The Bank Robbery
by
Carolyn Holbrook & Steven Holbrook
On November 10th
2002, my eldest son was sentenced to ten years in the federal
penitentiary. Ten years hard time in maximum security. This wasn’t the first time Steven was
given a number to replace his name. He has spent most of his life behind bars; a short sentence
here, a longer one there. But this time it was serious. This time my #1 son robbed a bank in a
lily-white suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, a blue collar burb with a shamrock as its logo, a 36-mile
area fifteen miles south of the Twin Cities whose census data in the year 2000 reported a
population of 14,619 white people with a smattering of Asians and Latinos and one or two black
folks for diversity; a community with a median income of $65,916 derived primarily from heavy
industry – refineries, industrial waste plants and the like.
A few years earlier, Steve was feeling frustrated. “Mom,” he complained, “nobody wants
to give an ex-offender a decent job or rent him a decent apartment, especially if he’s a felon.”
But my #1 son had held on tight and, to his surprise and my great pride, some good things started
to happen for him, a series of firsts; he worked his way off parole for the first time since he was a
teenager, he landed a job driving a semi – the job he had dreamed of since I bought him his first
set of Hot Wheels when he was barely old enough to walk – the kind of job that allowed him to
feel powerful as he guided a mighty rig across the highways of the U.S. of A. praising God for
the beauty of the plains, the hills and mountains, the rivers and the oceans that he witnessed
along the way. For the first time in his life, my #1 son had the means to buy a brand new car
-1-
and, for the first time, he was blessed with a child of his own.
But one morning when Steve showed up for work, ready to hit the road, he was faced
with the shocking news that the company had closed its doors, leaving all of its workers jobless
and leaving him vulnerable, in danger of reverting back to his old patterns. Ex-
offender/convicted felon seeks employment. Baby’s mama screaming on him cuz the rent’s late
and baby needs shoes. Powerless. Ashamed to tell the shrink he didn’t have the money for the
meds that kept his bi-polar disorder in check. Powerless. Ashamed to call his Narcotics
Anonymous sponsor or anyone else, for that matter, including The Almighty, to ask for help.
Shame has amazing power. It can cause a person to turn something around so that it
begins to look like what happened was your fault, like Steve was to blame for the company’s
problems.
Shame.
Shame buried just beneath the epidermis, the top layer of his skin, ready to jump out and
bite him in the ass at a moment’s notice. Shame stored in his genetic memory, imbedded in his
DNA. Shame that started when his great-great-great-grandparents were shackled and forced to
walk through the Door of No Return, locked up on ships that carried them through the middle
passage shitting and puking all over themselves and their relatives, friends and neighbors chained
close together like they were in a can of sardines then stripped of their history, their identity, their
language, their religion. Shame passed down to him through three or four generations of family
members who suffered the pain and humiliation that started with slavery and mutated into deep
anger and self hatred, one of the far-reaching effects of the phenomenon known as post traumatic
slave syndrome. It’s the kind of shame that has no place to go except to be visited upon those
-2-
less powerful, like spouses and children. My mama praised me for having put an end to the child
abuse that’s been in our family for all of those generations but by the time I learned how to show
my children that I love them, it was too late for Stevie. Shame. Shame. Shame on you.
It only took a few weeks for the positive energy Steve had built up over a few short years
of living productively to dissipate. He began to spiral out of control, sinking into that familiar
black hole of drugs and alcohol. And on November 20,
2001, two months and nine days after the
attacks on the World Trade Center, a year and ten days before he was sentenced to the federal
penitentiary, my #1 son imploded.
Dear Mom,
Donna threw me out and I was living in my truck so I decided to head out to Denver. I
liked it when I lived there before but it wasn’t the same this time. I got with this beautiful hooker
named Celeste and got stranded when she stole my SUV. I tracked down the guy who hooked me
up with her and pressed him to tell me where she was. He took me to her place and I met her
grandfather. I told him she stole my truck and he got upset, frustrated with his granddaughter,
saying “I don’t know why she keeps doing this to me.” The old man, Calvin, let me stay there
for about a week, until the police found my truck in the impound lot. I didn’t even recognize the
signs that said I was once again reaching the bottom of my life ... which is always the stop before
prison.
