The index of self destru.., p.8
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 8
His father hadn’t liked the idea of applying for a place in the Bootstrappers program, but Netta had insisted on it.
“They’re going to pay for the boy’s education,” she’d told her husband. “What’s wrong with that?”
“We already pay for his education,” Justin’s father had replied. “Don’t we pay our taxes? Where do you think the money for his school is coming from?”
The Bootstrappers provided scholarships to underprivileged but academically promising students and helped with the transition to private education. What bothered Daryl Price was the suggestion that his son was “underprivileged”—or any other polite word you wanted to use for poor. Their family was middle class. They didn’t need charity to bring up their boy. Indeed, Justin had until that point been raised to understand that he had advantages most of his classmates at MS 61 didn’t share. Both his parents worked, his father as a city bus driver, his mother as a secretary in an accountant’s office. He’d never worried about whether he would have enough to eat or a roof over his head. But middle class was a long way from paying for Manhattan private school, which was what Netta wanted for him. She was the one who met with Justin’s teachers, and she was the one who’d decided that MS 61 wasn’t good enough.
There were other reasons for her insistence, ones that couldn’t be spoken out loud. Both his parents knew that Justin was coming home with his nose bloodied or his shirt ripped every few days. His father sometimes suggested that the bullying would stop once Justin toughened up a little bit, but his mother understood the reason that Justin was being targeted, and she knew that this reason wasn’t going away. She hadn’t needed to say this out loud. She’d just held out until she’d gotten her way, as she got her way in nearly all the family’s decisions.
Once Justin was accepted into the program, his mother had chosen St. Albert’s from among the half dozen participating schools because it was Catholic. She wasn’t Catholic herself—in fact, she was vaguely suspicious of Catholics, who had something pagan about them—but none of the ostensibly Protestant institutions had so much as mentioned the Lord in their admissions materials.
Justin had spent the next summer being prepared for the rigors of sixth grade by tutors who were former Bootstrappers themselves, mostly now enrolled at top tier colleges, a few in law or business school or in the early stages of prestigious professional careers. They tried at once to impress upon Justin how hard he would have to work and how well this effort would ultimately be rewarded. Though he’d never missed class, always studied hard and gotten good marks, they told him he was a year behind grade level in nearly every subject. It didn’t seem fair that he’d been falling behind without even knowing it, while doing everything that was ever asked of him. That summer he worked as hard as he had it in him to work, and he was constantly reminded that this was just the beginning.
Near the end of August, they’d been invited to a lunch for incoming Bootstrappers, held at a townhouse in the east seventies, between Madison and Fifth. Standing outside the front door, he could see the tree-lined eastern wall of Central Park in the distance. In the first eleven years of his life, Justin had been to Manhattan a few dozen times. He’d gone on school trips to the South Street Seaport and the Empire State Building, he’d been to a Knicks game at the Garden with a church group, but he’d never been north of Penn Station, and he’d never seen Central Park. While they waited at the door, he imagined pulling off his zip-up tie, climbing the wall, and spending the afternoon running around—as he might otherwise have been doing that day in Prospect Park—instead of talking politely to strangers.
About their hosts, Justin had known nothing but their names, which he’d been trained by his mother to say with an extended hand: Good day, Mr. Doyle, Good day, Mrs. Doyle, Thank you for having me into your home. He could not have known the role this family would come to play in his life—or the one they’d already played. He didn’t know that this Mrs. Doyle was the chair of the Bootstrappers’ board, that her family’s investment bank was its primary financial supporter, that her grandmother had been among St. Albert’s founders. He didn’t know that the tie constricting his throat at that moment had in all likelihood belonged to her son. He didn’t know that this son would be his St. Albert’s classmate for the next eight years and his best friend for life. He didn’t even know that the Doyles had a son.
When a white woman a few years older than his mother answered the door, Justin nervously stuck out his hand and said, Good day, Mr. Doyle, Good day, Mrs. Doyle, Thank you for having me into your home. Kit laughed in what was clearly meant to be a friendly way, but Justin could feel his mother stiffening beside him, and he wanted to run away from that place.
Inside, he met the rest of that year’s scholarship students—black and brown boys from other parts of Brooklyn, from Washington Heights and the Bronx, about to start new lives at half a dozen different private schools, their uniforms distinguishable only by the colors of their ties and the patches on their blazer pockets. The one white boy wore shorts and a light green polo shirt, and he introduced himself as Eddie before asking each of them in turn which school they’d be attending and what grade they’d be in. Justin was one of four headed to St. Albert’s, but the rest were starting in seventh or eighth grade. When Justin said that he’d be in sixth, Eddie announced with excitement that they were in the same class. They talked for most of the next two hours.
Justin had thought of that first meeting often while Eddie was gone. He’d thought of all the ways the friendship that began that day had changed his life. He was so relieved to have Eddie back. It had felt strange to live in the neighborhood and not have him around. He’d wondered sometimes whether he could have stayed if something had happened to Eddie, if he hadn’t come back. But where else could Justin go? This place was his home.
