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med school? You crazy?”
    “Crazy? No way. I got the grades.” He looked at me like I was crazy. “What do you think I been saving for?”

THE MAKING OF A HERO
    A sk any brother in the projects who his hero is, and you’ll hear the names of basketball and football players.
    My hero was my dad. He was everything a man oughta be: strong, successful, smart. Men wanted to be his friend or they stayed away because they were afraid. Women couldn’t get enough of him. He went to parent-teacher conferences just to hit on my teachers.
    Orlando Johnson was raised by his grandma, dirt poor, in Prospect Heights. His mother died of a heart problem just after his brother Jean was born, and his father, well, he didn’t know nothing about him, except that his father was better looking than Jean’s. Grandma Johnson told him that much. She was a crabbyold witch who was only good for one thing: bitching. She was too lazy to get off her saggy ass and get a job, but her nasty mouth wasn’t too lazy to tell Orlando and Little Jean how she wished they was never born.
    Orlando never knew a scrap of clothes that wasn’t from the Salvation Army or a taste of meat that the butcher wasn’t gonna throw out, anyway. Not until he started working for a family of Italian mafioso. Orlando learned all about Brooklyn’s underworld. Strip clubs, brothels, weapons, drugs, there was nothing he wasn’t into. And when the boss retired from the business, Orlando went out on his own.
    Sure, he got caught. But in his day, he was king. He lived the American Dream. And once he got out, he’d be back on top again, with me by his side.

ORLANDO’S ONLY
    T hat week I got a postcard.
    Son,
    Come see me this weekend.
    Daddy O.
    *  *  *
    I got into Ossining on the noon train. It took half an hour to go through the paperwork and the searches. One guard liked frisking me a little too much, and I had to stop myself from smashing his ribs with my elbow.
    As usual, the meeting was in the visitors’ room. The plain white walls reminded me of the rehab center where we used tovisit Uncle Jean. The difference was that this place had bars on the windows and guards at every exit.
    I spotted my dad sitting at a back table.
    “Hey, Dad.”
    “Son.”
    He clapped me hard on the back. This was the closest we ever got to hugging, and it was close enough for me.
    Dad was looking good. He was mad brolic. Since he been in prison, he didn’t have nothing else to do but work out. His head was shaved, and he had a goatee on his square chin. He wore a gold hoop in his left ear.
    Leaning across the table, he grabbed my bicep, smiled. “You getting there. Got good genes after all.”
    “That’s what they say.”
    “Family business still booming?”
    Like he didn’t know. Yo-yo prisoners and guards kept him up on things.
    “You know it, Dad. Ain’t no shortage of customers.”
    “Good.” He sat back, folding his arms across his chest. “Proud of you, Ty. Sonny doing his job?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I heard there was a fuck up with an undercover cop.”
    I nodded. “Sonny told you?”
    “Nah, Sonny’s too pussy to tell me that shit. Heard about it from a Brooklyn nigga last month. He said a boy named Michael Brown took the fall for a bigger operation. I remembered you telling me you got a kid named Michael Brown running errands.”
    “I had a bad feeling about it, so I told Sonny to send Michael.”
    Dad glared at me. “You should’ve listened to your instinct and sent nobody.”
    “I know. But Sonny was so sure about the guy. . . . ”
    “Sonny won’t be making that kind of mistake again. When I found out about all this, I sent for him. We had a good talk.”
    “You probably had Sonny shitting his pants.”
    “I didn’t take a whiff to find out. He knows I tell it to him straight. And he knows he wouldn’t be nothing without me.”
    “Me, too, Dad.”
    “You better believe it. What would you be doing now if you wasn’t running the family business, huh?