Trapped in Pandora's Last Box: A Street Life Pathodrama

By Aadil Luqman Jai

During Birminghams Civil Rights era, with racism and crime battling for prominence, pimp Blake McDaniel managed his business with brutal efficiency. Trapped in an endless downward cycle, McDaniels is confronted by the sins of his past sins that are visited on his son.

Torn between two father figures and his mothers persistent dream, Tyson McDaniels struggles to make the right choices. His father is a drug addicted Vietnam veteran who transforms his racial anguish into living the life of a ruthless pimp. His stepfather, Vincent Big Vince Johnson, is a street-life late bloomer, a man who traded his assembly line job at Detroits General Motors for a roll of the street life dice. Lillian, his embittered mother, is caught between two vicious pimpsone she loves and one she hates. She is plunged into the very life she rejectedprostitution, drugs, and the need to escape a past of brutal racial hatred and a romantic disappointment too deep to forget.

Trapped in Pandoras Last Box explodes with deadly consequencesthe inevitable clash between Blake and his bitter rivals, Big Dester and Death Wish, Blakes imminent encounter with death and destruction, and the implications of his actions for the future of his son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462012053

Aadil Luqman Jai

Aadil Luqman Jai is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and was raised in the segregated south. His triumph over substance abuse and crime lends an authentic voice for urban fiction. He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he writes screenplays.

Book preview

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Author’s Book Bonus

Reference

Dedication

…To my children, grandchildren, the generations to follow and my entire family.

Acknowledgements

To all creative people, artist, writers, actors, singers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, screenwriters, playwrights, etc. Fortunate are you if you have producers, agents, managers, investors and industry sources who believe in your talent and give you total support to maximize your gift; be thankful. Don’t abuse it or take it for granted. You are blessed!

Foreword

If you do not prefer viewing harsh realities through gritty stories, this book is not for you.

If the suffering of women and their struggle to overcome their abuse is something you’d rather not be exposed to, then you might not want to read Trapped in Pandora’s Last Box.

If you find the language of the streets distasteful and offensive; the travails of abuse, crime, violence and suffering senseless trends beneath your dignity, this book is not for you.

If you think the world that young people live in should be filled with niceties, fair play and free of drugs; and you’d rather not see anything that portrays the opposite, put this book down!

If you’d rather not see how African American men and the descendant victims of racism, class discrimination, poverty and social repression turn their anger on their own community and the system they hold responsible, then Do Not Read This Book!

But if you seek out stories that offer a vivid peek into the raw world of racist cops, abused women, abusive men, pimps, drug dealers and the effect these trends have on our children and our society then I invite you to read this book. My major motivation for writing it is to challenge generational crime and abuse. To explore the idea that destructive life choices and experiences can be broken by better role models, a clearer view of our history and individuals willing to expose our youth to new paradigms to deal with old problems.

Aadil Luqman Jai

Spring, 2011

If I am what I have and I lose what I have, then who am I?

German Philosopher

Beth stayed as close as she could to Detective Dartmond. Four days had passed since she reported her husband Harley Cleburne missing. She wanted them to search his business on day two, but they claimed he needed to be missing seventy two hours before they could lodge an investigation. Only Harley had a key to the place, so when he didn’t show up after seventy two hours they broke the door down. Beth was prepared to hear good news, but terrorized over the possibility of hearing bad news. And what she was seeing and hearing pointed to bad news. She overheard one of the officers tell Detective Dartmond there appeared to be a struggle near one of the stripping vats. Another officer passed her with a clear bag of items that included the brown plaid shirt Harley was wearing the last time she saw him. It was at breakfast. He ate, had his coffee and left home in a fairly good mood. Harley’s business was a small operation called Strip All. It was a rare business that specialized in stripping wood, furniture and doors. Harley built huge vats or as he called them, wells which allowed him to submerge entire pieces of furniture, molding or a door into a powerful stripping solvent. He would soak the items for a day, sometimes longer, retrieve it, rinse it off and bingo, it was back to raw wood. It simplified the job for painters and builders and made Harley a lot of money. Suddenly a rush of urgent police buzz swept over the shop. They had discovered something that was not good. Detective Dartmond and a female officer approached Beth. The look on their faces sent her into hysterics. The female officer, introduced as Officer Randall followed Detective Dartmond’s orders. She took Beth, who was crying profusely by the arm and led her outside. The last thing they wanted Beth to see were the splotches and splatters of blood they discovered. The words Officer Randall spoke seemed unreal. They certainly weren’t the words Beth wanted to hear. Badly decomposed remains were found in one of the vats. After searching others they found the remains of two more people. It would take some time to get a positive ID, because the solvent had disfigured the bodies so badly. Beth was confused. Too emotional to make any sense out of what she was hearing, she humbly accepted Officer Randall’s suggestion that she allow her to take her home. Something very gory had taken place at Harley’s Strip All. Officer Randall assured Beth they would find out what happened and whoever was responsible for the death of her husband and the two other men will be brought to justice. A year earlier violent crimes jumped nationally from 42 to 50 percent. Birmingham had a stake in the rise. The city had transitioned into a vastly different city than its pre civil rights days, and trouble abounds where trouble abounds. During the spring of 1994, violence found two more unsuspecting victims.

