OPENING SCENE
Aerial footage of Los Angeles. Dawn. The city is still quiet. The camera moves slowly over familiar landmarks — the 110 freeway, Crenshaw Boulevard, the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Street level shots follow — corner stores opening, morning light on sidewalks, ordinary people beginning ordinary days. The city looks like itself. Beautiful and hard and full of possibility.
The camera settles on a car parked on a residential street. We can’t yet read the license plate. The narrator begins to speak.
OPENING MONOLOGUE
I was born in Los Angeles.
That fact alone shaped everything that followed — what I wanted, what I feared, what I thought was possible for someone like me. Los Angeles is a city that tells you every day that greatness is nearby. You can see it. Sometimes you can almost touch it. But for a young Black man growing up here, nearby doesn’t always mean available.
I didn’t know how to close that distance for a long time.
What I knew was this city. These streets. The particular quality of light on a Southern California morning when the air is still cool and the day hasn’t decided what it’s going to be yet. I knew what it felt like to want something larger than what was immediately in front of me and not yet know how to reach it.
I was twenty-six years old when I put a number on my car. The number was 109. My birthday — October 9th. My initials. It was a small act. A personal one. I wasn’t making a statement to anyone but myself.
I didn’t know then that number would follow me around the world.
I didn’t know I was going anywhere.
SCENE ONE: THREE ELEMENTS
Street level footage of Los Angeles. Crenshaw Boulevard. The camera moves slowly through the neighborhood — barbershops, corner stores, murals on walls, ordinary life on an ordinary afternoon. The narrator walks into frame from behind the camera. We see him for the first time. He is walking slowly, looking around as if seeing something familiar with new eyes.
NARRATION
I came back to Los Angeles from Oman in 2019. Eight thousand miles. Desert to city. Silence to noise. I needed time to process everything that had happened that year. The Ethiopian Airlines crash. Nipsey’s murder. The desert road and the truck that nearly ran me off it.
I found myself one afternoon near Crenshaw and 60th Street. Nipsey’s neighborhood. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was simply walking through a part of the city that felt important to visit.
And then I stopped.
Camera shows the Nipsey Hussle mural on the wall. Slow, deliberate shot. The camera holds on it.
There was a mural of Nipsey. Large. Vivid. His face looking out at the street he had claimed as his own.
Camera slowly pans to the cross on the church wall nearby.
Next to it — on the wall of a church — a cross.
Camera slowly moves to the address. 6109 is visible on the building.
And next to that — the address of the building. 6109.
I stood there for a moment. And something pulled at my memory.
The footage shifts. Desert imagery. Oman. Vast empty roads under blazing sun. The same meditative quality but a completely different world.
Eight thousand miles away. Seven days after Nipsey was murdered. I had walked out of my home in Nizwa, Oman at 7:30 in the morning. I was grieving. I was alone. I was eight thousand miles from everything familiar.
I looked up at the sky.
Shot of a desert sky. Vast and open.
There were lines in the sky. Dissipation trails — the remnants of aircraft passing through. What stopped me was their arrangement. They formed a cross. Perpendicular lines directly above where I was standing.
Pause.
One week after Nipsey’s death. A cross in the desert sky.
And on the morning I learned he was gone — driving to work through that same desert — a truck had nearly run me off the road. Two cars on an empty desert road. The truck’s license plate read 1090.
A cross. A memory of Nipsey. And the number 109.
Cut back to Crenshaw and 60th Street. The mural. The cross. The address 6109. The camera holds on all three in a single wide shot.
Three elements. Eight thousand miles apart. I want to be honest about what I can and cannot say about that.
The mural is a community memorial — one of many painted across Los Angeles after Nipsey’s death. The cross is on a church that stood long before he was born. The address 6109 was assigned by the city long before any of this happened.
None of these things were arranged for my benefit.
But I was the one who noticed them. And I was the one who had stood in the Omani desert seven months earlier and noticed the same constellation of elements under entirely different circumstances.
The narrator looks directly into the camera for the first time.
I don’t know what that means. I’m not sure I need to.