I had no money at all, so I called my little bro and he sent me enough to get my car out
and get back home. I promised to give him the money as soon as I got back to Minnesota. In
fact, I asked him to pick up my unemployment check and hold it until I got back, which he did.
-3-
I called him when I was about six hours away and told him that I would be there around
3 or 4 in the morning. He stashed my check on his front porch so I could pick it up without
disturbing his family.
I blazed into town around 4 a.m. Stopped off at my brother’s and picked up my check
from the hiding place on his porch, hit the freeway and headed to the check cashing place on
Lake Street and First Avenue. It should have taken me about a half hour to get from his place in
the burbs but at that time in the morning, when there isn’t much traffic, it only took half the time.
My plan was to cash the check and run back out to Julian’s crib to give him the money I
owed him. But I ended up at the crack house instead. My custom has always been to get my
dope and then look for a woman. Not necessarily for the sex, it was more about the company. I
found this pretty, petite little Chicana and for the next day and a half, we went bar hopping,
went back and forth to the crack house and holed up in a motel in south Minneapolis.
I don’t know what it was about this girl that made me want to keep her. With street
women, time’s up when the money runs out so I was trying to use whatever brain cells I hadn’t
smoked up to figure out how to keep her from leaving. When we couldn’t stay at the motel any
longer, I pulled into a liquor store and stole a bottle of vodka.
We polished off the vodka in a matter of minutes and right about this time the edge was
coming off of the dope. I asked her if she had ever robbed a bank. She said no, but she knew of
a way to rob banks by computer. I really wasn’t trying to hear that because I was one of those
here and now type niggaz. I didn’t have the patience for all of that long term hustlin’.
It was Tuesday, right around noon, and we were getting hungry. I pulled into a Burger
King knowing that all I had were some bad checks from my account that had been closed, so I
-4-
went inside where I could write a check instead of tryin’ to order something at the drive-up
window.
When I came back out, the girl was gone. I guess all that talk about robbing banks
scared her off. But by now I had been talking so much about robbing a bank that I convinced
myself to do it. So I pulled into a convenience store and stole a pair of those dark, mirrored
sunglasses so no one could tell what I was looking at, and then it was off to the bank.
The first bank I went to was crowded so I left. Jumped back into my truck and just sat in
the parking lot for about 20 minutes. As I sat there, I saw where I was heading – back to prison.
I thought about all that I had lost in just a matter of thirty days; a good job that I loved, my
woman and my little baby girl. I began to feel tears well up but, Mom, I can’t cry – not one tear
fell from my eye. It was almost like those bitter tears were backing up into my soul.
I was in Apple Valley, not far from Hastings where there’s a detox center so I thought,
“I’d better get to detox, that’s the only thing I can do at this point.” I pulled myself together,
started up the Bravada and headed off with full intentions of getting off the freeway in Hastings
and droppin’ at the detox center. But as I was rolling through Rosemount I caught a glimpse of
a sign that said “TCF Bank Grand Opening.”
Very impulsively, I pulled into the parking lot, a Cub Foods supermarket with a TCF
bank attached to it. I circled the building and found a place to park, then I wrote a note
demanding money. I put on my shades and my baseball cap which read Female Body Inspector
(F.B.I. – how ironic), and went into the bank and scoped it out. One of the tellers stood out, she
was so beautiful. So I walked in, half mesmerized by the beauty of her caramel-colored skin,
her long, thick black hair, and her honey-colored eyes; and half desperate for the money. I
-5-
talked with her briefly and she told me that she was Persian. Then I slid her the note. I should
have slid her my phone number instead and asked her for a date.
She looked at the note and then looked at me like she was confused, like she couldn’t
believe what was happening and then she nodded her head in agreement. When she opened the
money drawer and began pulling out the cash, I noticed a slot in the drawer that was stacked
with $100 bills. Little did I know that slot had the device that would change the next ten years of
my life.
The Rosemount newspaper reported that Steve “used a threatening note and the
suggestion of a gun to walk out with an undisclosed amount of money.” Witnesses helped
identify him. “As he ran out of the bank he had shoved the money down his pants and a dye pack
exploded, which attracted the attention of a number of people. One wrote down his license
number.”
I imagine Steve dropping the bag of loot down the front of his pants and trying to walk
fast to the Oldsmobile Bravada, the SUV he had purchased brand new just a few months before,
when he was employed. I see him looking over his shoulder cuz he knows that a black man
stepping into a new car in small town Minnesota will raise some eyebrows. I hear the dye pack
explode. Pow! And I see this red substance cover the front of his pants as he climbs into the
truck.