A Flickering shadow moved oddly through the brush outside of Mamie’s whiskey house. Modest homes, barely held together by do it yourself carpentry, sparsely placed with no street lights completed the landscape. Surrounded by a plethora of pine, hickory and oak trees, arched into mountainous heights in the foreground; the night appeared peaceful. Tina Turner’s gotcha back hit What’s Love Got to Do with it? was blasting on the box. A group of men, led by Blood Murray, the former star running back were throwing good night jabs at each other.

Hey Clyde, tell yo mama I’ll be home when she clip huh toenails. Hell, um tired of gitting cut every damn night.

Fuck you Blood, you just mad cause you know um yo Daddy. I hate a sucker wit a daddy complex.

The shadow stood still, watching the men clown around. When Blood broke from the crowd the shadow moved. The quarter of a mile walk to his mama’s house went fast for Blood. He was high, but far from drunk. The shadow darted ahead of him and was waiting in the shrubbery near the gravel driveway. Chirping crickets were sounding off with their unique prattle. A lucid blush from the full moon blanketed the night. The moment Blood passed the shadow’s hiding place the shadow launched an attack. The hooded figure leaped on his back. Blood felt the slime of mouth spit and the hard kernels of teeth clamping on his ear. A horrible sting followed the bite. He struggled for a quick ten seconds. On the eleventh second he snorkeled, gagged and gripped his throat. His hands immediately over flowed with blood. The shadow rode him to the ground and whispered in his ear, pussy bought you heanh and now pussy taking you out. The shadow plunged a knife into the side of his neck, pulled up off of him and darted into the night. Two days later the shadow made another deadly appearance. The scene was an off the road string of shacks in Wylam, one of many towns created to house employees of the nearby coal mines and steel mills called The Whup Shack. The Shacks were crude home made cubicles that served as a get away for couples to have quick sex. A room could only be rented for four hours at a time. They were so crummy; no one could stay there once the fires of lust were cooled. It was a Wednesday night. Business was slow. But the action was on in room number eight. Tireless sex fiend Bull Dozier Evans, the deranged proto typical Mandingo was humping, tossing and punishing some poor girl who probably thought he was going to make love to her. Outside, beyond the faint lights of the shacks lurked the shadow. Moving in agile stealth the shadow crept up to Bull’s Cutlass and punctured a front tire; driver’s side. When Bull and his sexual victim came out, he looked at the tire, cursed and went to the trunk. After observing a few minutes the girl went back inside of the room. Bull kneeled down to break the lugs on the tire. Suddenly he felt the weight of a body on his shoulders. He stumbled to stand but the invader was biting his ear, scratching his eyes and reaching for his throat. Before he could fully recover he felt a splitting sting and a trail of warm liquid. It was red. His eyeballs focused through the warm liquid in his eyes and saw it was blood, his blood! The shadow whispered in his ear, Congratulations, you just got yo last piece of pussy. Before he could fall fully to the ground the shadow was gone. The girl opened the door. The light from the room revealed a sight she would never forget. Her ebony face twisted into a mask of shock. She belted out a scream that stole the night’s silence, reaching the ears of the fleeing shadow, running calmly through the woods that lined the sparsely traveled street.

