The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action

I

It was just one of those things. A fact of life. I was naked. Naked and alone. I didn’t hold it against Mama for locking me up naked and leaving me alone. Wasn’t her fault there wasn’t no money for no babysitter... That’s just the way it was... Like being black, being poor, being six years old and not knowing your daddy, being locked up naked and alone was just one of those things...

I understood why she locked me up. Understood she had to go to work. Understood she didn’t want me hanging out on the block while she was off at work. Understood she had to lock my clothes in the closet so I wouldn’t get dressed and run out into the halls and get in trouble again. So I wouldn’t kiss pretty little Shamika and feel her baby pea breasts under the stairwell. So I wouldn’t bounce dumb onion-head Horace’s onion head off the wall a hundred times for calling Mama a crackhead ho, for calling me “crack baby”. It was just one of those things...

Just like Mama had to put on the starched white maid’s uniform and the spotless ugly cracked white shoes I carefully polished for her... Just like Mama had to take three crowded smelly old buses — sometimes standing all the way — cross town to where the rich white folk lived in a rich white palace... Just like Mama had to smile for those rich white folk, smile until her face hurt and speak only when spoken to, carry heavy silver trays of fancy food out to the big table, hold those heavy silver trays still and stand there frozen like a statue while each individual white folk studied the shape and size of each individual slice of meat before choosing, each individual soggy boiled vegetable, each individual cherry drowning in brandy, each individual part of Mama’s pretty slim brown body in the starched white uniform and white stockings and spotless ugly cracked white shoes I polished for her... Just like gunshots and drugs and dead bodies on the street below, just like sirens and screams and dogs howling in the night, just like televisions blasting and cats screeching and doors slamming and toilets flushing... Just like big folk arguing and babies crying and radiators hissing... Just like crackheads piping up in the halls and rats scrambling in the walls and cockroaches crawling on your face and eating the spit off your lips when you was sleeping... Just like my daddy being sent to penitentiary for killing a man before I was born, born small as a baked potato with the crack addiction running hot like fever in my blood... Just like me rubbing Mama’s aching swollen feet at the end of the night, being naked and alone was just one of those things...

Like the time she brought me to the big white palace when she couldn’t find no babysitter — before the white folk cut her nights down and she stopped being able to afford a babysitter. How I played with little golden-headed Mary. How I ran all over the big white palace with little golden Mary. Little Mary who changed dresses every fifteen minutes... The long halls, the big rooms, the carpeted stairs, the closets... How we hid in a closet, me and Mary, a closet near as big as me and Mama’s whole apartment, a closet with lights and carpets even, a closet full of bright soft clothes and pair after pair of bright shiny uncracked shoes... How little golden Mary found some candy hidden there and told me to eat the candy. How she giggled when I put the candy in my mouth. The big white ball of candy that tasted so bad, the candy I didn’t want to eat, was about to spit out when Mary touched my arm and promised with big blue serious eyes cold and clear as the sky that if I chewed it and swallowed it she’d kiss me. How I chewed the horrible candy and fought the sickness and waited for my golden kiss. How little Mary laughed at me then, laughed at me instead of kissing me. Laughed and ran away, ran down the hall, down the stairs, me following, holding my stomach... How Mary skipped into the dinner party, me following feeling so sick... How Mary announced with a big smile to the big people at the big table that Frankie Lawrence had eaten a mothball. How the big white folk laughed and laughed. How Mary laughed and laughed and then ran off to change her dress. How Mama marched me into the kitchen and made me throw up, sticking a long thin brown finger with a cracked fake fingernail down my throat until the mothball and the cheese sandwich on white bread I’d eaten at home came up, until the tears came down, flowing free and easy and hot... Just one of those things.

Like the next time I went with Mama to the big white palace and just like Mama told me I ignored Mary. Didn’t pay her no mind. Lay there on the green grass in the big green garden off the big shiny kitchen, lay there in the cool tickly green grass as the big orange ball of late afternoon sun rolled sleepy behind the big green trees, lay there in the cool tickly green grass playing with a caterpillar I called Vincent. I wouldn’t look at Mary, no way, wouldn’t answer her, no way. Even when she begged me to say something, no way. How she begged and begged and said she was sorry about the mothball and promised with those clear blue eyes that if I spoke to her she would kiss me and show me her pee-pee. How finally I spoke to her, told her to leave me and my friend Vincent alone, that I didn’t want to see her dumb old pee-pee. How she bent down and kissed me then with her cold cherry lips and then raised her skirt to show me her pee-pee. How the big white lady walked out the back door right that moment and saw Mary showing me her pee-pee. How the big white lady turned bright pink like a giant pencil eraser and pulled me away from little golden Mary by the ear and almost yanked my little cookie ear off and dragged me by the ear, me going “ow ow ow ow ow” all the way across the lawn into the kitchen and told Mama not to bring me any more. How Mama looked mad enough to snatch the big white lady baldheaded but instead just said, “Yes, Ma’am” and slapped me upside the head two or three times, then sighed and muttered and drank a big glass of cooking wine fast, then poured me some milk and broke out some cookies and made me sit in the corner of the kitchen all night long... How I kept looking out the window, wondering where Vincent was... How tired Mama was at the end of that day. That day, every day. How poor we were. How tired Mama was. That day, every day. How lonely Mama was. How lonely I was. How hard life was. That day, every day... How Mama kept writing to Daddy in prison and how the letters were never answered... How one time Mama and me took that long smelly bus ride upstate to surprise-visit Daddy and bring him oranges. How when we got to the big penitentiary with the high walls and the men with guns Daddy wouldn’t come out to see us. How Mama busted out crying then, cried as we walked down the street, cried as we was waiting there in the cold for the bus home, cried all the long smelly bus ride home, me hugging her, the small towns and moonlit forests outside the windows, the bag of oranges untouched on her lap, telling her it was okay, Mama, it was okay, it was just one of those things... How we never did eat those oranges, those bad-luck oranges shrivelling brown and dry and lifeless in the back of the fridge... How Mama sat there on the ratty old chair the nights she didn’t work — sat there on the ratty old chair in her ratty old robe, drinking a whole jug of wine, looking over all those old newspaper clippings she kept about Daddy’s trial, sat there talking to herself, laughing crazy and singing along to sad sad songs on the radio... She knew all the words... How one time I woke up in the night to go pee-pee and there was a naked man in bed with Mama and Mama was naked too, and she was smoking crack like the crackheads in the halls and the man winked at me and laughed nasty and said, “So that’s the pup...” And Mama giggled and said, “Frankie, baby, you’re dreaming, go back to sleep...” How sleep never did come back that night as I listened to them laugh and cough and grunt, the bedsprings singing, the sharp smell of the burning crack making me feel so sick...

I understood. I understood. I understood — didn’t I? Mama was just trying to keep me out of trouble by keeping me in the apartment — dumb onion-head Horace with his dumb eyes like a dead sheep in the Muslim butcher’s, little Shamika and her nice warm lips and Chinese eyes and baby pea breasts under the stairwell, Malik and Jamal and all those other boys running wild and free, getting in trouble. Trouble... So Mama had to lock me up, lock me up naked, lock that front door from the outside. It was the only way she could be sure I wouldn’t hang out in the streets and work for the bigger boys out on the corner who worked for the older men with the fine cars and fine clothes — was that what my daddy looked like? Mama laughed. There were no cars in prison, Mama said, no fine clothes. Only hard men who’d made hard choices, hard men learning hard lessons, hard men with hard eyes, hard men who’d once been little boys. Little boys like me who’d become bigger boys like the ones on the street, the ones with the hungry eyes, the ones who paid me to look out for the Man... I knew it was all about drugs — I wasn’t no dummy — drugs and money... Ten-dollar bags of heroin that turned folk into snaggle-toothed grey scarecrows with wobbly heads and dead eyes, their bodies split open with crusty scabs and running sores, scratching all over like flea-bit dogs, dreaming in their vomit, waking long enough to beg change and stumble into traffic... And the crack, the little white five-dollar chunks of instant heaven in the little clear plastic bottles that turned folk into bright-eyed skeletons, that made them jabber like monkeys, made them rob and shoot and scream and stab you bloody, stare at you with such bright hate... Mama hated the crackheads, hated the crack dealers, said it was the devil’s drug, that it had almost gotten her, gotten me, taken us both down for the long count... But there was money out there, out on the street. Money that Mama needed to pay for light, to pay for food, to pay for heat, to pay for clothes... But when I came back that time with twenty dollars after working lookout for a big boy, Mama didn’t want the money, dirty money she called it, and she beat me then, beat me till the snot bubbled out my nose, said she was beating the devil out of me, and then she marched me back downstairs and made me point out the boy who’d paid me and made me give the money back. And the boy just laughed at Mama, laughed at Mama and winked at me and walked off to talk with one of the hard men in one of the fine cars... But we were so poor. It was so tough on Mama. Mama alone... So I understood why I was naked. Locked up naked. My clothes behind lock and key. I understood being locked up naked and alone was for my own good, like Mama said. I understood. That’s just the way it was. A fact of life. Like not knowing your daddy. Like having no brothers and sisters because Mama had been hurt something awful when I was born, born the size of a baked potato and screaming for lack of crack from the git-go, spending my first four months in the hospital baking under a hot light in a glass incubator box... Like having no cousins or uncles or aunts or grannies or grampas because Marna had come up an orphan in foster care with bad people who beat on her like a drum, she said. Like death and drugs and the bills that kept coming and the letters from my daddy that never came, being locked up naked and alone was just one of those things, a fact of life, the way it was. And the way it was was the way it was. And the way it was? That’s just the way it was.

And then it was winter. And winter was cold. The winter wind whined and wailed, whined and wailed and rattled at the window like an evil deformed baby in the night, whined and wailed and got into your bones. And Mama couldn’t leave me there naked and alone, the wind in my bones. Shivering and naked when I went to make pee-pee. No. Marna loved me too much for that. Mama had to do something to keep the wind from my bones...

I was with her when she bought it. From the battered cardboard box outside the church thrift store. The two-dollar red dress. The bright shiny two-dollar red dress. I wondered, when she bought it, wondered that she would buy herself such a small dress. Such a shiny dress. It wouldn’t fit her, I thought. It was too small. Mama was small, yes, Mama was very delicate, bones so light you’d think a strong gust of winter wind would pick her up like a candy wrapper and swirl her around in a tornado of dust and losing lottery tickets and carry her far far away, maybe back to Africa or some other nice place, someplace nice and warm where she wouldn’t have to worry so much, and I would come too, I’d catch the next tornado of dust and losing lottery tickets, ‘cause I wanted to be with Mama always, and I was small too... but the dress was too small for her... The red dress... it fit me like a glove.

“Mama,” I cried at home, the red dress fitting me like a glove, my face streaked with tears. “I don’t want to wear it!”

“Frankie, we been through this,” Mama said, firm. “It’s cold here and I don’t want the wind in your bones. And I know you’re such a little tough guy you won’t go out looking like this...”

“I’ll stay in bed, Mama, please. Let me wear my Spider-man pyjamas.”

Mama shook her head.

“You’re a sly little man,” she said, smiling, her eyes bright with fresh memory...

A few days before when it got so cold and she let me wear my pyjamas and I went out the window and down the drainpipe. How the police picked me up wandering around a grocery store ten blocks away, eating a bag of chips I couldn’t pay for, barefoot in my Spiderman pyjamas. How they drove me to the station in the caged back seat of the police car. How that nice friendly young white Officer Charles made shadow puppets of lions and other animals on the wall before going back on patrol... How the police sergeant asked me the name of the white folks Mama worked for, me thinking hard and finally remembering and him whistling all impressed when he heard that fancy name and how he called Mama there. How I ate stale donuts and drank hot chocolate with the sergeant... How warm it was in the police station, the radiators hissing away like a bunch of happy snakes from a picture book, me falling asleep in the scratchy blood-stained police blanket that smelled of some old bum’s piss and puke, a pair of huge socks from one of the police on my feet. How Mama came from work early to pick me up. How the sergeant warned her to keep me inside.

Inside. Naked. Spiderman pyjamas locked up with the other clothes. The next day, out the window again. Running to the park naked. Playing football naked in the park.

The other kids laughing at my naked ding-dong at first, then treating me normal, letting me play. And then the police car cruising by. Officer Charles and his partner watching me run the length of the field, watching me make fools of the tacklers, watching me score. The cops clapping from the sidelines.

“Good run, Frankie,” Officer Charles said, before wrapping me up in another scratchy blanket and driving me to the station again. The sergeant smiling at me like an old friend and then calling Mama. Mama who had to leave work this time soon as she arrived. Leave to come pick me and my second pair of big socks up from the police.

