Public Enemy

Abstract

Public Enemy Daniel Donaghy (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph by Gary Tamin [End Page 114] I was eight years old and just strong enough to slip a shot over the lip of the rim when I heaved it just right. I don’t know how CJ missed me standing at the edge of the playground’s blacktop, crook of my right arm squeezing a basketball, but he did. I wanted to hide or run past them and up to my parents’ apartment, but I ended up backing up to the fence and sitting on my heels like I was watching TV. Preppy white kid had just rolled into the B Street projects in a Benz thinking CJ was dealing. The kid had been here before: he slid the tinted driver’s side window halfway down, back up, then [End Page 115] all the way down. He had short, wavy black hair and dark eyes like Karate Kid Ralph Macchio, who back in the day had all the girls swooning over those dimples and that voice that never made it out of puberty. CJ told Macchio, Let’s go, and the kid got out of his car and walked halfway across the street behind CJ until CJ whipped around and said, Give me your money, motherfucker. Macchio said, What? like he was confused, not like a smartass, but CJ didn’t take it that way. What? What? he said as the kid started backing up. Say “what” again, CJ said. Go ahead. But Macchio had his back turned by then and a hand on his car door when CJ shot him three times. Kid hung on to the top of the door a few seconds before he fell straight back, his head thunking once on the ground. No one else was out yet. CJ snatched Macchio’s wallet, then flicked the gun at him like a Chinese star. He stood looking down the only road in and out of the projects before he took off for the dirt path behind our building that led down to the railroad. Then it was just me and Macchio. I walked over to him and saw his wide-open eyes and mouth, his palms flat to the street, his fingers clutching like to sheets on a bed, above a bright red spill that soon would darken and mix with road dust. Public Enemy boomed from his speakers. I stood right over him, but he didn’t look at me. He was already gone, his eyes fixed somewhere far off. He struggled to take quick, shallow breaths. I could hear him pushing hard to get the air in and out. I wanted to run, but thought I should stay there with him until someone else came. I was screaming. When I tell the story thirty years later—and I don’t tell it often—it’s almost always across a dark wooden table in some back corner of a bar, and it’s always over beers. It’s usually a guy I end up telling, one of my students who graduated or is just about to from the college where I teach. When I was younger, I told a few women when we started getting close. They thought they wanted to know, and I thought so too, so I told them. Only I kept bringing the story back to myself. A guy got shot and died, and all I kept talking about was how some nights I didn’t even go to bed because I knew as soon as I lay down I’d see Macchio falling against his car, then flat on his back in the street. I can hear them saying very sweetly, You should talk to somebody, which was when I knew they’d never sleep with me and that we had just swung the boat of our evening around and were headed back to the dock of friendship before a clumsy goodbye. When it comes up now, it’s more like a play-by-play of a football game: one clean narrative with a beginning and an end and lots of details and sound [End Page 116...