'Stay low': An Albany teen's journey - Times Union

singkrata.blogspot.com

He wanted to escape his neighborhood on First Street, a place where before Labor Day eight people had been shot — where his own home was damaged by stray bullets. So Zanief Washington grabbed his skateboard and met his friends at the Empire State Plaza.

“I already messed up one arm,” Zanief, 19, warned his friends on a recent Friday night as they studied a steep hill. An aspiring musician, he imagined how hard it would be to pen lyrics with an injured arm. “I can’t risk it. I like to write. I can’t, man.”

He was hanging out, but he was also fleeing from an environment that could feel perilous. More than 100 people had been shot, and 14 killed, in Albany this year — most occurring within walking distance of his home. He often heard the pop of gunfire. He wasn't a direct victim of violence, but the factors that cause it have transformed him.

He was broke — his $102 laptop couldn’t even process music software. The last time he spoke to a police officer, he was questioned because he supposedly looked like a suspect. And just walking to other neighborhoods around Albany made racial and economic inequalities visible.

Zanief is one of many young people in the Capitol Region whose lives have been shaped by entrenched poverty, by violence that envelopes them. At no time is this more true than now, as Albany sees a historic level of shootings while the country witnesses local and nationwide demands for racial justice, and reels from a pandemic shutdown.

“Yeah, I’m not skating down this,” said Dwayne Thomas, who has known Zanief since their high school field trip to Salem, Mass., after reading Arthur Miller's play “The Crucible.”

The trip was Zanief’s first and only time traveling outside of Albany. His mother was busy supporting four kids mostly by herself, so instead of a car Zanief had black Vans and a board that he pushed and kicked around the plaza — until he fell, his board rolling underneath him toward the broad reflecting pool.

Zanief Washington aspires to become a professional musician, photographer and artist. His first live performance was at Rocktoberfest in 2019, where he performed his original song, "Hide N Seek."

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

In many ways, Zanief's life mirrors that of many teens: He loves skateboarding and anime, dreams of a music career. He knows the pain of lost love.

But all his life, Zanief has been affected by gun violence — all the way back to the cousin killed by a stray bullet who was buried the day Zanief was born. When he was 6, another wayward bullet left a hole in the living room wall while he was playing a "Spider-Man 3" video game.

He has never met his biological father, and never wants to. He has his mom, Latish Johnson. That’s enough for him. When Johnson had Zanief at age 19, she promised herself he’d be the first in the family’s history to graduate high school. The framed Albany High School certificate on the living room dresser says "Honor Roll."

On Saturday morning, Johnson was with her youngest children, Pedro and Egypt Valderrama, 3 and 2. Their father, Pedro Valderrama, is Zanief’s step-dad. They used to watch “Dragon Ball Z” together and wrestle and make each other laugh with Doritos in their mouths.

Valderrama has been in prison since 2018 and could get out as early as 2027. He was allegedly selling drugs out of the family's home on First Street. Undercover officers determined — after the raid in the home one morning — that Valderrama had a loaded handgun, crack cocaine, marijuana and over $1,300 in cash. Valderrama is serving a sentence on a weapons possession conviction at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County.

Zanief told those who asked that he didn’t know what had been going on. He was 16, a nerdy child too busy in high school. But he wasn’t surprised. It was a small drug gig, but it was a drug gig, and Valderrama had a gun, and so he is in prison. Johnson was not involved in any way. Once again, she was a single mother. Zanief would get questions in school: What happened? But he didn’t want to talk about it.

He listened to his siblings as he walked downstairs.

“What is that?” Pedro asked as he tried to climb on Johnson’s shoulders. “What is that? Gimme.”

“SNAP benefits,” Johnson said. “Do you read?”

“Gimme.”

“Say, ‘We’re getting an increase in food stamps.’”

It was $40 extra. On her next trip to BJ’s, she would have $680 to buy what she could until the next month. Lots of rice and chicken, most likely. Every month, in the mailbox of Johnson's Section 8 home, around $700 arrives in a disability check, which helps pay the $900-$1,200 in bills that accompany it, which leaves her behind, which means a savings account is as useless to her family as the prospect of paying someone to come repair the basement window that another stray bullet shattered years ago.

Zanief Washington and his mother, Latish Johnson, take a selfie in their home on First Street.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

And now Zanief’s skateboard was gone, ruined after plunging into the pool.

“You’re gonna be walking for some days, buddy,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” Zanief said.

His mother had raised him with tough love. She would look around her neighborhood and see many boys out of school, beginning to sell drugs, left destitute by their environment.

Her family lived in a neighborhood where the poverty rate in 2015 was around 37 percent; where the median income was under $29,000; where 29.6 percent of students in the city’s school district were in poverty.

