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Aaron Ritchie’s story

The Luckiest Man in Philly

Published onMay 11, 2022
Aaron Ritchie’s story
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Aaron Ritchie’s story

August 19, 1967 7:10 am Eastern Daylight Time, Philadelphia, PA.

“Aaron’s here. He’s right here. And asleep,” the voice whispered.

“Good. We can fuck with his head when he just wakes up,” a different voice.

The voices were kid’s voices.

I turned on my side. The bunk was soft, like an infirmary bed. The smell was wrong. Wrong and familiar. The dank, greasy odor of an ancient, oil-fired furnace. It reminded me of the basement where I lived for that year, until I got rousted. There in my aunt’s house on Yewdall in West Philly. The sounds were wrong too. There were none. Silence. Just the voices.

“Sooner he wakes up, sooner he knows,” a boy’s voice, closer.

“Morning, Cuz,” a girl’s voice.

I opened my eyes.

My cousins Mark and Jayne, a couple of little kids, stood by my bed looking down at me, frowning. The basement had just one small, dusty window high on the south wall to let in daylight. My single bed was a discard they never got around to tossing on the street.

“This is a nice dream,” I thought out loud. Nicest in a long while. I had tried to hold tight to memories of before, but they all faded away in the nightmares of today.

“Nice is not even close,” Jayne said.

“You are the luckiest nig…” He paused, a perplexed look came over him.

“…gro” Jayne said. “What are we calling ourselves now? Are we black yet?”

Mark said, “That might have been the seventies. We don’t even got hip hop yet, still just doo-wop. What I was saying. You are the luckiest African-American-black-negro-or-whatever human in the whole fucking world.”

“Amen to that!” Jayne said.

Mark said, “What if we had come back tomorrow, instead of today?”

My eyes were wide open now. I shifted and sat up. Wrongness accelerated all around me. I figured the decades of psychotropic drugs they used on me had converged into insanity. Jayne and Mark stood there, arms crossed, watching my confusion.

Mark said, “You will think you’re crazy. That will wear off soon enough.”

Jayne said, “It’s really simple. We’re back. All of us, and everything. Back in 1967.”

“Back?” I said.

“Radio man calls it a ‘time slip.’ The point is, this is real,” Jayne said.

“This is the day you fucked up. They day they took you away. But we won’t let that happen. You remember this day, don’tcha? It’s Saturday, mid-August, 1967,” Mark said. “You are so, so, very lucky that today is not tomorrow.”

Twenty years in solitary, thirty more inside, stabbed three times, likely to die any day. I’ve got more to forget than most folks got to remember. I do remember that day.

That night was still young. The day’s heat only just wearing off. Folks were out on their porches. Music and laughter, voices raised in anger. Sirens in the distance. Leroy and me, we were prowling around. Bored and broke.

I had no idea Leroy would shoot that cop. It wasn’t like any kind of plan. We were just thieving out of this Chrysler Imperial with New York plates, parked on 48th, near the nuthouse gated entrance. We figured the driver was in there visiting, and wouldn’t mind if we helped ourselves to any cash he left so completely unattended. The back seat held three suitcases that looked inviting.

The cop must have walked out the gate, because no car drove up. Leroy was bent over, jimmying the lock on a suitcase on the back seat. The cop took hold of his shoulder, spun him around.

Leroy had that damn zip gun in his pocket, then in his hand. He shot the cop in the face. The man crumpled to the sidewalk and Leroy took off. I was on the street side of the big car. I crouched down. Now I lay down and rolled under it. Quiet like. Not moving an inch. Leroy’s footsteps told me I was fucked. He would disappear and they’d have me instead.

I heard the cop’s partner shout. They come in pairs. Cops do. That one put three bullets in Leroy’s back. Bang. Bang. Bang. I was frozen in place. More cops came. They found me and somehow didn’t shoot me. Instead, they charged me with murder during a felony, with the extra charge of killing a cop. Life with no opportunity for parole. I was seventeen.

I looked from Jayne to Mark. They grinned back at me.

“You are seventeen again. You got a whole life ahead of you,” Mark said. “Momma doesn’t know the future. She doesn’t remember. She died of diabetes complications in 2010. She’s upstairs listening to the radio. Looks like Dad might be coming home early.”

My Uncle Vernon was in Nam. I remembered seeing him off. Last year, my mom’s then-boyfriend shot her dead in an argument and took off somewhere. I ended up here.

Jayne said, “You got hard, inside. Graterford almost killed you. You carry that hardness with you this time around, you gonna end up back in stir. Or worse.”

Mark said, “You got anything to say?”

“I spent twenty years in solitary. I got more to say than room full of Jehovah’s Witnesses. You run upstairs and let me dress. I’ll be up directly.”

Mark turned toward the stairway, then hesitated.

Jayne said, “Go on. Momma needs help with breakfast. I’ll be up in a minute.”

I watched him clamber up the steep wooden stairway and turned to Jayne.

Jayne said, “We got a lot of time to talk this out. I only have a couple things I need to get off my chest right now.”

She waited until I nodded.

She said, “You know I tried to see you twice a year, once they let you out of solitary. You never let me come. And your letters were few and so very angry. I remember all those years just like you do.”

“I was too low to see anybody,” I said. “I didn’t want nobody to see me.”

“You were ashamed. Your male brain turned that shame into rage. That day. That day is today. You are a lucky bastard. If this were tomorrow, you’d be set to do your time again. Well, right now, today is just another day where nothin’ special needs to happen. Your were the best of us. You were kind, nice to momma, helpful when needed. We were brats. I guess we are again. Can you be a brat when your head is sixty years old?”

“You done?”

“For now. I got my masters and became a social worker. I spent decades helping folks weather their traumas. I will always be here for you. I love you, Cuz.”

Jayne leaned close and planted a kiss on my forehead. “I’ll see you upstairs,” she whispered.

I watched her go and settled back on the bed. The ceiling was exposed floor joists, darkened with soot and festooned by spider webs.

In solitary, you got nothing but time to think about what might have been. Now, all my might-have-beens are lined up in front of me. Jayne is right. I got half a century of bitter to chew on in the quiet times of the day. But I feel the young me too. Inside. I looked at my hands. Young hands. Unscarred by time and knives.

I stood. Nothing hurt. Not at all. I needed a mirror. That would be upstairs. I spied my jeans and shirt on the chair. Dressing, I began to whistle. Some song by The Larks.

I took the steps in leaps. My mind was spinning. First business is to get out of Philly. Too many cops here with memories of my future trial. And a cop still alive whose buddies are gonna tell him about getting shot. They’ve got Leroy’s address and mine. Captain Rizzo runs the police like his own private army.

Every convict is a lawyer by circumstance. This time around, I’ll become one by conviction. If I can save even one wrongly convicted prisoner from the life I do remember, I will be justified in having this extra lifetime.

Today, I will venture out into the sunlight, stroll down Market. Glory in my freedom. If I see Leroy on the street, I will walk the other way. The whole next decade is me walking the other way. An entirely other way of living. It’s the least I can do as the luckiest black man in Philadelphia.

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