And the next day the social worker came to see us, to “assess” the home life, she said. I wore the Spiderman pyjamas.

“He’ll stay home,” Mama told the hard-faced black lady, Prudence De Vore, showing her the shiny new lock she’d put on the window that day. “I promise.”

“He better,” said Prudence De Vore. “Otherwise this little man will end up in foster care — or, worse, Juvenile Hall. The Zoo. You don’t want to go there, Frankie. It’s a bad place full of bad boys.”

And when the hard-faced lady was gone, Mama beat me. She beat me. With tears in her eyes, she beat me. Beating the devil out of me, she said. And afterwards, as I cried and cried, Mama cried too. She held me, and we both cried. And the winter wind whined and wailed, whined and wailed and rattled at the window like an evil deformed baby, whispering:

“Frankie, Frankie Lawrence, you’re my very special little nigga, come on out and play.”

And so Mama bought me the red dress. And I did stay home. Home. The front door was locked. The window was locked. I stayed home. Out of the wind. But it was cold there... And because it was cold, I wore the red dress.

At first the red dress made me so embarrassed. I would go in the bathroom, look at myself in the spotty mirror, see a little boy in a bright red dress and I’d feel the hot shame and I’d tear the red dress off and run into bed. But bed was boring — it was too early to sleep — boring at first and then scary there under the covers, nothing but the winter wind whispering cold at the window, so I’d get up, walk the apartment naked like an animal in a cage, dreaming of football, fine cars, pretty girls... But it was cold. So so cold.

So I wore the red dress. Stayed away from the window. Stared at the locked closet, the locked door, the locked window. The kids playing out there in the cold would call up to my locked window.

“Frankie! Frankie Lawrence! Where are you?”

And I’d ignore them. Go to the mirror and look at myself and see a boy in a red dress. A pretty boy who looked like a girl but a boy I knew. A boy in a red dress.

And I would go to the window on my knees, stick my chin on the windowsill, look down at the kids playing.

“What happened, Frankie, you shrink?” the kids called. “You done lost your legs? Crack baby become a shrimp?”

I just watched them.

“Shrimpie!” they called. “Crack baby! Shrimp boy!”

But it was cold. So cold. So I wore the red dress. I looked at the little girls down there, bundled fat in their winter coats, in their tasselled winter hats, and I wondered what it would be like to kiss them. And I touched my little woodie through the red dress and thought of the girls.

And then one day Malik and Shamika were playing quiet in the hallway, just outside the door, when Mama came home. And when Mama came in I was standing there in the red dress waiting to give her a big hello hug and Malik and Shamika saw me in the red dress and my life was changed forever.

At the bus stop the next morning the word was out.

“Faggot! Faggot!” they sang. “Red dress! Red dress!”

I took a deep breath and ignored them. Turned the other cheek, like Mama was always telling me to. Turned the other cheek and thought about football and fine cars and Africa.

At school the word was out.

“Faggot! Faggot! Red dress! Red dress!”

By afternoon play-time I was boiling.

“Faggot! Faggot! Frankie is a faggot! Crack-baby faggot!”

I couldn’t take it no more. I chased Malik. Caught him easy. Hit him hard. And the next one. Jermaine. WHAP — upside his ear. And the girls, I smacked them too, pulled them by their pigtails. There were five crying kids when the teacher dragged me to the principal’s office.

“What’s wrong, Frankie?” the old lady principal asked.

I just kept my grill shut.

The principal sighed and called Mama on the phone...

Mama came. Asked me what was wrong.

I just kept my grill shut.

Mama sighed and took me home. Sat me down. Kneeled in front of me and looked at me with big tired dark eyes.

“Frankie, baby, why you always fightin’?”

How could I explain? Didn’t Mama remember what it was like to be a kid? The way other kids smelled your soft spots and grabbed onto those soft spots and ripped into those soft spots like a pack of hungry wolves...?

“Mama,” I said, imitating her sigh. “Like you always sayin’, it’s just one of those things...”

And Mama handed me the red dress.

“I wish my daddy was here,” I said. “He wouldn’t make me wear no girly dress.”

“That man ain’t in the picture no more,” Mama said, hard and firm. “Now put it on, boy.”

“Please don’t make me.”

“You know, baby,” she said, soft. “When I was a little girl I dreamed of a red dress. I wanted a red dress so bad, so so bad, and I asked my foster mother and she just laughed. I figured, if only I could have a red dress, everything would be okay.”

“But I’m a boy, Mama. It ain’t the same.”

“Child, this dress is magic. You wear it, you’ll be safe. Now be a good little man and put in on.”

“No, Mama.” I was crying, holding that red dress and crying.

“Frankie, please... Do it for Mama. I can’t go to work until you put it on... Please, to make Mama happy.”

Finally I put it on...

Then she kissed me. She held me close.

“I love you, Frankie Lawrence. You got all my heart, baby... Maybe you think some of the things I do are wrong. But I’m doin’ the best I can.”

“I know. Mama. I love you too.”

And then Mama was out the door, the lock clicking. And I was there alone... Alone in the magic red dress. And the clock was ticking and the wind was whining and a dog started barking and the cars were roaring and a toilet flushed somewhere and an ambulance screamed and I was alone alone — alone.

It started snowing. The flakes swirled fast and thick. I went to the window finally, looked out finally. No need to be on my knees any more — they all knew — so I stood...

Down there, Jamal, Erik, Dwayne, Abdul — throwing snowballs at the window.

“Come on down, crack-baby faggot!” called Jamal, grabbing his crotch. “Get your after-school special!”

“Go away,” I said to them, though I knew they couldn’t hear me through the dirty glass.

And then I sat down in the ratty old chair. I turned on the fuzzy old television. The TV screen was as snowy as the weather outside. I turned it off. Turned on the radio. Some sad sad stupid stupid song. I turned it off... No Nintendo, no videos. A few picture books I’d looked at a thousand times. Nothing but the wind...

Yellow papers sticking out of a picture book... The pile of crinkled old clippings that Mama read when she got all drunk and misty... First grade was learning me how to read...

“Gangland slaying,” I read aloud. “Larry Lawrence charged in the brutal execution-style murder of Lucius Weathers. Lawrence is in stable condition in Mercy Hospital after undergoing three hours of surgery for multiple gunshot wounds.”

Damn, I thought.

“Larry Lawrence found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years to life...”

“Faggot! Faggot!” came the voices. “Red dress! Red dress!”

“Stop it,” I said to the window, the clippings falling off my lap and sailing to the floor like losing lottery tickets...

And then the snowballs started hitting the window. One after another like dull distant gunshots. And the anger rose sour in my throat like moth-ball vomit.

“Leave me be,” I said to the window, to the kids out there, to the laughing wind. “Why can’t y’all just leave me be?”

But they couldn’t leave me be. I’d beaten their heads at school and now brave, in a pack, they wanted payback.

At the window, eyes full of hot tears, the melted ice of cold fury. The kids down there laughing, laughing along with the wind.

“You want me? You want some of this?” I pulled the red dress up, waved my little boy penis at them through the snow-filmed dirty window.

“Suck my dick!” I screamed.

Then BOOM, an ice ball smacked the window, cracked the window, and a cold bony finger of wind snaked through the spider web of glass into the room, the evil deformed baby stroking my face, reaching under my red dress, reaching into my head, inviting me out to play...

“Faggot, faggot, red dress, red dress, faggot, faggot... Poor Frankie! Poor Frankie!”

I punched the window. The glass broke. My hand was cut, bloody. Cold wind peppered with snowflakes rushed in like water into the doomed Titanic. And I punched again and again until the glass was gone. And then I was out the window, hanging on the drain pipe, holding on for cheap life and the kids were gone, out of sight... Inside. They were inside the building, inside my head, and I was outside, on the drain pipe, above the street, the snow in my eyes, the wind in my ears. Like Spiderman, but cold. Hand bloody. Dick cold. Spider-man in a red dress. Spiderman in a red dress with a cold dick. And then I heard them again, from above.

“Faggot, faggot, red dress, red dress!” They were on the roof and I was climbing.

“Poor Frankie! Poor Frankie!”

Like Spiderman, I was shinnying up that drain pipe in the cold, the wind in my ears, cheering me on, saying:

“Go, Frankie, go!”

The snow blowing in my eyes, a trail of blood on the pipe, climbing, climbing.

On the ledge, over the ledge, on the cold roof, feet in the snow, not feeling it.

“Gotcha nasty little niggaz now,” I said, huffing and puffing, grinning cold, my breath white and evil as crack smoke.

“Whatcha gonna do, faggot?” Malik was brave. Had his posse with him so Malik was brave.

“Gonna jack you up, Malik. Jack you up and shut you up.”

“You and what crew?”

“Me and my shadow gonna teach you respect.”

My toes were frozen numb. The wind whipped my legs, stroked my ding-dong frozen, made the red dress flap. The blood dripped warm down my arm, dripped into the snow, melted the snow into red slushy sauce.

And the boys just laughed.

“Motherfucking faggot in a red dress. The blood matches your dress, nigga.”

I caught Dwayne first. Beat his head against the cold snowy roof. Erik pulled me off, rolled me in the snow, mashed my face into the roof as the others punched me. Jamal, Erik, Dwayne, Malik. Punch punch punch punch. I felt nothing. I absorbed the punches and smiled. My grill was bloody. I could taste the salty blood. I went limp and still as the little boy boots pounded my ribs, as they kicked and punched the red dress over and over... I felt nothing. The pain was like my daddy, locked up far far away, a total stranger...

“Ya mama’s a crack ho,” said Jamal, kicking my stomach.

“And ya daddy’s a convict,” said Erik, spitting on me.

“And you a faggot,” said Dwayne, laughing.

And then the boys were walking away...

“Stay down, little red-dress faggot,” said Malik, sneering over his shoulder. “It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over. I was up and I grabbed the first boy, didn’t matter which one — Malik! — and I punched and pushed, butted Malik with my head, punched and pushed and avoided his wild windmill swings, and then we were at the ledge, him and me, me and Malik, we were wrestling, dancing and...

“Cool it, Frankie!” called Erik.

“Chill out, nigga!” cried Jamal.

“Faggot!” screamed Malik.

“Faggot this!” I screamed back, punching...

And Malik...? His eyes were wide and full of wonder, his lips were wide and screaming as he stumbled backwards and grabbed air, and... he was over the ledge, out of sight, falling falling falling into empty space... a dull sick slamming THUMP...

I looked over the ledge. Malik lying there on the sidewalk, crumpled flat as a pizza, arms and legs at broken puppet angles, blood running from his grill, staining the fresh white snow.

“Malik,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

“You be in trouble now, crack baby,” said Dwayne at my side. “A whole mess o’trouble.” And all the other boys looked down too. “You and your muhfukkin red dress are in some serious shit.”

I felt a tear run down my cheek. I was in serious shit. Me and my red dress were in some serious shit. Malik was dead and I was in trouble... And that’s the way it was. A fact of life. Just one of those things.

And the winter wind just laughed.

II

As advertised, Juvenile Hall was a bad place. Bad food, bad beds, bad smells, bad sounds, bad vibes — a bad life for bad boys who’d done bad things... And as a consequence of all that badness — shit — I grew up bad.

But not at first. No. Those first few weeks I was as good as Mama told me to be. Good as a little angel... Break out the harps and the hallelujahs, I was all sweetness and fear... I’d been sentenced to the maximum — Malik’s uncle was a cop and he fixed it so the juvenile court judge sentenced me to the max.

“This was no accident,” said the old bald white judge, hair snaking out of his nose, his ears. “This is a case of vicious, malicious, premeditated murder. And given Mrs Lawrence’s history of drugs and the lack of supervision in the home...”

He didn’t throw the book at me, nuh-uh, that old clown threw the whole twenty-volume encyclopaedia. The Zoo was gonna be my home sweet home till I turned eighteen, what they called a “full-term baby”.

But I wasn’t bad, nuh-uh. Not yet. With me, badness didn’t come slow, no, it didn’t come limping slow and loud like some fat old asthmatic club-foot thief in the night, it didn’t germinate inside of me like some nasty little seed of evil, no, with me badness flowered forth instantly — like a bullet in the brain, like a thunderbolt, like death driving a Lamborghini — like true motherfucking love...

