Free the Other Wes Moore (2010) by Wes Moore Page A

shuffled and my voice lowered a few octaves. I caught Justin out of the side of my eye, shaking his head with amazement at the nonsense that was coming out of my mouth. I could feel the burn of his skeptical stare on the side of my face, but I pressed on.
    "Let me tell you how I run things up there," I said and launched into the story of my recent suspension from school.
    A few weeks earlier I had been suspended for fighting. I was playfully wrestling with a kid from my grade when I decided to go for a killer move: I grabbed his right arm with mine and hoisted him over my shoulder, then dropped him hard on the ground. The fall was awkward, and he landed on his head, opening a small but surprisingly bloody cut. After the boy was rushed to the school nurse and eventually to the hospital to get a few stitches, I was suspended for fighting.
    That was the truth.
    For my friends, I decided to juice the story up a little. Or a lot. The story I told had the boy disrespecting me and me getting in his face to respond. When he kept jawing, I picked him up over my head and slammed him to the ground. Then I stood over his bleeding body, taunting him like Muhammad Ali over Sonny Liston, daring him to get back up.
    My friends looked over at Justin, who had a pained expression on his face. He knew the truth, and soon the rest of my friends did too. I became the butt of pretty unrelenting taunting. My attempt at creating a Wes Moore legend had backfired.
    I was saved after about twenty minutes when a man stumbled toward us. His hair looked like it hadn't seen a comb in weeks. There were laces in only one of his filthy sneakers.
    "Can you young brothers spare some change? I need to make a phone call," he stuttered. An old and unpleasant odor preceded him.
    Ozzie responded first, his Jamaican accent a little thicker than usual. "Get the hell out of here, man. Nobody has any change for you."
    The man slowly moved away, peeking backward a couple times, hoping one of us would overrule Ozzie's rejection.
    Ozzie shook his head in disbelief. "If dude wanted to buy some rock, he should have just said it. Who the hell was he gonna call if we gave him some change?" We all laughed as the panhandler staggered back up the block to look for sympathy elsewhere.
    Drugs were not new to the Bronx. Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all took their turns as the drug of choice. But crack was different. After it officially introduced itself in the early 1980s, it didn't take long for crack to place a stranglehold on many communities. The Bronx was one of them. I was an eyewitness.
    Crack was different from the drugs that preceded it. It was crazily accessible and insanely potent--and addictive. My friends and I would regularly trade the most remarkable stories we'd overheard or witnessed: A father who left his family and robbed his parents for money to buy rock. A pregnant mother who sold her body to get another hit. Someone's grandmother who blew her monthly Social Security check on crack.
    The other difference between crack and other drugs was its method of distribution. There was so much money to be made that drug gangs rapidly expanded their ranks, sucking in some of our best friends, and turf wars became deadly, aided by the influx of sophisticated firearms. The mayhem spread from the gangs to the rest of the neighborhood. Everyone felt threatened. Everyone was defensive. From the early 1980s to the end of the decade, there was an almost 61 percent jump in the murder rate. When I look back now, it's almost surreal. In 2008, there were 417 homicides in New York City. In 1990, there were 2,605. Those murders were concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were concentrated in a single demographic: young black men. In some neighborhoods, the young men would've been safer living in war zones. We laughed at the panhandler on the block, but he wasn't just an object of ridicule, he was an unsettling omen.
    After sitting with the crew for a few hours,