Listen. Do you hear the crowd? Can you see people spilling out of the building? Do you
hear them yelling “Catch him!” “Don’t let him get away!” “Give me a piece of paper. Gotta get
his license number.”
-6-
And I see my #1 son peal out of the parking lot, out of his mind from the pain in his groin
and the crack cocaine that gave him the guts to stop off in white town and rob the bank, his dark
eyes shining with a mixture of sadness, wonder and surprise, glazed and sparkling like stars in a
clear sky on a summer night.
I imagine him taking his right hand off the steering wheel and reaching down to unfasten
the holster where his cell phone is locked, lifting the phone and dialing somebody’s number, then
parting the mustached lips that hide his perfect teeth. But before he can get the first word out, the
dye pack starts to burn in his crotch, making the insides of his bones scream. He muffles the
screams, recalling instead, the confusion on the bank teller’s face when she realized that the
glassy-eyed black man who stood on the other side of the bulletproof glass, the ginger-skinned
desperado dressed in dark glasses, a baseball cap, tight jeans and a brown leather jacket, stinking
to high heaven cuz he’d been up smoking crack and drinking whiskey for three days and three
nights, had slipped her a note commanding her to fork over the cash. But he can’t hold the
screams back for long. He has to keep moving before the cops catch up with him but where will
he go? He has to get that bag of hot money out of his pants before the substance ruins his ability
to father another child. He’s trying to keep control of his ride while his crotch is burning so hard
that we wonders if he has finally made it to that place where it’s rumored that Satan makes his
home. I imagine him digging his sweaty hand down where the Sun doesn’t shine and coaxing the
offending bag of cash away from his parched skin, a long, guttural moan barely making it past
the Adam’s apple on his thick, brown neck. And I imagine Julian, my younger son, who has
built a happy, prosperous, life with his wife and three sons feeling hurt, bewildered and
disappointed; wondering why his big brother ripped him off.
-7-
I put the bundle of money on the passenger seat and when I picked it up again it was still
smoldering, traces of the red dye had burned through the tan leather seats. I attempted to see
what I could salvage from the bundle. Now picture this, Mom. Here I am blazing down a dirt
road with my pants and underwear down around my ankles, kicking up a thick cloud of dust
behind me and tossing all of the destroyed, banded bundles of money that I couldn’t salvage, out
the window. Then it was off to Rochester where I had a delicious steak dinner and left the
waitress a $20 tip.
I hooked up with my dope man when I got back into town. It was the Tuesday before
Thanksgiving and I had promised him a month before that I would take him home to Detroit to
see his mom for Thanksgiving. You know me, Mom. How could I refuse a request like that? He
was just a 20-year-old kid. He called me “Unc” and I called him “Nephew.” I spent $400 with
him, then holed up in a hotel room close to his house smoking crack and tweaking so we could
hit the road on Wednesday.
I was still on fire from the burn I got from the dye pack so I showed it to the kid on the
way to Detroit. He asked me what had happened. He grimaced and then told me that I needed
to put some peroxide and Neosporin cream on it so we stopped and got some. Sure started
feeling better.
Soon as the youngster and I hit Wisconsin, my cell phone rang. I knew it was Donna. She
asked where I was and I told her I was on my way to Detroit for Thanksgiving. She asked me to
come back and spend it with her and the kids but all I could think was, “You got some nerve.
You threw me out of the house, I’ve been sleeping in my truck and you didn’t care when I was
stranded in Denver for five days and now you want me to have Thanksgiving with you?”
-8-
I talked with her again while I was in Detroit, told her I’d be back at 6:00 on Saturday
morning. I remember telling her that I was on my way to greatness (whatever that meant) and
she started crying. It didn’t dawn on me until later what her tears were about.
Anyway, we started back to Minneapolis on Friday night. The youngster was tired from
all the rippin’ and runnin’ we’d been doing so I took the first leg of the trip. Mom, I know you’re
familiar with Divine Intervention. Well, I believe that’s what happened for the rest of the trip.
God was not willing to let me go through with my plans for the next 24 hours.