But I wasn’t bad, nuh-uh. Not yet. Those first few weeks in the Zoo I wasn’t no animal. I was still Mama’s little boy, little Mr Innocent... I’d walk around those gloomy green-painted halls with big dark eyes full of fear — listening to the barbells clanking, the radios blasting, the basketballs bouncing, the sneakers squeaking, the laughter echoing — shivering at all the badness coming at me from every which way, all the hatred, all the despair, all the confusion, all those young twisted hearts and ancient evil souls stuck in young fresh bodies, and I’d lower my eyes and say, “Yes, sir,” to anyone older than me — and that was everyone, since I was the youngest dude there. And every night as I lay there in the dark on the battered old mattress, listening to the snores and sex noises and laughs and farts, breathing the nasty night cloud of farts and sex and cigarettes, waiting for the healing grace of sleep, as I lay there on the ancient lumpy mattress mapped with the misery of a parade of pissing and weeping and drooling boys, every night I’d add a few thousand of my own hot salt tears to that mattress, every single night I’d cry myself to sleep...

During the daylight hours I’d go to the school rooms and I’d stare at the walls, looking for exit signs in the peeling green paint, and I’d listen to the sad desperate laughter echoing out in the gloomy green halls that smelled of chemical cherry disinfectant, the sad desperate laughter of all the sad lost boys, and the laughter would sound like the winter wind — like a bunch of evil deformed babies, like a pack of fallen angels... I was so scared. So so scared and so so alone.

But I wasn’t bad. Nuh-uh. Not yet.

“Happy birthday to me,” I said to Mama’s good little brown-skinned boy brushing his teeth in the mirror one morning.

It was my birthday, my seventh birthday. Just a week into my incarceration incarnation and I was turning seven. Eleven years to go till I hit eighteen. Eleven years — count them — eleven years of three-hundred-sixty-five days of twenty-four hours of sixty minutes of sixty seconds till I was out. I’d never make it, I thought. The Zoo would eat me alive and wouldn’t even burp. I didn’t have what it took to ride the storm. I wasn’t hard, I wasn’t cold, I couldn’t laugh crazy in the face of fear. I wasn’t bad... Not yet I wasn’t.

January twenty-ninth was the day. There was a cake at dinner in the cafeteria. A special visit from Mama earlier. A new, bigger pair of Spiderman pyjamas. I’d cried and hugged her. She’d cried and shushed me, told me to be brave, to be good, that she loved me and I had to stay brave and good. She read me from the Bible and told me to be brave and good, that if some boy messed with me to just give him my other cheek, like you-know-who. I cried and cried and Mama cried and cried and when our time was up I had to be dragged off.

And now the cake. I listened to the old school standard sung by those evil-eyed bad boys. Those dudes could sing, sweet as a chorus of fallen angels.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, you look like a monkey and you smell like one too...”

I blew the candles out. I sliced the cake with a plastic knife. I ate my slice of cake, washed it down with a few gulps of fear and milk. I was alone. Alone and scared. But I wasn’t bad. Not yet I wasn’t.

And then it was night. Surrounded by sleeping boys in the dorm but alone. Alone in the dark... And then I wasn’t alone. They came fast and furious as a bunch of hyenas. I tried to fight them but there were too many. Six big boys held me down, yanked my Spiderman pyjamas off, stuffed a dirty sock in my grill, flipped me over and tore into me like a piece of cake, busting into my tender ass from behind, passing me back and forth like a football, spitting on me, mauling me, biting my shoulders with sharp dog teeth, sneering, laughing, hitting me, slapping at my tear-stained face, singing “happy birthday” as they poked and prodded and ripped me inside, taking turns, taking second helpings, drooling all over my chewed-up shoulders, wiping their bloody greasy flesh-weapons with my pyjamas... And then finally, when they were worn out, when wave after wave of cruel dog orgasm had soaked into my guts, as I lay there squashed and bloody and twisted like a dead cat in the street, my ass torn wide open, my belly swollen with their hatred, the winter wind laughing at me from the window, one motherfucker delivered a parting message by pissing like a garden hose up my ruined bloody hole... I couldn’t even scream I was so flat... All I could do was laugh... Lie there on the wet bloody mattress and laugh. And that’s the way the counsellors found me the next morning. Laughing. They sent me to the hospital ward stinking of piss and jism. And I laughed. The hospital ward where the nurse sedated me, cleaned me out, shot me full of antibiotics, where the doctor sewed my ass up like a torn pair of underwear, whistling all the while, where he bandaged my shoulders, where I spent two weeks in a hospital gown, on an IV, staring at the cracked ceiling, thinking bad thoughts, not looking for exit signs, not answering questions, not naming names, listening to the wind, laughing with the wind and healing into hardness, vowing never never by God never to cry again. Never. Bad boys don’t cry. They laugh. And, motherfucker, I was bad... The wind had dried all the tears out of me.

The last night in the hospital ward I stole the syringe. Sharp. It was sharp. Sharp and long. The needle gleamed. By the light of the diseased moon I filled the glass tube. Laughing, I filled it with yellow liquid. Carried it the next morning in my sock back to the dorm. Back to my lumpy mattress. Same old lumpy mattress — they’d just turned it over so the cockroaches had easy access to my dried crusted blood... Ready. Frankie Lawrence was ready. Frankie Lawrence was bad. Come on, you dog-mafockas, I thought, come on back for seconds.

And like I knew they would, they came again. That night. The same crew. The same six. They’d liked their cake and this time they expected no fight, they expected Frankie’s ass as a gift. The gift that keeps on giving.

But Frankie had other plans. Oh, yeah, I had other plans.

The first motherfucker got a different kind of gift — the syringe! — the syringe full of piss, he got the syringe right smack in his eye!

“Motherfucker!” I yelled, standing on the bed, and as the boy screamed I plunged the plunger and the piss streamed into the motherfucker’s head and I raked that needle back and forth hard, ripping his eyemeat, laughing as I bent the motherfucking needle hard against the eye-socket bone, him screaming like death driving a Lamborghini, and I yanked with all my strength and “plop” there it was, like a motherfucking shrimp on a fork, the fucking eye.

“Piss off, nigga,” I said, laughing like crazy, standing tall on the bed, showing those big bad motherfuckers the two-tone egg all goopy and shiny in the moonlight streaming through the caged window, my hand dripping piss. Showing them who was crazy, who was bad. And, laughing, I raised the eye to my grill, and, just like Mama always told me, I chewed before I swallowed.

“Better than a mothball,” I said, licking my lips, laughing my ass off, feeling the hot half-chewed chunks of eye-meat gurgling nasty down into my stomach. “Sweet as motherfuckin’ candy.”

And as the one-eyed motherfucker rolled on the floor in agony, the piss and blood like a trail of tears on his face, his eye-socket dark and empty, the eyelid puckered like your grandpa’s scrotum, the other boys looked at me with respect.

And me? I felt nothing.

I burped loud and long... I was bad.

The incident was noted on my records. Like Malik, laying there flat as a pizza on the street, just another cold hard fact in black and white.

The Zookeeper called me in, lectured me about anger, about self-control. I bowed my head, looked all sad and guilty. I kept my grill shut.

I got sent to the shrink. The motherfucker asked question after question. I bowed my head, looked all sad and guilty. I kept my grill shut.

And the counsellors, the guards, the teachers — no questions, no lectures — they kept their distance, like I was a dog with nasty foam on his lips. I could see it in their eyes, I was bad.

“Yo, little man,” said Eight Ball Johnson, head of the Zoo Crew gang, swaggering up to my bed after lights-out, him and Louie Tran, his Vietnamese number-one homie. Both fifteen years old. Eight Ball in for a triple homicide. Louie the Dragon in for narcotics and extortion. Both seriously bad. “That was some wild shit you pull.”

“Just one of those things,” I said.

“You a little cannibal,” said the Dragon.

“No, I be a Lawrence. Frankie Lawrence. My daddy Larry Lawrence.”

“Larry Lawrence?” Eight Ball was impressed. “Double L? Shit, that was one legendary nigga!”

“What’d the muhfukkah do?” asked Louie.

“Check it out, Dragon. Crazy nigga try to take down Ronny Dewitt single-handed!”

“Ronny Dewitt? Nigger Mortis? The dude run all the heroin?”

“Yeah, man. This back in the day Ronny was clockin’ rock in the hood... Nigger Mortis and Double L was partners... But they had them a altercation and Larry smoked Ronny’s number one nigga and was gunnin’ for Ronny hisself till Ronny put five caps in the nigga’s chest. Ronny skated on self-defence and the cannibal’s pappy upstate doin’ life.”

“Ronny Dewitt,” said Louie. “That’s a cold nigga to cross.”

“Cold and bold,” said Eight Ball. “It take balls the size of Kansas City to even consider takin’ down Nigger Mortis...”

“That’s my daddy,” I said, loud and proud.

“Ya daddy’s a bad nigga.”

Eight Ball checked me up and down.

“Yeah,” he said. “That boy you fucked up was my captain of the ten-and-unders, my best little nigga... How you like to take his spot? You got what it takes?”

“Balls the size of Kansas City,” I said.

They laughed

“Okay,” said Eight Ball. “But you need a new handle. Frankie sound like some Spaghettio lounge singer.”

He handed me a sharpened butter knife.

“Welcome to the monkey house, Cannibal. You in the Zoo Crew now.”

So I was Frankie the Cannibal and I was in the Zoo Crew, captain of the ten-and-unders. I was bad like my daddy. My daddy who took five caps and lived to tell the tale from jail... And the one-eyed motherfucker whose job I copped? He came out of the hospital ward a week later wearing a black eye patch. Immediately got tagged the Piss-Eyed Pirate, shortened to just Piss.

We was in gym class that afternoon. The day Piss made his pirate-patch debut. All the ten-and-unders, shootin’ hoop, taking foul shots. Piss glared at me hard from his one eye. Piss big for nine. Big and holding a grudge. Ready to explode.

The gym teacher handed him the rock just as the phone rang in the office.

“Shoot the ball, big pirate,” the gym teacher ordered Piss, as he went for the phone.

Piss threw up a shot... Air ball. Missed the basket by five feet. Mafockas be laughin’ they asses off.

“Piss sucks! Piss sucks!” the boys chanted.

Piss touched his eye-patch, then wheeled and came at me. Bull-rushed me. I sidestepped him, tripped him up, and then they was on him — all the ten-and-unders. Twenty boys had him ass-down on the basketball court. The brothers all laughing at him, taunting him as he struggled.

“Piss sucks!”

“Piss,” someone said. “You blind nigga! You gonna end up sellin’ pencils on the corner!”

Gym teacher in the office, on the phone. Piss on his back. Two boys on each leg, each arm. A big ten-year-old named Shaquille kneeling on his chest, pulling that dead eyelid skin back and spitting nasty clams into that empty eye socket.

“Motherfuckuh!” screamed Piss struggling, the socket spilling bubbly white snot.

Shaq snorted like a hog, hawked up some more mucus, splashed a long stringy loogie into the hole and laughed.

That’s when I put the cold steel of my sharpened butter knife against Shaquille’s throat.

“That’ll do,” I said.

“Say what?” Shaquille looked back at me.

“You heard me, fat boy,” I said, pressing the edge of the shiv into his throat. “Party’s over. This my nigga.”

“How you feelin’, homeboy?” I asked, when I went to visit my nigga that night. Came with a box of cookies I got from Mama.

Piss sat looking at a comic book on his bed.

“You took my eye, man. You took my job. Then the niggaz spit inside my head. How’s I s’posed to feel?”

“Grateful, boy. I saved your ass today.” I threw the cookies on his bed. I’d figured the angles. I needed this nigga.

“You took my eye, nigga,” he said. “I ain’t never gonna forget that.”

“Yo, you took my ass... Anyway, nigga, it wasn’t nothin’ personal. You was just the closest one.”

Piss laughed bitter as sour lemon candy. He was holding the box of cookies, reading the label with his one eye.

“So now I s’posed to just let it go?” he asked, looking at me cold and mad. “You ate my muhfukkin’ eye, nigga, then you shit it out like some bacon and eggs... My eye! I s’posed to pretend like it didn’t happen? Sell out for some Keebler chocolate chip cookie shit?”

“They made by elves,” I said. “Listen. Lemme ask you this, nigga — you a full-term baby — what you in for?”

“Nigga, I cracked my grandma skull with a baseball bat cause she try to wake me up early. Old bitch dead.”

“See, that’s the kind of cold-ass pirate motherfukkah I need to partner up with... You and me, Piss, we got years ahead of us behind these mafockin walls... We gots a choice, bro — enemies or homies. Me, I say we go for bros. All you gots to do is chill on the blame game an’ we both make money.”

He looked at me. I looked at him. And then he reached a decision. A sweet cold smile broke on his lips.

“Shee-it,” he said. “One eye’s all I need.”