They turned downtown at York and headed for the Drive, where they moved quickly until traffic came to a stop just north of the bridge. Tommy swerved on to the shoulder and sped up to the off-ramp, where he pulled smoothly back into the exit lane while the cars behind them honked in disgust. Tommy drove as though they were the only people on the road who mattered, an attitude that would have been obviously obnoxious in a private citizen but somehow seemed an acceptable form of professionalism.
In the two years since Justin had hired Tommy, his duties had slowly expanded from just driving Netta around to generally taking care of her needs. She never asked for much, but Tommy had a talent for anticipating her desires and gracefully meeting them, and they seemed to have genuine affection for each other. Tommy was a middle-aged Dominican, maybe five years younger than Netta. He was one of two Hispanics on Justin’s payroll, along with Fermin, who looked after the house in Bridgehampton. The rest of his staff was from the Philippines. Yoyo—her green card said Yolanda, but Justin had never heard anyone, even her children, call her anything but Yoyo—had been managing the apartment since he moved in, and she was a great evangelist for the talents of her race. Whenever Justin needed more help, she found a cousin or friend who was looking for work. Hiring this way was easier than conducting an open search, and it saved Justin certain emotional complications: he didn’t want to reject candidates for their color; at the same time, he couldn’t imagine having a black servant. (Of course he didn’t call them “servants” to anyone but himself, but this was what they were.)
The roads in Brooklyn were clear, and they arrived at the Bible Pathway House of God well before nine, but you would have thought they were late by the way Netta jumped from the car. She made no effort to hide the fact that these church trips were the highlight of her week. Sometimes he wished she were less enthusiastic about escaping the life he’d built for her.
Justin got out behind her and watched from the sidewalk as she hurried inside. Through the open doors, he saw about a half dozen people, mostly women Netta’s age or older in bright Sunday dresses and colorful, veiled hats, women who’d been going to the church all of Justin’s life. Despite this sartorial radiance, the most striking shade was the turquoise of the empty pews. The space held about a hundred people, but only a handful more would be arriving before services started. It was modest but well-looked after: outside, clean brick storefront and illuminated marquee; inside, vinyl wall covering and fresh nylon carpet, laid down at the same time the pews were last painted. Some passerby who happened to look in might wonder how the place stayed open. Justin didn’t have to wonder; he kept it open.
The Pathway had been run throughout Justin’s childhood by a charismatic preacher still memorialized on the marquee as the Hon. Bishop George Peabody but known among his followers simply as Elder George. Like Netta and many of the other congregants, Elder George was Bajan. He’d testified in a booming lilt that seemed to call the very heavens down, and he’d filled the pews each Sunday, until he died of a sudden heart attack—in flagrante, the rumors went, though Netta called this “devil’s chatter.” Now his son was the pastor. Jonathan Peabody was earnest and enthusiastic. Unlike his father he had a college degree and a masters in divinity, and he tried to put on a good show. His two sisters provided passable music—one playing the electric organ while the other sang and shook a tambourine. But most of their father’s following had moved on, or else died out, like Justin’s own father, with no one to replace them.
Some of Justin’s earliest memories involved playing in the back of the packed church with Jonathan and another boy, Terrance, whose mother had rivalled Netta as Elder George’s most enthusiastic disciple. After Justin went off to St. Albert’s, Terrance’s mother moved the family to New Jersey, and Jonathan was the closest thing to a friend that Justin still had in the neighborhood. In a lengthy letter thanking Justin for his first major gift, Jonathan had encouraged him to stop in one Sunday. You might find my preaching more tolerant than my father’s in some ways, he added. The Word of God is unchanging, but our understanding of it sometimes has to evolve. Justin had been almost impressed by his tact, but he hadn’t taken the offer up. Apart from his father’s funeral, he hadn’t stepped inside the place in years.
Netta never complained about this, except to say that it seemed a waste for Justin to travel all that way just to wait outside. She and Tommy were fine making the trip to Crown Heights on their own, she said. Justin assured her that he liked coming back, which was true, though his reasons for liking it were different than hers. Netta came for familiarity; Justin came to see change. He’d put a lot of money into the neighborhood, and he wanted to witness what had come of it.
Not everything was different, of course. As he walked north from the church, Justin passed the same Chinese takeout with the order-by-number menu and the bulletproof glass, but the hair salon that had once stood next door to it was now a skate shop. At Park Place, Justin came to their old building, where he’d grown up, where Netta had lived until he’d moved her into Manhattan, nestled against the elevated hulk of the Franklin Avenue shuttle. Beyond it, the neighborhood became more orderly, began its transition into Prospect Heights. Blakeman had always taken endless amusement from the idea that Justin had literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks, the kind of joke only Blakeman could make.
He’d been the second St. Albert’s friend that Justin had made, on his first day at the school, and he owed this too to Eddie Doyle. Justin still remembered that morning vividly. His father had spent half an hour demonstrating the proper way to knot his tie before giving up and doing it himself, pulling it flush against Justin’s collar. He didn’t want him wearing the zip-up that the Bootstrappers had sent them.
“You’ll get it eventually,” he said. He held his son firmly by both shoulders and kissed his forehead. “Don’t be nervous. They’re all just people.”
