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“Can’t we do something?” you ask the officer.
“What do you want me to do?”
“We’re really sorry, Officer. What can we do?”
“You tell me.”
Then you’re supposed to make up a story whereby you indicate to the cop how much
money you have on you. Which we couldn’t do because we didn’t have any money. So he took
us to jail. It was a public bus. It could have been anyone’s gun, but the guys from Alex were
the only ones who got arrested. Everyone else in the car was free to go. The cops took us to
the police station and threw us in a cell and pulled us out one by one for questioning. When
they pulled me aside I had to give my home address: Highlands North. The cop gave me the
most confused look.
“You’re not from Alex,” he said. “What are you doing with these crooks?” I didn’t know
what to say. He glared at me hard. “Listen here, rich boy. You think it’s fun running around
with these guys? This isn’t play-play anymore. Just tell me the truth about your friends and
the gun, and I’ll let you go.”
I told him no, and he threw me back in the cell. We spent the night, and the next day I
called a friend, who said he could borrow the money from his dad to get us out. Later that day
the dad came down and paid the money. The cops kept calling it “bail,” but it was a bribe. We
were never formally arrested or processed. There was no paperwork.
We got out and everything was fine, but it rattled us. Every day we were out in the
streets, hustling, trying to act as if we were in some way down with the gangs, but the truth
was we were always more cheese than hood. We had created this idea of ourselves as a
defense mechanism to survive in the world we were living in. Bongani and the other East
Bank guys, because of where they were from, what they looked like—they just had very little
hope. You’ve got two options in that situation. You take the retail job, flip burgers at
McDonald’s, if you’re one of the lucky few who even gets that much. The other option is to
toughen up, put up this facade. You can’t leave the hood, so you survive by the rules of the
hood.
I chose to live in that world, but I wasn’t from that world. If anything, I was an imposter.
Day to day I was in it as much as everyone else, but the difference was that in the back of my
mind I knew I had other options. I could leave. They couldn’t.