I drove for about 4 hours and right around 6 a.m. as we were pressing through Gary,
Indiana and were about to head into Illinois, I got so groggy that I had no fight left in me, no
energy. I turned the wheel over to the youngster and was about to nod off to sleep when Donna
called again and asked where I was. I layed my seat back and went to sleep just as we were
about to cross the Illinois/Wisconsin border.
About four hours later, the youngster woke me up in a panic.“Unc! Unc!” he cried out.
“We’re getting pulled over!” Being a trucker, I knew how the troopers were in Wisconsin so I
said, “Boy, I told you not to speed in Wisconsin.” He assured me that he had set the cruise
control at 60 m.p.h. so I told him to pull over and we’d straighten the whole thing out. But he
said, “I don’t think you understand. We are getting pulled over!!!!”
I flipped down the visor and opened the mirror and when I looked out the windshield,
what I saw was like something you only see in movies. I swear, Mom, Wisconsin state troopers
and federal marshals were everywhere. They had completely shut the highway down! You
would have thought I was Osama Bin Laden, the way they came at me.
A few days later, as the marshals were transporting me to the Federal jail in Madison,
-9-
Wisconsin, I naively asked, “What is a marshal? Is he like a deputy or something?” The
marshal arrogantly replied, “Let me put it to you this way. I can go anywhere at any time and
arrest anyone, including the President of the United States.”
I thought, “Man, what have I gotten myself into?” Then I asked how they knew where I
was. He said, “You guys all make the same stupid mistake. We know that if we really want you,
all we have to do is hook up with your girl and she will lead us right to you.” I learned very
quickly what Donna’s tears were about when I told her that I was on my way to greatness. She
knew otherwise. She knew I was on my way to jail. And not only that, she knew that all the
while she was working with the feds to catch me.
Something else I found out (speaking of God’s intervention) was that, if the police would
have caught up with me 10 miles later, I would have ended up going to jail in a county of
Wisconsin that is run by the Ku Klux Klan.
So here I am, Mom. 10 years for a bank robbery that I only salvaged $1,000 out Pof.
That’s $100 a year, less than 37¢ a day. Now that’s crazy!
All my love,
Your #1 Son
Published in Black Renaissance Noir, New York University, April 2010
Published in Blues Vision, MN Historical Societry Press & MN Humanities Commission, 2015
2002, my eldest son was sentenced to ten years in the federal
penitentiary. Ten years hard time in maximum security. This wasn’t the first time Steven was
given a number to replace his name. He has spent most of his life behind bars; a short sentence
here, a longer one there. But this time it was serious. This time my #1 son robbed a bank in a
lily-white suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, a blue collar burb with a shamrock as its logo, a 36-mile
area fifteen miles south of the Twin Cities whose census data in the year 2000 reported a
population of 14,619 white people with a smattering of Asians and Latinos and one or two black
folks for diversity; a community with a median income of $65,916 derived primarily from heavy
industry – refineries, industrial waste plants and the like.
A few years earlier, Steve was feeling frustrated. “Mom,” he complained, “nobody wants
to give an ex-offender a decent job or rent him a decent apartment, especially if he’s a felon.”
But my #1 son had held on tight and, to his surprise and my great pride, some good things started
to happen for him, a series of firsts; he worked his way off parole for the first time since he was a
teenager, he landed a job driving a semi – the job he had dreamed of since I bought him his first
set of Hot Wheels when he was barely old enough to walk – the kind of job that allowed him to
feel powerful as he guided a mighty rig across the highways of the U.S. of A. praising God for
the beauty of the plains, the hills and mountains, the rivers and the oceans that he witnessed
along the way. For the first time in his life, my #1 son had the means to buy a brand new car
-1-
and, for the first time, he was blessed with a child of his own.
But one morning when Steve showed up for work, ready to hit the road, he was faced
with the shocking news that the company had closed its doors, leaving all of its workers jobless
and leaving him vulnerable, in danger of reverting back to his old patterns. Ex-
offender/convicted felon seeks employment. Baby’s mama screaming on him cuz the rent’s late
and baby needs shoes. Powerless. Ashamed to tell the shrink he didn’t have the money for the
meds that kept his bi-polar disorder in check. Powerless. Ashamed to call his Narcotics
Anonymous sponsor or anyone else, for that matter, including The Almighty, to ask for help.
Shame has amazing power. It can cause a person to turn something around so that it
begins to look like what happened was your fault, like Steve was to blame for the company’s
problems.
