The only sound in the studio of HardTymz Productions, which is really a guest bedroom in Apartment 8 of the Salt Creek apartment complex, is the quick shuffling of my notebook’s pages, as I pretend to thumb through it, racking my brain for ways to keep the interview going.
All other noise has stopped, sucked into a vacuum of awkward stillness. In front of me sit three men with metal teeth and tattoos named Rebel, Problem Child and Rah, and who are no doubt aware of the giant gulf that has existed since I arrived an hour earlier, intent on telling their story.
“Um � hold on a second,” I say. “I have a question here somewhere.”
I don’t, however, have a question somewhere. I’m stuck. Rattled. Attempting to keep the conversation moving, but not sure that I can. I don’t know how far to push. I know that each has spent time in jail, but I’m hesitant to ask the questions I truly want the answers to – What was prison like? How’d you end up there? – tip-toeing around questions I fear might ruffle feathers or somehow portray me as racially insensitive.
And, if I had to foster a guess, I would suggest that they are equally uncomfortable, still a bit unsure why a white 22-year-old recent college graduate from Missouri would ask permission to spend his Saturday hanging out with them, a group of struggling rappers from south St. Petersburg.
I fiddle with the collar of my shirt, a blue and white number made by a man named Ralph Lauren, which I had spent 15 laborious minutes picking out earlier that morning. And immediately, as I stare at the baggy T-shirts and sagging shorts that cloak my subjects’ bodies, I realize that I’ve made the wrong choice. The Polo is too formal; too visual an illustration of the different worlds from which we come.
Where I come from is the Midwest, a suburb of Kansas City, and I have spent my life on a structured path designed to lead to a successful, enjoyable life. I was raised on Little League and shopping malls, sleepovers and college prep courses. And while my dad spent 20 years as a high school teacher in the rugged world of inner-city Kansas City, my experience was limited to the annual installment of Take Your Child to Work Day. I have not known poverty or drug abuse or violence, outside of a box in my living room.
The men with whom I am speaking have known all these things. Intimately. They are black men and they come from the ghetto, as they themselves put it, the kind of place that many of us see only in movies or in passing, on our way to some place better. They were raised in big cities – New York, Philadelphia and St. Petersburg – and they have been hardened, over time, by their exposure to so many of life’s atrocities.
But today, a scolding Saturday in July, our worlds have merged, in a cramped apartment bedroom with rap music wafting in from the living room. And it’s not going well.
When’s the first time someone called you Rebel? I ask. Do you remember?
“Not really.”
Rah, was it hard leaving New York a month ago to move to St. Petersburg?
“Yeah, it was hard.”
And then, something interesting:
“I worked at McDonald’s,” offers Problem Child, in response to a question about past employment.
I look up from my notebook.
“You worked at McDonald’s?” I ask. “I did too.”
He looks at me, a bit wearily at first, as if attempting to decide whether this new information is to be believed.
Then he smiles, and for the next five minutes, we dive into an animated discussion about our lives as cooks/cashiers/custodians at the world’s leading fast food establishment. We trade horror stories – and there are a lot – from the grease-caked floors to the staunch scent of french fry that clings to your body and won’t let go, even after you’ve showered. He knows the agony of arriving to work at 4:45 in the morning in the dead of winter to spend the next eight hours preparing Egg McMuffins, because he has done it. I laugh when he tells me about his manager, who used to try to force employees to pay for food that they ate, because my manager had done the same thing. I listen to him bitch about his boss’s demands that each employee shave his facial hair, and he listens as I described the shifty break system that my boss imposed.
And when we have milked the topic for all it is worth – and then some – Problem Child concludes with this: “That,” he says, “was the worst s— ever.”
“No s—,” I answer.
And in that moment, the barriers – of race, of class – come tumbling down. It is no longer an interview between a white reporter and a black rapper. It is two guys, two 22-year old guys, with a shared experience, shooting the breeze. It is an entrance into their world, and an entrance into mine. And it was a connection. Problem Child, who left the state of Virginia two years ago to escape law enforcement, gave me detailed accounts of the crimes he had committed. Things for which, most likely, he could still be punished.
And although I can’t say this with certainty, I think the conversation eased the others’ nerves as well. In the coming days, each would end up telling me intimate details of their lives. Rebel told me the story of how he met Lateesha Jenkins, his girlfriend of four years. Rah, who had muttered maybe two words before then, described the helplessness he felt while locked away in multiple New York prisons.
And I, too, grew comfortable. I asked stupid questions (“Do your grills come out, or are they permanent?”) and they answered them (by removing them from their mouths).
I instigated a long-awaited video game boxing rematch, and commented on the fact that a group of hard core rappers, who rhyme about such things as killing snitches, own a miniature Pekingese mix, Mesha, no bigger than a Nerf football.
Eventually, they seemed to forget I was there to chronicle their lives. By the end of the week, I was able to stroll in and out of the studio like I would my own apartment. I would walk in and they would look up and give me a nod or a handshake, and go back to doing exactly what they were doing before I had arrived. I had become a part of the environment, as natural as the worn furniture and rap posters housed within the studio’s walls.
That’s what happened that day in St. Petersburg, in the waning days of an intense six weeks at the Poynter Institute’s Fellowship for Young Journalists.
Walls crumbled. Similarities, however small, became more important than differences. And for an instant, two lives on opposite ends of life’s spectrum intersected.
One more thing happened that day, before I got into my car and pulled away from the depressed apartment complex and headed toward the sprawling green campus of the Poynter Institute.
As I sat in a green swivel chair, scribbling down notes and observations, Problem Child pointed to my torso, my Ralph Lauren.
“Nice shirt,” he said. “I have the same one.”
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