What I know is that paying attention to this city — to these streets, to the people this city has produced — opened something in me I didn’t know was closed.
And it started here. On this corner. In Los Angeles.
Slow fade.
SCENE TWO: TWO GENIUSES
Street level footage of Los Angeles. Daytime. The camera moves through downtown — office buildings, suited workers, busy intersections. The imagery is deliberately corporate and impersonal. Then a slow transition to South Los Angeles — Crenshaw, residential streets, a different world within the same city.
NARRATION
By 2005 I was twenty-six years old and trying to make my American Dream come true.
I had done what I was supposed to do. I had earned my bachelor’s degree in Finance. I had followed the path that was supposed to lead somewhere. But somewhere wasn’t opening its doors.
I was temping. Moving from one short assignment to the next. Getting let go. Starting over. The corporate world felt like a room I kept being escorted out of before I could sit down.
I want to be honest about what that felt like. It felt like rejection that was bigger than me personally. Like the system itself had decided that a young Black man with a Finance degree from Los Angeles was not what it was looking for.
I don’t know if that was true. What I know is that it felt true. And when something feels true every day for long enough it starts to shape how you see yourself.
The camera settles on the exterior of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Summer light. People moving in and out.
That summer I walked into the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue. There was a retrospective on display. A painter I had never heard of. Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Images of Basquiat’s work — vivid, dense, crowded with meaning. The camera moves slowly across canvases.
What I saw stopped me.
Here was a Black man who had taken everything the world gave him — the streets, the rejection, the noise, the history — and turned it into something that demanded to be seen. His paintings didn’t ask permission. They didn’t apologize for taking up space. They insisted on their own worth with a confidence I recognized and desperately needed.
I felt seen in a way I hadn’t expected to feel in a museum.
Pause.
And then I learned he was dead.
Twenty-seven years old. Gone in 1988. Another Black man who couldn’t live long enough to fully inhabit his own genius.
I stood there in that gallery and asked the same question I had been asking my whole life. Why can’t Black men live?
I claimed his work anyway. Perhaps especially because of that.
The footage shifts. Street footage of Crenshaw. Energy. Movement. Music just audible at the edges of the sound design.
Around that same time I became aware of a young rapper from Crenshaw. Ermias Asghedom. He called himself Nipsey Hussle.
I watched his early videos. I recognized something in him immediately — the same quality I had seen in Basquiat’s paintings. A refusal to apologize for who he was or where he came from. An insistence on his own worth that the world hadn’t yet confirmed.
But I kept my distance.
Nipsey’s world was dangerous. His affiliation with the Rollin 60s Crips was not a secret. For a young Black man navigating Los Angeles I understood what that affiliation meant — it was its own kind of navigation strategy, a way of finding protection and community in a city that offered young Black men very few legitimate alternatives. But it was also a world that consumed people. I had seen it happen.
So I watched from a distance. I recognized his genius. I noted it. And I kept moving.
The footage slows. Night. A television screen glowing in a dark room.
Years passed. I left Los Angeles. I taught English in South Korea for nine years. I traveled to Saudi Arabia. To Ethiopia. To Oman. I was building something — slowly, deliberately, one decision at a time.
And then March 2019 happened.
Nipsey was gone. Another Black genius taken too soon. The same question. The same grief. The same anger underneath it.
I returned to Los Angeles sometime after. And one night — sometime around 2020 — I reached for a DVD. A documentary about Basquiat. I put it on with no particular expectation.
The glow of a television screen in a dark room. The narrator’s face partially illuminated.
After about thirty minutes a painting appeared on the screen. Dense with marks and words and symbols. My eyes moved across it looking for somewhere to land.
And then I saw it.
I jumped up. I rewound the video. There it was. My number. In a Basquiat painting I had never seen before.
I reached for my phone to post about the discovery on Facebook. I was ready to share what I had found.
And then I noticed the clock.
11:09pm.
Long pause. The screen glows in the darkness.
I sat with that for a long time.
Over the months that followed I kept returning to the painting. Looking more carefully each time. And the more carefully I looked the more I found.
