Darius and the Vanilla Funk Read online

  About that confrontation… Mr. Cohen ushered me from the 3rd Precinct and took me out to eat at Banini’s Italian Restaurant. This restaurant was in Mr. C’s town but was a

  few steps from the border of Branchville. I must have eaten just about everything with red sauce and it felt good to fill my body with something other than McDonald’s or KFC for a change.

  I could tell that Mr. Cohen was getting ready to talk to me about something serious, so I said, “Think we can win it all this year?” He looked me in the eye and said, “Darius, you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.” I had heard this kind of talk from him before, so I shrugged it off and kept eating my lasagna.

  “What is going on with you anyway?” Mr. Cohen asked me. I kept my focus on the food and shrugged my shoulders. “If you don’t stop doing this you’ll wind up either in jail or worse,” he said trying to get my attention. I continued to ignore him and ate the last piece of the lasagna.

  I could hear by his breathing that he was starting to get upset. He inhaled and went for the jugular, “What do you think your dad would say if he could see you now?” I became instantly incensed like I was face-to-face with the

  person who jailed me, not the one that had bailed me out. “Mother fucka! What the hell do you know about my old man? You ain’t my old man! Never was, never will be.”

  I looked angrily into Mr. Cohen’s eyes as he waited for me to calm down so we could talk. When I refused to back down, he got up slowly from the booth, reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of twenties and tossed them on the table. He put on his coat and said, “Darius, good luck to you” and he walked out of the restaurant.

  I was surprised to see him the next day at the hearing but I wasn’t surprised by all of the nice things he said to the judge about me. He said his piece and left the hearing without even looking my way. I had hurt the last person in the world that deserved it but I at the time there was no other way.

  Mr. C had become a fixture at our home basketball games because the high school was right next to the elementary school. The 4:00 games gave him plenty of time to get his room in order after school and then be home in

  time for dinner.After I yelled at him, I didn’t see him in the stands for the whole second half of the season.

  I made All State that year and was being recruited by over 100 colleges. The state championship was ours and a full scholarship seemed like a formality when I graduated in a couple of years. If they allowed me to skip from tenth grade to college I would have done it right then. I figured that once I made it to my senior year, college would be an afterthought to jumping right to the NBA. Talk about an enormous head…

  My celebrity on the court did little to slow my activity down off the court. I had survived the state championship, flying bullets, and knife fights, so in the spring of my 16th year I was feeling like nothing or nobody could take me down. I was the one that took down everything in my path, including my relationship with Mr. C.

  We got tired of running around retail stores, so we started to focus on our enemy the Crips instead. It was no secret where their hideout was and we would wait until they left before entering through a back window. These guys

  became pretty predictable and soft after a while; every night they would pile into the Escalade and get some dinner. They used to have a few guys getting dinner for the gang but we kept stealing it from them.

  It was a game of cat and mouse and we thought we were the sly cat again when the back window was open that night. In a strange twist of fate, I had been reunited with my original crew, Easy E and Beast. Beast had taken more bullets than 50 Cent and had been assigned to protect me full time. I didn’t realize he was there to protect me because I didn’t feel that I needed protection. It was good to have him on my back anyway.

  Getting into the hideout was easy enough—we were able to find a big stash of cash and a load of drugs and stuffed everything we could into the garbage bags we brought. We were on our way out when Easy E went back in to get this rocket launcher he had seen. We helped him out of the window with his new toy and started running around the dark corner.

  Once we moved into the light we could see the white Escalade screeching to a halt and thugs about 8 thugs coming at us from all doors. Once again, my first instinct was to run, so that’s what I did. Easy E reached for his gun and was greeted by a storm of Oozy machine gun bullets. Beast wasn’t the running type, so he hoisted the rocket launcher onto his right shoulder and quickly aimed it at the Escalade. Bullets were flying all around him by the time he launched the rocket.

  I looked back and saw the rocket exploding into the Escalade and the power of the blast sent me flying about 20 feet through the air. I must have been knocked out for a few seconds because when I regained consciousness, I saw a bloodied Beast standing over me offering a hand to get up. We limped over to Easy E’s dead body and then got out of sight when we heard the police sirens coming closer.

  The rocket blast had not only blown up the escalade but it also started a fire that also destroyed the Crips hangout. By the time we got back near our hangout, the place was also engulfed with flames and bodies were scattered around the street. I must have been out for more than a few seconds because the war had shifted and then came to a bloody end.

  The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed next to Beast. It was light outside, so I must have passed out and had been sleeping for a while. A doctor came in and said, “Mr. Mitchell, I’m Dr. Cooke and you’re lucky to be alive son.” I took as much in as I could and then he continued, “You’ve sustained extensive damage to your left knee as a result of two bullets that you were hit with last night. I’m sorry son, but I don’t think you’ll ever play ball again. It would be a miracle if you walked without a limp.”

