Death on Easy Street

"In all but love, woman is a mediocre player." Nietzsche.

Every woman has her own beauty, and Tamara was no exception. She "had the dog." She was tall and black, eighteen years old, and not lacking in attractiveness, not only among people of colour but among whites as well. By the time she was sixteen, Tamara was already dancing in topless bars, because life in the ghetto had made her look older than her years. With long and straight black hair past her shoulders and skin black as the night, more than her fair share of men wanted to sleep with her, because her body was both curvy and athletic, both soft and hard at the same time. But there was already a hardened look in her deep brown eyes from having grown up in the inner city, where there were drugs en masse and prostitutes on every corner, where girls walking past abandoned buildings to or from school risked being raped. Tamara was sexually assaulted a few times, though she was able to fend off her attacker each time, because girls like her are not easy to overpower.

Tamara did not know what she wanted from life but lived from day to day. She had graduated from high school with honours, but when people in her family told her how proud they were of her, she merely shrugged. What could she do with a high school diploma? Everybody her age understood that you had to go to college and beyond to get anywhere in life, but Tamara was at a fork in the road. She thought of enrolling at a junior college, but she wasn’t sure what course of study to take. Did she want to be a nurse? Did she want to be a teacher? Maybe she could go into business administration, but she wasn’t sure if she had a head for business. She was never strong in mathematics or science, though she could read and write better than the average. She had even won a prize for an essay that she wrote in sixth grade. However, she didn’t know what she wanted to do in life, so she continued dancing topless in bars.

The part of the city where she grew up, the West Side, was newer than the East Side. The East Side streets had French names from the seventeenth century like Beaubien Street and St. Aubin Street, while the West Side streets seemed to hearken to the Jazz Age, with names like Green Dolphin Street and Easy Street. The homes on the West Side were primarily two- or three-bedroom, single-storey houses with aluminium siding and sandstone brick façades, while the tenements on the East Side were built primarily of red brick with wrought iron fire escapes that lead to the alleys in back. However, both sections of the city were crumbling. Only the neighbourhoods by the waterfront downtown had been well-maintained.

The crack houses on the West Side more or less operated openly, without fear of interference from the law. The police, it seemed, considered them to be impregnable fortresses, because SWAT teams rarely, if ever, tried to storm one. What’s more, there was a lot of paperwork involved. Before attempting to seize a suspected drug den, the police had to go through the proper channels in order to get permission to mount what amounted to a small military operation. If, for some reason, they had to cancel the operation on or before the day that it was planned, the police would have to go through channels all over again. Because of the bureaucracy, it might take weeks to pull off an operation. On one occasion, the police raided a suspected drug dealer, only to find that the only one home was an eighteen-year-old girl with a baby. The police had wanted to arrest her boyfriend, but he wasn’t home, so they arrested the girl instead, since they managed to find some of the drugs that they were looking for. Nobody could argue, however, that this was a real crack house; the raid was too easy. It would have taken a well-trained Mossad unit from Israel, armed with Uzi submachine guns, to successfully raid a real crack house with the element of surprise necessary in this town.

Though Tamara wasn’t an addict yet, she had taken a liking to crack cocaine. There was a crack dealer on Easy Street named Dennis, who was able to meet her wants. Because of her beauty, she merely had to pay for it with her body, if she wanted it. Tamara only wanted to have a good time, since she wasn’t addicted yet. She wanted to dance; she wanted to party. She was sleeping with the crack dealer for the sex as well as the drugs. The crack was just to help put them both in the mood. Even though the euphoria from all forms of cocaine is only brief, usually only a few minutes, it’s sometimes enough. With a little bit of alcohol, weed and crack cocaine, you can have yourself a party. However, the addict can get caught up in the cycle of dependence by trying to recapture the newness of that first buzz. It can never be as good as it was the first time, if it was ever good at all. Tamara said to herself that she only wanted to have fun. She usually saw Dennis only on her days off, since she couldn’t see herself spending the rest of her life with him.

Dennis had himself convinced that Tamara wasn’t the typical “ho” or “bitch” in the “hood.” That is, she didn’t prattle about nothing but seemed to see conversation as equal parts talking and listening, an exchange of information. What’s more, she didn’t get jealous of other ho's or bitches. She could flirt with the best of them, but she also knew how to be direct. When she wanted to get high, she said so. When she wanted to have sex, she let him know in no uncertain terms. That was why Dennis liked her. However, crack dealers aren’t the type to think ten years or more down the line. Dennis saw himself as living pretty much the same as he lived now, if he was still alive. When he was thirty years old, he saw himself having his friends over for all-night parties with ho's and bitches, beer and weed, and crack cocaine. They might watch football or basketball, or play spades in the kitchen. He was sure that Tamara would be long gone by the time he was thirty years old.