Piss had a beautiful, evil smile. He was rotten to the core. I loved him.

“You a bad muhfukkuh, Frankie Lawrence,” he said.

“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know, Piss,” I said. “Now break out those muhfukkin cookies.”

The first few years Mama came to visit once a week. She took the bus and cried every time. I felt bad for Mama. Yeah, she was my sweetheart. Yeah, she was getting her shit together. Yeah, she was going back to school and getting her high school diploma. She’d stopped drinking the wine, she said, was getting career counselling, she said, planning for the future — her future, our future — yeah yeah yeah... But sure as shit ain’t sugar, sure as pigs don’t fly, sure as black ain’t white and sure as eating pussy and drinking cognac is the breakfast of champions, I wouldn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. I was past crying. The wind had dried all my tears. I’d become hard. I didn’t dream, I didn’t hope, all I did was scheme and hustle and practise being hard and cold. All I did was stay alive and get my piece of the action... I was growing into the full glory of my badness like a puppy grows into his paws.

Sure, I went to school. Shit, I was a straight A student... Sure, I learned to smile at the teachers and counsellors and guards, at that big old Zookeeper. Shit, that was the game... But it was after school hours, after the books were shut and the basketballs were asleep, when the real lessons of Juvenile Hall were being laid out: how to lie, how to steal, how to get high and not show it. How to fabricate a weapon out of near anything. How to deal drugs and not get caught. How to hide a stash of drugs or a shiv in the walls or floor or your mattress. How to hide a safety razor in your grill or up your poop-chute so even in the shower you had a weapon. How to work the phone and talk in code so you could get motherfuckers on the outside to deliver you shit. How to bribe a guard to look the other way. How to make money hand over fist. How to take a cut of other dudes’ cash crops. How to think clear with a head full of pills or coke or reefer or home-made liquor. How to hurt a motherfucker, physically or mentally, how to strip him of self-esteem. How to hold a secret over a motherfucker’s head or sweet-talk that motherfucker into doing something he didn’t want to do. Crush that nigga’s spirit to the floor then raise him up an inch or two so that he’d lick your sneakers and be grateful for the taste of rubber. Intimidation and manipulation. That’s how you got by, that’s how you got ahead, that’s how you got yours... The gym teacher liked to say, “The best offence is a good defence.” Nuh-uh for that old school shit, Jack. Flip the mafocka for modern times: “The best defence is a good offence.” Translation, dumbfuck: score enough and the mafockas’ll never catch up with you. They be eating your dust till the end of time. So I went on the offensive, never gave an inch to anyone. I studied hardness and coldness — I sucked hardness and coldness from the walls, I made friends with the winter wind — and I learned my lessons well. I was the cream of the cream of the crop, as hard and cold as they came. I was Bad Frankie Lawrence, the Cannibal. A goddamn gourmet of respect.

I learned kung-fu from Louie Tran, how to kick high, punch low, take no prisoners. My fists and feet were fast as black lightning. The Dragon schooled me to the points on an enemy’s body, the places you pressed that would make the nigga beg for mercy, promise obedience, vomit instantly...

“Boy,” I said to some goggle-eyed chucklehead, some new bone-scared white mafocka my age fresh from the streets trying to be bad. “What’s your name?”

“Rocco. What’s it to you, black?”

“You want to see my invisible punch, Rocco?”

“Say what?”

And I threw down so fast the mafockin Wop-a-doodle-dandy never even saw it. Lights out, nobody home.

When he came back to the land of the living, groggy, pockets empty, me counting his stash of cash, I asked him: “Did you see it, Spaghettio?”

Rocco just groaned.

“That’s right, nigga. No one ever saw the Cannibal’s invisible punch and no one ever will. You could video the mafocka and slow the tape down and you still wouldn’t see it. Not if you lived till you were sixteen or sixteen million. And, homeboy, the way you stylin’ it, you won’t see next week.”

And I leaned down and gently touched Rocco under the collarbone...

“Welcome to the monkey house,” I said.

And the look in that mafocka’s eyes — gratitude at the softness, the reprieve, the ticket out of Pain City, but then, as I pressed the magic spot just an itty-bit harder, he turned pale green and his body heaved, he was right back in Shit Central, swimming in a sea of dark pain, the vomit bubbling ugly on his lips, and I laughed... Submission, motherfucker. I had another nigga for my collection.

I collected hard boys like that goofy fat Polish retard Maurice Kowalski collected rat turds. Every week another boy would join me. My junior crew was growing. As my hardness set, my crew grew.

And I listened to Eight Ball and Louie and the parade of older boys. I listened and learned. I acquired skills... From Julio the Blade I learned the best way to shank a guy. Right through the ribcage on the heart side, blade horizontal, wiggle the shiv back and forth, up and down, make sure those essential veins were properly sliced and diced, chopped into Big Mac meat, beyond the surgical skills of modern medicine, and then snap the blade off inside. Adios, motherfucker...

I learned stuff for later, for the streets. Gems of practical wisdom... Like when you wanted to remove a motherfucker no doubt... You walked up to his house wearing rubber gloves, you rang the bell, you pulled your silenced steel, and when the chump came to the door in his shorts, scratching his itchy balls, smelling like unwashed socks and ugly love, you popped a cap in the nigga’s head and walked away cool and calm, put some distance between you and the cooling body... Then you took a file and filed the barrel so ballistics could never match the hardware and software, you burned the gloves, you dumped the file, took the gun to the river and chucked the mafocka into the cold dark deep where it would sleep innocent for about sixteen million goddamn years or eternity, whichever came first. Adios, motherfucker.

Oh yeah, Frankie Lawrence was on the offensive. I was heading for freedom and age eighteen at Lamborghini speeds. I had no brakes, but shit, the Cannibal was a helluva driver, a child of the wind, slick and crafty behind the wheel. There was no mafockin way this nigga was gonna crash... I was in control, on top of my game. And as my body grew into young manhood, lean-muscled, hard, slim and cool and handsome as any hip-hop nigga sucking magic money from the musical mammary, as I grew bigger and wiser and stronger with each passing day and year, my heart cold and smoking like dry ice, as the factory pumped out hard young muhfukkahs, cold and perfect as snowflakes — some graduating to the streets where they lived like kings or died like flies, some shipped off to adult institutions — and as the younger boys took their place in the food chain, I gained power, I took control. And so it came to pass, that at the age of fifteen, I, Frankie Lawrence, took over the Zoo Crew, I became the king of Juvenile Hall, the hardest, coldest, baddest motherfucker in the joint. Long live the king! If you weren’t with me, you were against me. And if you were against me? Adios, motherfucker.

III

And Mama kept coming. She’d finished her studies and become a nurse. Traded one white uniform for another...

And then one week she came with somebody, some lean muscular nobody, an older black dude. Like a carpet that’s been stepped on for years, like a dog with the mange, the old dude was all used-up.

“Frankie,” the man said. He was old.

“Do I know you?” I asked. But I knew him.

The man looked into my eyes, never giving an inch. Dude had some coldness in him. But old. An old man. Must have been thirty-four.

“Do you know me?” The man raising his eyebrows.

“You hard of hearing on top of bald and ugly, old dude?”

“Frankie,” Mama said. “Talk nice. This is your father.”

And I just laughed and laughed. I could see the other visitors cringing at the laughter. Crazy laughter cold and bad as the winter wind.

“Mama, that ain’t my father,” I said, looking with contempt at the old dude’s cheap new clothes, straight out of some K-Mart clearance sale. “My father don’t dress like a goddamn out-of-work garbageman! My father in prison! Double L doin’ twenty to life for murder one!”

“I’m out,” said the old dude. “Did fifteen years hard time. I got parole.”

“Shit, nigga, my daddy’s parole officer ain’t even been born yet.”

“I’m out,” the old dude said with a sigh. “That’s a fact. And I’m here to make amends. I never called or wrote ‘cause I wanted your mama to divorce me and find someone else. But she’s stubborn.”

“Like you, Frankie.” Mama took the old fuck’s hand. “I’m stubborn like you.”

She looked at the veiny-armed jailhouse nigga with smiling love.

“Mama, you ain’t fallin’ for this old nigga’s game?”

“I want to be in your life now, Frankie,” old dude said. “Make up for lost time. Be a father to you.”

“You trippin’? My father cold, he bad, he tried to take Ronny Dewitt down, he took five caps... You ain’t him.”

“Frankie,” said Mama, sharp. “Don’t talk to your father like that. You don’t know what he done for us.”

“Praise God, son, I’ve turned my life around.”

“Old nigga, you better turn your ass around and walk it out of here while you still can.”

I waved him off.

“Mama, you get that money order I sent you?”

I’d sent her another five hundred dollars that week.

Mama looked at the old dude and then pulled the money order out of her purse. She handed it to me.

“Yes, baby,” Mama said with a sigh. “But Mama can’t accept the money any more.”

“Say what?”

The old dude put his hard hand on mine.

“Boy, no money comin’ out of here is clean. Your mama don’t want no dirty money.”

“Man,” I said, pulling my hand away. “Who the fuck are you showin’ up outta the clear-blue motherfuckin’ nowhere and tellin’ folks how to live? Who the fuck you think you are?”

“Just a man,” said the man with a sigh. “A man like the next man. Strong in some places, weak in others. But here’s the deal: your mother and I are makin’ a go of it. You don’t have to like it, hard case, but that’s the way it is.”

“I don’t hear nothin’, old nigga, ‘cept maybe a rat goin’ ‘cheap-cheap-cheap’. Mama, send this cheap old fool back to the boneyard.”

And Mama just sighed. She got up to go.

And the next time she came, she came alone. Old Larry Lawrence never visited again.

IV

The Zoo never changed. Just a parade of miserable boys walking the one-way road to hell. In the old-school days they were mostly white, now they were mostly black. But always, till the end of time, regardless of colour, the Zoo would be hard and cold. A stewpot of old misery, a breeding ground for fresh misery. A warehouse of badness, sadness, gloom and doom. A hard cold factory that produced hard eyes and hard bodies, cold eyes and cold hearts — un-softened by the feminine touch — hard with maleness, with macho, with attitude and anger and fear. A rumble could break out anywhere — spontaneous explosions of turbulence, testosterone, terror — even the cafeteria. Shit, especially the cafeteria. Never bother a dog when it’s eating... The cafeteria... That’s where the only females in the whole of Juvenile Hall worked, the cafeteria.

Hundreds of dog-mafockas and three females? Not a good idea, nuh-uh, but the females who worked the cafeteria, cooking and serving and locking away the knives between meals, a guard present at all times, the kitchen locked overnight, they musta had to show their menopause papers to get hired. Those females were way too used-up to cop even a second banana role in any teenage horndog fantasy — overweight and overworked — just your typical sad sweet old black ladies that life had been shitting on for about four hundred years, about as sexy as a bag of turkey necks rotting in the noonday sun or a hippopotamus’s asshole with a wad of toilet paper hanging off it... One even had a full flowing Pancho Villa moustache and chin whiskers. The motherly types? More like the grandmotherly types. Hell, more like the great-great grandmotherly types...

And then one day — I was sixteen now, only two years till bust-out time, sixteen and riding high — I show for dinner and there was a hum in the line. Like a live electric wire there was a hum.

I went to the head of the line as always, as befits the king, and when I got to the front I saw what was makin’ the niggaz jump.

She.

She was beautiful.

Ayesha was her name, said so on her nameplate. And she wasn’t the grandmother type, no, not even the mother type, except for those fine big wholesome breasts that’d make any little baby nursing at its mama’s titty bite his old lady’s nipple off so she’d drop him and he could land like a cat and crawl over to Ayesha and hop into her arms and nuzzle at hers. She was soft and curvy and beautiful, a bubblicious twenty-five-year-old caramel princess in a white uniform that showed more than was fair for all that swingin’ dick energy... The hormones in the place were hoppin’ wild and electric like a bunch of hungry fleas on a rabid dog.

“Shut up, you knuckleheads,” I said, showing Ayesha my lovely pearly whites, noting her cheap gold wedding band. “Any of these sorry mafockas bother you, Ma’am, tell ’em you know Frankie Lawrence.”

“If you say so, Mister Slim, but reality says I don’t know any Frankie Lawrence.”

“You do now. My name is Frankie Lawrence, honey, and I’d like some mashed potatoes.” I smiled at her and she smiled back. And that wasn’t any grandmotherly smile, I knew. No way no how. And as I walked off hard and cool, something soft and warm and distantly familiar was working in my guts. Like a foreign language you knew in another lifetime... Frankie Lawrence was in love.

