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But I was running Windows 95. Windows 95 took forever to shut down. I was closing
windows, shutting down programs. I had one of those fat Seagate drives that damaged easily,
and I didn’t want to cut the power and possibly damage the drive. This cop clearly didn’t give
a fuck about any of that.
“Shut it down! Shut it down!”
“I am! I’m shutting it down! I have to close the programs!”
The crowd was getting angry, and the cop was getting nervous. He turned his gun away
from me and shot the computer. Only he clearly didn’t know anything about computers
because he shot the monitor. The monitor exploded but the music kept playing. Now there
was chaos—music blaring and everyone running and panicking because of the gunshot. I
yanked the power cord out of the tower to shut the thing down. Then the cops started firing
tear gas into the crowd.
The tear gas had nothing to do with me or the music. Tear gas is just what the police use
to shut down parties in black neighborhoods, like the club turning on the lights to tell
everyone to go home.
I lost the hard drive. Even though the cop shot the monitor the explosion somehow fried
the thing. The computer would still boot up, but it couldn’t read the drive. My music library
was gone. Even if I’d had the money for a new hard drive, it had taken me years to amass the
music collection. There was no way to replace it. The DJ’ing business was over. The CDselling
business was done. All of a sudden our crew lost its main revenue stream. All we had
left was the hustle, and we hustled even harder, taking the bit of cash we had on hand and
trying to double it, buying this to flip it for that. We started eating into our savings, and in
less than a month we were running on dust.
Then, one evening after work, our friend from the airport, the black Mr. Burns, came by.
“Hey, look what I found,” he said.
“What’ve you got?”
“A camera.”
I’ll never forget that camera. It was a digital camera. We bought it from him, and I took it
and turned it on. It was full of pictures of a nice white family on vacation, and I felt like shit.
The other things we’d bought had never mattered to me. Nikes, electric toothbrushes, electric
razors. Who cares? Yeah, some guy might get fired because of the pallet of Corn Flakes that
went missing from the supermarket, but that’s degrees removed. You don’t think about it.
But this camera had a face. I went through those pictures, knowing how much my family
pictures meant to me, and I thought, I haven’t stolen a camera. I’ve stolen someone’s
memories. I’ve stolen part of someone’s life.
It’s such a strange thing, but in two years of hustling I never once thought of it as a
crime. I honestly didn’t think it was bad. It’s just stuff people found. White people have
insurance. Whatever rationalization was handy. In society, we do horrible things to one
another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them
as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the
victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black
people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we
don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would