Читать книгу Angels with Dirty Faces - Walidah Imarisha - Страница 9

“First, I would like just to make a brief statement on behalf of my client, and I think it’s very important for the Court and for the family who’s present, to know that I’ve had an opportunity to spend time with the defendant, at times when he’s been much more quiet, much more remorseful, much more insightful.”

Kakamia watched his lawyer pleading for his life. With his big Santa-like beard and thick glasses, he didn’t look like your typical lawyer, but he had worked for years as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. Kakamia’s mother had hoped his years of experience would change the course of her son’s disintegrating future.

“I just want the Court to realize that this is a person who came into this system, quite frankly a boy, a child. A very immature young man that did a tremendous wrong, and he has learned a great and hopefully a life-changing lesson, here,” Kakamia’s lawyer continued.

Funny, Kakamia didn’t feel like a child. At nineteen, he felt like a grown man. How many men could say they had already done three years in jail at the age of nineteen on a conspiracy to commit murder charge?

While he swaggered hard in the jail about his time in, when he was alone in his cell, it wasn’t pride he felt. He missed his family, despite his fractured past. His mom had tried so hard to raise the bail. But it just hadn’t been enough. Seems like it was never enough. Innocent until proven guilty, he snorted mentally. Even if they had decided to let him go, he still would have lost three years of his life. But of course, he wasn’t going home. After all the things he’d done, and been through… He looked down at his forearms. He saw the kiss of razorblade to his skin, old faded lines crossing his flesh, along with new red intersections. He’d done them himself. Not deep enough to cause damage, but enough to feel. To control the pain. Be in charge of it for once. Be in charge of his own body. Scars on the outside to match the scars on the inside. Maybe then someone would notice.

Just surviving growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in the 1980s had been an accomplishment, though they didn’t hand out certificates. He had heard some of the older Jewish people in the neighborhood reminiscing about when it was a good place to live—clean, safe, friendly. He knew that meant before Black people moved in. By the time he was there in the 1970s, the neighborhood was mixed, and the Jewish residents were the only whites stubbornly holding on. There were clashes between the different groups. He had been involved in more than a few himself.

The neighborhood fell from comfortable to dirt poor. It had to be that way for him, his mom, and his sister to live there. His mom worried about him so much, gave him a curfew and strict instructions. She held down two jobs his whole life, and when she wasn’t working, she was trying to find a way to block out the pain.

His eyes in the courtroom looked over to his mom, who sat in the first row, twisting the banister with her hands, as if trying to wring some compassion out of the court. She was short and solid, with a hearty laugh and gold brown hair that curled like sunrays around her head. He always teased her that she must have some Puerto Rican in her Irish heritage, to get hair like that. “I don’t know, ma, you know they’re always talking about Black Irish—there might be something to it.”

He got so tired of having to explain to people that yes, that was his mom, yes he was mixed, yes it was Puerto Rican and white, but Puerto Ricans were Black too, don’t you know? Didn’t enslaved Black people get sent from Africa to Puerto Rico? Wasn’t there voluntary mixing happening between the Indigenous folks and the Africans, and less-than-voluntary mixing between those two and the Spanish? He felt Black folks in his neighborhood looked at him with suspicion, because of his white mother and his light skin. And the Puerto Ricans looked at him with suspicion because of his lack of Spanish and his white mom. It would have been easier if his father had been around to point at for verification. Hell, it would have just been easier if his father had been around. He could have helped with the bills, which crushed his mother to the floor so hard, the only way she could lift herself up was with a drink or a snort of something.

But his dad was locked up. Again. He had been out all of five years of Kakamia’s life. Most of the time he was at one of the maximum prisons in upstate New York, and they didn’t have the money to travel up to see him. And by the age of thirteen, Kakamia was no longer interested in him. He left us, he had told himself, so he can go fuck himself for all I care.

What would his father think of him now, Kakamia wondered, looking down at the orange prison jumpsuit the state gave him. He had been in jail for almost three years, first awaiting trial and now awaiting sentencing. If he had money, he could have been bailed out. If he had had money... So many of the thoughts throughout his life had started with those words.

