altercation had led to a phone call, and a heartless coward rolled up and shot him on sight.
The fear was palpable. Danger was all around us. I learned on my first day in Brooklyn that elevators were death traps and I knew to take the stairs. One time I was on my way from the rooftop with a young lady who had just performed oral sex on me, colloquially known as getting head, brain, knowledge, domed, wisdom, or, simply, our little dirty dick suck. I measured my manhood by how many times I could get a young lady involved with me sexually. The roofs of most buildings around my neighborhood were used for messy teenage sex, to smoke weed, to hide a rusty shared handgun, or to look out for the police. And on this day the girl I was with suggested getting into the elevator. I went against my survival instincts and agreed.
Looking back, I always wanted to be a gentleman, but gentlemanly ways are costly here. As the elevator descended and she fixed her hair, we abruptly stopped on the fourth floor. I stepped back to put distance between us, because another rule is to not be seen with a girl who just performed oral sex on you. What if she had done the same for several of my friends?
The doors opened and a young man I had never seen before walked in. As the doors closed, he flipped open a butterfly pocketknife. It was distinctive, with two handles that counter-rotated so when it closed the blade was concealed. He pressed it against my throat, his forearm pushing me into the corner of the elevator while his left hand simultaneously emptied my pockets. The girl freaked out and was screaming. All of this happened within seconds between the fourth floor and the main lobby. In the same elevator where I’d punched my next-door neighbor in his face for ice grilling me a few weeks prior. The cycle continues.
My friend Dr. Gore often says, “Hurt people hurt people.” Like Shawn, and many of my friends who were killed, Jigga didn’t have a choice in picking what type of world he had been given. He grew up with a Haitian father and a Trinidadian mother. They lived at 250 Crown Street, the building attached to mine, and he was one of the first friends I made on the street. On my way from school, I had walked past him and a group sitting on the steps of the building. Without saying anything, I squeezed through, proceeded to the gate, and rang the bell. Behind me, I heard, “Say excuse me next time, pussy.” Being called “pussy” here without a fight was sufficient grounds to become somebody’s bitch. I responded, and Jigga jumped up, coming toward me as my grandmother buzzed the door open.
Days later my cousin BIGS took me to the store, where we ran into Jigga. BIGS told him I was his little cousin, fresh from Haiti, and we became friends like this. Jigga would often protect me, or at least ask other dudes to shoot a fair one instead of jumping me.
I visited his apartment often when I didn’t have anything, and he’d share what little he had with me: food, alcohol, weed, girls, his worn number-seven Air Jordans with dark charcoal and red stripes weaved in at the top and bottom. All the cool kids sported them, and Jigga had every single pair on the first day of release. Once the new ones came out, he’d pass down an older pair to me. He even gave me his favorite vintage Ralph Lauren varsity jacket, gray with black sleeves, leather patches on the elbows, and the signature “R. L.” emblem embroidered on the chest.
The girls looked at me differently with my hand-me-downs, and I felt like my stature grew overnight. There was a magnetic pull to wearing name-brand clothing for kids who weren’t able to attach value to meaningful things. Now there was something to work toward. When I began hustling, he’d often give me pointers, the dos and don’ts, the code of the streets. The things you can only learn by living them. Jigga told me who to trust, how to identify undercover cops, and the difference between Latin Kings, Bloods, Crips, Folks, and other gangs. I learned who the runners were versus the decision makers, and the OGs I shouldn’t fuck with, the ones who had access to weapons and weren’t afraid to use them. This type of mentorship was remedial education. There were rules everywhere, and breaking them here could earn you a broken jaw, or worse.
Jigga loved BMWs, especially the 745Li with the peanut butter interior. Haitian, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican guys often parked their cars in a line and let us play with the radio systems. We picked our favorite songs, making our own concerts, which were an invitation for the police.
