I would read about Javon in the paper. Minutes before he was shot, he was hanging out on a corner in Hunter’s Point near his home with a group of other kids. A city bus approached. On it was a rival crew. The camera on the bus showed the kids passing a backpack between each other, arming themselves. The driver was clueless. Passengers who knew it was about to go down warned the driver not to stop, but he didn’t heed their pleas. He pulled over to the bus stop. Some kids near Javon, seeing enemies onboard, began firing at the bus.
It’s unclear if these guys were Javon’s friends, acquaintances, or if he just happened to be in the same vicinity as these kids. “We know nothing,” the homicide inspector stated, but in the very next line, perhaps in an attempt to rationalize tragedy, the inspector added that Javon had once been arrested as an “associate of Westmob,” the same turf that the kids who had fired those first shots presumably claimed, though the inspector didn’t offer details of Javon’s earlier arrest. Had he been charged with directly participating
in a crime, or had his arrest been a matter of guilt by association?
Whatever the precise relationship between Javon and the boys nearby, the facts remained. The kids on the bus returned fire, and Javon, unarmed, was the only one killed. Though the article acknowledged that Javon was a student at John O’ Connell High School, the quoted district spokeswoman referred to Javon as a student at June Jordan: “He was a very easygoing guy who was excelling at math at June Jordan. He wanted to be an engineer.”
four guns
I’ve had a gun pointed at me four times, all as a teenager. All after I’d transferred high schools. Three of the four stemmed from adventures on the city bus.
The first time, I was with a tagging crew, a racially diverse bunch, vandals of all stripes. We were on a bus that had made a stop, and some of us were talking shit through the window to a group of Latino dudes hanging near the bus shelter, maybe late teenagers, dressed in khakis. As the bus was pulling from the curb, one of the Latino guys reached in his waistband, pulled out a gun, and waved it at us. We dropped to the gum-stained ribbed floor as the bus rode away.
The second time was at my doorstep.
My apartment was on the ground floor of our housing project,and it opened up to the courtyard. I was kicking it with Rob. We were inseparable. He lived two floors up, and he’d stop by my house, sometimes for dinner but mostly just to shoot the shit.
I’d transferred into his high school, and I’d met most of my friends through him. Rob was the kind of kid everyone noticed. Had the height and talent of a basketball star, though he could never cut the grades to play for the school. Other kids buddied up to him. Some cowered. Adults treated him like a top prospect. The spotlight clung to him, and if I stood close enough, I could feel the light’s warmth, if not its gaze.
That night I was standing in front of my door, which was slightly ajar behind me. Through the opening, my mother could be seen washing dishes at the sink.
Rob had just got paid, a wad of twenties. He opened the bills up into a fan, practically shoving them in my face. The money had been given to him by his father. His pops worked at a car dealership and lived in the East Bay with a new wife and a newborn daughter, who Rob refused to acknowledge as a sister. From time to time, Rob would swing by his dad’s job, a two-hour bus ride from our house, and guilt his father into giving him some dough.
None of my family drama was new to Rob. When I told him that my dad lived in Minnesota but paid our bills, he said, “Shit, that ain’t nothing but child support.” When I explained my parents were still married and that Willie was my mother’s secret boyfriend, a guy who’d take her on vacations, Rob praised my mom as a pimpstress.
He stuck the wad of bills into his jean pocket, took out a comb, and began to pick out his afro. He had gray strands sprinkled throughout, though you’d only noticed up close. I’d asked him about the gray hairs once, but all he would say was, “That’s what happens when you fuck as much as I do. Grown man shit.”
Two men were passing by the courtyard. I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t think much about it. Relatives or friends of neighbors would often visit. The men approached us like they wanted to know the time. One took out a gun. The other patted us down. They grabbed Rob’s cash. I had nothing in my sweatpants.
Quietly, the one with the pistol told Rob to walk away, and he told me to get back in the house. I went inside and closed the door. My mom didn’t hear a thing. She was on the phone with Willie.
The third time someone aimed a gun at me I had a bat in my hand.
An hour before, a friend of mine, a short Latino kid who was growing out his frizzy hair into a ’fro, bumped into another kid as they both rushed to board the bus. My friend could’ve just apologized, but he acted bold. “Watch where the fuck you’re going,” he said. I suspected he was only doing the tough-guy routine because the other kid was Chinese, and he thought he could get away with it. So when fifteen of that guy’s friends also got on the bus, I thought, I’m not getting my ass kicked for this shit. And