  I rolled up the sheet with my left hand and saw my left knee bandaged up and in a brace. I didn’t even remember getting hit but the adrenaline was pumping so hard that I didn’t remember passing out either. I looked up at the doctor and asked, “Is my friend going to be all right?” as I looked over at Beast who was on life support. The doctor looked at him and replied, “It’s up in the air. He’s just hanging on by a thread.”

  Limping Through Life

  That night I was in the hospital I started to feel the pain in my knee and I started to cry. Beast had died only a few hours earlier and once again displayed the loyalty and heart of a true friend by saving me even though he was dying.

  I must have been crying for a while because a nurse came in and gave me a few pills to numb the pain. The events of the past 24 hours started to sink in—the Bloods and the Crips had been virtually destroyed in Branchville— the explosions came as such a shock to people in the town that they instituted a curfew for years after that.

  I started to think back to what the doctor said about my knee and his opinion that I wouldn’t play basketball again. Just as my mind was surrendering, I heard footsteps at the door. My first visitor would be the one and only Mr. Cohen. “I got next” he said as he walked toward my bed. When you say, “I got next” in the schoolyard that means that you are going to play the next basketball game.

  My smile quickly turned to full tears once Mr. Cohen leaned over and hugged me and cradled my head in his long arm. Any thoughts he had about letting go were squashed by my Kung Fu grip on his arm.

  “The doctor said…” I blubbered after a few seconds. “Shhh, I know, I talked to him” Mr. C interjected.

  We released from the hug and Mr. C pulled up a chair close to my bed. “Remember when we first met?” Mr. Cohen asked.

  “Yeah, you were the Candy Man” I replied as I wiped away my tears with my fingers.

  “Yeah, the Candy Man. But that was a time in your life when you didn’t feel special. When nobody really believed in you. Words can only take you so far. If you want to believe everything you hear than you might as
well throw your brain and spirit away.”

  “But, what if I can’t play again?” I asked.

  “Is that all you are, a basketball player?” Mr. C asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m a firm believer that if you take care of the mind, the body will follow.”

  “What does that mean” I asked.

  “It means that if you focus on other good things besides your knee than your life will be balanced and good things can happen to you.”

  I just shook my head and my thoughts seemed so jumbled and distant. We talked for another 20 minutes until I started getting groggy from the drug’s the nurse had given me. Mr. Cohen took a business card out of his pocket and wrote his cell phone number on the blank side. He once again wrote the words ANY TIME on top of his number. We banged fists and he walked through the door as my eyes closed and I drifted off into a deep sleep.

  Three days later I was walking with crutches out of the hospital with my Aunt Angela, who had come to visit me and told me I could live with her. She was tougher than I had remembered when she said, “You start any of that nonsense again and you’ll feel the door hitting your ass when I kick you out!”

  It was a good three weeks before I could get up and walk again. It was the summer and my aunt’s air

  conditioning was no match for the New York heat. My skin was stuck to the plastic covers of her couch and I needed to get out and get some stale, humid air.

  Walking around the block with my metal cane was a sobering experience for a guy who could race around the block and make a big breeze. The hospital offered to provide physical therapy as part of my aftercare but I had no way to get back and forth from the hospital. I thought about calling Mr. Cohen but he was on summer break and I wanted to save that call for when I really needed him.

  No, I would let my knee heal naturally and when it came time for the season to begin I would be ready. It was that simple in my young mind.

  School started and I found myself walking better and going to classes. It was my junior year and it was time for me to step up. It was amazing but my average had not suffered greatly from my lack of caring. By virtue of my basketball talent, teachers had let me slide with an average that approached 80.

  As each day passed my confidence was being mended and restored. I was walking better and feeling as comfortable in school as I ever had. Practice was about to begin and I thought I was ready to take on the challenge, although I had played sparingly in months.

  My teammates were amazed to see my on the court, but my coach had been pushing me to return the minute he saw me the first day of school. He hadn’t visited me in the hospital and barely said two words to me since then. But it was winning time, so DMitch needed to get his groove on again.

  I made it through the lay-up drills, although it was apparent that I had lost over half of my 40-inch vertical leap. As my knee loosened up I tried to do more and more. Twenty minutes into the practice I was started to feel like my old self again. My knee felt so good that I tried to do one of my Allen Iverson crossover dribbles; my body seemed to leave my knee behind as I felt a huge pop and collapsed to the floor in excruciating pain.

  Forty-eight hours later I had my knee “scoped” and Dr. Cooke came into talk to me like a he had months earlier. This time he was a little sterner, if possible. “Was I wrong last time? Under no circumstance can you play again! Unless you want to be crippled and walk with a huge limp the rest of your life, just put your hoop dreams away.”