Shortly after the murders of Blood Murray and Bull Dozier Evans, Captain Grogan called a crowd of officers and detectives to order inside the 6th Ave. Police Headquarters. Every strand of dingy red hair on his standard police crew cut, the style that made even law abiding black men duck and dodge stood at attention. He was Five nine and built like a water heater. His block head was locked to his shoulders, revealing very little neck. He shaped his expression into his I’m in charge face and commanded loudly;

Okay men, settle down - hey, damn it hold it down back there! Dis briefing gon be just dat, brief. There’s a killer out there with a motive and a time line that we sho as hell don’t understand. But two bodies in two days, with their throats slashed say this killer’s got some kinda personal grudge. This is anger. Could be revenge, could be a vigilante or some kinda psycho. I want these murders solved and the killer’s ass locked up. I say dis killer’s mad as a bull in a red suit. A killer dat bites, scratches and cut folks throat tell us something and dat’s what we heah to discuss. A detective raised his hand to ask a question. Captain Grogan stopped him, saying - hold your questions for now. I want you to look at the black board. On one side you see what we found on the crime scenes and on the other side what wasn’t found. What was found was two bodies, blood and similarities in the attacks. What wasn’t found was a weapon, and one ear missing off of each victim. For some strange reason dis sombitch bit off the ears and took dem from the crime scene. Now those the facts, what we know now. The floor is open for questions, theories, facts and observations. You McDonald, you had your hand up - talk to me. The meeting that Captain Grogan promised would be brief lasted two hours. The officers disband with still very little evidence and an investigative strategy that mostly entailed questioning neighbors and informants. The killer’s identity or motive remained a baffling mystery.

