Everyone knows not to cross Kobe’s sidewalk. It’s an unspoken rule, an urban legend. The only people who adhere to it are tourists or suburban Atlantans.
Atlanta is a summer city. Most people usually go elsewhere to experience the fall colors and pumpkin spice lattes, and cold frigid winters while decked in gear. Sometimes it’s a spring city, things come alive in a big way, there’s block parties every weekend and flowers blooming on every sidewalk, not exactly cherry blossoms in Tokyo but it’ll do. The city is predominantly Black, most of its businesses, its housing, its glass ceilings, are all managed by the same circle of people. It can feel kind of stifling sometimes, especially for a newcomer, but a lot of folks make do.
Kobe has nowhere else to be, he sits there every day, a sentinel with a cause, talking to the air. He splits his time between the street and the top of a nearby building, which offers a great vantage point, where he keeps a coop filled with pigeons, which he cooks in the boiler rooms in the evening when no one is watching. He’s always dressed in a faded brown shirt and black slacks which might have been a different color in a past life, but are now filled with gunk, making it difficult to tell, and a scarf and jacket for warmth, even when it’s a hundred degrees outside, and some trainers, which are split at the front, showing his toes, his long nasty fingernails.
He first started living in the streets in 1994. Back then, he had his car, and he’d clean up in hotel bathrooms and go for job interviews—the economy had experienced a record growth and he was wildly optimistic. He’d moved to Atlanta from Seattle after his marriage had ended in divorce, and the judge had forced him to pay alimony, leaving him practically penniless; the only thing he could afford was a Subaru Impreza. All the companies he interviewed with told him he needed more experience. He’d sit in parking lots and have a smoke, patting himself on the back for trying, until one day, many months in, he grew tired of it.
He’d driven to a strange alley where certain folks gathered after dark, tried crack for the first time and loved it: the feeling of haziness, of impermanence, as if everything he saw, touched or thought about was not real, which only made things better.
His car was eventually impounded because he ran a couple of red lights. He took to living in the streets full time, always on the crack pipe, carrying a bag full of clothes, cleaning up from time to time in hotel bathrooms. He eventually got a job waiting tables at a themed restaurant; they had to wear shorts and cowboy boots to serve the patrons, which was good fun but the uniform was itchy. He’d lost a lot of weight, thanks to the crack.
That was where he met Mary Da. She usually came in on Saturday mornings and always ordered the breakfast skillet. They’d strike up a conversation, in which he learned that she was also from the North West, and had left Seattle to pursue her dream of being a vocal star. So far she was doing alright, she was booking shows left and right. Her agent thought she was close to making it bigtime. They hung out a few times, usually backstage after her shows or in bars. She showed him incredible kindness by allowing him to move into her spare bedroom. The lock on the door was jammed so it always remained open.
One night, while he was sleeping, Mary Da came into his room and climbed into his bed. She put a hand into his pants and pulled out his penis, then she started stroking it. At first, he was terrified, then he grew tired and hoped she would finish soon so he could go to bed. He accidentally yawned. Oh you’re awake already, she said. Once he was hard enough, she climbed on top and inserted herself. The whole room was dark except for the light of the moon. She was kind of plump around the face but her body was solid, nowadays they call that skinny fat. Her vagina was kind of dry, he wished there was lube. Six months in, she was still creeping into his bed, so he decided to move out. He had saved some money, enough for a seedy apartment on the other side of town, far enough for her not to visit. She stopped showing up at his workplace on Saturdays and they eventually lost touch. The apartment turned out to be too good a deal. In a few months’ time, the building was condemned. The government was planning to expand the highway that ran past the building into an interstate, so he moved out, and lived at his job for a while. He would sneak back inside after closing using a second key. The manager found out and fired him. He was back on the streets and without a job.