  Later that day, Mr. C stopped by the hospital after school. I was still a little dazed from the surgery and was trying to digest my crumbled life. This time when he sat near my bed his words never got near my ears—they seemed to float away like a kite with a broken string.

  When I got out of the hospital I returned to school the next week. Things seemed to be calming down a bit and I was able to get back into my schoolwork. That was until the basketball season started. It wasn’t a problem for me when the team was just practicing but when I went to the first home game and was watching from the sidelines, reality hit me really hard.

  Nothing could have hurt me more than to watch my team lose that first game. The guys were looking at me like I

  had let them down. Every time they made a bad play they would like at me like I could save them from their trouble. It had been a month since the surgery and I was falling off the end of the world.

  By the middle of the next game, I couldn’t stand being Darius Mitchell anymore. After that my schoolwork started slipping and I started drinking at least a couple of 40’s a day. Since I wasn’t the man that carried the team anymore, the school’s administration had a real short fuse with me. I didn’t care at that point what happened to me because the pain of life had brought me to a place where I needed an out.

  I took the gun I kept in my sock drawer and put it in my pants, then and scooped up my third 40-ounce Colt 45 for the afternoon and decided to take a little walk. With no particular destination in my clouded mind, I wound up in strangely familiar territory.

  It was 12 years to the day that my father had been gunned down and I was feeling it. That remembrance was definitely the straw that broke my back that day. As I drew closer to my house thoughts of ending it all were in the front

  of my mind. Being without my father all of those years was a burden I didn’t want to carry anymore.

  It appeared no one was home so I made my way up the driveway and proceeded to walk left up the path to the front door. I then stopped at the spot where my father was killed and took a seat. At the time I didn’t even realize that I had started crying. Tears were streaming down my face and onto the ground just like the sprinkler when my dad died.

  I reached for the gun in the back of my pants and lifted it to the right side of my head. I was so far gone that I didn’t even hear a car speed and screech its tires in the street in front of me. My index finger started to squeeze the trigger but a strong hand moved my hand away in time for the speeding bullet to fly harmlessly into a neighbor’s tree.

  I even thought about trying again but a voice woke me from my death daze. “Darius! Darius! What the hell are you doing?! Mr. Cohen screamed as my eyes were finally able to refocus. “Oh, hi Mr. Cohen. What are you doing here?” I replied in a calm voice. Mr. Cohen was sweating as he said,

  ‘Son, it’s not your time.It’s not up to you when you leave this earth.”

  Mr. Cohen helped me up and led me to the passenger side of his car. His PT Cruiser had been replaced by a large SUV, but I was happy to be finally driving in the car with him. Before we sat in the car he emptied the bullets out of the gun and threw the gun in the garbage can near the garage. Once in the car he looked over at me and said, “Looks like we’re going to go back to the beginning again. Hi, my name is Mr. C.” I held out my fist and open my hand as he put his hand in mine.” As the car rolled down the street I started hysterically crying. My life had spun completely out of control and the bottom would have been an improvement.

  Second Chance

  I always respected Mr. Cohen because he always did what he thought was right. I wasn’t sure where he was driving to that day he found me with that smoking gun to my head, but I was sure that he would take care of me.

  We drove about five minutes from Birchwood into a town called Bailey Woods. When we passed Banini’s Italian restaurant, I knew exactly where we were going. We pulled into Lincoln Street and then the garage door opened to a nice house, number 1325.

  For all of the time I had spent with Mr. Cohen over the years, I would have thought that he had kids. I suppose he gave all of his love and support to the kids at school and that was more than enough for his life. He and his second wife, Sharon, lived a happy life and they were both teachers.

  Mr. C. had called his wife from the car and she was just leaving school. We walked in from the garage and he said to me, “It must feel good to be home?”

  I looked surprised at
first and then responded, “I’ve been away so long.”

  From the moment I stepped in that house to the minute Mrs. Cohen came home, I knew that I could finally put my feet down and stop running. We all found something that we were missing and it took a gun to my head to realize how precious life really is.

  My Aunt Angela was happy to sign over custody to the Cohen’s and I was officially part of the family. The real question for me was where I would go to school. My first thought was to change over to Bailey Woods High School, but in the end I just owed the Birchwood community too much. I had taken from my community and now it was time to give back.

  Mr. Cohen had some decent gym equipment in his basement and we started working out every night. Having two teachers in the house also made me reach more at school and I started to expect more of myself in the classroom. If this was my second chance then I was going to make the most of it.

  I rarely thought of playing basketball again, even when the Birchwood team got knocked out in the second round of the county playoffs. I had become an average student and the silence was quite comforting.

  By the spring of my junior year I would walk across the street after school to Acorn Road Elementary School. Mr. Cohen was now teaching third graders and I showed up

  every afternoon to read a story to them. Some of the kids had seen me play basketball but most of them knew me as Darius, the guy who came in to read stories.