Break the cycle, she’d tell herself. So she told Zanief what a man should be: unemotional, confident, tough.

She told him to mind his business, but if someone got in his, fight back. When he came home with two black eyes at age 10, she gave him instructions:
Suck it up — deal with it. If they see you cry, you’re finished. Adapt.

Earlier in the week, his cousin had stopped by the house to say hello.

“What’s up, man?” his cousin had said as Zanief, breaking eye contact, heard a loud whoosh and looked down the street. It was a car.

Hearing a loud smack, Zanief had looked to his right — a car door was slamming shut.

He was always scanning, always paying attention to his surroundings to a degree that friends from different neighborhoods never displayed.

Images from Zanief Washington's Instagram accounts at @yrg_filmworkks and @zanief_youngredhoodie.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

Zanief retreated to Washington Park later on Saturday and scrolled through Instagram.

“I strive for greatness,” read the caption on one of his posts. “I show discipline. Stay low, keep to yourself and the blessings will come in time.”

The blessings had come before. Attending SUNY Schenectady last year enabled him to make music; he had been pursuing a digital music and digital beats certificate, a one-year program. He has a SoundCloud account with a little over 2,000 plays. He had begun the first serious relationship of his life, with a girl from his high school who went to Anime Club with him.

He sat on a bench and thought about it all. How he hated his college experience. How he gladly left the school in March with the pandemic as his excuse, never finishing the certificate program. How he wanted to be on Spotify and Tidal because those music platforms actually paid. How his two-year relationship was over, and the first love of his life had brought tears to his eyes when he read her farewell text. It was one of the only times his mom said it was okay to cry, and so he did, against her shoulder.

“I feel like I might fall behind,” he sang in “Hide N Seek,” one of his songs. “Starting to think about failing you. It’s only a matter of time. But this is the hand that I dealt.”

Images from Zanief Washington's Instagram accounts at @yrg_filmworkks and @zanief_youngredhoodie.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

As he walked back to First Street on Saturday afternoon, he looked at his surroundings. Houses denoted as abandoned with big red “X” signs, almost no affordable grocery stores, several small corner stores touting impossibly large lottery prizes.

The Powerball and Mega Millions signs glowed all day and night, as if they were lighthouses signaling to people drifting in debt and unemployment that here, with the right ticket, they would be brought back ashore, back to security, away from the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Zanief walked past the lottery signs.

Down the street was an Albany police vehicle. Another police vehicle drove by. Another was parked across from an abandoned home on Lexington Avenue.

He asked himself what community policing meant. How come he only saw officers in their vehicles or at crime scenes?

He walked by his old middle school building, Brighter Choice, the one that was all-boys and almost all Black students and teachers. They were sixth and seventh graders back in 2013-14, and they spoke with one another about being broke, because the unemployment rate in Albany at that point hovered between 6 and 8 percent.

They spoke about getting ahead, because in the Capitol Region, almost 42 percent of Black households reported earning less than $25,000 annually from 2009-13. From the year many of them were born, 2000 or 2001, the city with the highest poverty rate in the Capitol Region was their city — Albany, with 10.6 percent. And by the time they got to middle school in 2013, the poverty rate had increased to 13 percent. So Zanief heard the children talk about making money the quickest way they knew how: getting in the streets, selling drugs.

Zanief was almost back home, near Orange Street and Lexington Avenue. There had not been a shooting in five days. A man with white headphones began to cross the street as a car approached. The man kept walking in the middle of the road, and the car wasn’t slowing down. He stopped in the car’s path as it picked up speed.

“Hit me!” the man yelled.

The car sped on.

“Hit me!”

The car continued before screeching to a halt right in front of the man.

“What the hell you want?” he yelled.

The car honked its horn.

“What! Hit me!”

Another honk.

“Hit me!”

Zanief took a slight step back, glancing his eyes toward the man and car, wondering if there'd be violence.

“Oh my God,” Zanief muttered.

“Hit me, hit me,” the man continued.

Then the vehicle drove away, and the man walked on, his backdrop a row of dilapidated houses.

“Some people just don’t care,” Zanief said, walking away.

Zanief Washington holds fake money at a photo shoot at Youth FX, an organization that empowers young people in the Capitol Region through media arts and digital film.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

“Y’all wanna skate,” Zanief texted a group chat Sunday at 2:27 p.m. “We don’t have to skate just hangout.”

He woke up an hour earlier because he was going to sleep at 4 a.m. He still had no skateboard.

“Where and what time?” a friend responded a few minutes later.

“Like 4:30-5,” Zanief said.