In 1996, the new millenium was fast approaching, with its big promise of technological advancements, but also new fears, like artificial sentience, or the Y2K bug. His former crack spot had been replaced by a yoga studio and he wandered the city looking for alternative spots. He came upon the alley beside the Olympic village. Most of the athletes had already moved out and the remaining ones only had weed. He struck a friendship with one of the pole vault athletes, Bobby Lee, a US athlete, one of the team’s best. His body was limber and his puffy hair made him look like one of the Village People, nevermind the fact that the 60s style was fading fast, younger Black men now preferring waves, or flat tops.
Bobby could be found getting rowdy in bars when he was not winning gold. Before pole vaulting, he’d been a nurse aide at the ER in Newark. He’d seen some pretty gruesome shit. One time a group of insurgents had blown up a building, and their hospital had worked on the majority of survivors. Some burns were so severe that they smelled like charred beef. As a result, he’d become vegan and cut out dairy and eggs completely. He’d started training his body hard, doing core exercises.
He confessed to Kobe that he had done a ton of heroin at this point in his life—the Olympic team basically signed him right when he got out of rehab. The heroin was thanks to his trainer, who’d promised him that with it he’d be able to fly, which he did for a while until the national committee caught on. They absolutely refused to let him participate without recovery. Nowadays he was clean, but a little weed and a bar crawl every now and then did no harm. He really wanted his mother and sister to be proud of him. Kobe and he got on precisely because of recovery. Kobe revealed that he’d never really been to therapy. It doesn’t do anything for you neurologically, said Bobby, you just learn to plan your life away from drug use, or like in my case, supplant it with something else, like pole vaulting.
Kobe’s thing had slowly become anal sex. He’d been looking for crack at a cruising spot and let some guy fondle his ass once. He was no longer comfortable with his penis being stimulated, but wasn’t exactly attracted to men either so he found some trans hookers down in the alleys. Their going rate was fifty a night and they’d let him suck their dick for an extra twenty. By then, he’d started working at a warehouse store, and was raking in some good cash, enough to buy a second-hand Lexus SUV, which had plenty of room. He was living in a strict co-op, and paying a monthly mortgage. He didn’t wanna risk bringing any hookers home with him so he fucked them in the car.
***
In the spring of 1998, during the annual Freaknik, Atlanta was crawling with Black college springbreakers. It was remarkable that Freaknik happened in Atlanta, considering the fact that it was also the birthplace of the civil rights movement, the birthplace of Dr. King.
Bobby Lee had a cousin who went to Auburn who would be driving in for the weekend. Already, there was tons of traffic and students walking on the streets, laughing and holding hands and stopping to chat and exchange numbers, and not a lot of police presence, thank goodness. Kobe and Bobby caught up with Darrell Lee and his frat brothers. They were doing a step routine on Saturday night, alongside other Black frats and sororities. They were spending the afternoon practicing before heading out to the clubs in the evening. Rumor on the streets was that Remy Ma was making an appearance. They all had tattoos of Iota Phi Theta drawn on their arms and a few of them had piercings. They were staying with the members of the Clark Atlanta chapter, who would also be driving them around, therefore saving on rent and gas.
Kobe and Bobby tagged along for the club hopping, even though they were too old. None of the bouncers paid any attention to them. The music was bumping, the alcohol was flowing, all the boys were wearing dress shirts while the girls were in skimpy teen girl outfits. One could practically see through their cleavages without bending down. There was a lot of fondling and humping involved. Kobe thought he saw his ex-wife Joanne, stuck dancing in the middle with two guys grinding against her, but when came closer, it turned out to be a different girl. She had the same blonde highlights as Joanne, and was probably the same height, but that’s as far as the comparison went.
Eventually, they wore themselves out dancing, and called it a night at around three am. They walked to a pizza spot that was still open for a nightcap. The girl with the blonde highlights was there, arguing with one of the guys she had been dancing with. He was calling her a hoochie for refusing to let him take her home and presumably fuck her. She was laughing at him, cruelly.
