I wasn’t quite sure what to make of his tattoos, and stared at them a few moments longer before I noticed his grandfather, hunched over on the blue cloth couch across the room, waving at me. He began to say something before picking up a glass marijuana pipe. He lit it up and took one long toke before turning back toward me and groaning some barely audible greeting.
After a lifetime of chronic back pain, he’s usually stuck in a wheelchair and has spent most of the last few years under a haze of smoke and reruns of Judge Judy. At night, he simply curls up on the couch while TJ’s older cousin sleeps on the love seat.
The house itself is crumbling. The bathroom is decaying and full of mold, and the kitchen floor seems to be rotting completely on one side. The only well-cared-for items in the entire place are two large cannabis plants on a circular plastic kitchen table, surrounded by bleach bottles, glowing under fierce HID lighting.
TJ has lived here almost six years, after homesickness brought him back from Mississippi. Born in Sacramento, starting in eighth grade when his father moved him to Reno, he had a nomadic childhood. He was there for a year before his dad abandoned him and his sister for another family—he hasn’t spoken to him since. His mother remarried and took TJ to Oxford, Mississippi, during his high school years. He tried to adapt, but struggled in school, cutting classes to shoot hoops or just roam the streets with his new friends. He dropped out before graduation to help his family pay the bills. Eventually, one day when he’d had enough of the South, he walked to the bus station and headed back to Sacramento.
When he came home, after searching for months, he found the only job he could get in Sacramento’s harsh, collapsed economy—cleaning bathrooms, part-time, at the local Greyhound station. In three years, he’s never had a promotion or a pay raise.
Standing in TJ’s kitchen, the inescapable smell of weed and beer drifts in from the yard. I walk through the back door and see 20 to 30 smaller marijuana plants lined up in neat rows, empty beer cans strewn across the concrete patio. The family pit bull lies in the sun, tongue out, and takes in the sweet smell of freshly grown weed.
TJ, who seems to be weary, ushers me back inside. We pass his uncle’s bedroom. He’s counting piles of green Ziploc bags, and shoving them into a box.
I walk behind TJ into his room, then freeze and look around. His bed is immaculately made, his sneakers lined up perfectly. A clothes iron is placed on the floor. There is the tidiness of a well-groomed man, but also innocence, the naïveté of a 14-year-old boy who still views the world in terms of heroes and candy money.
As he talks to me, he fiddles with his white headphones and moves them off his ears. I can hear the faint sounds of Mobb Deep’s “The Infamous” eke into the air.
On his desk sits a large plastic jar filled to the brim with nickels, dimes, quarters, and pennies. Mostly pennies. It’s money he’s saving for food in New York. Next to the jar are spray cans and black markers for tags he’s working on—“Brooklyn” and “Uptown Finest.”
In the confines of his room, it’s as if he’s trying to live out his own fantasy of what he imagines an early-’90s childhood to be during the golden age of hip-hop on the streets of New York. A time that must seem romantic and authentic, in a way that his life now seems difficult and mundane.
On his desk, stacked neatly in two piles, seem to be every DVD or VHS tape ever produced about street basketball. Above the Rim, Heaven Is a Playground, a documentary about streetballer Earl “The Goat” Manigault.
These are the tapes he grew up with. “I was like, in the second grade watching a show with my dad and this commercial come on about streetball,” he says. “I can’t remember what it was, but the footage was fuckin’ crazy. I was hypnotized, I couldn’t get enough. Ever since that, that’s all I want to do.”
The rest of his room is a homage to his idols: quotes and pictures of Jay-Z over his window, an awkward life-size cutout of Michael Jordan leaned against the wall, a framed photograph he took with streetball legend Joe Hammond the first time he went to Rucker. “Joe didn’t have to go to class, he was a legend,” he says. “The entire Lakers flew to Rucker to see him play.” He holds the picture in his hands, then puts it down and stares at it in admiration.
And above his bed, glaring down on him each night, is a mini-shrine to the fiery Boston Celtics playmaker Rajon Rondo. It’s almost an unhealthy love. His entire bedroom is sprinkled with odes to Rondo—a jersey, his pictures, a warm-up shirt, and all types of assorted Boston Celtics paraphernalia.