Three years. 1,059 days. That was three birthdays. He could now vote, he thought sarcastically. Smoke legally. Die for his country. And kill. Only for his country though. If he had done what he’d done on the battlefield, he would be a hero right now, instead of this… The shackles on his ankles clanked dully.

Kakamia tuned back to the sentencing trial swirling around him. He wasn’t really part of it. He was like this table: a thing, to be moved around. That’s what he’d felt like, moved from jail to jail, from the California Youth Authority to the adult jail when they decided they would try him as an adult.

They had tried both of them, him and Bobby, as adults, even though at the time of the crime Kakamia was sixteen and Bobby was seventeen. Sixteen years old. Joining the ranks of too many smooth faces that have never been touched by a razor, living life with shadows of bars on their soft cheeks. Mike Males recounted the story of the first youth sent to the electric chair, tried and convicted as an adult in his book, Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation. The youth asked for a cigarette as his final request. The guard admonished him, saying he was too young to smoke. Then the state electrocuted him.

Kakamia and Bobby were facing murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy. It was the conspiracy that really scared Kakamia. It woke him up with cold sweats at night, hoping with his eyes squeezed tight that he would open them and be back home. Conspiracy carried a sentence of life without parole. No chance of going home again. That’s it. First strike and you’re out.

After all, this was his first charge. Of course it was a big one. It hadn’t seemed real at the time, not while he stood in the entryway of what Bobby’s parents called “their dream home.” Kakamia had never been in a house so nice before. He thought of the bedroom he, his mother, and his sister shared back home, and worse, the car they had shared for a few weeks when the bills got the best of them.

It hadn’t been real to him until he heard the first shot rip the air. And another. And another. It had not been real until he saw Bobby’s face emerging from the bedroom. It was real when Bobby dropped the gun into Kakamia’s hand. It was real when Kakamia felt the heat from the recently fired barrel. The gun curled up in his hand, warm like hot blood was rushing through its casing. The air smelled like burnt metal and closed doors. That’s when it began to feel real. And that’s when it was too late.

Kakamia remembered his friend Eric approaching him in school with this deadly proposal. He knew both Bobby and Eric, who the prosecution had described as the little devil on the shoulder, telling everyone to do it. Kakamia was much closer with Bobby: as close as he was to anyone. People liked Kakamia well enough; they thought he was charming, engaging, funny. But they also thought he was crazy. They thought that about him in New York as well. And he was proud of that—he had worked hard to cultivate crazy. After all, when you’re a scrawny mixed Puerto Rican kid with a white mom addicted to drugs and alcohol in a racially charged neighborhood—shit, a racially charged country—you gotta do something.

The something he did was pick up a two-by-four during a fight with another Black kid to prove something, if only to prove he existed. The funny thing was, Kakamia couldn’t recall what the argument was about now. It seemed like so long ago, even though it was only a few years away. What Kakamia did remember was the blood that poured out of the kid’s ear, how he looked lying unconscious on the ground. Mostly Kakamia remembered how everyone treated him later, nicknaming him Lumberjack. They gave him some real respect after that.

Soon after, his mom decided they needed a change of scenery, him and his four half-brothers and -sisters. Different daddies, same mom, but they were all family as far as they were concerned, regardless of the fact they looked like a color wheel, lightest to darkest.

So mom chose Sacramento: sunny California, a place of new beginnings. Everyone goes west to strike their fortune.

This is where it got them, Kakamia thought as his eyes took in his mother’s face, creased and worn with stress as she stared at the judge.

When Eric approached him in the hallway at school with a proposition, he listened with an open mind.

“Hey, you wanna make some big money, I mean real easy?” Eric started out.

“Sure, who doesn’t? What would I have to do?” Kakamia replied.

“Simple. Help Bobby kill his parents.”

To most people this would have been a shocking statement to hear at school. And it was…the first time they heard it. But Kakamia was the third person to be asked to join in on this contract over the past week. It was a high school, word got around. Kakamia had wondered if they would approach him. He already had a speech prepared, having played the scene out in his head many times; he was kind of excited to get to use it.

“What’s the plan?” He spat out the line like he was in a movie.