And then an hour passed. No response from anyone. Another hour — still no text.

Finally, a friend said: “I got some stuff to do today but I can another day if y’all down.”

No one else said anything. He was stuck alone again, so he went for another all-day walk.

He has no standard hourly job, but local rappers sometimes hire him to shoot behind-the-scenes photos of music videos. He charges $150 an hour for photo shoots, but he can’t edit them, so he asks a friend with a better laptop to help. He’s had three clients so far. He tries to network as much as he can with local artists. He is entrepreneurial. He’s studied the music profession. He knows what equipment he needs, the types of songs he wishes to make.

But he couldn’t create anything without money.

And when he looked around, this is what he saw: vigils for shooting victims; “RIP” scrawled onto the pavement. In front of him: a cop in his Albany police vehicle; an abandoned house; kids playing in the park on Third Street, climbing the jungle gym.

Zanief Washington loves to look at sunsets when he goes on long walks around the city. He often posts photos of sunsets on his Instagram page.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

By late afternoon, he was at Albany High School, where he created his first songs and felt most at home. He hadn’t visited since graduation.

Back then, he had a full house to come back home to. He had a blue nose pit bull, his mother, an uncle, siblings. He had a stepfather.

And now he was walking back home, where the police raid took place.

The last time Zanief saw his stepfather, they were playing Injustice 2 on Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018. He picked Hellboy, Valderrama picked Harley Quinn. They were eating Doritos. They boxed for a bit. They said goodnight around midnight.

Early that Wednesday morning, there was a knock on Zanief’s bedroom door, which was slightly cracked open. He thought it was his stepfather coming in to get his keys. He got up and peeked. Bright lights were aimed at his face. He saw an officer with one hand by a gun holster. They pointed guns at his dog.

“That’s my son,” Johnson recalled telling the officers.

An officer handcuffed Zanief, then asked questions:

Did he know what was going on?

“No.”

What was his name?

“Zanief.”

They sat him down on the couch.

“Am I in trouble?” Zanief recalled asking.

No, they told him.

“Can I go get dressed?” he asked next because he was still in grey sweatpants and a white T-shirt.

The officer followed him to the bedroom, then to the toilet because Zanief had to use the bathroom before school, which he figured he’d be late for.

An officer took the handcuffs off Zanief. He never saw them take his stepfather; he had been asleep when they did. Zanief texted his girlfriend that his house had been raided, that he’d been handcuffed.

She didn’t believe him until he sent her a photo of the marks on his wrists.

Now it was getting dark, and Zanief was returning to First Street. His mother texted him: “What time are you coming home?”

“I’m home,” he said a few minutes later, walking in the door.

Images from Zanief Washington's Instagram accounts at @yrg_filmworkks and @zanief_youngredhoodie.

Courtesy of Zanief Washington

Again, he awoke at 1 p.m. on Sunday. Again, he left.

His destination this time was the Empire State Plaza.

As he left his neighborhood:

“Excuse me, anyway you can give me some cash for bus fare?” a man with brown smudges on his clothes asked.

“I don’t have any cash,” Zanief said.

As he sat in Washington Park:

“Ay, you wanna smoke weed?”

He didn’t.

Now Zanief walked through different neighborhoods near Lark Street, ones that were a 20-minute walk away and more affluent:

A white man was riding on a pastel yellow bike, listening to Bob Marley as he passed by a white man gardening outside.

“Hi, how are you?” a white man in a blue button-down sitting on the front porch steps asked Zanief.

Zanief nodded and kept walking.

Before crossing on Hamilton Street, Zanief heard a car coming and flinched, taking a few steps back onto the sidewalk.

At the same time, on the opposite side of Hamilton, a white man with earphones on kept jogging and crossed the street. The black Hyundai Sonata stopped for the man, and as it did, Zanief scanned the road again, then crossed.

Zanief often asked himself if they know how different their world was from his?

He climbed the steps of the New York State Museum and saw the governmental buildings around him.

“NY TOUGH,” stated the Corning Tower in lights.

Tough, like the time he fell off his skateboard here.

“TOUGH”

How he was told to act to survive.

“TOUGH”

The type of road he knew was ahead of him.

He was doing so many things right. He was being so cautious, so careful. He was pursuing his passion. He was working when he could. He was trying so hard to stay away from the danger — to, as his mom often said, break the cycle.

“NY TOUGH”

As the sunlight faded, the building’s lights became more pronounced. It was time to go home.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"low" - Google News
September 20, 2020 at 07:06PM
https://ift.tt/2ZPqMRq

'Stay low': An Albany teen's journey - Times Union
"low" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2z1WHDx


Bagikan Berita Ini