I found Alexander the Great written at the top of the canvas. I found Toussaint L’Ouverture on the left side. I found a crown. I found a bone.
And I found something else.
A photograph of Nipsey Hussle that reminded me of the painting. The same energy. The same insistence. The same refusal to apologize for existing.
I went down a rabbit hole.
And at the bottom of that rabbit hole I found something that stopped me completely. In his own voice while he was alive Nipsey Hussle had named Jean-Michel Basquiat. Of all the painters in the world he had named Basquiat. As a moral reference point. As a measure of what it means to have genius and squander it.
One man from Brooklyn. One man from Crenshaw. Both geniuses. Both navigating worlds that didn’t make genius easy. Both taken too soon.
And one painting that seemed to hold them both.
Slow fade.
CLOSING SCENE: THE WELL
Dawn footage of Los Angeles. The city waking up. The same streets we saw in the opening — but now familiar. The camera moves slowly through Crenshaw, past the mural, past the church, through neighborhoods the viewer now knows something about.
The narrator walks into frame. The same man we met at the beginning. But something has settled in him.
NARRATION
I want to be honest about what I know and what I don’t.
I know that Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. I know that he died at twenty-seven. I know that he wrote the name Toussaint L’Ouverture on a canvas in 1982 — invoking the leader of the Haitian Revolution, invoking his own ancestral lineage, making it present.
I know that Ermias Asghedom was born in Los Angeles in 1985 to an Eritrean father and a mother from Louisiana. I know that he died at thirty-three. I know that in his own voice while he was alive he named Jean-Michel Basquiat — of all the painters in the world he could have named, he named Basquiat.
Those are documented facts. They are real.
The camera moves slowly across the Nipsey mural. His face looking out at the street.
What I cannot tell you with certainty is what those facts mean when placed next to each other. I cannot tell you that a painting made in 1982 predicted the life of a man born three years later. I cannot tell you that the number 109 appearing across my life on multiple continents over twenty years constitutes proof of anything beyond personal significance.
What I can tell you is what I believe.
I believe that both of these men drew from the same deep well. A well that survived the Middle Passage. That survived slavery. That survived colonialism. That encoded itself in paint and music and street culture because those were the vessels available.
Basquiat carried that well through his Haitian heritage. Nipsey carried it through his Louisiana roots — roots shaped by the same Haitian diaspora that arrived in New Orleans two centuries ago.
Neither man chose that inheritance consciously. It moved through them the way inheritance always moves — without permission, without announcement, and with more force than either could have fully understood.
The camera slowly pulls back from the mural. The cross on the church wall comes into frame. The address 6109 visible in the background.
I started this journey as a young Black man in Los Angeles who couldn’t find work. Who felt unwanted. Who walked into a museum one summer afternoon and found a dead painter who made him feel seen.
I ended it here. On these streets. In this city.
Eight thousand miles traveled. Multiple countries. Multiple languages. Multiple versions of myself tested and discarded and rebuilt.
The narrator looks directly into the camera.
I don’t know if the number 109 means anything beyond what I’ve brought to it. I don’t know if the painting was waiting for me to find it. I don’t know if the cross in the Omani desert sky was a sign or simply a meteorological event on a morning when I was already looking up.
What I know is this. Paying attention saved me. Paying attention to Basquiat’s work taught me that Black genius is real and worth documenting. Paying attention to Nipsey’s life taught me that where you come from is not a ceiling. Paying attention to my own story — honestly, without embellishment — taught me that the distance between who I was and who I wanted to be was crossable.
I crossed it one decision at a time.
The camera holds on the street. Ordinary life continuing. People moving. The city doing what cities do.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died at twenty-seven in 1988. Ermias Asghedom died at thirty-three in 2019. Both left behind work that rewards careful attention. Both deserve to be seen clearly — not through the distortion of mythology or the flattening of dismissal — but honestly, precisely, and with the full weight of what they actually accomplished.
Two men. One city. One deep well.
The marathon continues. The well remains.
Slow fade to black.
In the darkness, simply:
109