“They have a gun in the house. It’ll be easy. Bobby will take the gun earlier and hide it. I’ll drive you out there, and he’ll let you in. We’ll steal a TV or something to make it look like a burglary. Then you’ll sneak up into the bedroom, put pillows over their faces, pull the trigger. You won’t even have to see the blood. I’ll drive you home, and that’s it. We just wait for Bobby to collect the insurance money.”

“And how much is that?”

“It’s gonna be like a million for both of them, can you believe that?”

Kakamia thought about it. No more struggling, no more going without heat in the winter like when they were in New York. No more spaghetti for dinner for weeks on end. No more hearing his stomach rumble.

Kakamia already knew his options were limited. He felt like he had so much talent, but none of it saleable. He was always working on the scheme that would make them rich. His sister teased him about it constantly. His mother told him the only way to get rich was to go to school and go to college. But school had never worked for him. They moved around so much, he spent more time fighting and establishing his reputation than actually going to classes. His reading and writing weren’t so good. In fact, they were awful. He had gotten this far by faking it. By the time they settled in Sacramento, he was so far behind the other students in his class, he was embarrassed to go: scared the teacher would call on him and show him up in front of the class.

He ran through the moneymaking options he’d tried as an alternative to school. It was the golden era of hip hop, and Kakamia was in the middle of it. He tried breakdancing, and he was good at it too —for once his long limbs and lighter weight were an asset, instead of a detriment like in boxing. But breakers weren’t making any real money —you could put a can out and break on the street for folks walking by, but that was almost as bad as school. He had been able to get some loot out of DJing parties, but he didn’t have any money for his own equipment and you couldn’t borrow someone else’s turntables forever. Graffiti just landed you a one-way ticket to jail, which was too bad, cause he was actually a great graffiti artist.

He’d tried to sell drugs, gotten down with the Bloods. But he knew unless he moved up fast, he’d just be a low level gangster working harder than if he had a 9 to 5, and barely scraping by. Until someone put a bullet in the back of his head.

All of this made him wide open to Eric and Bobby’s plan. Plus, Kakamia really loved gangster movies. He liked to imagine himself as a Mafioso, like the ones he used to see in Little Italy in New York. And suddenly, one of his favorite movies had come to life. After all, this was a contract. He’d be a contract killer, a hit man. If that didn’t sound dangerous, he didn’t know what did. No one would dream of fucking with a hit man. Hit men got real respect. Hit men didn’t have to worry about a cousin’s wandering hands in the middle of the night, about their mother’s boyfriends’ heavy boots on flesh.

Kakamia had tried everything to block it all out before. Alcohol when he was eleven. He graduated to pills, cocaine, meth, crack, heroin: anything to erase his past and his present; anything to open a door in his head so he could finally escape.

None of it worked. The next morning, he would be right back in his body, track marks on his arms, eyes a little more vacant in the mirror.

Perhaps blood would finally wash him away.

“All right,” Kakamia declared, “I’m in.”

“But I got some terms.” He steepled his fingers and leaned back. He felt so Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “I want $25,000 in cash when the insurance money comes in. And Bobby has to buy me and my mom a house. And a car.

“And anything else we need,” Kakamia added, proud that he had thought to cover future expenses like that.

Eric and him shook hands solemnly.

“We’ll be in touch soon,” Eric turned to walk away.

“Hey,” Kakamia called out as an afterthought. “Why does Bobby want to kill his parents? Is it just the money?” Frankly, Kakamia couldn’t really imagine this being Bobby’s idea. He definitely had an explosive temper, but he didn’t seem like a planner. More like a “fly into a violent rage and damn the consequences” kinda guy.

Eric stopped and turned around. “Man, you know he’s been grounded for almost two years cause of his grades. And they make him give them almost his whole check from his after school job to go towards household expenses. They say he’ll get it back when they pay for college, but you know that’s wrong. And you know his mom’s the worst. She’s a real bitch. She goes through his mail, listens to his phone calls. I know whenever I call over there, she’s on the other line, listening to every word we say. He came to me saying he just couldn’t stand to live with them anymore, he wasn’t going to be able to make it to his eighteenth birthday. So I suggested he have them taken care of. And that’s where you come in.”