Jigga was a son, nephew, cousin, friend, and leader. A paragon of urban youth, willing to risk it all for name brands, looking fly, and girls. He had a serious affinity for reggae and dance hall music and could memorize the latest lyrics from Jamaica in just three days. He kept to himself but was loved by many. He was sharp, talented, curious, and full of ambition. Sadness overcomes me as I think of the architect, investor, scholar, or family man Jigga could’ve been had he been born into a different situation.
Jigga and many others never had the opportunity to visit a college campus with mommy and daddy. No SAT preps, sleepaway camps, studying abroad, or prom dates. Instead, we were swept by the urban conveyor belt into Spofford Juvenile Detention, Rikers Island, and funeral homes.
I was well aware of another America. I knew it existed, and I didn’t have to go far to see it. It was on the other side of Nostrand Avenue, where the orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch community was. There the women wore wigs and long skirts, pushed strollers, and chatted with their friends in Hebrew. They even had black babysitters. The men, wearing traditional orthodox black hats, white shirts, dark suits, and tzitzits, their absolute connection with God, and thick beards, gathered in tight groups, animatedly discussing affairs in Hebrew, Yiddish, or a mixture of both. They stared unabashedly while we sat on the steps of the synagogue, which we childishly called the “Jewish steps,” blowing blunts while bopping to Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life soundtrack. Periodically, the men approached us and asked if we would mind turning on their lights or a stove. I’d agree to help. It was like this that I could look into another Brooklyn world.
Near here, east of Crown Heights, just a ten-minute walk or a few stops on the number 2 train, yet another world existed: Park Slope. In this neighborhood, many of the kids’ paths were already carved out for them too. With million-dollar brownstones, yoga studios, therapy offices, outdoor cafés, gourmet supermarkets, well-funded schools, piano lessons, and parents who were always more involved than necessary. It was nearly impossible for the kids here to fuck it up. The streets were cleaner, and the police didn’t feel like an occupying force. The “American Dream” was the floor here, not the ceiling.
But on my side of Brooklyn, just shy of my sixteenth birthday, I was already a regular at the 71st Precinct. I remember one officer said to me, “We should start charging your ass rent.” But it was the city and state that picked up that tab. The daily hustles I partook in—the drugs, weapons, fights, boosting, truancy, suspensions, weed smoking, and a slew of near misses with fatalities—led to regular encounters with the police, until I faced two Class D felony charges for possession and intent to distribute drugs. The walls closed in. I was sentenced to the juvenile justice system.
I ended up in a group home. At first I fought my peers, got high, and lost my position as a leader. I suffered from withdrawal and, with it, a lack of connection to my family and community. But after an agonizing process of hard work, sacrifice, and steadfast pursuit of education, I pulled through. I was tutored by Joanna and got help from Iza with piecing a paragraph together. I was placed in the karate class with Sensei Tessa to channel my anger. I owe a lot to the support of staff members, peers, and mentors like my appointed attorneys and my former teachers—many of whom did not share a similar upbringing, socioeconomic status, education, culture, or skin color. So many pitched in to become the vessel I desperately needed in troubled water. They believed in my potential. They invested in me. I was introduced to books and soaked words in like dry soil.
I stayed the course because I knew what the alternatives were. I sought mentors and listened to anyone who was willing to teach. Reading helped me see America’s social and political landscape for what it is. The responsibility to change was mine, and I embraced it. Ultimately, I helped found Preparing Leaders of Tomorrow (PLOT), a nonprofit organization that provides mentoring to at-risk youth. My guiding principle is the axiom “Those closest to the problems are closest to the solution.”
3. Brooklyn. Now.
It doesn’t end. In April, Sayid Vessel, a twenty-six-year-old mentally challenged young man, was gunned down by the police on Utica Avenue for allegedly wielding a silver pipe the police claim resembled a firearm. His murder took place in broad daylight at the hands of police officers from the 71st Precinct, the very same one I had dealt with in my youth. I still walk by it today with my five-year-old son, Caleb.
