Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Mind telling me what that was about?” I asked.

“They didn’t believe the story they’ve been hearing about the white guy who smoked up with the Browns then started falling all over the place.”

“Oh, so now I’m a story?”

“You ain’t a story. You like a legend. It’s been all over the hood today. I must have heard about four different versions by now.”

“I’m never going to live this down, am I,” I said. When I had asked Tommy that earlier, it was a question. It was getting to be more of a statement now.

“Not a chance. By the way, did you really give them a lecture on how tsunamis are created?”

I searched my memory. I couldn’t recall having done so. And I’m not sure, sober, I even knew myself. But the brain on drugs could cook up some interesting things.

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said.

“Huh. You’ll have to explain that to me sometime. Because I always wondered.”

“Right. Anyway, did you get the answer to my question?”

“What question?”

“About the brand Dee-Dub sold?

“Oh, yeah, that. Allegedly his brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ You know, like it was stuff but it was proper stuff so they called it ‘The Stuff.’ But remember, you didn’t get that from me. His mama would whup my ass.”

“Right,” I said. I would worry about how exactly my story would deal with the sourcing later. A simple “according to people in his neighborhood” would probably suffice.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

“Anytime. Thanks for winning that bet for me,” Tee said. “Talk to you later, you old pothead.”

I hung up the phone and self-consciously fingered the dime bags of heroin that were burning a hole in my pocket. There were still too many wandering eyeballs around to make a safe transfer to my desk, so I turned to my notebook.

“Notebook,” I said, using my internal voice because otherwise everyone would think I was still smoking something. “Notebook, please tell me something about Tyrone Scott.”

I flipped the pages, ever hopeful. I know it seems desperate, asking a four-by-eight-inch pad of paper to be your savior. But there are times when this kind of pleading really does work, when you’ve buried some little treasure of a note that you uncover at just the right time. Maybe it’s some scribbled observation that brings an entire picture into perfect relief. Or a name and a phone number you never followed up on. Or something you forgot having ever written that perfectly synthesizes your story.

Or you can just end up staring at a bunch of worthless scribbles for twenty minutes.

The only way I was going to discover more about Tyrone Scott was to head back out to that chicken shack and poke around.

By the time I arrived at the Wyoming Fried Chicken, home of Cowboy Kenny’s secret blend, it was pitch-black. Still, the hooded figures who patrolled the sidewalk in front of the chicken shack became aware of my pale-faced presence the moment I stepped out of my car, and scurried off quickly.

Leaving behind only one guy. My friend North Face.

“What, you drew the short straw again?” I asked.

“Aw, come on, man. I already told you everything I know. Now you going to screw up my business again?”

“You can tell your customers your product is so good I just can’t stop myself from coming back.”

“Oh, great. We’ll put it on a billboard: ‘The guy who dresses like a narc only gets his stuff from one place.’ Man, get out of here.”

“Relax. I just got one question.”

“And I’m supposed to give you the answer? Do I look like Alex Trebek to you?”

I laughed.

“I ain’t trying to be funny, Bird Man,” he said, reaching into his jacket and leaving his hand there, the all-purpose winter-time signal that a gun was being kept nice and cozy underneath.

The last time we met, North Face had just been giving me a hard time for the sake of giving me a hard time. It had been earlier in the day. I wasn’t really costing him business. This was different. It was after five now-prime time for sales. A lot of Newark drug users are slightly more functional than they are stereotypically given credit for. They manage to hold down day jobs then go straight to their local dealer and buy enough to keep them high until the following morning. The early evening was rush hour for a guy like North Face.

“Okay, okay. Take it easy,” I said. “Look, I just want to know what brand of heroin Tyrone sold and then I’ll get out of your way.”

“I ain’t in that market.”

“Can you point me toward someone who is?”

“I ain’t the Yellow Pages, either. Now get the hell out of here.”

“Do we really have to go through this again?” I asked. “You know I’m going to hang out here until I get the information I need. So why not just help me out?”

“You know what? I ain’t helping you with nothin’. I ain’t telling you nothin’. I’m gonna ask you to leave and if you don’t I’m gonna stop asking nicely.”

His hand dug a little farther into his jacket. A good 98 percent of me was certain it was an idle threat. The other 2 percent of me was sure my bowels were about to loosen.

“Look, pal, I’m just a reporter here doing a job, that’s all,” I said, trying hard to project an image of everymanness.

“Well, then, let me ask you, when my cousin got killed out here two months ago, where were you then, huh? Where was his story?”

North Face glared at me. The cold fact was, in our business, some deaths mattered more than others. But I don’t think North Face needed to hear that. When I didn’t immediately open my mouth to answer, he continued his tirade.

“Oh, so my cousin is just another dead nigga, but Tyrone Scott is some kind of cause for you people? Tyrone is better than my cousin, is that it? Because he got killed with three other people and my cousin got killed on his way to the store for some milk? That makes Tyrone better than my cousin?”

He glared some more, which I took as my invitation to speak.

“I’m sorry about your cousin,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible in an effort to deescalate the emotion of the moment.

I thought about adding more: that in a city where ninety or a hundred people are killed every year, no newspaper could write at length about every one; that we had to pick our spots or risk being tuned out altogether; that treating every single murder like it was a big deal, while it would honor the memory of the victim, could actually make the problem of urban violence worse by lending undue attention to it.

But those were all macro justifications for a micro problem. We should treat every murder as if it mattered, because what could be of graver concern to society than the intentional taking of human life?

So I just said: “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

It’s tough to argue with someone who won’t put up a fight. When he saw I had no more to say, North Face relaxed his shoulders and slowly slid his hand out of his jacket, then pointed up the street.

“You can go over to Booker T,” he said. “All kinds of junkies there. Half of them used to buy from Tyrone.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get out of your hair now. And I really am sorry about your cousin.”

“No one reads the paper anyway,” he grumbled.

I let him have that parting shot. And as I pulled away, I saw the hooded figures start to emerge from their hiding places and resume their posts.

The Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project, otherwise known as Booker T, was a few blocks away. Booker T’s story was a sadly familiar one in Newark. Built not long after World War II-when it was hailed as a glistening, modern replacement for nineteenth-century tenement housing-it had once been a vibrant, thriving community where slightly down-on-their-luck families found their bootstraps and pulled themselves up.