Unlikely Brothers Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN PRENDERGAST

  The Enough Moment (with Don Cheadle)

  Not On Our Watch (with Don Cheadle)

  Blood and Soil

  God, Oil, and Country

  Crisis Response

  Frontline Diplomacy

  Crisis and Hope in Africa

  Civilian Devastation

  Without Troops and Tanks (with Mark Duffield)

  Left to right: Michael, David, Elsie, Sabrina, André, Denise, J.P., and Philana

  This author is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at [email protected] or (212) 572-2013.

  http://www.rhspeakers.com/

  Copyright © 2011 by John Prendergast and Michael Mattocks

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Prendergast, John, 1963–

  Unlikely Brothers / John Prendergast & Michael Mattocks.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Prendergast, John, 1963– 2. Mattocks, Michael. 3. Big Brothers of

  America—Case studies. 4. Friendship—United States—Case studies.

  5. Human rights workers—United States—Biography. 6. Drug dealers—United States—Biography. I. Mattocks, Michael. II. Title.

  HV881.P725 2011

  323.092′273—dc22

  [B] 2010042790

  eISBN: 978-0-307-46486-6

  Jacket design by K1474@A-MEN PROJECT

  Jacket Sam Chung@A-MEN PROJECT

  Photograph on this page courtesy of Ann Curry, NBC News

  v3.1_r1

  We dedicate this book to our fathers and our brothers,

  both the ones who are still here on earth and the ones

  that have departed for what we hope are greener pastures.

  We are sorry for so many things that happened, and finally

  forgive you for the rest.

  JOHN AND MICHAEL

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. “He Ain’t Heavy, Father, …”

  2. “Come to Save the Day”

  3. “The Gifts Which We Are About to Receive”

  4. Welcome to Somalia

  5. “Earn It Myself”

  6. The Unthinkable

  7. “A Gun Was Easier to Get Than Books Around There”

  8. “I Was Trying to Do the Thing”

  9. “That Shit Is Fun”

  10. Amazing Grace

  11. “Old Enough to Be a Drug Dealer, Young Enough to Cry”

  12. “Nonstop for the Ninjas”

  13. “All About the Money”

  14. “Because I Know You Are Going to Change”

  15. “Success Is Failure Turned Inside Out”

  16. “Let’s Stop This”

  17. “To Tell Her What I Got Out of, I’d Have to Tell Her What I Got Into”

  18. My Father’s Grandsons

  19. “You Don’t Look Like J.P.’s Brother”

  20. Strange License Plates

  21. “I’ll See You Tomorrow in Church”

  22. “That Never Happened”

  23. “We See You Out Here All the Time”

  24. “You Know You Not About to Do That”

  Acknowledgments

  Beyond Reading This Book

  About the Author

  1. “He Ain’t Heavy, Father, …”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  Now, you got to remember I was little when all this started. I know now how fucked up my childhood was, but I didn’t know it then. I just lived it—me, my mom and Willie, my little brother James, and my big sister Sabrina. We were living in a big old run-down house in Washington, D.C., with my grandparents, aunts, and uncles piled in on top of us. We all slept in one big room. Back in them days we had enough to eat, but it wasn’t like anybody was cooking family meals. We kids would get some cereal if we were hungry. To a little kid, living all together like this was fun. One of the earliest things I remember, though, was my mom and them crying. My aunt Francine’s husband beat her to death with an iron, wrapped her body up, stuffed her in the wall where he lived, plastered it over, and painted the wall. I got a cousin who remembers that too. He was small, but he remembers. Aunt Francine was his mother.

  My mom has always been a real pretty lady. Not tall, but proud and upright like a queen. Her dad—my grandfather—was real hard on her. With us kids he was okay, but he drank, and he could be mean to my grandmother and to their kids. Not a one of my mother’s brothers and sisters—and there were thirteen of them—turned out right. What saved my mom was that she had Willie, her husband, who worked construction and always brought his pay home to look after us. Willie was slim and dark-skinned, with very wide-set eyes and a big smile. Always wore a goofy little corduroy cap. On weekends he would take us kids out to Sandy Point Beach near Annapolis and teach us how to fish, and if we met up with anybody, he’d introduce us as his kids. Willie was a hugging man—always wrapping us kids up in his arms.

  For a long time, I thought Willie was my dad—even though he had a different last name. You don’t think about that stuff when you’re a kid.

  Everything changed when my grandfather passed. Grandma sold the house where we all lived together, and everybody went their own way. She could have held the family together—she was the grandmother. She had that power. But her thirteen children were all beefing with each other, so she sold the house, and we all just fell apart. By that time, my mom had had my little brother David and my sister Elsie too, so there were seven of us in our family: five kids, Willie, and my mom.