On the train into Manhattan, Justin wanted to loosen the tie, which felt hot around his neck, but he was afraid the knot would unravel at his touch, so he just fiddled at his collar until his mother slapped his hand and said, “Leave it be.” Despite his father’s encouragement, he’d never felt so nervous in his life, and this was just one of the conflicting emotions pulsing through him, along with relief at escaping the daily torture of MS 61; fear of what it would mean if things at St. Albert’s weren’t any better (namely, that he was destined never to fit in anywhere); pride at the work he’d done that summer; anxiety about the work still ahead of him; mild aggravation at the prospect of wearing a tie every day; and guilt that he alone among his classmates was getting out. Plenty of other kids—including Terrance, the only one he was sad to be leaving behind, the one who would continue to get the beatings that Justin would now escape—might have done something with this opportunity, but only Justin’s parents had made it happen. At least, he told himself, he had one friend already, but he wondered whether Eddie Doyle would be so nice with other kids around.
As it happened, Eddie found him before homeroom and introduced him to Max Blakeman, along with another boy, also named Eddie. The other Eddie was a scholarship kid like Justin, though white and not a Bootstrapper. His mother worked as the school’s receptionist. All three had been going to St. Albert’s since kindergarten, and Justin could immediately read their long-established dynamic. The two Eddies deferred to Blakeman on nearly everything, and once it was clear that Max approved of Justin, his place in the group was secured.
When Max asked what rap he liked, Justin understood that the honest answer—he preferred the old jazz records his father played at home—would disappoint, so he told them he was down with Biggie and Scarface, which is what Terrence would have said.
“Kids here like House of Pain and all that wigger shit,” Max replied.
Both Eddies giggled nervously at the word.
“What’s your tag?” Max asked.
Justin did have a tag that he’d occasionally drawn in notebooks, but he’d never shown it to anyone, not even Terrance, because he had a nagging sense that it was lame. He’d certainly never tagged anything publicly, which would have been doubly dangerous in Crown Heights: if caught by the wrong kid, he would have gotten a beating from whoever owned that block; if caught by an adult, he would have gotten a beating from his father. He demonstrated on a sheet of loose leaf that Max provided—Price IZ Right, with the IZ bleeding into the capital R—and the boys seemed to think it was cool. More than this, they seemed to view Justin as the natural arbiter of what counted for cool in this area. Max showed off his own tag—Opus, in bubble letters. When Justin granted it his approval, Max celebrated by producing a Sharpie and marking up the inside of his new locker door.
Now, some kids played in the street outside his old building, as they always did on sunny weekend days. Before starting at St. Albert’s, Justin had been one of these kids, at least when he wasn’t in church. He’d mostly run around with Terrance while Jonathan chased after them, wanting to be included in whatever they had planned. Terrance had lived in the same building until his mother moved them to Jersey. After that Justin had never seen him again. He’d died at nineteen, in a botched liquor store robbery in Camden.
Even before Terrance was gone, it had been clear that their mothers didn’t want them spending time together anymore, and after that there was little to keep Justin tied to the neighborhood. Still, he’d had no idea—neither had his parents, presumably—how little time he would spend in Crown Heights once he went off to school in Manhattan.
After classes ended on that very first day, Eddie had invited him back to his house.
“Is that allowed?” Justin had asked.
Eddie laughed.
“Of course it’s allowed. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Justin was expected straight home, but his mother didn’t leave her office in Downtown Brooklyn until after six, which meant he could spend at least an hour with Eddie and still make it to the apartment before she did.
At the house Eddie introduced Justin to his sister, Margo, who was just in kindergarten. The three children sat in the kitchen together while Angela, the nanny, fixed them snacks. Angela was a large black woman who spoke with a light Caribbean lilt like Justin’s mother, and he felt an odd mixture of pride and shame at being served by her, though she gave no sign that Justin bore any resemblance to her that the Doyle children lacked. When Margo and Eddie finished eating, they left their dirty plates and glasses at the table, something Justin could never do at home, and they rushed up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Justin followed Eddie down the hall to a bedroom that was bigger than Justin’s own and his parents’ combined. It had a basketball hoop on one wall and a Ping-Pong table folded up against another. Justin would have been happy to play with either, but Eddie instead sat down cross-legged in front of the TV, turned on his Sega Genesis, and spent the next half hour beating Justin repeatedly at NBA Jam.
At home that night, Justin watched his parents looking at each other, trying to decide how to respond to the news of how he’d spent his afternoon. Finally, his mother said that it was all right to see friends after school, so long as he got his homework done. “We aren’t sending you to this place to play arcade games,” his father added.
Justin went over to the Doyles’ house each of the next two days. On Thursday, Eddie had tennis lessons, so Justin spent the afternoon watching television and waiting for his mother to get home to make dinner. He’d passed countless enjoyable hours this way in the past, but now it felt boring and stifling, the apartment too small, the TV too old. He wished that he had a Sega Genesis and NBA Jam. If he took the next step and imagined living in a house like the one where Eddie Doyle lived, it was only in the most abstract way, as he sometimes imagined while watching a Knicks game that he was Mark Jackson feeding the ball to Patrick Ewing—more a fantasy than an aspiration.