She was there only until her grandma Hortense got out of the hospital. We all knew it was for a short time. We all knew she was married — shit, she wore that big gold ring like a goddamn advertisement for marital bliss. We all knew she was a dream princess come to grace us with her beauty... We all knew she was generous with the starch. One day it was potatoes, the next it was rice, the next it was spaghetti. She piled it on... But every day, between me and Princess Ayesha, on top of the starch, it was smiles and respect — an exchange — it was attraction.

I had eyes and ears everywhere in the joint. I heard the mafockas dreaming, heard them scheming...

Piss sat on the end of my bed, broadcasting the CNN as Black Jimmy braided my hair. My boy Piss was huge now. Six foot seven, tippin’ the scales at two-hundred-forty pounds of pure muscle. No weights or steroids, just a big damn motherfucker. He’d refused a glass eye, said it looked dumb, and now, with that black eye patch and his shoulder-length dreadlocks and his size and natural coldness, he commanded instant respect. Shit, motherfucking Arnold Swatchanigga would pinch a musclebound log in his diapers he run into Piss. Huge and bad, his black eye patch embroidered with a red skull and cross bones, the fine stitch-work done by his ex-bitch Jewel — Rafael to his Mexican mama and daddy — Piss was almost eighteen, about to graduate and hit the streets. Pity the poor mafockin streets. And unlike me the motherfucker had a heart. He’d cried the day he caught that little taco-loco bitch Jewel in the shower takin’ some fat nigga up the Hershey highway. Yup, he’d cried, cried with his one good eye then thrown Jewel headfirst into the shower wall. Cried some more as he kicked the shit out of the soapy nigga who’d been bangin’ Jewel. Cried and then stomped that broken-neck paraplegic Jewel in the family jewels and said, “Adios, bitch.”

“Word up, Cannibal. Shaq and his crew are fixin’ to jump your honey freaky tomorrow night.”

“She ain’t my honey, brother.”

“Yo, whoever she is or isn’t, they plannin’ a pony party. They talkin’ they gonna rock that fine puddy into the next life.”

I sent for Shaquille. Him and me hated each other, had never made it up since the day I saved Piss from his spit bath.

“Whussup, nigga?” I asked that cold motherfucker. Piss stood by, tall. Black Jimmy was done with my hair and was finishing up my manicure, buffing my nails mirror-bright.

“Me, always.” He grabbed his business.

“Whoop-de-damn-do for you... Lookee here, bitch, whuss this shit I hear ‘bout you and Money Johnson and Claude DeVeaux bein’ all geeked up about a certain female?”

“Don’t believe the lyin’-ass niggaz.”

“Listen up, lame-ass — you get within spittin’ distance of Miss Lovely and I’ll personally chop your sorry mafockin’ steroid-shrunk Johnson off and put it in a bun and sell it as a midget goddamn hot dog — hold the motherfuckin’ mustard. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Why you always frontin’ on me, man?” Shaq wasn’t bending over easy. “Why don’tcha back off and take care of you own business?”

“This is my business, nigga.”

“You think you bad?”

“No, sucker,” I said. “I know it.”

“I ain’t one of your dumb little Zoo Crew niggaz, Frankie. I don’t scare like a pussy-ass mafocka. You can’t just order me around.”

“I just did. You just too dumb to know it. You liftin’ weights and shit but your brain still the size of a mothball.

Consider your gorilla ass warned. Now remove your stank out of my presence and lemme watch the paint peel.”

I waved him away with a flash of polished nails. Piss smiled and growled.

Later on Piss and Popeye and Gangstahlove sat on my bed. We smoked a blunt full of sweet coke and sensemilla.

“I want Shaq and his niggaz shadowed.”

“Toyota,” said Piss, echoing an ancient ad. “You asked for it you got it, Toyota.”

“Burger King,” said Popeye, echoing another ancient ad. “Have it your way.”

“And if they try some shit...” I smiled, drawing deep on the blunt.

“Nike, my brother,” said G-love, echoing another ancient ad. “Just do it.”

“Truth,” I said. “Just do it.”

They made their play for her the next night. It was her last night, everyone knew it. Grandma Hortense was out of the hospital and coming back.

I’d said bye-bye to Ayesha, told her to stay beautiful. Told her to be well, be happy, be happy with that lucky mafocka of a husband she had. Told her that Frankie Lawrence was her friend, her friend for life.

She’d looked at me with affection in her eyes.

“You’re a gentleman, Frankie. One of the boys told me you been watching my back, and I appreciate it.”

“Someone squealin’?” I faked anger. And then we both smiled.

“You stay strong, Ayesha.”

“You be good, Frankie.”

“Too late for that, baby,” I said. “But I’ll stay alive.”

The word came in an hour after dinner. Just as I figured, Shaq and his boys were bustin’ a move. It was Friday night and there was a Harrison Ford movie rolling in the auditorium. Most of the boys and staff were there watching old Indiana Jones do his hangdog hero thing, including the kitchen guard. I had a skeleton crew walking the halls, and two good niggaz, Spanish Jimmy and Rocco the Wop, stashed in a storage room behind the kitchen. And when Shaq and his boys made their play, the hall boys passed the word.

This is how it went down.

Ayesha and the two grannies about to bust out. The kitchen spotless. The fridges humming. The cutlery all locked up. Ayesha looking for her purse. Not finding it. Telling the old ladies to get going, she’d be fine, just had to find her purse. Old ladies gone. Ayesha alone there looking for her purse. Looking in the changing room. Looking again in her granny’s locker. Looking under the benches. Not finding it.

And then the three mafockas standing there, grinning evil. Shaquille with a sharpened spoon in one hand, his other hand stashed behind his back.

“Hello, sugartit,” said that cold nigga. “You lookin’ for somethin’?”

“Nothing you’d know about,” she said.

Shaquille took his hidden hand from behind his broad back. The purse.

He laughed, cold and evil, and then they was on her, ripped her coat and dress off. Her titties pressing against a sheer red slip. Up against some boxes, Money and Claude pinning her still as Shaq worked his zipper and pressed the polished sharp spoon shiv to her long lovely throat.

“Oh, yummy mama, Shaqdaddy gonna eat you with a spoon! It gonna be an Olympic bonathon!”

Ayesha spat in his laughing face. Shaq slapped her hard, wiped his face, ripped that slip up and off her flailing arms. Lacy black panties and bra over ripe caramel curves. His lovestick jumpin’ ready, all primed and shit.

And that’s when Jimmy and Rocco busted out of the storage room, that’s when me and Piss and Popeye and Gangstahlove rolled into the kitchen. Jimmy and Rocco grabbed Shaq by the arms, pulled him off. Piss wrapped a lock-arm around his throat, shut down his air. I pressed his wrist and took his shiv. Shaq’s flagpole drooping to half-mast as he struggled.

“Mafocka,” I said. “You been warned.”

Gangstahlove and Popeye had their shivs out. They closed in on Money and Claude. Shaq’s niggaz let Ayesha go and turned, stepped off, hands up. The supplication gyration.

“We just followin’ orders, Cannibal.”

“New orders,” I said. “I want a review of the movie. You my Cisco and Egbert now, niggaz. Harrison Ford likely in some deep doo-doo by now, but it ain’t within nine millimetres of the pool of shit Shaquille in.”

I motioned Cisco and Egbert away. They walked. Shaq’s dick was soft now. Shrivelling into grey nothingness with fear. He could hardly breathe the way Piss was clamping down on his throat.

Ayesha dressing fast, leaving the slip off, stuffing it in her coat pocket, checking her purse, that the money and ID and shit were all there.

“Frankie, thank you, but I don’t want him hurt. Promise me he won’t be hurt.”

“You’re good,” I said, pocketing the shiv. “A good lady. He won’t be hurt,” I said. “I promise.”

And then I walked her out of there. Into the back room of the kitchen. Through that back room with the dim bulb and all the boxes full of rice and shit, to the door to the hall, the hall that led to another door, a door with a guard, the door to the street, the door to goodbye...

“Baby,” I said.

She sighed and gave me a sad smile.

“Ayesha,” I said. “You know I got feelings for you.”

“I know,” she said, coming close, those big brown eyes burning into mine. “I think you’re a very special young man...”

She kissed me then, pressed my lips with her soft sweet lips, a hint of tongue, the pressure of her breasts, the heat of her body...

“Goodbye, Frankie.”

“Ayesha...”

“I’m a married lady,” she said.

“That’s the way it is,” I said with a sigh. “Thanks for not sayin’ anything about me bein’ a kid.”

“You’re not a kid, Frankie Lawrence. You’re a man. A man of respect. I hope from here on out life treats you with a little kindness.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Good luck,” she said.

She pressed the red slip into my hands.

“Take this to remember me by. You’re my knight in shining armour.”

She kissed me again, quickly this time. And then she was through the door, her hot brown eyes grazing my face as the door closed and the lock clicked.

“Goodbye, Ayesha,” I said, going to me knees.

I smelled the slip... So sweet... The perfume of her sweat, her thoughts, her essence... Ayesha, my sweet flower... I put my head against the door... I’ll never make it two years, I thought, kissing the door handle, the locked handle, banging my head against the door softly. I’ll never make it, not feeling like this I won’t, not with this soft thing working in my guts, eating away at the hardness, not two years, not two minutes... Ayesha, baby, I love you I love you... And the walls pressed in on me, the walls just seemed to close in tight and suck all the air out of me, all the light, all the hope... I was in a closed coffin, no light, no air, no hope... And then like some ugly old demon with bad breath, the coffin walls just seemed to press in and vomit up all the stinking horror they’d been storing, all sadness and despair of the institutional life, all the violence and crazy laughter that sounded like the wind, all that crazy laughter stored in those cold hard walls, all that crazy laughter that sounded like a crew of fallen angels, like the wind, it all just came tumbling down, a tidal wave of misery pouring onto my head, into my brain, pounding at my heart and lungs, and the walls closed in and I was in the coffin and the vomit rose, the vomit and laughter and sadness and horror were around me and inside me, squeezing my heart and lungs, filling up my brain, and I couldn’t breathe... I clawed at my shirt as the echoes sounded in my memory, echoes of boys begging, boys crying, boys screaming, all the tears I’d seen, all the screams I’d heard, all the pain I’d caused, the blood — all of it, a whole universe of hurt — and the dead bodies, they were in there with me too, crowding me, the dead with their cold dead lips and cold dead flesh, blaming me with their cold dead eyes, and I laughed, I laughed, just like the winter wind I laughed. My clothes were strangling me, I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating. I was drowning in a coffin of blood and death and vomit and mad mad laughter. I covered my ears but it did no good, the hyenas were inside of me, laughing insanely and tearing huge putrid chunks out of my rotten soul, and their laughter echo-echo-echoed in all the empty places... I had to get out of my clothes. I had to breathe. I tore my buttons, I yanked my shirt and pants and shorts, ripped those clothes off and sucked in huge gulping lungfuls of air. And I lay there naked, naked, smelling that slip, breathing pure sweet hope instead of sour ugly vomit, hope instead of death, hope instead of hell, touching my hardness, breathing hope and life instead of death and vomit... Life... Ayesha, baby... Life...

When Shaquille saw me standing there in the kitchen doorway in that red slip, the shiv gleaming in my hand, he laughed.

“Faggot,” he said before Piss cut his air supply off, and it was like an echo, an old old song.

I smiled. Oh, man, how I smiled. That smile was feeding off his disrespect and I could feel the sweet evil percolating in my brain, bubbling mad and electric in my veins. I was charged with it.

Piss and the boys, they didn’t laugh. They knew that smile. They didn’t know my red dress but they knew that smile.

“I promised her I wouldn’t hurt you,” I said, and my face hurt from smiling. “And I won’t. You see, motherfucker, pain is a privilege... Pain is for live niggaz...”

V

The Zookeeper stood at the podium in the auditorium next morning. He was gripping the old wood hard.

“Gentlemen,” he was a big old black man. Old-school dude. Old and tired, but strong. He’d seen boys come and go and come and die — he was the parade marshal checking off names as motherfuckers marched the one-way road to hell. Nothing seemed to rattle his cage. But today he was off his game.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “And I use that form of address reluctantly. Last night while most of you were in this room watching Harrison Ford make the world safe for democracy, we lost a boy. This morning Mrs Wills opened up the steam table to put in the oatmeal and eggs and what did she find? Shaquille Clark in the water. His penis and testicles stuffed in his mouth. Dead? You can’t get much deader... Now, I assure you, the hoodlums who perpetrated this monstrosity will not get off...”