  We moved to an apartment in Landover, Maryland. But we didn’t stay there long because one day Willie took me and my little brother James to go see his friend Mr. Morris, and as we were walking up the alley, Willie just fell out. His eyes rolled up and down he went. James and I must have been crying real bad, because Mr. Morris came running out and called the ambulance. I remember the doctors telling my mom that Willie had an aneurysm in his brain and to “expect some changes.” Some changes? Willie was gone in the VA hospital six months, and when he came out, he took one look at my mom—mother of his children—and said, “I don’t know you.” Next day, he took David with him when he went back to the hospital to pick up some medicine, and he forgot him there. David must have been about three years old. My mom was screaming, “Where is he? Where is my baby?” and Willie kept saying, “I left him here with you.” He didn’t have any idea. It took my mom forty-nine hours to find little David; some homeless lady had kidnapped him from the hospital and taken him back to the shelter, at Second and D, where she was staying. Luckily, a sharp-eyed social worker there noticed that the woman suddenly had a child who obviously wasn’t hers, and the social worker called the police.

  Not long after we got David back, Willie drifted off. He didn’t know who we were, and he was going to look for his own people. He left my mom with five children.

  That must be when we became homeless; I was six. I don’t remember how it all went down, but I know there was one shelter after another because they never let you stay in any one for more than a few nights. Sometimes we stayed in these slum-ass motels the city put us in—dirty, cheesy places full of roaches. One time the city put us and about fifty other families in a school at Fourth and O. They pushed the desks aside and set up cots
, and we all had to be out of there in the morning before the children showed up.

  Most of all I remember carrying our stuff around the streets in Hefty bags, and not knowing in the morning where I’d be sleeping that night.

  But here’s the thing: Nobody should feel sorry for us, the way we was back then. I know it sounds funny, but we were happy—at least us kids. We didn’t know it was bad. My mother cared a lot about us. She made sure we ate every day, even if it was just a little something. If she had a little money, she’d get us a McDonald’s even if we had to split a cheeseburger three ways. I remember us standing at a bus stop one time real hungry, and my mom gathered some change, and all she could get us was a couple of twenty-five-cent cupcakes so that we’d have something in our stomachs. That she tried so hard meant a lot to us. Those hunger pains would never really go away, though. Often we would have canned meat. That shit smelled like dog food out of the can, but my mom somehow made it taste real good.

  Our bouncing from shelter to shelter went on for a couple of years. One time my mom took us to her sister, our Aunt Evelyn’s house, and asked if could we spend the night, and Aunt Evelyn told my mom no. I don’t know why she did that, but like I said, the family kind of came apart after my grandfather passed. Thing is, we never slept on the street. Mom would find us a shelter for a few days, and then we’d be out on the streets again, in the heat, hauling our stuff around in those black Hefty bags.

  My mom could have put us in foster care, but she didn’t. Around that time, Aunt Evelyn gave up her kids, all seven of them. I don’t know where she went, but she was smoking crack, and one day she just walked out on her kids, right out of the house they owned off Florida Avenue. Mom was there that day, visiting, and she just rounded up Aunt Evelyn’s kids and brought them to the shelter and hid them in our room there. They was our cousins, our family, and we just all crammed in together and didn’t think twice about it.

  Mom saw what happened to Aunt Evelyn, and she kept us all together. So for a little while, she was raising all of us and five of Aunt Evelyn’s kids right there in the shelter. The two eldest cut out once their mom left them, and later on, two of them stuck around and lived with us. Mom didn’t know much about raising children, but she knew enough not to let us go. I remember we were at a shelter place, and some people came to my mom and said they wanted to take us. Man, mom flipped out. “You ain’t taking my motherfucking kids!” Screaming and throwing shit—she really went off. There wasn’t anything wrong with us as a family, really; we just didn’t have money, plain and simple. We also didn’t get a whole lot of hugging once Willie was gone. Mom was all about just getting us through the day—ten-hut, pick up your things there, look after your little brother, find your other shoe. Just getting her own five kids up and fed and off to the next shelter was about all she could do.

  Pretty soon, it was time for me and James and Sabrina to go to school. There’d be a van come take us to Thompson Elementary, pick us up at whatever shelter and take us back there. No one knew we was from the shelter because we hid it real good. My sister Sabrina was seven, one year older than me; she was more like the big brother than a big sister. She was a little bitty thing—pretty like my mom—but man, you didn’t want to fuck with Sabrina. A kid would tease us about our raggedy-ass no-name-brand shoes, and Sabrina would come down on him like a hurricane. Always ready to throw the fuck down, and it wouldn’t matter how big the other kid was. Always getting in trouble for fighting and wouldn’t give a fuck. To her, it didn’t matter going to the principal’s office. She had her little brothers to defend. Like a mama bear with her cubs; that was Sabrina. To this day, I’ve never seen her lose a fight.

  James, he was one year younger than me, and he was Willie’s boy for sure because they had the same last name: Whitaker. James was small and skinny, and darker than me. We have Cherokee in our blood from way back, and you could really see it in James. We were tight, being the two big boys of the family. We did everything together. But he and Sabrina shared something that I never did—that love of fighting. James could be going along just fine and then something would set him off. Even as a little kid I remember being shocked by it. We’d be out playing in the street with some kids and I’d think everything was fine, and suddenly James would be throwing his fists on some kid like to kill him.

