High Price

own family’s example. On one visit home around this time, I discovered that they had been exiled from my aunt Weezy’s house because of their cocaine use. The cousins I’d once looked up to, who’d instructed me on sex and manhood, had now been kicked out of their own mother’s house.
    Instead of getting their own place, however, they had begun living in a toolshed in her backyard. It was the same one, in fact, that we’d tried to hide behind unsuccessfully when we were caught trying to smoke our first cigarettes as boys. Amid the rakes and lawn mowers in this ten-by-ten shack, my cousins had their new sleeping quarters.
    When I came to see them, the shed was squalid, filthy. It had no electricity or plumbing, of course. Where were the cool older cats I’d admired and hung out with? Could these be the same brothers I’d looked up to, the ones I’d trusted to get advice from when I’d had my first embarrassing sexual experience?
    These days, Amp and Michael weren’t working or taking care of families; they were stealing from their own mother in order to buy crack. They were once even caught trying to steal their mother’s washer and dryer to sell them to buy drugs. The only way their behavior made sense to me was if it had been compelled by a drug. At the time, I didn’t recognize the roles played by factors like their failure to graduate from high school and Anthony’s chronic unemployment. I didn’t think about how we’d all engaged in crime back home, even without using drugs. I didn’t know how Michael had gone from having a wife and steady job as a truck driver to living in that shack at his mom’s. I didn’t think about the difference the military had made for me. All I could see that differentiated me from them was their drug use.
    I tried to find them to talk sense into them on a later trip home. But they dodged my sanctimonious black ass. They weren’t going to let themselves feel humiliated. They also knew that I had nothing to offer them but empty words. The “just say no” rhetoric of the time wasn’t effective for adults who had limited employment options and had previously said yes. And that’s all I really had to give them then.
    For one of my friends, though, the consequences of our failure to recognize the real problems that were behind the “crack epidemic” were even worse. I knew that when I’d joined the air force, Melrose and a few other friends had started slinging rock (meaning, selling crack cocaine) on the corner. They’d boasted to me about how girls would do “anything” to get crack and bragged about all the money they were going to be making. I hadn’t paid much mind at the time because I knew that for all their talk, they were still living at home with their mothers or in other equally nonaffluent situations. Obviously, they hadn’t made any real money.
    I thought that their dealing was virtually all talk, like so many of the capers we’d planned in high school but never really gone through with. We had always been just about to get some real loot, always been about to grab the riches and fame that we knew were just around the corner. My experience in England had made the futility and unlikeliness of success in these endeavors transparent to me, and it now seemed a bit sad, embarrassing even. I hadn’t expected their small-time hustling to amount to anything, good or bad.
    But apparently, Melrose had been selling cocaine, on the 3900 block of Southwest 28 Street in Carver Ranches, pretty regularly. He wasn’t moving large quantities and was no one’s idea of a kingpin. Of all my friends, he was never one I expected to be involved with violence: although he was incredibly physically fit and an imposing-looking specimen, he was a genuinely good-hearted person. As a child, he’d been sent to that “special” school where he’d gotten no education at all, but he was gentle and no real threat to anyone. On August 14, 1990, he’d spent hours celebrating his daughter Shantoya’s first birthday with her. Then he went out to the corner.
    The guys who decided to jack him—some small-time dealers from another neighborhood who had targeted the spot where he worked—didn’t know he’d just come from a toddler’s birthday party. They didn’t know Melrose was as kind and loyal a person as you’d ever meet. They didn’t know him at all. They drove up and pulled out their guns before Melrose and his boys on the street had any chance to react. They made