•

When Dr Tyson McDaniels returned to Birmingham in 1995 to fulfill his father’s request and commit him to the earth, it was a bete noire, a dreadful debt to pay to a family pariah. It wasn’t like he had a lot of experiences or memories to draw from. Being raised in Detroit by a mother who devoted her life to keeping him away from his father gave him little to relate to as he went about his duties as the oldest of Blake’s children. The last three years hadn’t been very kind to him. The work he put in to become a doctor was difficult, but the hurdles he foresaw in his move to Birmingham were even more arduous. First and foremost he needed information. He needed to know who his father really was. Was he a good man trapped in a bad situation or was he a bad man who created bad situations for himself and others? Though Dr. McDaniels spent his childhood in the seventies, his teen years in the eighties and grew into manhood in the nineties; he was truly a man equipped for the twenty first century. His father, his mother and his step dad were baby boomers, spin offs from the fifties, sixties and seventies. He tried with all of his youthful intelligence to understand their generation, but he kept running into brick walls. He was busy enough pondering trends and controversies in his own generation. He could clearly see the striking contrast that set the two worlds apart. It was cultural warfare, a place where the old school and the hip hop generation collided. When he listened to the music from the sixties and seventies he could easily groove to the smooth and rhythmic sounds of Motown, the message laced cool of the Philly sound and the undeniable, funky rock and blues from Memphis based Stax Records. But he found that he could also identify with the rap beats and the seemly endless braggadocio in hip hop. He had enough conversations with Grandpa Johnson in Detroit to get a clear understanding of why old school people were wary of rap. They talked often about the violence in the lyrics, the over the line, graphic sexual language; and the glorification of drugs, crime and gangbanging. He never heard the word misogyny until it was applied to rap. And he had to admit that as he got older and more involved with the demands of his goal to be a doctor, the more he understood the power of distractions. His responsibilities in protecting and guiding his daughter Kayla were shaping new perspectives in him daily. It was a responsibility that came complete with a special brand of challenges. During his youth the more he saw the kids he grew up with falling to the violence, prison and the entrapment of life in the hood, the more he understood Grandpa Johnson’s concerns. It was as if there existed no worlds of importance outside of their block, their neighborhood and the streets that fenced them in. He gathered first hand experience on the power of the streets through his relationship with his childhood friends, Montel and Jerron. The need to protect one’s self, friends and relatives demanded street toughness in their neighborhood. These conditions alone were direct invitations to gangbanging and hustling. Along with the struggle to understand and avoid such pitfalls in his experience, he struggled to understand the hypocrisy in the minds of old school denizens. Growing up in the world of his step father, Vince Johnson, beyond the shadow of his father and under the broken wings of his mother Lillian, he had some peculiar examples to wrestle with. He knew the sacrifices that the old school paid when they were young, many of them joining the civil rights and the black power movement. It was easy for him to understand their concerns that the hip hop generation and the youth of the fast approaching twenty first century were just taking the gains and sacrifices for granted. Yet he saw another side to their complaint. The youth of his era didn’t see every act of displeasure carried out by whites as acts of racism. They simply weren’t as suspicious about the conduct of whites. Even if whites intentions were race driven, and they missed it; they just weren’t that concerned about it. What concerned Dr. McDaniels the most were the social practices that were set in motion by the old school and the blame they cast on the young generation when they acted on those trends. There were over the line, graphic lyrics in the music of old school artist. He knew about Stagalee, who shot Billy in a crap game and Frankie murdering Johnny as he sat in a bar with another woman. He heard many of the same themes in their music that he heard in hip hop and new school R&B. Crime has been glorified in America going back to Jesse James and the outlaws of the Wild West, John Dillinger, Al Capone and the mobsters of the twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. The youth were simply doing the same thing, in their way, in their time. All of these thoughts were exploding in him as he rushed to meet an old friend of his Dad’s, a man by the name of Johnny Sharp. According to his brother Kenyatta, Johnny Sharp, (Kenyatta called him Uncle Johnny), and his dad grew up together, went into the war together and hustled in the streets as partners in crime. For once and for all he hoped that the information Johnny shared would not only help him know his father, but help him discern the causes that shaped their lifestyles and help him understand if he was missing something by choosing not to go into that lifestyle. On numerous occasions he found himself torn between two worlds. Many of the guys he grew up with started gangbanging and hustling early. He watched some of them make big money dealing drugs. Others went into car theft, car jackings, robbery and burglary. He also watched many of them die in violence or receive long sentences in prison for their crimes. His mother and Grandpa Johnson stayed on his butt, constantly reminding him that medicine was his way out. If that was true, he often wondered why his mother, his step dad and his dad chose the street life. Why didn’t they go into medicine or some other legitimate field? He wanted to know if each generation was doomed to repeat the same missteps as the previous generation.

When and how could the cycle be broken; when will the black community have more men on the streets being productive, being fathers to their children and caring and supportive of their women than in prison or the grave?

The blue van that Johnny described drove off of Interstate 65 and pulled onto the lot of The Huddle House on Green Springs Avenue. The downtown skyline could be seen in the distance, perched like a city on a vow to grow. Dr. McDaniels watched, to his surprise as Johnny unstrapped himself from his special equipped van, slid into his wheel chair, dropped his lift and maneuvered his chair into the restaurant, unassisted. Johnny had adapted easily to his life as a paraplegic. This was credited to his base understanding and loyalty to the street life code. After being gun down he accepted it as a what goes around comes around moment. His final vow to the streets was that he would not go after his shooter for revenge, but he would defend his life with his life. The minute Tyson saw his face he remembered him as the man who was with his dad at his grandmother’s funeral. He remembered because Johnny was dressed quite nice, had a cordial manner about himself and his mother embraced him with a warm, sincere hug. That was rare for Lillian, because she seldom showed affection to men. In fact, there were only two men he knew that she openly showed her love: Big Vince and Vince’s father, Grandpa Johnson. Johnny stared at Tyson longer that he should have. He could feel the discomfort it created for Tyson. But he was immediately impressed by this new day version of Blake. It was so rare to see a young black kid who could wear a sport jacket with coordinating slacks with such natural elegant ease. Most young black men he noticed were busy trying to master the look popularized by the rappers. But this kid was too busy being himself to get caught up in that. For the next three hours Johnny kept his promise. He shared his dad’s story. The pictures in each of their minds crystallized into one, filling the space between them with the vantage points that exist between the storyteller and the listener. He only stressed two things; that he reserve judgment until he could understand his dad’s mistakes and the society