The next day was the day fest and the cops closed off some of the roads leading into the city. It was utter chaos, the park was filled to the brim with college-goers.. There was an emcee onstage calling for girls to come up and get turnt., Most of them were in shorts or tiny skirts, and they got up and shook their booties as the music played, much to the excitement of the men in the crowd. There was a camera crew from Real Life Documentaries hanging around. Darell and his crew were initially asked to interview but they pulled out at the last minute. Kobe and Bobby found a poker table and decided to play. It was spring but the sun was fully out, the heat making everything musty, add that to the drunkenness and everything became hazy, voices were slurred and movements were faulty. There was a guy at the poker table who won the first few rounds before his luck changed, then Bobby won two rounds and then they started losing track of who had better cards, so the game was eventually called off.
Bobby and Kobe decided to look for a place to eat. They walked past the crowd and into the streets, which were filled to the brim despite the afternoon heat, and found a bar called Meridian. Inside, Darell was seated with his boys, arguing. No no it’s not OK to rape a sister nevermind what she’s wearing, one of the guys with a smaller physique, clearly dwarfed out by the rest of the guys, was arguing. Darell argued the contrary. The way she was dressed, that’s like asking for unwanted attention.
It turned out that one of the girls who shook her booty onstage had gone back to the crowd, and the men had taken turns tearing off her skimpy clothes. The police had intervened before things got worse. She had on blonde highlights, according to one of the crew members. Kobe immediately remembered the girl from the previous night, he wondered if she might have been the victim they were speaking of. If it was her, he felt like it was warranted—women like her always got whatever they wanted. Finally somebody did something about it, he thought.
The rest of the day was chill, except for the endless debating. Most guys were not here to meet their future wives and girlfriends, so they didn’t have much sympathy for the assaulted girl. A few were sympathetic because they had taken some intro to feminism classes, like the dwarfed out dude, and one or two were Pan Africanists. They spoke of having umoja, oneness, within the community, instead of divisive politics which the white man would no doubt exploit.
The step concert was the final part of Freaknik, an institutional co-sign of the experience in order to keep the city from shutting them down. Unlike Black kids, privileged white kids heading to Cancún didn’t need any constructive excuses to gather. To some people, who might have been more concerned with respectability, Freaknik diluted the movement, with its vulgarity and rowdy youth, but the progressives probably saw it as important to the history of the emancipated Black man, and an acknowledgement of his right to associate. In the end, the Iota Phi Theta may have lost the step competition, but they did well, placing third.
On his way out of the auditorium, a group of teenagers shoved past Kobe, rushing towards the exit, and he came down hard on a woman who was about half as tall as he was. I’m so sorry, he exclaimed, I didn’t mean to. She struggled to stand up. You’re fine, she said. That was pretty nasty, he said. Truth, she replied, hope the next woman you run into is luckier than me. Her name was Gemma, and she was from South Carolina. Her hip was out, so taking her to the bar so he could learn more about her was out of the question. He offered to drive her home instead. She agreed. Her friends were probably gonna go dancing anyways, and she didn’t wanna slow them down. They stopped for ice at a gas station.
When she got home, she asked him if he wanted to get high with her. She pulled out a crack pipe from underneath her suitcase and filled it, and then lit it up. Man, it felt so good to be back, almost as if he had never left. Except this time, as they lay down on the carpet, pretending they were out in a field, feeling the grass beneath their bodies, an ominousness took over, a shadowy feeling of being consumed by darkness. It only lasted a brief few minutes, but was enough to ruin the high for Kobe, so he decided to drive home and leave Gemma alone.
He spent the next few days at work absolutely terrified, looking over his shoulder, worried that something or someone was tracking him, hunting him. Sometimes, even in his sleep, he smelled something fetid in the air, almost like sulphur. He felt a pair of eyes fixed on him constantly. Sometimes he could hear low grunting. One time, he woke up in his dark room, unable to move. He could see the shadows moving around him, but he was paralyzed, unable to breathe until he eventually broke out of the debilitation. He also started hearing voices, people telling him, do this, say something, pick that up, stop moving.