Shame.
Shame buried just beneath the epidermis, the top layer of his skin, ready to jump out and
bite him in the ass at a moment’s notice. Shame stored in his genetic memory, imbedded in his
DNA. Shame that started when his great-great-great-grandparents were shackled and forced to
walk through the Door of No Return, locked up on ships that carried them through the middle
passage shitting and puking all over themselves and their relatives, friends and neighbors chained
close together like they were in a can of sardines then stripped of their history, their identity, their
language, their religion. Shame passed down to him through three or four generations of family
members who suffered the pain and humiliation that started with slavery and mutated into deep
anger and self hatred, one of the far-reaching effects of the phenomenon known as post traumatic
slave syndrome. It’s the kind of shame that has no place to go except to be visited upon those
-2-
less powerful, like spouses and children. My mama praised me for having put an end to the child
abuse that’s been in our family for all of those generations but by the time I learned how to show
my children that I love them, it was too late for Stevie. Shame. Shame. Shame on you.
It only took a few weeks for the positive energy Steve had built up over a few short years
of living productively to dissipate. He began to spiral out of control, sinking into that familiar
black hole of drugs and alcohol. And on November 20,
2001, two months and nine days after the
attacks on the World Trade Center, a year and ten days before he was sentenced to the federal
penitentiary, my #1 son imploded.
Dear Mom,
Donna threw me out and I was living in my truck so I decided to head out to Denver. I
liked it when I lived there before but it wasn’t the same this time. I got with this beautiful hooker
named Celeste and got stranded when she stole my SUV. I tracked down the guy who hooked me
up with her and pressed him to tell me where she was. He took me to her place and I met her
grandfather. I told him she stole my truck and he got upset, frustrated with his granddaughter,
saying “I don’t know why she keeps doing this to me.” The old man, Calvin, let me stay there
for about a week, until the police found my truck in the impound lot. I didn’t even recognize the
signs that said I was once again reaching the bottom of my life ... which is always the stop before
prison.
I had no money at all, so I called my little bro and he sent me enough to get my car out
and get back home. I promised to give him the money as soon as I got back to Minnesota. In
fact, I asked him to pick up my unemployment check and hold it until I got back, which he did.
-3-
I called him when I was about six hours away and told him that I would be there around
3 or 4 in the morning. He stashed my check on his front porch so I could pick it up without
disturbing his family.
I blazed into town around 4 a.m. Stopped off at my brother’s and picked up my check
from the hiding place on his porch, hit the freeway and headed to the check cashing place on
Lake Street and First Avenue. It should have taken me about a half hour to get from his place in
the burbs but at that time in the morning, when there isn’t much traffic, it only took half the time.
My plan was to cash the check and run back out to Julian’s crib to give him the money I
owed him. But I ended up at the crack house instead. My custom has always been to get my
dope and then look for a woman. Not necessarily for the sex, it was more about the company. I
found this pretty, petite little Chicana and for the next day and a half, we went bar hopping,
went back and forth to the crack house and holed up in a motel in south Minneapolis.
I don’t know what it was about this girl that made me want to keep her. With street
women, time’s up when the money runs out so I was trying to use whatever brain cells I hadn’t
smoked up to figure out how to keep her from leaving. When we couldn’t stay at the motel any
longer, I pulled into a liquor store and stole a bottle of vodka.
We polished off the vodka in a matter of minutes and right about this time the edge was
coming off of the dope. I asked her if she had ever robbed a bank. She said no, but she knew of
a way to rob banks by computer. I really wasn’t trying to hear that because I was one of those
here and now type niggaz. I didn’t have the patience for all of that long term hustlin’.
It was Tuesday, right around noon, and we were getting hungry. I pulled into a Burger
King knowing that all I had were some bad checks from my account that had been closed, so I
-4-
went inside where I could write a check instead of tryin’ to order something at the drive-up
window.
When I came back out, the girl was gone. I guess all that talk about robbing banks
scared her off. But by now I had been talking so much about robbing a bank that I convinced
myself to do it. So I pulled into a convenience store and stole a pair of those dark, mirrored
sunglasses so no one could tell what I was looking at, and then it was off to the bank.
The first bank I went to was crowded so I left. Jumped back into my truck and just sat in
the parking lot for about 20 minutes. As I sat there, I saw where I was heading – back to prison.
