Who is Knowledge Brown? September 21, 2005

"I Came to Bring the Pain"
Method Man

I came to bring the pain hardcore from the brain
Let's go inside my astral plane
Find out my mental's based on instrumental
records hey, so I can write monumental
Methods, I'm not the King
But niggaz is decaf I stick em for the CREAM
check it, just how deep can shit get
Deep as the abyss and brothers is mad fish accept it
In your Cross Colour, clothes you've crossed over
Then got Totally Krossed Out and Kris Kross
Who da boss? Niggaz get tossed to the side
And I'm the dark side of the Force
Of course it's the Method, Man from the Wu-Tang Clan
I be hectic, and comin for the head piece protect it
Fuck it, two tears in a bucket, niggaz want the ruckus
Bustin at me bruh, now bust it
Styles, I gets buckwild
Method Man on some shit, pullin niggaz files
I'm sick, insane, crazy, Drivin Miss Daisy
Out her fuckin mind now I got mine I'm Swayze


This is a post from my old blog, dated September 21st, 2005. In general, I'm not going to give context for my old posts, I figure they can stand on their own, but this particular one is very special to me. It's about a friend of mine, my first best friend (other than my brother). I found out today (through trying to find him, on facebook, myspace, then finally the Pennsylvania DOC website) that he is in a medium security prison outside of Philadelphia. Objectively (if a little stereotypically) speaking, there was always a high chance that he was going to end up there... grew up in the projects, absentee father who was later killed, brother in prison, mother on drugs. The type of kid that statistically has very little chance of not being in prison at one time during his life and even if he did manage to avoid being incaracerated, had an uphill climb towards having regular living wage style employment. All that is true.. but I can't say it didn't sadden me considerably... I've been bummed for pretty much the rest of the night.

When you move as often as I have throughout my life, you have to learn to make friends quickly, but at the same time, you rarely get a chance to develop something that is lasting. The people you meet and the friends you made when you're 6, 8, 11, 14, they're always frozen in time and place, they never change as you continue to grow older and they fade into memory, becoming cariactures at best, more often they're barely visible silohuettes. Everyone goes through this, whether they move every two years or they've lived in the same house their entire life. The difference, I think, is that you remember the people more when you're the person who moves all the time. It's akin to going shopping at a store. You are much more likely to remember the cashier than they are to remember you. Your stay in the store is short and your transaction is (relatively) memorable to you, the cashier is representative of that place. To the cashier, who stays in the store much longer than you, you are a momentary face in the crowd, who vanishes as quickly as he arrived. Well, in my memory, no matter what he has become.. and I haven't spoken to him in 11 and a half years, haven't seen him in 14... Knowledge will always be my 8 year old best friend, reciting Method Man's "I Came to Bring the Pain," in the hallway, laughing because I always got Lakeisha for my wife in MASH; the same rain-soaked kid I missed so terribly when I moved to South Carolina, the representative of Bregy and Philadelphia in the mid 90's.
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In my entire life, I have never thought about a person more than I think about Knowledge. At certain moments I think about a person more, like when I’m feelin a girl, for awhile she'll be what's on my mind the most, but Knowledge has been consistent since the 3rd grade. He came into my mind again while I was watching the Teach for America video. Most of the people watching the video were amazed at what they saw, even if they knew the alarming statistics they do not know what it's like first hand. I'm not trying to say that my entire life was spent in bad schools, for the most part I went to regular schools. Driver was a regular small town school, Broad River was regular small town school, Laurel Bay was a Department of Defense School, HSB was a good school, and Antioch, no matter how low their test scores were or how hard some of the people tried to act was just a regular city school. The schools that stick out in my mind the most though, the schools where I had the best friends and the schools that I enjoyed the most were Bregy and Juneau, and that's where I draw my experiences from.
Watching the video brought me back to the days of free lunch for everyone and the concrete playground with the bases painted onto them so we could play kickball. It made me think about the pretzel man who would come by on fridays and we could buy pretzels for 25 cents a piece. It made me remember fights everyday on the playground and the first day of school when I got jumped; the Italian kids who use to throw eggs at our school, the kids bused in from the Passyunk housing projects, and the corner store where I once left school to buy candy from. Mr. Ipolito and Ms. Pearson, Ms. Addis, Ms. DiMarco, Aaron's class, the baddest class in the history of first grade, riding the bus every week to the Jenks because we didn't have a gifted and talented program, and of course space meals and milk in a pouch, there's enough stories in those two years to fill up a lifetime, stories that people can never believe when I tell them, things I wouldn't believe if I hadn't lived them, all in the second and third grade.
But mostly it made me think about Knowledge. I thought about how we became friends when I was tutoring him in science, how we became inseperable. We use to play together at recess and during gym, we would always be partners whenever we had an assignment in class, and we use to sit together at lunch and argue about whether or not the pizzas in the plastic pouch were as disgusting as the pizzas that came in the white box and trade out items in our space meals. There are three moments in particular though, that stand out for me; how we use to play Mash over the phone because we thought it was so cool and grownup, and how we use to always laugh when somebody got an ugly girl for their wife. I remember how after I got into a fight with this one kid over who got to be the door-holder, Knowledge got mad and bloodied his lip in the auditorium the next day. And I remember the last day we spent together before I moved to South Carolina, he’d stayed over the night before and we went to Six Flags and had ourselves a ball. Minutes after we stepped out the park the rain started coming down real hard, it was one of the hardest storms I’ve ever seen and by the time we had raced back to the car we were absolutely drenched. And I remember thinking how much I didn’t want to leave, how he was the first best friend (besides my brother) that I’d ever had. It was weird how he could possibly look up to someone like me, because I so much looked up to him. Mom was always a little hippiesque so every know and then we'd try out being vegetarian, and I remember Ms. Pearson telling my mom how Knowledge decided that he was going to become a vegetarian too. One time mom drove me to the projects so I could hang out at his house and there were roaches crawling everywhere, no food in the refrigerator; we had to stay in the house the entire time. His dad had died a long time ago, his brother was doing a bid for robbing or robbing someone at the Travelodge, his mom was a confirmed drug addict. I was the only one out of all our friends that didn't grow up in the projects. I use to think that my parents were the richest people on the planet. I'm so grateful that they were always there.
I always wonder how his life turned out, how high school turned out for him, whether or not he stayed on the path that he was going on. The journey from Elementary school to high school is such a long one, and surely his surroundings brought him back down to where they are. And yet... Meeting him turned my life around, even if it took me years to realize it, and even if the effects of being cool by association wore off gradually as I slowly became a nerd again, but I also know that I changed him. He started making the honor roll from the first quarter of third grade until well after I left, after he started going to Vare. We use to talk, we called each other every week when I first moved to South Carolina, but slowly it became once a month, once every two months, every six months, until finally in the beginning of sixth grade his phone got disconnected and I never talked to him again. So when I think about Teach for America there is always a face for me. He struggled and fought more when he was 8 years old than most people here have had to or will have to their entire lives. I hope to God more than anything that he made it out of Passyunk, that he made it to a good job or to college, that he survived everything that was destined to take him down and he became a better man for it all. There is no one on the planet that deserves a better life than him. I just hope that he remembers me. Because I certainly remember and think about him.