***
Over time it became hard to concentrate at work, so Kobe started drinking a lot of coffee, so much that his heart was racing all day, his hands and legs started trembling out of nowhere. He noticed that people also started looking at him with concern. His boss pulled him for a chat after he accidentally dropped a box of tools on a colleague’s foot, and the colleague broke his navicular. His boss said, I’ve noticed you’re a little preoccupied, if you need a break, or somebody to talk to…Kobe looked him straight in the eye, unblinking, and said, I’m fine, no need to worry. His boss then asked, are you sleeping alright? Isaac said he saw you passed out in between the warehouse boxes. Kobe was furious. I was meditating, that’s all. No need to grass on me for that. His boss relented. As long as you’re alright, he said.
After work that day, Kobe followed Isaac to his favorite pub. Isaac was a tall redheaded Irish guy with a square jaw. He sat by the bar and ordered a beer. Kobe slipped into the booth right beside him and got a vodka cranberry. He spent all evening staring at Isaac, who was pretty conversational with the bartender and the waitresses from the look of things. His laugh was boisterous. He paid and tipped after drinking his last beer, then walked on home, Kobe trailing behind him. He got to his house. Kobe stood outside on the other side of the street and watched through the windows. It was easy to spy on Isaac, since he lived on the second floor. Kobe watched Isaac sit down in his living room, turned on the TV, then picked up his landline and called someone. A few minutes later a pizza delivery boy stopped by and handed him a large. He ate the whole thing in one sitting, before heading on to shower and get changed for bed.
Once the lights were turned off, Kobe walked into the apartment building, jimmied the lock open and walked around the house. He moved a bunch of stuff, like knick knacks and furniture. He then opened the fridge, which was bare bones, and drank half the milk. Finally, he took a dump on the toilet and left it there, floating quietly on the water. He left the door wide open.
The next day, and the day after that, Isaac didn’t show up for work. He skipped a whole week before he finally turned up, dishevelled, eyes wildly blinking like hazard lights. He looked like he hadn’t slept a wink. Meanwhile, the darkness that had been chasing Kobe had briefly abated.
Soon after, he met up with Bobby and they had dinner together at a barbecue place. They smoked a joint beforehand so the meat and sides would be mindblowingly delicious. Bobby advised Kobe to dip his burnt ends into the macaroni and cheese, which turned out to be amazing. Afterwards, they went for a small post-dinner walk. The city was just coming to life, one of the perks of living in a 24-hr economy. Bobby asked Kobe how he’d been, Kobe told him everything about how he had followed Isaac home and how he did stuff to his apartment and left the door open. He skipped the part about smoking crack and the depressive darkness he was pulled into. Instead, he made the whole story out to be a joke. Bobby laughed at it, as expected. You wild fr, he said, I wouldn’t wanna get on your bad side. I had this pigeon which tracked me home once cause I gave it some pretzel bites, it jumped inside my car and then started cawing loudly when I stopped at the gas station. Kobe felt like a pigeon, small and weightless. Nothing could stop him.
The next week, Isaac came to work with two policemen, who wordlessly handcuffed Kobe and took him down to the station. They showed him footage from the building’s camera, and the camera off the street. They also got his prints and compared them to the ones in the apartment, which were a match.
His trial lasted two weeks, he got a state lawyer, who wasn’t very good but he managed to get Kobe out on bail during the trial. The judge was very hostile, stopping him multiple times during his testimony, telling him to stop mumbling. The jury was mostly made up of white people, a few were above fifty, but most ranged between thirty and forty. They all seemed wealthy and prosperous. The lawyer mostly argued the security cameras, claiming that it was impossible to tell it was Kobe, nevermind the fact that it showed his full face, which was distinctively asymmetrical thanks to a childhood bike accident. He wished his lawyer had let him enter the guilty plea instead, which the cops had told him would be more favorable given the overwhelming amount of evidence against him.