Shit, I thought. There was no way we were gonna get busted. Not with Cisco and Egbert already in the Zoo Crew, each happy and high on some killer smoke, each with a stash of pills to sell, each of them having given thumbs-up to Harrison Ford... They were my niggaz now. They knew what happened to Shaquille. How he begged. How he exited soft. How he paid for fucking with Frankie Lawrence. Ain’t no one was gonna drop a dime on us. Hell, no, we weren’t gonna get popped... Not in this life, anyway.

And then it was night again, and I was alone. Naked and alone there in the dark, there in my bed, making love to my own right hand, my faithful friend and lover, my own right hand. I was stroking and squeezing and thinking of Ayesha. It was dark. My bed was off from the others, as befits the king. I had my privacy. All the solitary boys and all the loving couples were asleep and I was smelling that red slip of Ayesha’s and making love to myself, listening to the wind blowing mad outside the walls. And then like magic, like going home, I slid into the silk, slid into that cool red silk, and I felt safe, I felt strong. The wind couldn’t touch me and there were no walls. I was free.

Did they laugh when I started wearing that red dress full-time? Maybe behind my back they laughed. I didn’t give a retarded rat’s ass about behind my back. The motherfucking king wants to wear a motherfucking dress, the rest of you mafockas better get with the programme and break out your cell phones and dial Victoria’s Secret and order you a dress too. Just make sure it ain’t red, motherfucker...

The Zookeeper called me in.

“What’s with the dress, Frankie?”

I kept my grill shut.

“Frankie, you’re smart. Talk to me, man.”

Smarter than that. I kept my grill shut.

“The young boys look up to you.”

“They better not look up my dress, boss.”

“You think you’re funny?”

“No, sir.”

“Frankie, don’t screw up here, man. You’ve got a chance in life. I’ve seen smart guys like you turn it around. You could go to college.”

Now that was funny. I laughed. I laughed and laughed. Me in college.

“What? And waste a perfectly good million-dollar education the taxpayers already provided me?”

The Zookeeper sighed.

“Take the dress off, man.”

I shook my head.

“I like it, boss. I feel comfortable in it.”

“I can make you take it off. You want that?”

“You can try,” I said. “It’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. You don’t want a war.”

“War?” He laughed. “You want war? Nigger, I got the army, I got the National Guard.”

“You don’t need the publicity, chief.”

He played his hole card.

“They’ll laugh at you, Frankie. Ruin your rep as a swinging dick. You want that?”

“Let ’em. One laugh per customer.”

“Shit,” he said, smiling. “You’re a ballsy little punk. This is going to be some entertainment. It’ll be a pleasure to watch you go down.”

The guards laughed. Well, one guard laughed. One guard laughed one time... You see, there was a catch to the system, a built in protection factor for us niggaz... If you were a full-term baby, any infraction — short of icing a motherfucker inside the joint — was just noted on your jacket. Maybe it caught you a beating from the guards, maybe it bought you a few days locked down in the hole, maybe you were sent to the shrink who’d look at you like some interesting frog shit under a microscope and ask a few dumb-ass questions, maybe, but they couldn’t hurt you where you lived, they couldn’t add time. You hit age eighteen, you passed go, you were back on the streets... So when the guard laughed at me and I kicked him in the jaw and then stomped him some teeth out of his head, I did a week in the hole and then was sent for a little shrink rap.

“Do you like girls, Frankie?” the new white shrink asked, his eyes behind thick glasses like giant undercooked fried eggs with wet green yolks. He was staring at me like I deformed. A freak in a soiled red dress. I could see the nasty smile bubbling ugly under the surface of his ugly rubber lips. Could smell the laugh hiding down there like a mole in a dirty hole.

“I been here since I was six, Doc. What’s a girl?”

“Do you love your mother?”

“I ain’t even gonna dignify that one.”

“Do you have fantasies about making love with girls?”

“Do you, motherfucker?”

“How do you feel about your father?”

“He be dead.”

The shrink looked at the file on his desk.

“But it says here—”

“Nigga dead,” I said.

The shrink switched tactics.

“Do you like boys, Frankie?”

“Where you goin’ with this, Doc? You want to know am I a faggot? Did I ever fuck a boy? That what you askin’?”

“That’s what I’m asking, Frankie.”

“Listen up, Doc, you a new visitor to the Zoo here, you just on a day-pass — so maybe you don’t know the whole score...”

“I hear things. I see the results. This isn’t my first institution.”

“Could be your last, you don’t vacate your nose from my business.”

“You’re a very angry young man. Do you dream at night? Dream about boys?”

“Life’s a dream, Doc. Life’s a stinkin’ nasty bitch of a dream and then you die... But you, Doc, you ain’t in here with us livin’ the dream. You get to go home at night — you know what I’m sayin’? What you do there, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Maybe you got some fat old mutant bitch of a wife with a giant hairy snappin’ clam between her legs, maybe you got some slim young dude who licks you like an ice-cream cone — maybe you got both of them with lit candles up they ass plus a Pit Bull wearin’ a party hat. You got needs, motherfucker — that is if you human. Urges and shit, right? Juice in your balls, right? Loneliness in your flesh, right? And flesh is flesh, right? A warm hole is just that, right? Doesn’t matter it’s pointed southeast or southwest... So what do you think goes on here? Answer your own question.”

“Do you wish you were a girl, Frankie?”

“You askin’ did any boy ever fuck me, Doc? You askin’ me if I’m a bitch? Shit, man, we in Buttfuck City here. We in Cock-In-The-Assadelphia. You read my psych profile. It’s all there in black and white. Once, motherfucker. I got fucked once, by the Wannabe-Jackson motherfuckin’ Five plus one. They pulled a train on me... But that was a long long-ass time ago. I’m a different person now. I wasn’t the Cannibal then... But the bottom line is this, motherfucker: No one fucks with Frankie Lawrence and no one fucks Frankie Lawrence. Period.”

“Don’t be angry, Frankie. I’m just paid to ask the questions. Ask questions and make recommendations. Talk to me here. I’m your friend. I’m just trying to understand your... fashion statement...”

“Listen up, ‘friend’. Forget my ‘fashion statement’. I got pussy on the brain 24/7. I’m normal that way.”

He looked at me. That smile struggling to come out. I could see he wanted to smile. Smile at the red dress. Smile at the bad little nigger in the dirty red dress. Maybe he thought I was a joke. Me and my red dress. Maybe he thought that a boy in a dirty red dress was a joke... Maybe he thought I was joking. Maybe he thought all his degrees and shit made him safe. Maybe he was just textbook-smart and life-stupid, ‘cause the shit-eating grin broke free on his face.

“Something here funny?” I asked.

“Frankie, the whole thing. The tough-guy act and you sitting there looking like a lingerie model!”

“Doc,” I said, shaking my head. “I’d say that comment is downright unprofessional.”

“Why did you kick the guard, Frankie?” he asked, still smiling. “The man’s jaw is shattered. He lost two teeth.”

I raised my kick and put in on the desk, leaned back in my chair. The blood was dried to black and fading, but I’d left the two big front broken fangs embedded in the rubber of the toe.

“I found them.”

The doctor looked at the fronts and his smile died fast as an executed nigga.

“Doc, the guard laughed at my red dress. Someone laughs, you lash out. It’s the normal reaction. I don’t like people laughin’ at me. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Well...” He looked in my eyes. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“That’s good, Doc,” I said, smiling cold. “I wouldn’t want to think you were laughin’ at me. I mean, I’m a normal guy... Except for one thing. Listen up careful, motherfucker, and take this to the bank: I ain’t scared of dyin’.”

The doctor turned ashy white and made notes.

“I’ll recommend you be allowed to wear your red dress.”

“You a good nigga, Doc. For an old white boy... In fact...” I stood up, leaned across the desk, smiling, my face inches from his. “You my nigga. You my very own private doctor nigga... And nigga, right about now I think I could use a prescription for Valium.”

Lemme just fast-forward through those last two years of Zoo time. What’s there to tell? I sent away for some red dresses by mail and I wore them. I wore red and I ruled the joint... And I set up an operational structure for the street. After all, what good were all the lessons of Juvenile Hall if I didn’t put them to use? I had that million dollar education you taxpaying mafockas forked your hard-earned cash for and shit if I was gonna disrespect your investment...

Piss was out a full twenty months before me. Piss and Gangstahlove ran the show for me out there. They rented apartments. Bought the coke from the Colombians. I took a map and carved the city up into territories. Piss and G-love assigned corners and spots to the boys. They were good niggaz, those boys, true motherfucking blue. Many of them’d grown up under my protection and care, some of them was my elders too. Zoo Crew boys. My niggaz...

It was New Jack City out there. The rock business was booming. Niggaz just loved that shit. Poor black niggaz suckin’ the welfare tit, rich white niggaz livin’ champagne wishes and caviar dreams in fine cribs — they were all stone-cold dog mafockas for the smoking cocaine zap... The old dudes out there in the fine clothes and fine cars? Shit, they ran the heroin for Ronny Dewitt... Nigga Mortis still the King Kong of Dope in the hood... But as far as the rest of the city went, it was every ethnic posse for itself... The Shaghettios? Shit, those ravioli-eatin’ garlic-breath cap-puccino-drinkin’ Woptalian motherfuckers didn’t have what it took to compete anymore. Them and the Won Tons — Chinese niggaz — had been squeezed out of most of their traditional rackets by fresher, hungrier types... I mean, shit, now you had Jamaicans, Ricans, Dominicans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Koreans, Russians, Albanians, Serbs, Greeks — you name it — every mother-fucking ethnic posse under the sun was working the dark side of the street, sucking cash from they own people’s sorry immigrant asses. And all those hard motherfuckers from those hard motherfucking countries make us home-grown niggaz look soft with our Big Macs and government handouts. Hard motherfuckers from hard motherfucking countries who come up eating rats and breadcrumbs and wiping their asses with their fingers, they all come to this country and see that money tree blooming with cash and they eyes light up like Christmas morning... Grow up with nothing, nothing scares you...

But the rockpile was wide open. Gangs of hungry young-bloods springing up right and left. And the Zoo Crew was right in there with the best of them... My boys were cold and hard, ruthless, never gave an inch. Pluck that easy money off the tree. Money tree ripe with fruit. Shake it and take it. Pure easy money just waiting for anyone with the balls to step up and take it. And motherfucker, under my red dress I had balls the size of Kansas City.

So I did my time. Saw Mama less and less now, now that she was living with whatever-that-motherfucker’s-name-was. I knew she was worried about me, me and my red dress. I saw it in her eyes the times she came. I told her it was cool. Gave her a history lesson. Told her all about Mel Gibson and Braveheart and all those bad Scottish motherfuckers in their plaid skirts. But, really, I didn’t give a fuck. Not about what she thought, not about what anyone thought. Thoughts untranslated into action can’t hurt you. All I wanted was respect. Man without respect not a man. As long as I was respected, I was cool. And respect is born of fear and fear breeds respect and mafockas fear crazy... Was I crazy? Hell, no. No more than you if you was in my shoes. If you was in my dress, haha — hey there, don’t you laugh now, nigga. I see that smile breaking ugly on your face... Listen up, you, I wasn’t crazy, I was bad. Crazy is a momentary thing — like when you take a life out of emotion. I’ve had my crazy moments. Maybe doing Shaq was crazy. But it also solidified my hold on the Zoo... It was smart and it was bad. And bad is just bad. I’m taking you to school here, teaching you the facts of life — a nigga be bad enough he get away with any damn thing. You take that basketball nigga Dennis Rodman. He wear dresses too. And that bad championship nigga got the last laugh, he laughing all the way to the bank. All the way to fame and motherfucking fortune. And motherfucker, that’s where I was headed too. Destination Fame and motherfucking Fortune. Shit, after I’m dead and gone you still be talking about me. Me and my red dress. You can take that to the bank. And when you get to the bank, look for a bad nigga in a red dress... Or look for the ghost of a bad nigga in a red dress. That’ll be me, motherfucker. Counting my money and laughing at your ugly ass.

VI

“Adios, motherfucker,” I said to Juvenile Hall from the back seat of the armoured black Benz as we rounded the corner, putting the old cold walls behind us.

G-love was driving. Piss was with me in back. Between us on the fresh baby-butt-soft black leather that smelled of new money, a bright butterscotch-skinned honey named Kali. My dress was hiked up around my waist and Kali’s silky semi-pro grill was working overtime. Wet and wild. Liquid lickability factor through the roof. Maybe sixteen years old.

“Happy birthday to you, Frankie,” she said, coming up for air, planting a kiss on my lovestick.

“Yeah,” I said. “Blow that candle for me, baby.”