They never quarrelled. However, Dennis made the mistake of saying to Tamara, “You ain’t like all the other crack ho's...” Dennis meant it as a compliment, but it was a mistake because Tamara didn’t consider herself a crack whore. She now wanted revenge for this show of disrespect.

Drug users prefer the dealer who gets high, and Tamara was no exception. If Dennis had been paying attention, he might have noticed that Tamara cased out the place every time she came over. After a few months, Tamara was sure that she knew the layout of his crib. The only room that she hadn’t checked was the basement, because Denis never went down there in her presence, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to know what was down there.

It was a Friday night, and Tamara made over a thousand dollars that night. After tipping the bartender, the bouncer and the DJ, she still made well over five hundred dollars. Dancers make their money by sitting with customers and dancing on tables, as well as dancing topless or nude on stage. Sometimes, they go into a back room and do “lap dances” or “couch dances” with a customer, since the city had passed an ordinance against that type of dancing. Though prostitution isn’t unknown in these places, the bar where Tamara worked didn’t allow it. People in the neighbourhood were already complaining about this bar (and others like it), and the owners didn’t want trouble with the police. Besides, dancers could make more than two or three hundred dollars just by sitting with people at their tables. Tamara and a couple of other dancers had been fortunate enough to sit with a large party that night. That was why she had made so much money.

Tamara arrives at Dennis’ with three other men that he hasn’t seen before. They're just some friends of hers, she assures him, and she introduces them as Cedrick, Darrell and Percy. The party is the same as any other, with enough drugs and alcohol for everybody. With six or seven other people, everybody parties until the small hours of the morning. One by one, everybody falls asleep, until Tamara and Denis are all alone in his bedroom upstairs. Tamara and Dennis have sex on his king-sized bed like they always do. There’s no reason for this night to be any different from all the others, right? After they're done, Tamara stands up to get dressed, with her back turned to him.

“Leavin’ so soon, baby?” Dennis asks.

With her back still turned, Tamara replies, “I got things to do.”

“Like what?” Dennis asks, sceptically.

“That’s my business,” Tamara replies curtly.

When she’s finished dressing, Tamara casually picks up her purse, opens it, and reaches inside it. “I can’t find my lighter,” she says, apparently still searching for her lighter. “Got a light?”

As Dennis reaches over and searches his night table for a lighter, Tamara says blithely, “Forget it. I don’t need it.”

Tamara calmly turns around, points a 22 Derrigner at Dennis, and shoots him twice in the chest, killing him instantly. When Cedrick, Darrell and Percy hear the gun’s report, they stand up, pull guns from their coat pockets, and fire indisrimminantly at everybody in the living room. There's blood everywhere, on the walls and on the furniture. The victims are lying in pools of their own blood. In the time that it takes to finish off the six or seven other people in the room, Tamara opens the top drawer of Dennis’ dresser and takes all his money. She doesn’t have time to count it, but she finds later that Dennis had more than ten thousand dollars in the top drawer of his dresser. He either didn’t believe in banks or he never got around to depositing the money in a savings account. Either way, his money sat at home in a dresser drawer without collecting interest and making more money in a bank.

One person survives the massacre. A fourteen-year-old boy had gone down into the basement to crash on a couch during the party. Everybody had forgotten about him, and Cedrick, Darrell and Percy hadn’t thought of going downstairs to see if anybody was down there. It's the one part of the house that Tamara has never seen; she never thought of checking the basement either.

The boy is able to positively identify Tamara as one of the assassins after hearing her speak to the other three before leaving the house. The police pick her up on suspicion of murder. They find the 22 Derringer in her purse, and the ballistics tests match the gun to the two bullet wounds in Dennis’ body; she confesses to the murders and fingers her three friends. There are still powder burns on her right hand from having fired the murder weapon. A couple days later, the police arrest Cedrick, Darrell and Percy, and they all confess as well.

Tamara, Cedrick, Darrell and Percy are tried for first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

Proverbs from Hell

What was law for the child is oppression for the adolescent. For the adult, it can be a perverse form of revenge.

If adolescents survive junior high, it’s usually because somebody hasn’t killed them. If they survive high school, it’s because they haven’t killed themselves.

There’s nothing like an impudent child to turn a parent to thoughts of homicide.

Teachers and animal trainers are more alike than different, save that lion tamers have guns.

Puberty is that phase in life where (many) children are as ugly on the outside as they are in the inside.

Childhood is that time where we most resemble angels; puberty, the time when we are most hellish in appearance if not in character.

Corporal punishment doesn't work with the devil, so how can it to work with children for very long?

Discipline is only possible when the child feels outnumbered.

Guns were banned from school to protect children from teachers as well as from each other. This, teacher know better than anyone else.

The fantasy life of a child is poetic while "real life" for the adult is prosaic. The inner life of the adolescent turns nihilistic when they find that fantasies can never be real and real life is too prosaic.

Be careful how you treat a child; it could be your own.