High Price

into high school cheerleading like Beverly and Patricia. She didn’t even distinguish herself by surrounding herself with friends with status. In fact, we ultimately grew apart as she began to see me as arrogant. “You think you’re better than me,” she’d say.
    The change in Joyce escalated when MH moved us to the Crystal Lake projects in 1980. These projects, which, ironically, have now become expensive condos, were located in Dania, which is closer to Fort Lauderdale than to Miami. They were two-story brick buildings, built low to the ground. There, for the first time ever, the apartment my mom rented had enough bedrooms that I shared with only one sibling.
    But the Crystal Lake projects were zoned to a different high school than the one I’d started at. Since it was Patricia’s senior year in 1981, MH didn’t try to switch any of us until that fall. Then, however, she wanted us to go locally. I didn’t want to make the change. I’d established myself at Miramar and had standing in sports and a tight group of friends. So I stayed true to my school, splitting my time mainly between my girlfriend Marcia’s house and Big Mama’s, which were nearby, and only occasionally staying at my mother’s new, more distant apartment. Joyce, however, agreed to switch schools and began attending South Broward. I started to see her less.
    When she got shot in an incident that reverberated through our social world, we were just beginning to drift apart. Joyce wasn’t the intended victim: that was Kenneth Good, who would later become the lighting man for our DJ group. I don’t even know what the beef was about, but a guy whom I’ll call Wes—and who had dated my sister Patricia in junior high—had a problem with Kenneth. Wes was then in high school, maybe sixteen or seventeen, short and stocky. Whatever the issue was, Wes had taken it seriously enough that he’d planned to shoot Kenneth over it. No one knew when it would happen. When trouble was coming, we usually could sense it, but the timing here was a surprise.
    We’d all gone to a high school football game. I wasn’t playing, but Beverly was cheerleading. Some of my female cousins were there as well. It was sometime in 1979 and I was twelve or thirteen. I’d started deejaying but wasn’t getting much play yet.
    After football games, everyone always went to a nearby McDonald’s in Hollywood. It was across the street from the city’s major mall, the Hollywood Fashion Center. Hundreds of people would flood into the large parking lot. Under the palm trees, music was bumping at volumes aimed at displaying the raw power that could be achieved by a carefully selected and modified car sound system. KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Do You Wanna Go Party” was one of the biggest hits that year and I’m sure they played it at least once that night. Bright streetlights, almost like floodlights, kept the parking lot lit up.
    With such a large crowd, the line for food already stretched almost to the door when I rolled up with my cousin James. Joyce was standing near the doorway, probably next to Beverly and near my brother Gary. A crowd of people was gathered there, including Kenneth, laughing and talking, maybe deciding whether it was worth it to get on line then or wait.
    We’d just parked when several shots flew across the parking lot. It was maybe ten thirty or eleven at night but the garish lighting made it pretty easy to see. I was starting to step out of James’s car. I heard a sudden, familiar tat tat tat . Everyone knew instantly that this wasn’t some firecracker or car backfire. We all hit the ground. We knew the drill. It was far from the first time I’d seen gunplay.
    In fact, not long before this, I’d seen a white guy get shot and killed outside a park where I sometimes played basketball. He’d been killed in retaliation for the shooting of a sixteen-year-old black teen whose street name was Flap, the older brother of a boy I knew. I’d seen how that death had changed his family. My mother was close to his, even though I didn’t know him or his younger brother that well. I’d kept a lid on my feelings about all of it, trying to seem nonchalant as I watched the white guy fall dead to the ground and then learned about what happened to Flap. It was hard to believe that moments like that could end a life.
    Of course, when the shooting starts, the thought that you might get hit is inescapable. Everything seems to go into slow motion and your