John sometimes asks me why I never share the details of my private life. I'm not like him, I know about John's ex-wives, his family, his religion, his views on everything from politics, to foreign policy, to the environment. He has nothing to hide, whereas I do. I could tell him lies but they are hard to keep track of. I could tell him the truth, but I suppose I'm too ashamed.
I am a New York City detective, a job that has standing and responsibility. A job I'm proud of. But I wasn't always a person who deserved standing and responsibility and I certainly wasn't always someone to be proud of. I started off just another black kid from the Bronx and the projects of Brooklyn. My mom loves me, always will and that if nothing else keeps me going. I never knew my father, and I'm glad. My mother always had men going through her life and mine, and all of them were bad, all of them took advantage of her, and all of them treated her bad. I'm just glad I never had to see a man I share a gene pool with treat my mother that way. Not many black kids from the projects go on to become police officers or detectives. Most die young, or rot in jail. That was almost my fate. I started running drugs when I was 11, at first I did it for my mom, for rent, for groceries. It seemed easier just to walk somewhere with a bag of powder in your pocket than see my Mom work 14 hour days. But after awhile I found myself doing it for me. Fast money is just as addictive as the drugsI was running. Seeing those stacks of bills in your hand, in your pocket was mesmerizing. I started selling crack when I was 14, the risk was higher and the money was better, my adrenaline got pumping. My Mom despite how much she loved me kicked me out when started getting high. I never blamed her, she had my two younger sisters in the house to think of. After that day when she screamed at me, a phrase I never heard before: You're just like your father. I didn't see her again for nearly three years. That phrase, more than the drugs kept me away, I had turned into another man who broke my mother's heart. I went and got stupid. I dealt drugs, took drugs, got myself a gun, and lived on the streets and in crappy hole in the wall apartments where the cockroach count always outweighed the human count. Even trying to remember those years are difficult everything is a blur, everything is foggy, people are faceless, and places have no names as I drifted from one crack hit to another. I was just another statistic, just another project kid that the white police officers were afraid of.
My son was born when I was 17, His mother wasn't a girl I really knew, she was just one of the many people I woke up beside. I didn't believe her that it was my kid, and I tried to ignore her and go back to my crack induced haze. By some freakish coincidence one of my friends was shot the day he was born, and I saw her at the hospital. I stood in front of the nursery glass just looking at him until my hands started to shake, my heart started pounding out of my chest and my face streamed with sweat. Even then I didn't want to leave. He was tiny and beautiful and he starred at me through that glass with my eyes. He was the quietest kid there, I fell in love with him. I vowed I would clean up, change my life. Charise, his mother and Dorian, my son were staying at my tiny rat infested apartment in the Colin Brown Brooklyn projects. One day I woke up and she was gone, Dorian was crying, and I found that there was nothing in the house by cigarette butts and crack pipes. I tried to straighten my life out, I cleaned up and went home begging to my mother. She agreed to help me, but told me in her take no prisioners voice that she would call social services if I ever got high in her house. I tried not to get high. It was the hardest thing I did everyday. Walking out my front door knowing a dozen places that I could go where it would be cheap and no questions asked. I needed money and I sold drugs, its all I knew. One day on a bleak October day I was approached my an undercover cop to be his snitch, to be his source. He offered me money and I agreed. I became friends with a person I used to think didn't understand my language who didn't understand my plight. He was a good guy and I told him all I knew. Over coffee, months later he looked at me and asked why I didn't get a real job, why I didn't try to get on the force. I laughed in his face. I thought about the questions the police would ask. Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Have you ever served jail time? Do you have a high school diploma? I couldn't even answer the first two, I didn't know. I'd been arrested, I'd been to jail, but I was too cracked out, I couldn't remember if I went to court, I couldn't remember if I was charged. I laughed at it, but it made me think. The next day I enrolled in a G.E.D night course, my mother hugged me and Dorian called me Daddy for the first time. It kept me off the streets at night and probably saved my life. I got my G.E.D and I applied to the police academy, my friend gave me a recommendation. They were not accepting of me, but I could pass the physical test and I was a minority, I could fill the quota. I moved into the city, got my own apartment, enrolled Dorian in kindergarden. Everyday we both learned something new, he would tell me about his sand castle and show me his painting and I would tell him about felonies and misdemeanors. For the first time in my life I as making money legally and it felt good. I became a New York City police officer. Everyone thought I would be a crooked cop, that I would use my position to break the law, and make money. I was determined to prove them wrong. I wore a uniform, drove a squad car. My son didn't live in the projects, he knew me, he would tell his friends at school proudly that I was a cop. Time went by and I began to lose Dorian. The job I got to protect my son, made him slip away. I made detective in narcotics, I was at my best, I had to work long hours. I once told Elliot that I left narcotics because my partner got shot, which he did. But I also never wanted to arrest my own son. I started to hear about 'King' a black male in his teens. My son. He knows I love him and I hope that someday he'll find something that will make him realize that his life is worth living, because as much as I try I cannot be that person for him.
I'm a special victims detective. I live in a nice apartment, I have a respectable girlfriend. But that's just a front. I spent 6 years on crack, my son is a drug dealer, my mother still lives in the projects, one of my sisters is a prostitute and my other sister became a mother at 16. Her kids didn't make her clean up. I'm ashamed of them, I'm ashamed of myself. I was determined never to tell anybody. Until I walked into the office one day and was informed of the next case in which the suspect was a black male in his late teens, early twenties, a drug dealer named 'King.'