High Price

realized that she needed extra love and support; we all thought that once the physical wounds healed, she’d be fine, and she behaved as though she was. But Joyce would ultimately be involved in a number of violent incidents, two of which stand out. Once, she got stabbed by a woman who was angered that they were both seeing the same man; another time, she stabbed a different woman in a similar dispute.
    For most of her twenties and thirties, her life was chaotic and unsettled. But it’s interesting to note that despite all this, she never had any kind of drug problem. Her issues were related to her relationships and, possibly, her experience of that trauma. Sadly, she would later blame me for leaving the family to join the air force as she was left dealing with these events, saying that I’d failed as a brother by not being there for her at that time. None of us realized back then that such support was supposed to come from parents and other adults, not siblings who were just children themselves. Her feelings of disappointment still pull at me.
    As for Wes, he was incredibly apologetic when he got out of juvie. He said over and over that it had been an accident. He certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Joyce. Our families stayed close, and since Joyce seemed physically fine, we put it behind us. I wouldn’t get my hands on a gun until the idea of getting back at Wes for shooting Joyce had long been discarded.

CHAPTER 6
    Drugs and Guns
    Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
    — AUDRE LORDE
    I t was Richard’s grandfather’s gun, a large rifle that looked like an M16 but shot .22s. It wasn’t a handgun that you could hide down your pants, so we usually kept it in the trunk of my car, a 1972 Pontiac LeMans in midnight blue with a white vinyl top and a suave cream leather interior. I’d paid four hundred dollars for it. I was planning on putting Tru-Spoke rims and Vogue tires on it, but never got around to it. I was sixteen, just entering my senior year in high school. I was at the wheel and Richard, whom we called RAP III, for Richard A. Ponte III, was almost literally riding shotgun. He held the gun across his lap as we headed home.
    We were driving down Hallandale Beach Boulevard, just coming off I-95. It was a four-lane road that marked the border between Carver Ranches and a white neighborhood. We were probably returning from eating at a local Denny’s, a place we frequented with an irregular policy of “dine and dash,” sometimes failing to pay the bill. We were bored.
    Then I noticed someone walking along the side of the road. That in itself was unusual: this was South Florida, and people drove, they didn’t walk. But what was really strange was that it was a white guy.
    “What he doing here?” someone said.
    In the back of my car were the two Derricks, my good friends Derrick Abel and Derrick Brown. No one ever called Derrick Brown by his given name. Since elementary school, he’d been “Melrose,” after the local school for developmentally disabled kids (whom we then called retarded). He wasn’t really any more “retarded” than the rest of us, but he’d tested badly in school and the name had stuck. Melrose was slightly taller than me, about five foot ten. His skin was a dark, blue black and he was built. Most of my teenage friends looked immature compared to the well-developed young women around us, but he looked like a man, with a huge chest and arms.
    Derrick Abel was something of a mama’s boy. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness and she tried to keep close tabs on him. We called him Super Slick, but the name wasn’t as resonant as Melrose was for the other Derrick. Sometimes it seemed aspirational or almost ironic. With his strict mother, Super Slick always felt he had something to prove.
    Though his mom blamed us for being a bad influence, much of our misbehavior was, in fact, instigated by her son. He was tall and very thin, with the close-cropped hairstyle we all wore at the time. We thought the more flamboyant eighties hairstyles like Jheri curls were uncool. Like the rest of us, Derrick dressed in tightly pressed high-water pants and short-sleeved Izod shirts. He was constantly trying to show how tough he was.
    In this case, though, it was probably my idea to mess with the white guy. As usual, Slick joined in and no one dissented. We didn’t consider any possible consequences or even think at all about what might happen if things