It was January the twenty-ninth. I was eighteen. Eighteen and free. Eighteen and free on the back seat of a silent black Benz with smoked windows. A butterscotch honey named Kali blowing my candle... And here’s the CNN: freedom air didn’t taste no damn different than Zoo air. No different. I felt exactly the same as an hour earlier back when the Zookeeper was spilling me the canned adios lecture about accepting responsibility... You see, geography, walls, those bitches just an illusion. There’s no real inside and no real outside. That’s a fact. The road to hell is in your head. And if you walkin’ that road, you walkin’ that road. Just follow your feet. No detour from the facts. And when destiny calls, that nasty third-class ho calls collect... And it ain’t like you got a choice, nigga just gots to accept the charges... Now that’s responsibility.

I’d told Mama not to pick me up and not to expect me living back home. I’d visit the old lady — pretend I was kickin’ it there if any authorities checked up on me — but I wasn’t gonna actually put my head on no pillow there. Not while whatever-that-motherfucker’s-name-was was with her...

We drove the city. That fly gangstah bitch Kali now high in the saddle, getting busy, working me with that slippery slidy velvet crotch glove, thumping and bumping and grinding, riding the pony to Paradise as I looked out the window and smoked a cigarette...

The hood hadn’t modified a fraction since I’d been inside. Nothing but poor folk and wild dogs. Desperation and the wind. Winos and junkies and homeless motherfuckers waiting for gold or death to fall out of the sky. Candy wrappers and losing lottery tickets and empty heroin bags blowing dead in the cold wind. Paper sailboats in a sea of dust and grey decay... Grey sky, grey buildings, grey faces. Colour and life sucked out of faces by the wind. Empty crack vials and dead syringes glittering like false promises in the gutters... The geography of poverty. Hopelessness reigned supreme.

There were things I wanted. A whole shopping list of things I wanted. I wanted power, I wanted money. I wanted folk to know my name. I wanted people to beg me for favours, for drugs. For rock, for heroin... I wanted females, females of every colour and shape. I wanted to eat them, to fuck them, to make them laugh and shiver and whine with pleasure. I wanted to blow my nose in their hair and make them cry and sigh and whisper my name with love and fear. I wanted to pop my nut a million times in a million different pussies. I wanted your wife, your girlfriend, your sister — I wanted your mother if she was fine... I wanted cars, cars of every make and model. I wanted to drive fast, fast as the motherfucking wind. I wanted cars, I wanted girls. I wanted fine champagne and uncut cocaine, Hawaiian herb and big screen TVs. I wanted toasted bread and clean mattresses. I wanted silk sheets and silk bitches. I wanted...

“You find her?” I asked as Kali pogoed up and down, sweat on her brow, making freaky yipping noises.

“Easy,” said Piss. “Ayesha got a baby now. Her husband work in a damn supermarket. Stockboy.”

“She happy?” I asked, squeezing a ripe Kali chest mango.

“She poor,” Piss said. “Poor can’t be truly happy.”

“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

“Word,” said Gangstahlove as we passed two scabby winos playin’ tug-of-war over the dregs in a bottle. The loser crashed to the ground and watched the winner upend the bottle, two final drops hittin’ the nigga’s dry grey tongue.

I looked out the back window as that gymnastic Kali drew the major gush out of me. The loser was swinging a piece of wood at the winner’s head. And as I popped, the winner’s head popped red... Winner now the loser...

I’ll tell you what it was I really wanted. All that other shit was just shits and grins, magazines in a wating room...

You know what I wanted. I wanted Ayesha.

Mama’s toenails needed cutting. Mama’s hair needed fixing. Mama’s face was looking saggy and ragged, tired and cracked as an old shoe.

The apartment was same. On the surface it was changed. Different furniture, different paint on the walls, a different smell. No more little-boy-with-his-mama smell, now it had a man and woman smell. Different on the surface, but at the core it was the same. Same sadness, same desperation. Same poverty. It was the same, yeah, but I wasn’t.

It was just before lunchtime and Mama was still chillin’ in her robe, fresh from the sack. Me, I was in my ankle-length black chinchilla coat.

“Frankie, baby!” She hugged me hard. “Happy birthday! Welcome home!”

“Yeah yeah, Mama. Don’t break my ribs...”

“Baby, it’s good to see you.”

“Mama, what’s goin’ on here? Why you not gettin’ ready for work?” I knew she was on the swing shift.

Her face fell. “I lost my job, Frankie.”

“I’ll give you money, Mama. I got stupid mad money.”

She licked her lips as I flashed the roll of hundreds Piss had pressed in my hand soon as I exited the Zoo.

“I can’t take it,” she said. But I could see she wanted to.

“Where’s what’s-his-name?” I asked.

“His name is Larry, Frankie. Your father’s name is Larry.”

“Where’s what’s-his-name?”

“He’s working.”

“When he get home? I wanna talk to the motherfucker. Give him some cash. Straighten his ass out.”

“He got him a church service after work. He’s workin’ construction, but he got a little storefront he preaches out of.”

“What’s-his-name’s a motherfuckin’ preacher?”

She nodded.

“He a preacher, he oughta be bankin’ the clink. Get him a television show. That’s a good hustle.”

“Your father’s not a hustler. Whatever he gets he gives away. He’s a righteous preacher.”

“You shittin’ me.”

“Frankie, it’s God’s truth.”

“Damn,” I said. “Motherfucker accepted the collect call.”

“Frankie, show some respect for the Lord.”

“The Lord,” I snorted. “What’d that skinny-ass bottom-of-the-deck-dealin’ shoot-from-the-hip white nigga ever do for black folk? Pass us his motherfuckin’ crown of thorns, that’s what.”

“Frankie, watch your language.”

“Mama, I’m beyond language.” I peeled her some bills. “Go fix yourself up. Get yourself a new dress. Buy you a magic red dress, okay? I want a smile on that pretty face.”

As we made the rounds, touring the city, Piss never introduced me, me in my floor-length fur over a thigh-high red silk, but you could tell the motherfuckers knew who I was. The legend had arrived before I had. And mother-fuckers’d been warned. The Cannibal wore red. Don’t laugh. If breathing was a function you cared about, don’t laugh.

We stopped at corners, at crackhouses, in a club we owned where we drank champagne and cognac. In the back room I put the wood to a nasty little Janet Jackson-lookin’ freak whose name I never got.

“Fuck me good, bad daddy,” she said. “Fuck me good with that nice big dick you got under that nice red dress.”

“Toyota,” I said. “You asked for it, you got it. Toyota.”

The factory. That’s where they cooked the coke. Behind steel doors, that’s where they packaged it. Armed guards on the street, one on the stairs, one at the door. Only females working the labour jobs. A crew of two cookers working the stoves, cooking the shit up nice, and five packers sitting at a table packing rocks into vials, vials into bags, bags that runners took to the corners, to the houses... All overseen by Julio the Blade. A stone-cold wizard with cutlery, in his mid-twenties, he’d done a three-spot in the Zoo for attempted murder back when I was a ten-and-under. Attempted murder? Shit, there was nothing “attempted” about it. If Julio the Blade wanted you out of the equation — simple math, you was out. That Puerto Rican mafocka could carve his initials on a nigga’s chest faster’n you can say Swiss Army.

The females cooking and packing were naked, their clothes locked up so they couldn’t rip us off — which no doubt they would given half a motherfuckin’ chance. The heat in the place was on high. Bitches were sweatin’. They were allowed to smoke a pipe every two hours of their eight-hour shift, but that was it. Smoke a few pipes and take some shit home at a discount, but work time was just that. They worked. Bitches earned their head-candy.

“Whussup, Piss?” Julio dropped fingers with the big man. And then he saw me. “Frankie? Bienvenida, Cannibal! Gimme some love!”

He hugged me.

“Lookin’ good, m’nigga!”

“Doublemint Gum, Julio,” I said, quoting the ancient ad starring exact mirror-image twins. “Keepin’ your ass busy here?”

“You know it, bro. Suckas out there smoke the rock so fast we barely got time to shit or go blind or eat a slice of pizza...”

Julio went over to the changing room and let seven new naked females into the room. They sat on a couch. All sizes, all shapes, all ages. All naked.

“Yo, Frankie. It’s shift change time. You want to do the honours?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll watch.”

“You know the drill,” Julio said to the females.

The bitch packing on the far end of the table stood up. Her spot at the table was instantly taken by one of the couch bitches who didn’t miss a beat and stuffed a rock into a plastic vial, then put that vial into a plastic bag with others. The table was shiny with plastic bags and rock cocaine. Bags full of vials. Money tree ripe with fruit. Bitches packing away like machines, brown fingers moving fast, titties bobbling, sweat rolling down their brown bodies like widow’s tears. The room smelled of coke and sweat and pussy.

“C’mere, girlfriend,” Julio said, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. “Gotta watch these bitches like a hawk, Frankie. They got hidey-holes everywhere.”

He checked her oral cavity. Clean.

He checked her frontal cavity. Clean.

He checked her rear-end cavity...

“Hey,” he said, mad, looking deep and reaching. “What’s this?”

He pretended to pluck a quarter out of her ass.

“Bitch be shittin’ money!”

Piss and I laughed. Julio grinned.

“Okay,” he said, slapping the empty ass. “Next.”

We watched him work. He was fast, he was good. And the bitches knew the drill. Soon’s one stood up, one sat her ass down.

“Julio,” I said, when the shift was all changed, as we drank a beer away from the work area, “I got something for the Blade.”

“Bueno,” he said, smiling, patting his pocket. “Who is it.”

“A nobody,” I said. “A stockboy at a supermarket...”

Colombia is a fertile fucking country. Don’t believe what the government tells you ‘bout the war on drugs. Ain’t no war on drugs. Drugs just a weapon in the war on niggaz. And Colombia be the nation’s partner in the war on niggaz. Like the coke, the heroin comin’ out of Colombia was fine. Strong. Muscular. Fine product. Competitive product. Less travel and less middlemen than the Asian shit.

As Piss and I watched G-love and the boys cut and package that good Colombian heroin, I knew: Ronny Dewitt’s days as the King of Dope were numbered. Zoo Crew on the way up. Rigor mortis for Nigger Mortis. Adios, Ronny.

The little white boy hassling the doorman at the B Street crackhouse when we showed took one look at Piss and shit, he nearly pissed his pants.

We’d been still cruising the town that first night, checking out the spots, letting the niggaz know that the Cannibal was in town and that all work and no play would be rewarded with hard cash and friendship.

A fucking limousine was pulled up out front the crack-house. What kind of conspicuous dumb-ass white motherfuckers ride the hood in a white stretch limo?

“But I’ve been here before, sir.” The white boy begged Piss. “We’re cool...”

The doorman looked out the slot in the heavy steel door.

“That true?” asked Piss. “You know the gentleman?”

“Never seen him,” said the doorman.

“I was here, I swear.”

Motherfucker goin’ to a crackhouse in a limo? An invitation to the heat, invitation to get taken down.

“Who’s in the limo, Bubba?” I asked.

“Friends,” said the skinny white boy. “Look, bro, we got cash to spend. We wanna cop five hundred dollars worth.”

“Bring your friends in,” I said. “And tell the limo you’ll call for a pick-up when you all nice and crispy.”

I was watching the white kids piping up and lemme tell you, those suburban punks was as doggy for the rock as any broom-pushin’ janitor on payday. And there were a few of those there too. All of them, black and white, rich and poor, sprawled out on old mattresses sucking hits like Hoover vacuums. The white kids’d smoked their five hundred dollars, were moving up on the seven-hundred-dollar mark, all their ready cash, but I didn’t give a platinum-plated shit about the money. I was watching the blonde. The blonde bitch with the blonde curls.

Now’s a good moment for a quick rundown on my relationship with the drug. You see, me being born a crack baby, undersize and jonesing for the buzz from the jump, I steered clear of the shit. I sniffed a line now and then, but if I smoked it, it was always just a rock or two mixed with herb. I wouldn’t let myself become a pipe jockey. No way, Jose.

The thing about rock is that it wipes out colour and class. Everyone equal behind the pipe. The democracy of compulsion. Money and need the common denominator. And now that the white kids were out of money, their need was through the roof.

I’d been watching them — watching the bitch to be exact. Watching them smoke — watching the bitch smoke. Watching them laugh — watching the bitch laugh. Watching them kiss — watching the bitch kiss. Yeah, watching her kiss... I was sitting there, my dick hard under my red silk under my fur coat, watching the blonde bitch with blonde curls kiss the pushy little front boy she called Morton... I watched her kiss him and I smiled...

