Of course, the alarm was going off, which in the still of the night always sounded amplified 1000 times. However, I was serenely calm. All the butterflies I’d had before the event had dissipated. This was how I was with any job, whether it was stealing clothes or fighting a contender – as soon as it started I would be at peace.
I grabbed about six suits and then just stood there, stock still in the centre of the store, soaking up the peace. When I was ready, I simply walked to the taxi and headed back to London. Easy. On the M23, however, these two sleek police Jaguar cars pulled up alongside us. I looked behind and another one had taken position to our rear. It transpired that someone had heard the alarm, saw me break in and called the police. I was nicked.
There was no escape. They hauled me up in court and I explained that it was just a matter of money, that this was not my usual behaviour. Things were looking quite bleak, but thankfully the judge granted me bail, which I jumped and headed for a new life which was waiting for me . . . in New York.
‘They know exactly who you are and what you are doing. They’re watching you, don’t kid yourself they’re not. Wait until you’re 17–you’ll get caught, you’ll be in and out of jail for the rest of your life. You keep on screwing up.’
This warning shot was fired my way many times by my father over the years, but I didn’t change my ways. Unless I was taken elsewhere, he was convinced I was being groomed as Borstal and prison fodder.
It was actually my mother who plucked me out of my life of delinquency. She was hearing all these reports from Dad about my misbehaviour, so she asked him to send me to New York. She even forwarded the money for the plane fare. My flight was on 29 November 1982. I flew in a silk suit, with burgundy Italian shoes, but halfway across the Atlantic I realised this was not a clever choice of garment. I arrived at JFK after seven hours in a cramped seat with my silk suit looking like one big crease. I did a lot of thinking on that plane, though, and promised myself I would stop smoking, go to church and try to start behaving myself. I also thought it would be a good idea to go to a boxing gym, mainly to get fit. I knew that my peer group in London would make it very hard for me to forge a new life, so I was fully aware this was a chance of a fresh start. I collected my bags from the airport carousel and caught a taxi with my father to where my mother lived, at 161st Street on Melrose Avenue, South Bronx.
Being from the street, I was not intimidated with settling into a new environment. One of my first impressions of New York was the culture – I didn’t understand how inconsiderate people were with their language and the disrespect they threw around. It took some time to soak in the new terrain – this was, after all, nothing like even the toughest parts of London. My acute sense of observation was to quickly prove invaluable.
Pretty soon, I realised three basic facts that would remain constant during my time in New York. Firstly, it was very, very cold in the winter. Secondly, it was bakingly hot in the summer and, thirdly, I was just as poor here as in south London. In New York, it doesn’t matter what colour you are, if you’re poor, you’re made to feel like an outcast. You can be white, black, Hispanic, Chinese, whatever, if you don’t have any money, you don’t get any respect. It was very, very hard. I often had a dollar for my dinner and that would get me eight rotten bananas and a quart of milk. I’d put that in a blender with a little nutmeg and that was my dinner. Some days my mother would cook for me so I’d eat decently, but she wasn’t always with me as she worked as a live-in nurse for the aforementioned old Jewish lady, Dorothy.
I started straight away on my new less deviant path. I’m not saying that I stopped all my vices overnight, of course not, but that was my intention; indeed, I would drift back into the shoplifting later when I travelled intermittently between New York and the UK, but for now I was determined to start a clean slate. There was no one to tempt me like my London friends and I knew what I had to do. I had one more chance. I wanted to be a success and that meant not stealing, not drinking and not fighting. As I’ve said, before I flew to New York, I drank very heavily. It was either Bacardi or Special Brew, often swilling several cans before I went out in the morning.
Within three months, I had stopped smoking, no mean feat when you consider the quantity of nicotine and ganja I was getting through in London. Two devastating incidents happened which made me stop smoking cigarettes and joints completely. The first episode was after I had come from Manhattan and stopped off near Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, to go into a bar that was near to where we lived. There were some guys whom I vaguely knew from playing pool with, and one of them offered me some weed. This was not just ordinary weed, like the weed I was used to in England. This knocked me for six! I walked the eight blocks home but, before I went upstairs, I trudged into the store on the ground floor. This was an amazing shop, a cornucopia of fascinating objects. They used to say they stocked everything from a pin to an elephant. It certainly looked like that, all old boxes crammed to bursting, piled high, teetering with the weight of the weird objects inside.
The store was run by two middle-aged, real African American New Yorkers from down south, Mr Seymour and his sister Norval. This particular day, Norval was serving and as I asked her for whatever it was I wanted, she looked up at me. Now, when you smoke weed, your eyelids kind of shine and droop. I don’t know if she knew what I had been up to or not, but my perception told me she did. I could almost read her disappointed eyes saying, ‘. . . and I thought you were a good boy.’ That look, which I am sure she was not aware of, withered me on the spot. My spirit was crushed. I have always had a deep-felt respect for my elders and so this lady’s inner dismay really hurt me. I stopped smoking weed there and then.
Some Jamaicans say weed is a herb of wisdom. I agree but perhaps from a different viewpoint, namely that the wisdom only comes if you stop smoking and apply yourself to something. Marijuana helped me because it made me appreciate my focus more when I had stopped.
As with weed, I had always felt guilty about smoking cigarettes, but did it anyway, as you do when you are younger. The incident that stopped this habit was when my mother came down one day and caught me outside on the steps smoking a cigarette. All she said was, ‘Jesus Christ!’ but that was enough. Knowing how precious her religion is to her, she could not have hurt me more if she had whipped me with a cane. Those two words made me feel like crying. It levelled me and for days I was in despair, so ashamed. Whatever I did, I would always say to myself, Please don’t say those words.
I gradually cut back on the drink too and started to get my life in order. Although I had been a persistent offender in London, I was street-wise enough not to steal one thing during my time in the Bronx. Over there, if they catch you stealing even the tiniest thing, they give you a good hiding first before they call the police. New York was a rough place and I was there in the early 80s, when it had one of the highest crime rates of any city in the world. This was not the place to be taking liberties with people’s livelihoods.
I was surprised by the prevalence of the gun culture over there. In London there were knives at worst, and even then they were only brandished in extreme circumstances, and actually used even more rarely. Yet in New York it was common for everyone to have a gun. I would find out just how popular firearms were shortly after.
I started attending church and enrolled at Morris High School in the South Bronx, where I studied from 1983 until 1986. I took North American History, Spanish and Geography. I didn’t have the same temptations around me as in London, so I became a good student who worked hard towards graduation. My transition was well underway (this period of cleansing, if you like, went on until I fought for the world