Paper Chasers by Mark Anthony

drug plan because I figured that eventually I would be able to give Sabine whatever she wanted. Now was I weird, or what?
    Later that night we found out that Donnie, Erik, and J.P. had netted $560 for the day. I didn’t want to calculate it exactly, but I knew that we were only about fifteen hundred dollars away from our goal.
    Before I slept that night, I made a point to have a meeting with God.
    Dear Lord, please let us all be OK, especially my family and Sabine. Lord, forgive me and the rest of the crew for killing those people. Lord, you know that killing and crime is not in our hearts. Please forgive us. Lord, give the families of those that we murdered the strength to move on with their lives.
    Thank You, Lord.
    I love you.
    In your Son’s name, I pray. Good night and Amen.

    Finally it was Friday. TGIF. Our crime spree was behind us. Thursday we’d gobbled up three more cars and brought them to Sal. He gave us about nine hundred dollars a piece for the cars. The cars weren’t that expensive—two American made jeeps, and one Honda Accord. I have to say that although Sal had only given us twenty-seven hundred dollars, we still made off good. For the week we’d made more than what we intended to make. Best of all, we were all still alive and free from jail.
    We decided to go to the park and play some basketball. The exercise benefited us all. As I laced up my sneakers and prepared to play, I found nothing wrong with what I was about to do with my crew on this day, maybe because I was preparing to be an athlete and not a murderer. All I wanted to know was, how on earth did I let myself and my friends who I’d claimed to love, get to the point where we would kill innocent people and have no remorse? Or to the point where we wanted to get involved in something that ultimately was either going to get us killed, or get the people around us that we loved hurt? I guess the love for cash was controlling us.
    Maybe it was not my fault for behaving like a heathen. It was bugged ’cause man I just hated what we were getting into. I hated it, but at the same time I loved it. I mean I was a rationally thinking human being, so there was no way for me to justify my actions. The guilt and anxiety inside me is what would make me feel like I was gonna go crazy. The only reason that I had guilt and anxiety was because I knew full well what the right thing to do was, but I just didn’t have the courage to do it.
    Could my lack of courage be the blame for all of this nonsense? I didn’t know. But I did know two things. The first was that in a quest for riches and paper chasin’, I had come very far along the path of destruction and there was definitely no stopping. The second thing that I knew was that I had to get “The Elements To A Black Man’s Fist” out to the rest of society very quickly, because something just wasn’t right.
    That night I planned to write about one of the elements and to stop procrastinating. I felt that writing about the elements would probably wake me up to the realities of what I was doing. But again I felt bugged because if I didn’t have the courage to stop myself from doing what I knew was wrong, then how on earth was I going to have the courage to hold the world accountable for helping to stop black on black crime?
    â€œYo, Randy, pass me the ball. Hurry up and pass me the rock, kid . . . Holz catches the pass. He sets. He shoots. For three . . . at the buzzer . . . The shot . . . Swish! . . . It’s gooooood . . . It’s goooood! The crowd goes wild!”

The Purchase
    Fourth Crew’s second pre-planned breakfast was scheduled for Saturday June 29. Since we had accumulated so much money during the week, we decided to scrap those plans that we had had for McDonalds and splurge and live it up. No more McDonald’s or small time Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity breakfast from IHOP. We decided to play like Big Willies and take a cab to City