There’s a single incident that motivates a lot of my new album, Better Days.
Senior year at Miami Killian I got into my first “serious” (for high school) relationship with a girl named Vero. Vero had a friend named Karen and I had a friend named Justin and when Justin and Karen met one day and started dating, we thought this was the most amazing goddamn thing on the planet. And it was fun for a couple of months, until the day Justin and Karen were painting his room and Justin’s cousin Jonathan came over and beat them both to death with a baseball bat.
We were there that day, Vero and I, just after the murders took place. Standing not inside the house but out front, knocking on the door and wondering why our friends wouldn’t open up even though twenty minutes ago they were the ones who invited us over for spaghetti. We wouldn’t find out about their deaths until later when the news broke on TV, after we’d already left Justin’s house pissed that they’d bailed on us. It would be another couple months before we found out Justin’s cousin was on the other side of the door that afternoon while we were knocking, standing amidst the carnage with the bat in his hands, waiting.
I still sometimes have this recurring nightmare of knocking at that front door, only in the dream the door opens and before I can react the bat hits me right in the face.
This all happened almost twenty-five years ago, which is long enough now that I feel obligated to say the phrase “a different time.” The memories of back then are dream-like, the edges of the pictures frayed, specific details buried beneath years of layered synapses. I’m guessing if you were in or around Miami at the time you might remember the story, but I wouldn’t fault you if you didn’t.
Crazy shit’s always going down in Dade County, right? Dalé.
Growing up in Miami is odd because much of what this city is and what it represents is not meant for children. Mine’s was not a unique experience; talk to most people who grew up down here and you’ll hear any number of crazy stories that would lead to pearl-clutching amongst the residents of smaller, less crowded towns. I used this rationalization back then to force myself to move on from the murders, vowing not to make this the defining moment in my life. I’d just started as a freshman at FIU a few months before, on a computer science scholarship. I was eighteen, whole life ahead of me.
By the following summer I’d lost my scholarship and landed on academic probation after two semesters of failing all but one class (Calculus, shit you not).
Following a tense meeting between myself, my parents and my advisor, I wasn’t too keen on going back to school. In fact, I was perfectly fine spending afternoons serving tables and nights getting drunk with my coworkers before inevitably passing out somewhere in a dreamless stupor. So that’s exactly what I did, for over a year.
The next summer I had a sit-down at a Barnes and Noble with a friend who was worried about me and she suggested I try writing about what was going on in my head. Get the thoughts out so I could maybe see them clearer, organize them better. So I did. Within a couple of months I was enrolled at Miami Dade College (it was still Miami Dade Community College back then) as a Journalism major, and within two years I had my associate’s degree and an acceptance letter to Florida State University. In my personal statement for my application I mentioned what had happened to Justin and Karen, a sheepish justification for all those F’s on my freshman transcript.
At FSU, I majored in English with a Creative Writing track which required a few writing workshops. In one, I wrote a first-person essay about Justin and Karen’s murders, beginning in the hours leading up to their deaths and ending after my testimony at their killer’s trial in which I was asked to identify the victims in pictures of their dead bodies. It was the first time I’d really sat down and examined what happened to them in any detail, and the draft I submitted for workshop was way too long and way too self-involved. I vividly remember how I felt coming in to class the day my story was up for critique, the butt-clenching fear looking around the room at these literary wolves waiting to technically rip the essay apart the way they had already done to a few of our classmates (senior- and graduate-level writing workshops are brutal).
Instead, I received (along with uncomfortable and discomforting stares) some genuinely good advice on how to make the story clearer and easier to read.
Back at my laptop, I used the notes to rewrite the essay and—at the urging of my professor—submitted it for a department writing competition in which I took first place. The next semester I submitted the essay as part of my graduate school application, which is how I ended up with a master’s degree and a teaching career.
And for a lot of those years, that shit ate at me.
The idea that I had let happen exactly what I’d told myself I would not let happen. My entire career hinging on me writing about my friends’ murders. Death becoming the catalyst of my life.
I don’t remember when I first heard the term “imposter syndrome,” but I remember immediately identifying with it, like that meme of DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sitting on a couch holding a cigarette and a beer, pointing wide-eyed at the TV. Felt it in and after grad school, felt it when I landed a Managing Editor gig in Manhattan (sounds more glamorous than it was), felt it when I got the teaching position I currently hold at my alma mater, and felt it most recently when I published my first novel, Riders in Disguise (a Jitney publication).
The only thing that’s ever quieted these internal objections is writing more. More articles, more short stories, more novels. And not just writing, no. Anything that took both time and creative energy. Spent a whole summer making an ad for the unpublished novel I wrote as my graduate thesis, an ad that at one point featured me in my underwear pretending to be drunk on my bedroom floor (this video has mysteriously vanished). Bought my first guitar in graduate school and am now fairly competent (people who’ve heard me play know “competent” is doing a lot of work there). Tried to start a blogging series, three articles a week, made it a couple of months before that shit got old. Spent a decade working on Riders in Disguise, part of a planned trilogy. Got on GarageBand and made some beats, which led to some lyrics, which turned into Autonomous Entity and a couple of albums, the newest of which is why I’m writing this essay (Better Days, December 13th). All while adhering to this addictive routine that always required a project, a creative process, an external purpose. A mental back scratcher, the sharper the prongs the better. Or a factory, cranking out products with the primary goal of just keeping those machines running.
The mechanisms. For coping.
As many would expect—especially when teenagers are involved—Justin and Karen’s murders were hard on a lot of people, primarily their moms and dads, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. However, in the sense of the general population, it’s hard to connect to even the most heinous deaths or the people caught in the ripple effects when you don’t personally know these people. Even harder to connect to the comparatively—for lack of a better term—mundane clashes with mortality.
An uncle dead from prostate cancer when I was twelve.
A friend on the way home from school drowning in a canal at sixteen.
A cousin dead from a rare allergic reaction in his early thirties, the same rare allergic reaction that would kill a friend a couple years later.
My little sister, dead from Covid at thirty-two.
Words on a page, I know.
As an author and Creative Writing professor, I get this. The details of such matters are evergreen, in the way all things mortality-related stay interesting. But once those details are known and the shock value runs its course, nobody wants to stick around for the mental collapses, the lost grips on reality, the disillusionment, the existential dread, the painful and arduous treks through the barren maze that is Grief. Wading through that stuff takes time—that most precious of commodities—and a whole lot of it. And the only way to interest a stranger in something that takes that much time is to present it from a uniquely thoughtful perspective.
Which takes time.
Better Days is my perspective on time, past and present, good and bad.
It’s about how time eventually surrounds grief, encapsulating it in a bubble that grows thicker and thicker each day, until you can barely see the scars anymore. It’s for the 40-year-old hip hop enthusiasts who maybe still got some shit from the past they haven’t completely dealt with, and for those who have dealt with their shit but in the process may have forgotten what things were like before. It’s for people who wax nostalgic about life before the internet even though they’ve been in this current state of society for so long the old world seems like a fantasy.
It’s for the people raised in a crazy city who also didn’t realize how crazy their city was until they met people from much less crazy cities.
Time does heal all, but the bigger the wound the longer that healing process takes. Half of us can’t even sit through an entire TikTok video, much less a recovery process that’ll take years with no set expiration date.
That shit? You gotta handle that on your own, bruh.
Unless…do it got a hook?
