PRL Serials

Journey back to an unexpected time and delve deep into what you think you know…

Phase I – The Children of A-space

Drug Wave

– Issue 3 –

I had the privilege to talk with a young man named Sonny who knows the men Ivan and Clay personally.

“All the stuff you hear about them is true,” he said early in our conversation to get it out of the way. “They have superpowers and shit, and they good people saving the world from stuff we don’t really want to know about.” 

I had learned about Sonny from the TIp: Earth editors who had featured an interview with him, and the last time I was in Winston Salem, North Carolina, I reached out to him. He was great to talk to and we met at his mother’s house. It is a beautiful home and we sat out back in the gentle breeze under a nice shade tree.

“I don’t know the why and all, but they do that stuff. Ivan is a good man. If anybody should have that kind of power, flying and stuff, he the one.”

Sonny explained that he’d met Ivan a couple years ago when he came to Tennessee hoping to find answers about a friend who was injured.

“I guess he was working with a detective and we got some answers. I’ll always appreciate both of them.”

When I met Sonny, he had been out of the drug game for a few years, retired in his mid-twenties, and he’d been living with his mother since he left New York. 

“After everything that happened. I was ready to give it up. I was glad to have the excuse. I realized that I was doing it to impress a man that didn’t really do all that much for me; my father. I wasn’t all that impressed with him, but people around here knew his name and they remembered stories about him. I was supposed to be just like him, but I was better. I did more in a year that he did in his life, and that was my first year. It only got better. But I guess I got tired of seeing people die. I ain’t saying I killed nobody, but it ain’t just the killing you doing, you know? It ain’t just shooting guns. That shit I sold was killing people, leaving babies without they mamas and daddies. I was killing my community. I didn’t want to do that no more.”

I asked Sonny his thoughts on a solution to the country’s drug problem.

“Don’t nobody who in a real position to do something about it really want to solve the drug problem. If they did, it would be fixed. I think the biggest problem is people confused as hell about what drugs even is anymore. The doctors sling more shit than these corner boys, and most of that shit ain’t necessary. All people need to do is stop eating shit that’s bad for them and move around a little bit, but they steady making drugs so people don’t have to change bad habits. I’m glad to be outta that shit. And no, I don’t go to the doctor. I’ll just die if I get sick.”

He laughed and I hoped that he was joking. 

I asked him about the alien drug, the sparkling one; I wondered if he had ever encountered it. 

“I used to work for a man who was big time in the game. I went to live in New York and I was one of his gophers, like whatever he needed, I did it for him. I was young and he ain’t never asked me to kill nobody, but I put beatings on people for him. I delivered scary messages and flashed weapons to intimidate. Anyway, he was the kind of man that had access to drugs like that. I never met him, but he had a scientist friend who could cook up anything he asked for, and some shit he didn’t want. I wouldn’t be surprised they ever made alien drugs, but I didn’t ever see it.”

Sonny was sketchy about details of the man he had called his boss, even though the man was shot to death about three years ago. 

“It’s strange to talk about him with a civilian, but I guess you a reporter. He taught me how to survive in that game and knowing who to talk to about what was probably the most important thing he taught me. Men like that, they know that a most powerful man attains power by trafficking in information. They try to limit stories about their personal lives in the general public and encourage the telling of those that make them look scary. They seek to know every corrupt or corrupatable person in positions of power or authority in hopes of gaining advantage or access. Information is the key to longevity and it separates a dealer from a trafficker.”

I love listening to the way a man like Sonny uses language. He speaks colloquially, with a noticeable southern accent, but when he is really analyzing something, it’s as though the conversational speech is inappropriate or inadequate to properly characterize his analysis and he speaks with more formal and elevated language that is also precise to properly convey his meaning. And he sounds like a natural using both patterns of speech, not like he is forcing anything or trying to impress me. It gave me the sense that his discussions with other high level drug traffickers was probably very sophisticated and I would have enjoyed sitting in on those conversations. 

“But all of that longevity, all that working to maintain, is vicarious. Working with drugs means you encounter dangerous people who care more about themselves than anything else, and you are liable to die at any time for reasons that may not even make sense to you if you knew them. It’s hard to really be happy and sell drugs.”

Drug Life

– Issue 2 – 

When he was a teenager, Tyrone was a healthy looking man. He wasn’t taller than average, but he was solidly built and the scowl on his face seemed to belong to an older man with many years of grievances. He was feared by his teachers in school because of the cognitive dissonance of dealing with a teenager in what they perceived to be the body of a grown man capable of significant violence. 

He spent a lot of time in the principal’s office and then he was recommended for permanent placement at a group home for troubled boys. It was there that he would earn his moniker, Fire.

“One of the men that worked there was a pedofile.” I spoke with a man who had lived in the group home at the same time as Fire. He still lives in the same town, he owns a house in the same neighborhood, and we walked past it through the quiet streets as we talked. “He ain’t never touch me, I made sure I wasn’t ever alone with him, but he touched a lot of boys. I remember when Fire first came, we was in the same room. He was mean if you tried to talk to him, but I left him alone. The pedofile used to try to talk him, find some reason to touch him, and Fire couldn’t take it. Eventually, he waited until everybody was asleep, the pedofile fell asleep on the couch, Fire set that bitch on fire.”

The group home was closed shortly after the incident and it has been a residential home since. Fire had killed the man and burned most of the living room. He avoided jail time; the murder was deemed self defense because others had testified that the man was inappropriate with children.

Shortly after, he was released back on the streets, and I am reminded of something my drug dealer friend in Baltimore, Maryland told me.

“You hear stories,” he said when we first met, “bad men, like the baddest dudes you can imagine, disappear off the streets and they supposed to be running things. But it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just stories.”

Fire wasn’t back on the streets long before he wasn’t on the corner selling drugs anymore. He had proven himself and ascended, and he became the personal bodyguard of the man who had preceded him. He too had made a name for himself in a dangerous game before he was called up to bigger things.

Fire was self made. He had no role models pushing him into a life of drugs, he had no father to impress. He became the man that he wanted to be. Though it is true that he had very few models of happy and successful black men and he cobbled together an existence that was part Cosby show, part Scarface.