Here are some of the things I knew about Sayid: like me, he grew up on Crown Street; we had countless mutual friends; his parents migrated here from the Caribbean; we were close in age; his mental-health issues were well known in the neighborhood; no one had been harmed by the time the police arrived. Nonetheless, the pipe he brandished was more than enough to warrant his public execution. That Sunday afternoon, I not only saw myself in this young man but saw us—I saw the kids I mentor, I saw my son.
I know this beloved Crown Heights community, its lively, hardworking, and diverse group of immigrants and Jewish residents. It’s thought that the person who called the police on Sayid was a new resident, brought to the area by an aggressive wave of gentrification that is displacing and now killing long-term residents. Meanwhile, the same police manage to disarm white murderers over and over again, many of them taken alive after some of the bloodiest terrorist acts in recent memory. No surprise there. The animalistic behavior of police officers who produce black blood as red as the light on their patrol cars is as American as it gets.
We are under no illusions; our president has made his opinion of us and our heritage clear. President Trump has called Haiti a “shithole nation,” willfully ignoring Haiti’s rich history. It was Haitian strength and perseverance in the face of colonial brutality, after all, that made the Louisiana Purchase possible. If not for the Haitian people, the United States would likely be half the size it is today. But as long as people like Trump and their followers dismiss whole countries and populations as shithole nations and shithole people, we will stay trapped in our neighborhoods, police targets without opportunity.
The other day, I lost my cool with Caleb. I raised my voice to a level that’s against my usual standard. He looked at me and said, “Daddy, you yelled at me, and I’m not your friend.” For a brief moment I wished that he wasn’t my responsibility to be afraid for.
There is this notion that we, as black and brown people, take great pleasure in talking about racism and oppression. One thing I am certain of is this: no oppressed person finds joy in addressing the very thing that stymied his or her fullest potential. I wish that, like my white friends, I didn’t have to be held accountable for every mistake made by another brown individual. And that, like them, I was assumed “innocent until proven guilty.” What I wish for, more than anything, is the ability to stare into my son’s beautiful brown eyes and reassure him that, in his country, he will be judged by his hard work, grit, kindness, and commitment to what’s right. And he will be awarded access to all that his country has to offer. That’s every father’s dream, including, and especially, black fathers.
But I must face this heartbreaking reality: in America my greatest joy is simultaneously my greatest fear. Caleb could easily be taken away from me, and no one would be held accountable. Sayid’s murder is yet another blaring reminder that my beautiful boy isn’t protected anywhere in his country. Not by the street violence that many of us fall victim to, not by the men and women who are sworn to protect him, not by the educational system, the job market, his intelligence, or his parents’ socioeconomic status. And I can’t perform my number one duty as a father: to keep him safe. Being his father is the equivalent of living with my heart outside my body in a war zone.
Last July, my memoir, A Stone of Hope, was released by HarperCollins. The book is an examination of my struggle and a call to action. After it was published, I began a book tour that took me to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, I drove through Beverly Hills, mesmerized by all the wealth: high-end luxurious storefronts, foreign cars, and people dining at expensive establishments who looked like they belonged. My Uber driver assured me that this grand sight was customary. WELCOME TO THE CITY OF ANGELS. A few minutes and two left turns later, he pulled up to the house where I would be staying, on a quiet, modest, and beautifully constructed street.
I woke early every morning and ran up the hill toward Fuller Avenue, where I made my way to the trails. One morning, on my way back, I slowed as I approached the house and passed a couple with their dogs. I greeted them before I opened the gate. Suddenly, I realized that the gentleman I had just passed was standing behind me, flashing me a wary look, peeking through the bush.
I felt a sense of rage taking over my body as I stood there, my hand shaking as I tried to fit the key into the lock. I got in the house and sat on the couch, my mind running wild, thinking about all the ways this encounter could’ve ended.
I thought about my son being confronted by this man’s kids ten years from now. I thought about his inability to react as I just had, so different from what fifteen-year-old me could have done. I thought about this very same incident taking place at night. I thought about if this man was in possession of a firearm, as many of his countrymen and women are. What picture of me would the LA Times use in its morning news? I thought about my son. I thought, I must stay in the game. I have skin in it.