  I can’t be sure why James was like that, but part of it maybe was because he and Willie had a special bond, more than Sabrina or me. It hurt us all when Willie left, that’s for sure, but it hurt James the most. He was in a lotta pain for a long time from that. And he was real angry at my mom over it, but I didn’t know why. He turned that anger on other people, and most times I wouldn’t even see it coming. That’s where I think his love of fighting came from. James, he never did get over Willie leaving.

  I wasn’t like that. I didn’t really like to fight. I wouldn’t get mad like that. It made me feel safe, though, having Sabrina on one side of me and James on the other. Even as little kids, ain’t nobody wanted to fuck with either of them, or with me.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  When people learned that I was a big brother to Michael and James, they would always say something about how generous or noble I was. I guess that’s one way to look at it, but it sure isn’t the whole story. Not even close.

  When I first met Michael and James, I was a curious, driven, and emotionally wounded twenty-year-old. At the time, I was talking my way through summer courses at George Washington University, having already attended three other universities, and I was working at the Robert Kennedy Memorial’s Youth Policy Institute in some kind of glorified internship. I was on a mission to change the way America addressed the needs of kids living in poverty, to help shine a light on what was called back then the “underclass,” and to create an education-to-employment system that would give kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods real equal opportunity. You know, the kind of grandiose dreams a twenty-year-old should have. So becoming a big brother to Michael and James fit right into that, I suppose. But to understand what really propelled me into the lives of these little guys—to gauge the parameters of the hole in my heart that I tried to fill with Michael and James—you have to go back to my own beginnings.

  As with all boys, it starts with my father, a Purple Heart awardee nicknamed Jack, who was a giant of a man. He’d studied to be a priest, and though he had veered from that path, he retained an intense and old guard Catholic faith. His personal form of devotion ran the gamut from volunteering at Mother Teresa’s soup kitchens and homeless shelters to lying prostrate in front of family planning clinics to protest abortions and going to jail for it regularly.

  Here’s the kind of man he was: Once a week, when we lived near Philly, Dad visited the sisters of the Regina Mundi Priory, a contemplative order of nuns with physical disabilities, and he took them in two or three shifts in his car to a swimming pool to give them an outing. One of the nuns, though, never went near the water; she sat alone in her wheelchair ten feet away from the pool, locked in a deathly terror of drowning and intense shame about her condition. Each week, Dad knelt before this sweet woman, needling her playfully and gently trying to cajole her into the pool. It took months, but finally she relented. He removed her leg braces, picked her up in his arms—Dad was a rugby and hockey player—and carried her tenderly into the water, holding her until she stopped trembling. Within a few weeks, she was able to float on her own. A couple decades later, I went to visit some of the surviving nuns, who had moved to another convent in New England. That’s how I learned about this story. She told me no one in her entire life had ever been as patient and gentle with her as my dad was during that time.

  These are the kinds of stories I grew up with. I was constantly being told what a wonderful man my father was.

  And for the first seven or eight years of my life, that’s how I experienced him. Dad was an old-school traveling salesman for a company called Fred’s Frozen Foods. He was a grandmaster at it in the way born salesmen are, and he always knew th
e angles to approach people. He had an Irishman’s bottomless well of funny stories to tell, to soften up the client, and he also had a charismatic but mischievous way of interacting that made everybody around him feel important and at ease. He would walk down the street flashing a big grin and playing tricks on or saying hello to countless passers-by. He loved to draw people out and connect to them. He was a chameleon, a comedian, a people-pleasing tornado of a man.

  Dad spent his days on the road with his partner-in-culinary-crime, Uncle Dave Wells, driving a station wagon around to schools and hospitals all over the Midwest, armed with a big dry-ice cooler and deep fryer in back filled with corn dogs, pizza burgers, and breaded pork tenderloins, the kind of gluttonous product line that would make a nutritionist go on a hunger strike in protest.

  We always lived in comfortable houses big enough that my younger brother Luke and I had our own rooms. We mostly saw Dad on weekends, but when he was home, he was fully present. One time, for my science fair project Dad and I decided to figure out where a steak comes from. So we went to a prototypical Midwestern cattle ranch, and then we went to the Kansas City stockyards. The whole time, Dad would interview the cows about their impending fate. He’d have full-blown conversations with cows! I mean, the guy was mesmerizingly original and creative. I don’t know who was more startled by his tactics, the ranchers or the cows or me, but darned if I didn’t win first prize at that science fair with our big, blustery poster boards showing the remarkable transformation from a cow in the field to a steak on a plate, from the cow’s point of view.

  Dad used his extraordinary storyteller’s gift on the neighborhood kids, but especially on Luke and me. We’d both get into one bed at night, and Dad would sit there in the dark with us, spinning out his own versions of Call of the Wild, Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He’d start with the skeleton of the original tale and then go off on long, imaginative riffs. I never knew where the real stories ended and Dad’s flights of fancy began until later when I read the originals, but I loved Dad’s versions. It was never hard getting Luke and me to go to bed when Dad was around. And the stories of his adventures on the road with Uncle Dave! To a kid, they were magical. Who needed television when you had a dad like mine!