Kakamia was a little shocked. Could this kid really want to kill his mom over something so trivial? Kakamia’s gangster mask faltered. He thought of his mother. Sure, things had been hard. Sure, he wished she’d been there more, that she’d protected him more, that she’d believed him more. She was the first one to tell him he was making up stories when he finally showed her the wound he had been carrying around for years.

He had wanted to leave home so many times, and had run away half a dozen. He had vowed to never talk to his mom again after particularly bad fights. But he had never imagined hurting her physically. In fact, just thinking about it now drew tears to his eyes.

Kakamia’s mind and heart hardened. Yeah, but this wasn’t his mom. In fact, it was better not to think of her as a mom at all. It was just a woman. No, just a…thing. Just a job to get done, a task to be completed. Nothing else.

The only way this is connected to him, Kakamia thought decisively and almost feverishly, is that it was going to make him rich. It was going to make him important. And no one will ever hurt him again.

Eric clapped Kakamia on the shoulder, and left.

* * *

Kakamia looked over at Bobby’s father, sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom from Kakamia’s mother. Bobby’s father had a small scar on his cheek, where a bullet had bruised it deeply, but not penetrated. It was actually a miracle he lived.

Bobby’s father had come to court to see Kakamia sentenced, and wanted him to get murder in the first degree. Since Kakamia was underage when the crime was committed, they couldn’t give him the death penalty. But they could give him life without, which Kakamia felt was worse in some ways than the death penalty.

Kakamia fantasized about what it would be like going to the chair (he wasn’t sure if that’s how they did it in California, but it sounded the most dramatic). He would set his jaw and walk with confident unhurried steps. They’d strap him in, and ask if he had any last words. Sometimes in his fantasy he’d imitate one of his favorite rappers Ice Cube from the album Death Certificate, which came out a year after he was arrested: “Yeah, yeah I got some last words. Fuck all y’all!” Sometimes he’d smile and say, “I regret that I have but one life to give.” He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that line before, but he liked the sound of it.

He’d been thinking of that over and over when he was arrested, the day after the murder. Maybe that was what prompted him to tell the cops that he was the one who pulled the trigger. There had been two cops, and they had him in a room asking him a lot of questions. They called his mom but the phone had been cut off that day. She wasn’t at home anyway.

They kept asking him who did it, and he wasn’t saying nothing. He wasn’t going to rat on anyone. At first he kept saying he didn’t know, but it sounded like a burglary, if things were missing.

“I heard that burglars often shoot people if they think they could ID them later. I saw it on a TV show,” Kakamia offered. That had been the story they agreed on: after Bobby shot his parents with the gun he stole from them, Kakamia would take the gun and run out. Bobby would hurry back to his room and pretend to have slept through the “burglary.”

Unfortunately, Kakamia and the others hadn’t studied those crime shows closely enough. There were only minimal signs of forced entry; they had barely broken the front door lock. Not enough to convince the police. And they had only taken the TV and VCR; with a house full of so many other valuables, the cops ruled out robbery gone wrong quite quickly.

Kakamia was momentarily at a loss for words after the cops interrogating him told him this. They hadn’t thought about that. They figured it would be enough if stuff was missing and Bobby was in his bed. What were they going to do now? He started to panic.

Then he had a flash of imagination: him standing over the sleeping couple, dressed all in black with a black ski mask on, the .38 revolver in his hands. He walked to the edge of the bed, extended his arm and burrowed the bullet into the back of Bobby’s mother’s head, firing one shot, then swung expertly to the father, and did the same. He wiped the gun down, and threw it in the corner. Without a backwards glance, he slipped out of the house, walked around the corner, pulled out a wad of cash, counted it and started laughing.

It’s already done and they already had both of them, so why not go out with style? So that’s what Kakamia told the police. All of it except the cash. He knew that wasn’t true, cause the insurance money hadn’t come in yet. One of the cops got ecstatic. But the second wasn’t convinced. “We know about you, kid, we asked around. Talked to your friends.”

“Yeah,” Kakamia tried to put some bass in his voice to sound tougher. “And what did they say about me?”

“They said you live in a fantasy world. That you like to be a big shot. You boast and brag about doing all kinds of things, but in reality you’re just a little nigger who comes to school in worn out shoes and eats mayo sandwiches for lunch. By yourself.”

