When I was fifteen my grandfather died, and my father brought home his old black and white television set. Our house was small with not much space to store things, so my father set the thing on the floor of my room. It took a few weeks, but one night I decided to plug it in to see if the light would be bright enough to read by, but low enough not to wake anyone up. So I fiddled with the TV dial and found I could get the brightness sharp and I could read with the sound down. That is what I did for a little while, until after some experimentation I discovered that I could get one channel and if I sat real close with the sound low I could watch TV.

The one station was Channel 13, WNET and the show that I watched was called "Free-Time." This show was broadcast live and came on at 11 pm. Free Time had a rather eclectic offering of guests, musicians, radicals, politicians, and poets. It was on Free Time that I heard a young poet named Nikki Giovanni. She read poems about John Coltrane and Billy Holiday. It was unbelievably exciting to me. Nikki was young and radical, very untraditional with a huge Afro and she was different than anyone I had ever heard.

So one night when the address for tickets flashed on the screen I jotted it down and sent off.

When the tickets arrived, I arranged with a friend to go. We lied to our parents and took the LIRR to NYC at nine at night. I'm really not sure how, but we found our way to the subway and then to the TV station. We entered the studio which was nothing more than some bleachers and a stage.

The program that night was about gang violence. The studio was over flowing with gangs from the South Bronx. People were pushing and shoving and cursing. And to my amazement my desire to see this show was so strong that I convinced my friend to stay. We found seats and the program went on.

The gang members who sat on the stage were it seemed to me at fifteen--mature and insighttful. They got right to the point. Don't judge us, they said. A gang was a family that you needed to survive and you just had to live in the South Bronx to understand. Although I didn't live in the South Bronx I did understand and while the program was running I lost what ever misgivings I had about our situation and how it would unfold afterwards.

These quickly came back when the house lights went down and the moderator left. There was a general uneasiness then. Everyone knew things was different out on the streets. The gangs were at war. Who would leave first? How would they do it? And what would happen as there was no promise of safety as we headed to the subway. By this time it was about 1 AM and my friend and I had little idea about how to get out of the City.

And then shouting started and we heard some threats, and because we were too frightened to leave-- we just stayed. We were still hanging around an hour later. Then these Ghetto Brothers walked over to us and started to talk.

The Ghetto Brothers were a gang (or club) founded in New York City's South Bronx in the late 1960s. They eventually spread to much of the Northeastern United States. Like the Young Lords, they were involved in Puerto Rican nationalism, including, in the case of the Ghetto Brothers, an association with the then-new Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Ghetto Brothers founder Benjamin Melendez, who left the organization in 1976, was also known as a guitarist. He led a band, also known as the Ghetto Brothers, which included his late brother Victor Melendez on drums. They released one (self-titled) album in 1972, which had only informal, local distribution.

The Ghetto Brothers, especially in their early years, had a reputation as one of the more politically minded and less vengeful of New York-area gangs. After Cornell "Black Benjy" Benjamin was killed in 1971 trying to prevent a fight between two rival gangs, the Ghetto Brothers did not seek the expected revenge on those responsible for his death. Instead, under Melendez's leadership (and that of Carlos Suarez, also known as Carlos Melendez), they were instrumental in achieving a moderately successful truce among South Bronx and other New York-area gangs. The best-known of the meetings to hammer out a peace treaty occurred December 8, 1971. Among those present was Afrika Bambaataa, then a 14-year-old Black Spade warlord known on the streets as Bambaataa.

Under Melendez's leadership, the Ghetto Brothers represented one end of the spectrum in terms of how they treated the women involved with the gang. Referred to as the Ghetto Sisters—the respectful term contrasted sharply with the names used for the women attached to other NewYork gangs of the period—the women were generally viewed as organization members and as girlfriends, whereas many other gangs treated women almost entirely as sexual property.

We talked with them like the high school kids that we were. We were all into this Free Time scene.The guys liked us and we had a lot in common. One guy in particular, a guy known as Benjii was a poet and we hit it off, he showed me some poems that he had written that he had in his pocket. Great stuff about the streets.

We felt comfortable enough to tell these guys we had to get home, but had no idea how to do it. They agreed to show us the way and walk us to the train. But first they had to do something important for our protection. Benjii made them turn their vest jackets inside out, so no one would see their colors on the street and we wouldn't be targets. They walked us to the train, these guys with their jackets turned inside out, and we talked some more and held hands. It was that kind of thing--kid stuff. We had a long walk, and it was winter and we were cold, but happy to have found each other, pleased about having a small bit of time like this when we could just be teenagers and not battling some problem.

When we got to the platform Benjii and I kissed and as I remember it, he read me another poem, and I thought it was really good and I knew we had a lot in common. Maybe he would call me sometime in the future—I gave him my number—give me someone to hang on to in my stupid life. And I went home. It was probably six in the morning when we arrived at the our stop and my friend and I slept on a bench in the waiting area until about 7 when we got up, school would start soon, and the school building was across the street from the train station. We didn't want to be seen by teachers arriving for work.

The next week while I was running some errands for my mother I waited in line at the cash register and grabbed up the Daily News to check it out---there it was on the front page, Benjii on the ground. Shot trying to make peace in the South Bronx. He was the only one killed. This was the kind of photograph that we were used to seeing on the front page in the Seventies of young men on the concrete because there were in gangs and crime was bad in NY. Young men were pretty much killing each other and themselves and later there were the riots and the police became the ones doing the killing and then of course there was Vietnam.

Benjamin Melendez began the GBs in the South Bronx around 1967 with his brothers and some neighborhood friends. Known on the streets as "Yellow Benjy", Melendez would also become a key organizer of the pivotal 1971 Bronx truce that transformed the culture of the borough, and made the rise of hip-hop possible.

So, the way I remember it is-- I was shocked, but not shocked. I went to school and started to thinking about how much the sidewalks of New York City looked like tombstones and how headlines can sometimes read like epitaphs and how some people will always be trespassers because there will be places where they're not allowed to walk and how first someone had to let you come in before you can go out and I thought about how much pain there is in the world and how someone has to express it and I thought about poets like Benjii who die with their words in their pockets when everyone else has a gun and I wrote my first poem.