Get Right

Section 2

Saturday, May 22, 2021

05:00

They received news of Imani's autonomic nervous system failure at five o'clock in the morning. She had had to be put on oxygen immediately. It was a good thing that some doctors and nurses had just yesterday forced Get Right to invest in life insurance for Imani... just in case. He had taken out a life insurance policy for twenty-five thousand dollars, paying three-fourths of it in cash to the speechless hospital administrators and adding a thousand dollars each for their assistance. They took care of everything and returned a folder of receipts and other paperwork to him later that afternoon he had not even opened.

Get Right could not be bothered at all. All he could think about was how a man shooting at him could miss, yet hit the two women he had come to love so much in literally days. Women who, as best friends and for the strangest of reasons (whatever they were) had accepted to both be his girls. The girls lived in Harlem together, renting and sharing a studio in Grant Houses, a short walk from where he lived. The past few days, though, they had been staying with him, going home only to pack a change of comfortable and familiar clothes, even though Get Right was generous and had set them out with racks on racks to buy all kinds of outfits and footwear.

The past week they had known each other, they were seen almost everywhere together and people were constantly scandalized or amused or jealous of their openly polyamorous relationship. Then they got shot by accident by a grieving, crazed and drunk dad who, paradoxically, was a cop, meant "to serve and protect" his community. Two female detectives out of the 23rd Precinct, investigating the murder of Jay Miller, escorted Sgt. Miller (from the 75th Precinct) up to the 28th Precinct to have a "word" with the suspect, Jeffery Deaver, alias Get Right. Unfortunately for everyone, things did not work out quite as expected.

In any event, because of the malfeasance involved in the illegal arrest of the suspect, the 28th Precinct, with pressure from Kingson Jackson, Get Right's attorney, was forced to release Get Right. That morning had begun terribly for him, gotten terrifically better and nosedived into horrifically worse. Sergeant Miller was not having any of that. He knew what Get Right looked like and took the law into his own hands and was now in a jail cell at the 28th Precinct for Attempted Murder and other related charges. But from what things were looking like, that top charge would be upgraded to M1, that is, intentional homicide, which, in New York State, carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment.

Murder in the First Degree.

Which all meant shit to Get Right if he could not bring Imani back. He had just come from downstairs where Naomi was curled up on a large chair with a hospital blanket swallowing her in its folds and keeping her warm from the AC. Katrina was laying on a hospital bed on her back, with an IV in her left arm, also tucked under a large blanket. They had put her on slow drips about an hour ago; her recovery was coming along just fine. They were giving her a combination of nutrients and vitamins to be sure that her healing would be fortified. As he watched the machine breathe for Imani, he suddenly remembered the conversation among he and his Strongmen. After beating Dibs's ass for disrespecting the other big homie's new woman, Get Right had had an interesting palaver. He tried getting in touch with Bison but the nigga phone had been off most of the day. He would holler at him in a few hours. And to think that it was all Bucky's idea - kind of impressive and farsighted for a young nigga. At the very least, Bison would listen and think about it. In light of what had just happened with the police, Get Right was more inclined to the idea than he would have been just two days ago.

And maybe it was, indeed, some kind of Divine Revelation. Perhaps it really was time to start falling back. But what did he mean by "falling back"? Was he going to fall all the way back? Or would he still be partially involved in the day to day affairs of The Forum? He might not have known exactly by how much he had to fall back, but he knew he had to get the fuck up out of New York, quick fast and in a hurry. That was why it was so important for him to talk with Bison about that plan Bucky had spoken to the other Captains about.

As he sat near Imani,Get Right wondered why man went through everything he went through in life. What was it all for and what was it all about? He felt the universe opening up as these universal questions fell upon his shoulders. Was there some cosmic Plan? Did it all have meaning? Would it all eventually make sense? In simpler terms: what was the point? If it all had meaning, that meant there was a guiding hand or permissive will behind all that happened. And if there was a "Creator," for lack of a better word, Get Right admitted to himself, why did He allow so much suffering? So much pain and killing? Why?

Because of the coldness of people in the world, the hardness of their hearts, the wickedness of their actions, many individuals had refused the belief in some Almighty Being - there was simply too much hate, too much strife, too much evil in the world for God to exist. Granted, some people lived wild and dangerous lifestyles and the lifespan of these individuals would naturally be arrested earlier than expected. But what about someone's mother, or grandmother, or cousin, or sister, brother, father, daughter, son, etc. who had lived a perfectly safe life and was now in the morgue because of an indiscriminate piece of metal fired from a rather discriminate piece of metal several blocks away?

No one was safe in their apartment or house anymore. Unless you had bulletproof walls and even then, would you add bulletproof windows? Bulletproof doors? And what about when you stepped outdoors - would you be mandated to wear bulletproof clothing? No one was safe anymore.

That was why saying "I love you" was so important, Get Right realized. It was because you were not guaranteed to see that person again. "Later" and "next time" were misnomers - the words "maybe" and "possibly" should have preceded those words. Even "hopefully." Get Right knew his life choices were far from the safest. There were many times he should have died in street battles and street fights, but here he was, while little girls and boys and other innocents were losing their lives in racially motivated mass shootings.

Get Right remembered a meme he had seen in which there was a smiling baby and a question above the baby read, "How did you sleep last night?" The response, beneath the baby, read: "Like Jesus during slavery." It had been tragically amusing at first, but that meme had kept him up at night many nights.