Kakamia’s rage flared inside him like a gun going off. “You don’t know shit about me! I did it!”

But the cops continued questioning him on different aspects of the crime, trying to trip Kakamia up, confuse him.

“So you say you put the gun to both of the victims’ heads while they slept in their bed at 1 am?”

“Yeah, right up against their heads, just like they did in The Godfather,” Kakamia replied.

The cop wheeled on him fast. “Then how do you explain Bobby’s father still being alive? The only reason he didn’t die like ­Bobby’s mother is because the bullet got caught in the pillow and slowed down. When it hit his cheekbone, it didn’t penetrate his skull,” he finished triumphantly.

Kakamia sat quiet. He had forgotten that was part of the plan, he had gotten so caught up in his own imaginations. Since Kakamia hadn’t been in the room, hadn’t seen what Bobby did, he didn’t have that point of reference. He had waited downstairs in the darkened entryway, his hands raining sweat into his gloves.

But it was too late to turn back now, and in truth, he didn’t want to. He liked the image of himself holding money, handling business, stone cold. Hurting other people before they hurt him. He liked it as long as he didn’t think about Bobby’s mother, didn’t wonder about what her last thoughts were, or whether she knew subconsciously, as she lay there sleeping, that her own flesh and blood was about to end her life. He held that thought out at arm’s length, dripping red, so it wouldn’t stain him.

“Well, I did it,” Kakamia said stubbornly. “That’s all you need to know.”

* * *

Kakamia tuned back in to his sentencing trial. The judge was talking about probation. For half a minute, Kakamia’s hope flared. “According to the law, the defendant is eligible for probation for this charge. This charge, however, is one that clearly calls out for denial of probation, despite the fact that the defendant is so young and has no prior criminal record. The crime is just too enormous—there’s two separate victims, with loss of life and near loss of life to the second person—to allow for grant of probation, and therefore probation is denied.” His voice had the finality of a banging gavel.

Kakamia sighed. He knew he wouldn’t be getting probation; it was just an empty hope. He also knew they wouldn’t be sending him back to the California Youth Authority to finish his sentence. CYA could only hold him until he was twenty-five, and everyone involved, including his lawyer apparently, felt that wasn’t enough time for his crime.

No, Kakamia knew exactly what he was getting. After Bobby pleaded guilty a couple months before, he was given twenty-five to life. Bobby got out of the conspiracy charge by saying he wasn’t the trigger man. He blamed it on Kakamia, which of course went along with Kakamia’s earlier confession to the crime. So everything was hanging on him, and he was looking at life without. Kakamia used to think prison wouldn’t be a big deal. His dad had been in prison damn near his whole life. His whole life felt like a prison, like there was no escape. He was locked in, and no matter how hard he rattled the bars, no one came for him.

But when he was actually facing life in prison, he knew if his life had been a prison, it had been minimum security, grooming him for this next step, the big time. He had heard so many stories of prison from the other guys in his set, or gang. He would have to get deeper into the gang to survive, or he’d be left to fend for himself, always watching his back, always wondering where a shank was going to come from…

Kakamia couldn’t breathe. His throat was just as constricted as when he had tied the bed sheet around it. Wound it around and jerked the knot. Tied the other end to the top bars of his cell door. He thought it would be fast. One of the other guys in the jail told him it would be quick, a snap and then nothing. This guy, he’d seen other guys do it, and he said they didn’t feel nothing. But Kakamia hung there, no air. His eyes felt like grapes being squeezed. His legs jerked like a broken wind-up toy. They took him to the jail infirmary after they cut him down. The court had to push back his next court date, because he couldn’t walk. The doctors said it did permanent damage to his lower back and neck. He still couldn’t turn his head to the left or the right in the court room. He had to shift his whole upper body to look at his mom, eyes full of tears and frustration.

Kakamia leaned forward, rested his head on his folded hands. Why, at nineteen, did he feel like his life was over?

* * *

Kakamia had had a meeting with his lawyer right after Bobby pleaded guilty.

“This isn’t good,” his lawyer told him. “In fact, it’s very bad.”

“Yeah, I figured that,” Kakamia spit back sarcastically. “Look, can’t you just tell them I didn’t do it?”