I thought about all that I had lost in just a matter of thirty days; a good job that I loved, my
woman and my little baby girl. I began to feel tears well up but, Mom, I can’t cry – not one tear
fell from my eye. It was almost like those bitter tears were backing up into my soul.
I was in Apple Valley, not far from Hastings where there’s a detox center so I thought,
“I’d better get to detox, that’s the only thing I can do at this point.” I pulled myself together,
started up the Bravada and headed off with full intentions of getting off the freeway in Hastings
and droppin’ at the detox center. But as I was rolling through Rosemount I caught a glimpse of
a sign that said “TCF Bank Grand Opening.”
Very impulsively, I pulled into the parking lot, a Cub Foods supermarket with a TCF
bank attached to it. I circled the building and found a place to park, then I wrote a note
demanding money. I put on my shades and my baseball cap which read Female Body Inspector
(F.B.I. – how ironic), and went into the bank and scoped it out. One of the tellers stood out, she
was so beautiful. So I walked in, half mesmerized by the beauty of her caramel-colored skin,
her long, thick black hair, and her honey-colored eyes; and half desperate for the money. I
-5-
talked with her briefly and she told me that she was Persian. Then I slid her the note. I should
have slid her my phone number instead and asked her for a date.
She looked at the note and then looked at me like she was confused, like she couldn’t
believe what was happening and then she nodded her head in agreement. When she opened the
money drawer and began pulling out the cash, I noticed a slot in the drawer that was stacked
with $100 bills. Little did I know that slot had the device that would change the next ten years of
my life.
The Rosemount newspaper reported that Steve “used a threatening note and the
suggestion of a gun to walk out with an undisclosed amount of money.” Witnesses helped
identify him. “As he ran out of the bank he had shoved the money down his pants and a dye pack
exploded, which attracted the attention of a number of people. One wrote down his license
number.”
I imagine Steve dropping the bag of loot down the front of his pants and trying to walk
fast to the Oldsmobile Bravada, the SUV he had purchased brand new just a few months before,
when he was employed. I see him looking over his shoulder cuz he knows that a black man
stepping into a new car in small town Minnesota will raise some eyebrows. I hear the dye pack
explode. Pow! And I see this red substance cover the front of his pants as he climbs into the
truck.
Listen. Do you hear the crowd? Can you see people spilling out of the building? Do you
hear them yelling “Catch him!” “Don’t let him get away!” “Give me a piece of paper. Gotta get
his license number.”
-6-
And I see my #1 son peal out of the parking lot, out of his mind from the pain in his groin
and the crack cocaine that gave him the guts to stop off in white town and rob the bank, his dark
eyes shining with a mixture of sadness, wonder and surprise, glazed and sparkling like stars in a
clear sky on a summer night.
I imagine him taking his right hand off the steering wheel and reaching down to unfasten
the holster where his cell phone is locked, lifting the phone and dialing somebody’s number, then
parting the mustached lips that hide his perfect teeth. But before he can get the first word out, the
dye pack starts to burn in his crotch, making the insides of his bones scream. He muffles the
screams, recalling instead, the confusion on the bank teller’s face when she realized that the
glassy-eyed black man who stood on the other side of the bulletproof glass, the ginger-skinned
desperado dressed in dark glasses, a baseball cap, tight jeans and a brown leather jacket, stinking
to high heaven cuz he’d been up smoking crack and drinking whiskey for three days and three
nights, had slipped her a note commanding her to fork over the cash. But he can’t hold the
screams back for long. He has to keep moving before the cops catch up with him but where will
he go? He has to get that bag of hot money out of his pants before the substance ruins his ability
to father another child. He’s trying to keep control of his ride while his crotch is burning so hard
that we wonders if he has finally made it to that place where it’s rumored that Satan makes his
home. I imagine him digging his sweaty hand down where the Sun doesn’t shine and coaxing the
offending bag of cash away from his parched skin, a long, guttural moan barely making it past
the Adam’s apple on his thick, brown neck. And I imagine Julian, my younger son, who has
built a happy, prosperous, life with his wife and three sons feeling hurt, bewildered and
disappointed; wondering why his big brother ripped him off.