Kobe remembers the exact moment when the verdict came in. It was eleven in the morning, the sun was bright against the windowpanes. There was a faint smell of hibiscus in the air. The stenographer was drinking from a flask, which might have been hibiscus tea. While Kobe mulled over the mystery of the hibiscus, the bailiff walked in with the envelope from the jury. The verdict was unanimous; guilty on both counts, stalking and burglary, both of which were class three felonies, attracting up to $10,000 in fines and ten years in jail. His sentencing was done a week later, and he got the maximum sentence, which he had seen coming, since the judge was a deuce.
He spent the rest of the time before jail hauling stuff to Bobby’s garage with his SUV. His building had contacted his lawyer as soon as they’d learned of the arrest and they would be terminating his housing contract.
He was held at the Fulton county jail for a month, then moved to Union county in South Carolina. He decided to hire his own lawyer for the appeal case. The man came highly recommended among his inmates at Fulton, who had been fairly easy to get along with. Most of the people in Union were hardened criminals. They barely talked except for barking some mid-level threats. His cellmate was a bedwetter, which didn’t bode well for him given that he was on the bottom bunk. He tried asking him if they could switch and all he got was a middle finger instead. But it drips down, Kobe wailed. I don’t care, punk, his roommate said.
Kobe busied himself with poker games in order to pass time. The poker guys were friendly enough, not exactly conversational or charming, but still more approachable compared to the rest of the inmates. During the day, people played each other for stuff from the prison commissary. Most illegal stuff like drugs and phones were dealt during the evening games, when the guards had their shift change. Being a bookie was enviable, people liked to be on the bookie’s good side because he was closer to the goods, so they always slipped him a little something extra. Kobe wanted that position, but to get it, he needed to be friends with Gus, who was impossible to talk to. Gus was always in and out of solitary for starting fights. Kobe decided to catch him in the shower.
Usually, Kobe would shower quickly and leave in order to avoid a knifing incident, but he decided to take his chances. He eventually caught up with Gus, who initially demanded a seventy percent stake in his earnings, but Kobe talked him down to sixty five, which felt fair to both of them since Gus was going to do all the heavy lifting. Gus promised to talk him up to the bosses of the game. By the end of the week, he would be the official bookie. First, they had to get rid of the previous guy. He wasn’t going to be hard to depose because most people didn’t like him anyway. He had a debilitating cannabis habit, sometimes he showed up late and didn’t keep track of the games.
Three days later, a crazy thing happened, the bookie was stabbed in the showers, and he had to stay in the infirmary for a week and a half. Gus denied having anything to do with it, but Kobe couldn’t decide if he was telling the truth. Either way, by the end of the week, Kobe was the official replacement. He handled more than thirty bets while presiding over his first game. He also got to eat a lot of chocolate ice cream, which they didn’t sell at the commissary but it got smuggled in by the kitchen staff during dinner. It had a strange texture and tasted bitter, like cacao nibs. Gus explained it was bougie ice-cream, they got it from one of the country clubs in the area.
Kobe offhandedly mentioned to Gus that his roommate was a bedwetter. The guards came by the next day and moved Kobe into a different cell. Things in prison were officially looking up. His new lawyer showed up in the afternoon and told him that the appeal case was well underway. They had already called in some of the evidence from the first case, and were running through it with a fine tooth comb, hoping that they could find some new evidence to admit into court.
That very night, Kobe was winding down from a particularly long evening of poker and apple crumble when two guards walked into his cell and grabbed him. They marched him to a dark room on the third floor and strapped him to a chair before putting electrodes on his head and feet. He convulsed when they turned it on.
The prison commissioner showed up halfway, yelling he’s the wrong guy, get him out. Commotion ensured as the guards went back and forth between the chair and the controls. They turned off the machine and unstrapped Kobe, who was thankfully still breathing, and took him to the infirmary, where he spent three days on a drip, his left arm constantly in pain from all the needles they kept jamming in him. He had also involuntarily peed himself during the execution, and two times after that. The hospital said it was likely to happen again, but the whole thing would probably resolve itself in a month, as soon as his sphincter muscles went back to normal.