“The problem is you already told them you did. I tried to tell them that it should be disregarded, but it’s on record. Now we have Bobby saying you pulled the trigger. And quite honestly, a jury is going to be inclined to believe a nice young white boy from a stable family, than a newly arrived Puerto Rican from a broken home with a disciplinary record.”

Wasn’t that the story of his life?

“Well, what can I do?” Kakamia said, an edge of pleading in his voice. “I don’t wanna die in prison, I’m only nineteen years old.”

“You could always cop a plea, make a deal. But you gotta have something to trade for a deal. If you could give them the other guy involved, I am sure I could get you fifteen to life. I’ve already talked to the prosecutor about it, and he assures me the deal will hold. That means you’d definitely be out in fifteen, maybe sooner if you’re on good behavior. You’d have seven years probation after that and have to pay some restitution, but you’d be out in fifteen at the most.”

Little did Kakamia know that his lawyer’s word wouldn’t mean much of anything soon. His lawyer himself would be arrested a few years later, for torturing and killing his wife. There would be no deals for him. Life in prison, sitting alongside people he had both prosecuted and defended.

Kakamia balked at the idea of snitching; he hated squealers. It was ingrained in him almost from birth, passed down genetically from his parents. It went against the gangster code—he knew that from every movie he saw. He knew it from the gang. He knew snitches get stitches.

But on the other hand, this was all Eric’s fault; he got Kakamia involved. He should have stepped forward to take some of the heat off of Kakamia. It wasn’t fair he carry this on his own.

Fifteen years did sound like a long time. But life was even longer. And like the lawyer said, he could be out in less time. All he had to do was act right; he could do that. Maybe he’d even be out in five.

“You promise I’ll be out in fifteen?” he asked Hamlin.

The lawyer nodded his head decisively. “It’s a done deal.”

Kakamia sighed. “Then I’m ready to play.”

* * *

The judge had given Kakamia murder in the second degree, which carried a sentence of fifteen to life, and was now setting the sentence for his second count, attempted murder in the second degree. The judge set it at the highest possible time, nine years.

“I don’t necessarily know at this point, since the jury never got to the point of resolving who is the person that pulled the trigger on that gun,” the judge admitted. “But it doesn’t matter in terms of the sentence, because at least these three individuals who have been convicted, now, joined together in agreement to carry out the sophisticated plan of attack on a very vulnerable victim and those very aggravating circumstances far outweigh the only mitigating circumstances of a youthful Defendant without…”

Kakamia’s mother shot out of her seat, and said in a tearful but still strong voice, “Excuse me, Judge, I don’t mean to interrupt the court but you have to take into account the circumstances around this…”

“I’m sorry, Judge, could we have a moment,” the lawyer interjected.

“You just can’t call this justice in any form, though, you just can’t,” his mother wailed.

Kakamia’s lawyer pulled her closer to the defendant’s table. “You are not helping your son with these outbursts,” he said sternly.

Kakamia held out his hands to her. “C’mon, mom, it’s going to be okay, just calm down.”

“Okay? What about fifteen to life and nine years is going to be okay?” Her tone escalated. “I just don’t know how we got here. I just don’t know how this happened.”

“I know, mom, I know,” was the only thing he could get past the lump growing in his throat.

His mother slumped back to her seat. The judge looked down at the defense table sternly, waited a moment and then continued with sentencing.

When he was done, Kakamia got what he expected: fifteen to life for murder in the second degree and nine years for attempted murder in the second degree. Luckily, the sentences would run concurrently. He would get seven years probation once he was paroled, and he would have to pay restitution to the victim, $7,469, and a $10,000 restitution fine to the state of California.

Damn, Kakamia thought. Ain’t that fucked up? The state gets more money than the people who actually lost something. You’d think he’d injured the state or something.

The judge raised his gavel. “If there’s nothing further, then I remand the prisoner to the custody of the Department of Corrections.” The gavel sounded louder in his ears than the three shots Bobby fired that December night three years before.

And may God have mercy on my soul, Kakamia intoned mentally as the prison guards walked toward him. He felt that tight feeling in his throat again. He couldn’t breathe. He thought of his cell, of twisted sheets. Maybe this time it would be quick. The drop, the snap, and then silence.