text: I think we were always competitive until the day when we weren’t anymore. It was always chalked up to two cousins seeing who could get the best of the other, but in reality, we never were that close or particularly fond of each other. The times when we did do things together it was because of something our parents arranged or seeing each other at those family functions that no child wants to go to when they could be at home doing anything else. But eventually we all grow up, and we realized that if we focused our competitive nature together on a mutual task rather than trying to one up another, we could accomplish things that no one in our family had ever done before, reach levels no had ever dreamed of ascending to before. We complimented each other perfectly, he was Heavy Metal and uber aggressive, where I was more laid back and liked to let life come to me as it saw fit. I came from a semi-strong parental background, where his mom, my Aunt, wanted nothing to do with him and had him on his own since he had started fourth grade. But I needed that to counter what I had, and he is the perfect counter. Argumentative days and minor fist fights gave way to teens running the streets, we were and are both street punks, dropping off packages for the drug dealers for twenty dollars a pop, hustling pool in places where we were the youngest ones by at least twenty years, cruising up and down the streets as the music bumped solidly and the cool air of the night ricocheted off the black top roads that just hours earlier had blistered heat and launched an aroma that only someone familiar with street life could understand. Sticking our heads out the window to take in the night air and let the wind blow relief over our sweat encrusted faces, life seemed so open even though we were on a fast track to the only destinations being jail or death, the world still seemed open with our ignorance guiding us throughout. We knew the dealers, the bangers, the prostitutes, we knew it all, and for that two mile stretch we were the kings of nothing, but at least we were kings. It was probably about ten years later and the world changed with the internet taking over. All of a sudden, every dream and every impossibility seemed within our reach and very, very possible. All you had to do was go online and read the numerous stories of people who were hustling and succeeding. Jay-Z became our inspiration for someone who come up from the hustle and made it big, while also making everyone around them successful. With our diametrically opposed personalities, we knew we could represent something that had never been seen before, and it truly felt like the beginning of a brand new gold rush. We wanted it. We wanted happiness. We wanted money. We wanted the new life money could buy. We had heard all the sayings before on how money couldn’t buy happiness, but have you ever been miserable when there’s no food and you can’t afford any? When the winter drops the temperatures below zero and you can’t afford heat or electricity and all you can think about is how there’s absolutely no hope? Now, have you ever been depressed when there’s a refrigerator full of food, or sad when the winter has the outside world below zero, but inside you are walking around in a house that’s in the mid-seventies with so much electricity every room is a shining beacon unto itself? People who say money can’t buy happiness are correct, but it can put you in a lifestyle that allows you to be happy. We had always found that people who say this never knew what it was like to be alone for days on in as a nine year old kid when no parent comes home. How at that time you have to find whatever it is you can find to eat because your parent has long since stopped caring, and now they’ve just stopped remembering. The hopelessness as you eat toothpaste, or on the rare occasion it was there, dog food. The utter panic that a nine year old has during these times, but not having the mental experience to know what these new feelings that utterly decimate your soul are. The days when you have to go the hospital to see your parent having their stomach pumped due to overdoses or suicide attempts. How in the fifth grade you don’t how to buy deodorant but know exactly how to pump your parents stomach with a charcoal milkshake? The absolute suffocation of despair as it seems every breath, every step, every moment of hope is just something that allows for a greater depression to wrap its claws around your neck and further squeeze out what little hope you have for life left? Very few people understand how before you even make high school the only air you can breathe is the air that makes you realize nothing will ever get better, better times are for people with watches, you have death or suicide, when the only hope is that maybe the next life will get it right. We knew this, we experienced this, and once we understood we were both here, we knew we could do it. If someone’s Hard Knock Life could lead to a Yellow Brick Road, then ours could as well. The streets prophet even waxed poetic on the Rose That Grew from Concrete. And with the internet, we could make money with the kids in the neighborhood who were C++ straight and moving on, we would finance them and ride the success. One of the women we knew, a stripper who was using her money to become C++ and go into business for herself, was looking for backers, not fuckers, but backers, and we told her we could spot twenty grand. She agreed, we panicked. Twenty grand only existed in a state of verbiage for us, that was a reality for preps, not street punks. But we had two months until she needed it, so we fell back on our only steady in our life, the streets and the hustle. My cousin and his girlfriend would come up with ten, me with ten. During the days I would run whatever packages I could for the hustlers, at night I would run guns for the dealers. Deuce-deuces and deuce-fives, sixty for unloaded, eighty for loaded. That was my hustle. I never slept during that time, not only because I was on the clock for twenty-four-seven, but this wasn’t me and my stomach and nerves reminded me of this at every moments peace. My dreams were nightmares worse than the nightmares of my reality, but we had to do it. We only wanted the little biggest slice of the pie, and this was our break. The two months came and I had ‘made mines’ about a week prior. I went to see the stripper on the day we agreed, my cousin and his girlfriend made theirs, but as she danced away and I sat, my cousin never showed. I told her he had it, just to give it another week. During the days I searched everywhere I could for him, but no where was the only answer I could get. On the third night of me waiting in the strip club, his girlfriend showed up. He had left. She came home one day and he was gone, took everything. And just like that, I was dead in the water. All the memories I had of us, coming up, times spent running the streets, laughing, fighting, discovering life only the way you can with a family member, all gone. Now when I drove the streets, the air seemed colder and the smell of the piss painted black tops never seemed to leave. It was all over, as was my faith in humankind. That year closed in utter depression. It was about a year later a frantic knock on my door woke me up. I could see one of my cousins at the door, pounding on it. I opened it up to the panicked tone of someone who was in shock. He was in his backyard is what I was told. I didn’t have any clue as to what my cousin was talking about, so I told him to calm down and tell me again. THE cousin. He was in his backyard. A bullet in the chest and buried alive. I was shocked. I asked what happened. I was told what would’ve been about two days before we were supposed to meet with the stripper, his girlfriend came home tweeking, and he told her she had to go the rehab or get out of his house, so she shot him in his sleep. He wasn’t dead, it was a chest gunshot wound, but then she buried him alive, where he died. For a year he stayed buried while she lived there. When I met up with her and we drove all around the city looking for him, she had already shot and buried him. After she was arrested, my cousin was added to a national database for Domestic Violence Fatalities. It turns out being born of a dad who left, a mom who didn’t want him unless it was to put down or verbally abuse him, had left him to find a partner just like that. Abusive. He wanted out not only because of the streets, but because he just wanted to escape all the abuse. My cousin and I. We who fought many, surrounded by machismo bullshit all our lives, and he was going home to an abusive partner. He never would’ve told me his girlfriend was abusing him. And now his last words were whatever was being said as the dirt piled onto him, his final stop in this world, an unwanted son buried alive with a bullet in his chest.