-7-
I put the bundle of money on the passenger seat and when I picked it up again it was still
smoldering, traces of the red dye had burned through the tan leather seats. I attempted to see
what I could salvage from the bundle. Now picture this, Mom. Here I am blazing down a dirt
road with my pants and underwear down around my ankles, kicking up a thick cloud of dust
behind me and tossing all of the destroyed, banded bundles of money that I couldn’t salvage, out
the window. Then it was off to Rochester where I had a delicious steak dinner and left the
waitress a $20 tip.
I hooked up with my dope man when I got back into town. It was the Tuesday before
Thanksgiving and I had promised him a month before that I would take him home to Detroit to
see his mom for Thanksgiving. You know me, Mom. How could I refuse a request like that? He
was just a 20-year-old kid. He called me “Unc” and I called him “Nephew.” I spent $400 with
him, then holed up in a hotel room close to his house smoking crack and tweaking so we could
hit the road on Wednesday.
I was still on fire from the burn I got from the dye pack so I showed it to the kid on the
way to Detroit. He asked me what had happened. He grimaced and then told me that I needed
to put some peroxide and Neosporin cream on it so we stopped and got some. Sure started
feeling better.
Soon as the youngster and I hit Wisconsin, my cell phone rang. I knew it was Donna. She
asked where I was and I told her I was on my way to Detroit for Thanksgiving. She asked me to
come back and spend it with her and the kids but all I could think was, “You got some nerve.
You threw me out of the house, I’ve been sleeping in my truck and you didn’t care when I was
stranded in Denver for five days and now you want me to have Thanksgiving with you?”
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I talked with her again while I was in Detroit, told her I’d be back at 6:00 on Saturday
morning. I remember telling her that I was on my way to greatness (whatever that meant) and
she started crying. It didn’t dawn on me until later what her tears were about.
Anyway, we started back to Minneapolis on Friday night. The youngster was tired from
all the rippin’ and runnin’ we’d been doing so I took the first leg of the trip. Mom, I know you’re
familiar with Divine Intervention. Well, I believe that’s what happened for the rest of the trip.
God was not willing to let me go through with my plans for the next 24 hours.
I drove for about 4 hours and right around 6 a.m. as we were pressing through Gary,
Indiana and were about to head into Illinois, I got so groggy that I had no fight left in me, no
energy. I turned the wheel over to the youngster and was about to nod off to sleep when Donna
called again and asked where I was. I layed my seat back and went to sleep just as we were
about to cross the Illinois/Wisconsin border.
About four hours later, the youngster woke me up in a panic.“Unc! Unc!” he cried out.
“We’re getting pulled over!” Being a trucker, I knew how the troopers were in Wisconsin so I
said, “Boy, I told you not to speed in Wisconsin.” He assured me that he had set the cruise
control at 60 m.p.h. so I told him to pull over and we’d straighten the whole thing out. But he
said, “I don’t think you understand. We are getting pulled over!!!!”
I flipped down the visor and opened the mirror and when I looked out the windshield,
what I saw was like something you only see in movies. I swear, Mom, Wisconsin state troopers
and federal marshals were everywhere. They had completely shut the highway down! You
would have thought I was Osama Bin Laden, the way they came at me.
A few days later, as the marshals were transporting me to the Federal jail in Madison,
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Wisconsin, I naively asked, “What is a marshal? Is he like a deputy or something?” The
marshal arrogantly replied, “Let me put it to you this way. I can go anywhere at any time and
arrest anyone, including the President of the United States.”
I thought, “Man, what have I gotten myself into?” Then I asked how they knew where I
was. He said, “You guys all make the same stupid mistake. We know that if we really want you,
all we have to do is hook up with your girl and she will lead us right to you.” I learned very
quickly what Donna’s tears were about when I told her that I was on my way to greatness. She
knew otherwise. She knew I was on my way to jail. And not only that, she knew that all the
while she was working with the feds to catch me.
Something else I found out (speaking of God’s intervention) was that, if the police would
have caught up with me 10 miles later, I would have ended up going to jail in a county of
Wisconsin that is run by the Ku Klux Klan.
So here I am, Mom. 10 years for a bank robbery that I only salvaged $1,000 out Pof.
That’s $100 a year, less than 37¢ a day. Now that’s crazy!
All my love,
Your #1 Son
Published in Black Renaissance Noir, New York University, April 2010
Published in Blues Vision, MN Historical Societry Press & MN Humanities Commission, 2015