tags: dariusburgess, jerseycity, memorial, shooting
from a hundred feet away in the postmidnight dark it looks like a small bonfire. the tight crowd of people bracketing the jumping yellow glow, along the chainlink under the trees, mostly looks like they’re opening a christmas present full of light.
but stuff generally don’t burn outdoors around here unless it’s been stripped and left under the railbed.
the day hadn’t gone well in most ways. the usual routines had not been reassuring. all the surprises hadn’t felt like happy gifts, it took real effort but now this seemed to fit. indecisive morning showers started the first real real summer humidity day, even normal was a slow damp tote, and then an enveloping obligation. on the way in there was a blind staggering hour of stopped traffic with nothing to show at the end but a turnaround. no warning, no advisory, no cops, a crawl through multiple feeder ramp ambushes to a dead end and then a slow turn back facing the dead stopped lanes of cars and trucks just fought through. it was like summers in baltimore; later i said maybe it felt like the day martin luther king was shot and baltimore burned.
but this little fire wasn’t so much of a kind with that. you get close enough to realize there’s no menace or abandonment in this, there’s no destruction or scavenging in this. turned out someone had been shot done and final, but sometimes when it’s all badly wasted good things happen farther on just a bit. i don’t know how this is but somebody can die for little reason and leave something strong and good and real behind. immediate, expansive and i can’t really put it into words.
darius burgess was 28 and darius burgess had been dead for about eleven hours, and i was walking into the beginnings of his memorial. fifteen or twenty tall glass votive candles set shoulder to shoulder in a mass of soft conical light, backed hard against the abandoned bocce court and radiating out to the basketball nets across the open side of the path. you want metaphor about the interface between what’s done and what’s now and here were the coordinates marked in light big as hell in the playground come on. slowly skirting the small crowd onto the dirt shoulder fronting the sideline fence, hearing one man facing the flames muttering something so steady and fluid it could have been a freestyle prayer in a one-man language and the rest took it like the best church, rapt and night-glittering. another step in the dirt and i saw the man who clearly lives outdoors, sitting six off on the curb, facing frontlit an oiled beaming, amber with what sure looked like communion to me. some strange comfort, dark fortune.
light coming up off empty cognac glass anchoring the chainlink, men pouring tribute out of longnecked bottles onto the asphalt, the splash down coming up like small breakers through the still focal memories of darius burgess. we were all a lens, a chain, a mirror.
darius burgess is now distilling, a story that hasn’t yet words is purifying, this is the field where something is really consecrated in the dirt and glass and tarmac, under the wild trees and eight long steps back from the sidewalk where he fell on his face this afternoon. his mother found him down on the pavement before the gun was a block away and called his name and it’s only now we’re hearing his answer. it’s a long call back, he’s got wind in his lungs still that can blow it all away if you can be still long enough to join, pull with him past and out and off.
when i stumbled late for work into the edges of a crime scene yesterday afternoon people passing out from the corner were saying somebody got shot in a bar and all i wanted to do was figure out a way to navigate the skeins of police tape that seemed to bind up most of the neighborhood. fifth-graders were leaving school for the day heading to the bottom of the hill calling “somebody got shot” over their trailing shoulder packs.
today the guy who bums cigarettes off me when he sees the pack in my pocket takes me by the hand and leads me closer to the chainlink, says the shooter waited on the brick wall until darius burgess came out and turned to the courts, when he put one shot in his back.
“we get along here; blacks, latinos, puerto ricans. nobody makes any trouble for nobody else. we watch each other’s kids.”
there are team jerseys hanging from the top of the fence, heralds of the boston red sox and the orlando magic, a large color photo of darius burgess in partial profile on white posterboard below. he shows strong features, etched clear and bold like the messages written on the uniform shirts hanging above, the RIP yearbook notes tattooing the white cardboard. my smokehound says they’ll all be there again into the night, and i say i’ll see him then.
the local news coverage is brief. no one’s been caught. the police refer vaguely to a search for “a person of interest.” it all seems unfocused, uninspired, and more than a little perfunctory. this fluid group along the path glows with some better purpose not recognized in more fortunate municipalities; darius burgess has shed the damp burden and his extended family carries on, freed up a bit through the sacrifice. the direction is evident though the purpose can’t yet be put to paper. they’re not leaving darius burgess behind.
The Cribs – Bastards of Young (the replacements)
The Magnetic Fields – Papa Was A Rodeo
Husker Du – Hardly Getting Over It
The Replacements – Bastards of Young
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Dancing In The Street
The Blasters – Border Radio (live in cleveland)
X – See How We Are (demo-remix)