When he came out, his lawyer was waiting for him in the visitor’s room. He asked Kobe if he was okay. Kobe was unsure of what to say. He felt slightly off. There was a buzzing in his skull, like a small electric current had lingered behind after the botched execution. The darkness was too back, a feeling that death was after him. He couldn’t explain it fully but felt extremely confined, being inside this prison, with people watching him, and voices telling him what to do.
His lawyer mentioned that, in light of the horrible experience, they could ask the courts to change the sentence to time served. He was excited. He tried calling Bobby but the phone wouldn’t go through. He spent nights in the cell freezing from the cold. The temperature had dropped significantly in the span of the days he’d been in the infirmary.
He was put in front of a judge on a Friday, a different one, a Black woman, who seemed more sympathetic. She quickly let him know that the state of South Carolina was sincerely apologetic for the incident, and that she would be ordering his immediate release. A check of fifty thousand dollars would also be mailed to the address on record. The money was good as long as he promised not to sue. In an hour, his paperwork was done, and he walked away a free man.
He caught the prison bus to Atlanta, and got off a few blocks away from Bobby’s house. He tried the doorbell but nobody was home. He didn’t have a phone so he stayed on the sidewalk and waited for Bobby to show up. Pretty soon, it was nightfall. Kobe decided to pick his lock and walk inside, only to find that the house was empty, nothing remained except for gathering dust and cobwebs. He checked the garage, all his stuff was still there, including his SUV.
Bobby had the keys, so Kobe ended up having to break into his own car. He wrapped his fist with his shirt and broke the window right next to the driver’s seat. He’d learned all these tricks from his younger years in Seattle. Back when he was a rowdy teen, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. All its members had been resourceful. On weekends after school someone would score booze and weed while the rest would jack a car, and they would all head off on road trips into the mountains and have fun. It was also his first time having sex. One of the older girls had invited him into the back seat while the rest of the kids were skinny dipping. She pinned him down and got on his dick and rode until he came in one long earnest explosion. The rest of the guys in the gang had patted him on the back for losing his virginity. Nice one bro, they said. It didn’t dawn on him until much later that they’d all fucked her, like some kind of twisted rite of passage.
At first, there was nothing to eat, so he drank a lot of tap water and fell asleep in his car. He woke up the next morning to a lot of light. It turned out that he’d left the garage door open. There was a pigeon pattering on the floor, cooing softly. He got out of the back of the car and quietly closed the garage window. He then grabbed a box and leapt on top of the unsuspecting bird. He wrung its neck and took it to the kitchen, where he split the carcass down the middle with a piece of broken glass. The lights were off but the gas was still on; he held onto both halves gently while they baked above the stove. It tasted great, a little gamey but worth the effort. He caught two more pigeons within the week.
He grew pretty adept at catching pigeons, most of which he found trailing into the garage to avoid the morning sunlight. He found a backdoor to the roof and made a small coop out of mesh wires, every bit done with his hands, which he stuffed full of pigeons. At night, he’d take one out of the coop and walk downstairs to the boiler room, he’d open one of the gauges and tie a plastic bag to the open end. The pigeon would suffocate and die, then steam until it became tender. He’d take it out, and pluck its feathers as if they were scales, to reveal brown tuna-like flesh.
Eventually the landlord came by, after a litany of complaints from the building’s residents, and threw him out. Kobe took his stuff and drove out to the curb where he refused to move. The road is public property, he insisted. The car was towed away in his sleep, and he woke up at the impound lot. He walked all the way back to Bobby’s former street, where he continued to hang around, sleeping by the trashcans at the end of the street, where the street devolved into a park, which used to be filled with kids and basketball players but had slowly filled up with homeless fenians. The mailman came around 10 am everyday. Kobe would ask for his envelope every time but nothing ever came.
In the early aughts, most of the tenants moved out, the building got condemned, and soon enough deteriorated into a crack den. Kobe would find himself catching a hit from some of the users every now and then, while on his way to use the bathrooms, which were pretty overflown after some time, but he preferred sleeping outside, where the air was still fresh, and the streets were brightly lit at night. He liked chasing away the tourists, and digging through the trash. Like a stray dog.