“I want another hit, Morton,” the blonde bitch whined, breaking off the clinch.

“We don’t have any more money,” said the boy.

“Give them your watch,” said blondie.

We was sitting there, me and Piss, silent, watching.

The white boy came over and handed me a fresh Rolex. It was real. I could tell. Had the weight, the shine, the silence.

“How much?” he asked me, looking over at the girl, pissed.

“Nice copy like this?”

“Copy?” he almost screamed. “Dude, it’s real.”

“Fake shit like this you can buy from an African brother on the street for twenty. Maybe ten if he ain’t had his foo-foo yet that day.”

“Dude...” He had the beggar’s whine in his voice.

I nodded at the brother holding the house stash.

“Give them four bottles, Terrence,” I said.

“Four bottles!” Morton whined. “That’s twenty dollars!”

“Take it or leave it. Leave it and you leave here.”

It was a done deal, I knew. The blonde bitch was licking her lips. Blue eyes bright and sick with the rock fever.

“Do it!” she cried. “Tell your father you got ripped off!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Tell Daddy Bigbucks the bad niggaz ripped you off.”

Morton was about to be funny-style. I shook my head.

“Careful,” I said to him, passing the watch to Piss.

Morton sighed and nodded his head, looked sadly at his watch on Piss’s redwood wrist. Shit, the band wouldn’t even close.

“What time is it, Piss?” I asked.

“Party time, bro.”

“Party down, friends,” I said.

The blonde was already piping it up. She was a freak for the shit, her long legs were loose from the buzz. She looked over and smiled at me. Yeah, this was gonna be fun.

The new bottles were finished now.

“One more,” she said to me. “On the house.”

“No freebies,” I said. “What else you got?”

I looked her up and down. Licked my lips.

“Let’s go,” said the boy, getting up. And the other kids got up too. All except the blonde.

“Don’t be such a party pooper, Morton,” she said with a pout.

“Let’s go, Mary.” Morty was nervous. The kids were at the door.

Mary didn’t want to go.

“We’re tapped out, Mary.”

“Give him a credit card.” She giggled.

“Get serious,” he said.

“I take credit cards,” I said, winking at Mary.

“You have a machine?” Morton asked.

“No, bitch, I ‘take’ credit cards.”

Piss laughed. Mary laughed. The other white kids giggled nervously.

“Just fuckin’ with you.” I nodded at Piss. “Give her a hit,” I said. “For the road. And make it Hollywood style.”

Piss smiled. He packed a stem with a rock.

“Come here, Mary,” he said.

Mary stood, wobbly on those long legs. Morton grabbed her arm.

“Mary, let’s go. I don’t like this.”

“Fuck you,” she said to him, coming and squatting in front of us. Her skirt hiked high, panties visible. White thighs open, coat over her arm. I could see her pee-pee pressing wet against her panties. Could almost count the silky snatch hairs.

Piss hit the stem with a Bic. Sucked and sucked and sucked, coke crackling like a baby bonfire, Mary staring, blue eyes mesmerised, as Piss sucked that smoke deep. And then he reached a big hand and took that curly blonde head and brought it close. Blondie knew what to do. She closed her eyes, Hollywood style, and kissed Piss, Piss blowing smoke into her grill, filling her lungs as she sucked, him licking her lips, the endless smoking fade-out Hollywood kiss, and she tumbled back on her ass, a smile on her face, hair smoking, lips smoking sweet like a hot gun: pure crack ho bliss.

“Gone With The Wind,” I said.

Morton’s face was a blushing mask of pink anger.

“We’re going, Mary.” He pulled her to her feet. Mary grinning goofy.

I nodded at the doorman to open sesame. Mary wobbly on her pins, her brain spinning.

“Thanks,” she said to me and Piss.

“Anytime,” I said. “You come back anytime and ask for Frankie.”

“Thanks, Frankie,” she said, looking at me curious-like.

I smiled, passed her a bottle of rock to clinch things. She tucked it in her bra like any good little crack ho.

“Beats the shit out of a mothball, Mary, don’t it?”

As I lay there in bed that night in my new crib, watching Kali and the white girl Madrid lick each other, the city twinkling pretty as a jewellery showcase out the window — the jeweller with a gun to his head, the gems ready to be snatched — I thought about Mary. She’d known who I was. As the door closed, the recognition light bulb had popped on in her head. She’d known... Mary, little golden Mary... She’d be back, uh-huh, and when she came back, I had a surprise for that fine little rich bitch. Oh yeah, little golden Mary was in for a real lesson in democracy.

“Hello, Ayesha,” I said.

“My God, Frankie?”

“It’s me, Ayesha, all growed up.”

She came out of the shitty little apartment, into my arms and hugged me. A baby started crying behind her. Looked like the same shitty little apartment I’d come up in. Shitty little ghetto apartments all look the same. Look the same and feel the same. Ayesha deserved better. Hell, I thought, it won’t be long now.

“You still married, Eesh?” As if I didn’t know.

“Still married, Frankie,” she smiled and showed me her ring, still heavy and big and cheap, soon to be meaningless.

“Come on in,” she said. “Rasheed be home soon.”

I went in. She sat me down.

She took the baby in her arms, rocked it, shushed it up fast.

“How’d you find me, Frankie?”

“I asked around for the most beautiful girl in the world and all roads led here.”

She smiled. “You still sweet.”

“For you, Ayesha, always.”

“You graduate?” she asked.

“With honours,” I said. “Phi Beta Cappa.”

Phi Beta Cap-a-nigga.

“I told Rasheed what you did for me...” Then her face fell. “Frankie, my grandma Hortense, she told me that the boy who tried to mess with me... I heard he...”

“Wasn’t me, Ayesha. It was unrelated. I swear. I let him slide. I swear...”

“You swear?”

“I promised you I wouldn’t hurt him.”

“Well, I’m relieved.” She looked at her watch. “Rasheed should a been home by now.”

“I’ll take you both out for a fine meal,” I said.

“What about the baby?”

“Uncle Frankie pay for a babysitter.” I pulled a wad of cash.

“We couldn’t. It’ll be our treat. Rasheed workin’ steady and today’s Friday. Payday.”

Payday. The eagle shits on Friday. Niggaz gotta be careful when they step in eagle shit. That shit’s slippery...

“Frankie,” she asked, all concerned. “Where you getting money? You working already?” Her eyes took in my fur coat. “And that fur...? Can I take your coat?”

That’s when the phone rang.

“May I?” I took the baby. Looked into the little motherfucker’s eyes. He had her eyes. Poor little fucker. I knew what it was like to grow up without a father.

“He’s called Kareem,” she said, then picked up the phone, spoke into it. “Hello... Yes, that’s me...”

Her eyes went big and scared and she looked over at me... And as I tickled Kareem, she screamed.

Poor Rasheed. Niggaz gotta be careful on payday... As I said before, if Julio the Blade wanted you out of the equation... Simple math — minus one. Ayesha, sweet Ayesha, was a single mother.

Talking about single mothers... Mama was out. It was a couple days later. I’d paid for Rasheed’s funeral. Paid a month’s rent for Ayesha. I’d held her hand when she buried her old man. Yup, single motherhood was tough as a motherfucker. She’d need all the help she could get...

“Where’s Mama?” I asked the old dude.

“Boy,” he said, looking at my fur with contempt. “I don’t want you sniffin’ round here.”

“Where’s Mama?” I asked again. Piss gave the old nigga the cold one-eyed stare.

“If I knew I wouldn’t tell you. I can smell the evil on you hoodlums like blood in a slaughterhouse. You stay away from her, you cross-dressin’ fool.”

“Or what?”

“Or the Lord shall smite thee.”

“Let the nigga try. One smite per customer.”

“That’s all it takes, smartmouth. One strike and you out.”

Piss and I just laughed.

“Hello, Frankie,” said the white plainclothes waiting for me outside my crib later that day. “Your doorman wouldn’t let me up.”

“Those his orders, chief. The only white dudes allowed up are Jesus and Santa Glaus. And those blue-moon niggaz steer clear of this part of town.”

“I could get a warrant.”

“For what?” I asked. “And let’s see some ID.”

“For what?” he asked, pulling a badge. “For the fuckin’ whole menu, asshole.”

“Detective Charles,” I said. “Name’s familiar.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I usually remember bad shit, and man, you smell like somethin’ runnin’ out of a sick dog’s ass. But I can’t say I remember you.”

The dude was making weird shapes with his hands. He nodded to the shadow on the wall. And the years peeled back like a rotten banana peel.

“That’s a lion, Frankie. The lion that eats the nigger. Remember the shadows? The shadow puppets on the precinct wall?”

“Shit,” I said, remembering. “You that nice motherfucker who took me in back in the day.”

“That was me. But I’m not so nice anymore and neither are you from what I hear. And I hear everything.”

“So, you wanna shoot the shit, motherfucker? Talk over old times like some barbershop homies? Catch up and shit?”

“Sorry, baby barracuda. I got a message for you.”

“So deliver it, messenger boy.”

“Ronny Dewitt says, ‘Go back to the rockpile, Candy Balls. Or else.’”

“Else what, man?”

“Else?” The cop laughed. “Else he’ll fuck you where you live.”

“That it?” I asked. Piss had the car waiting.

“One more thing,” he said. “Do me a favour and open your coat.”

“Sure,” I said, opening up. “For Nigger Mortis’s pet cop, I give a prime-time fashion show... You like?”

“Now I seen it all,” he said, spitting. “A gangstah in a red dress.”

And then he laughed. I walked to the car, his laugh eating at me from inside my brain. Echoing.

“One laugh per customer,” I said back at him.

And the motherfucker just laughed.

“That’s two,” I said under my breath. “Over the limit.”

“Hello, Mary,” I said to the blonde as she piped up on a mattress in the crackhouse. “I’m glad you made it back.”

“Frankie,” she said, giggling goofy. “The same little Frankie I used to play with.”

“I know,” I said, laughing with her, sitting. “It’s a small damn funny damn world, ain’t it?”

“No shit,” she said. “How’s your mother?”

“She fine,” I said. “Forgive me if I don’t ask the same after yours.”

Mary laughed.

“She really did a number on you. I’m surprised you remember.”

I remembered alright. Something hurts bad enough, it sticks with you like stink on shit.

“So Mary,” I said. “Let’s celebrate new times.”

“New times,” she said, stuffing a rock in the pipe.

“The party’s on me,” I said, showing her a rock the size of the Ritz in a plastic bag. Rock the size of... a giant mothball. “Let’s take a ride.”

“Cool,” she said, getting up, taking my arm, smiling at the poor niggaz piping up. “This is so much cooler than hanging out with college kids.”

“I’m takin’ you to school, honey,” I said as we headed arm in arm for the door. “Education is everywhere. Just gotta be open to it.”

She was open to it. Wide open. And I was pounding that tight white blueblood “pee-pee” in the back of the Mercedes like there was no tomorrow, no yesterday, like there was only now now now now now.

“Yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!” she screamed. “More!”

I slowed up, pulled out to the gate. Packed a rock in the pipe, put the pipe in her grill, hit it with a Bic. She sucked greedily. And when her lungs were full — WHOOOSH — I slammed home.

“Frankie-ee-ee-eeeeee!” she moaned, eyes rolling. “Man, I think I love you.”

“That’s good, Mary,” I said, not a speck of back-at-ya love in my voice.

“Frankie,” she said, lounging in her crack ho bliss.

“Yeah?”

“I’d do anything to feel this way always.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“She yours,” I said to the pack of winos living under the bridge. Maybe ten of them ragged sad motherfuckers.

“She sick?” asked the head nigga, a giant slobberpuss so dirty you couldn’t tell he was black or white.

“Sick?” Piss threw Mary on the mattress. She was high as a motherfucker. High on dope, high on rock. Stinking of puke and sex. Moaning for another hit. “This is some fine high-class society pussy. She just love to party. Ain’t no thin’ sick about that. Right, Mary?”

“Gimme a hit,” she moaned.

The big bum looked at me, looked at Piss.

“What are you waitin’ for?” asked Piss. “That’s your invitation into high society, nigga.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “She all yours.”

The big motherfucker drooled and went to his knees, opening his pants.

Piss and I got back into the car. And as we drove away, the big motherfucker tore Mary’s clothes off and got busy. And the other bums touched themselves. Waiting their turn.

“Democracy in action,” I said.

Ayesha still in black. Mourning. We were walking along the river. Piss watching our backs from the car.

“Your mama loves Kareem,” she said. “It’s nice she’s watchin’ him for me.”

“Mama’s a sweetheart.”

Ayesha sighed.

“They haven’t caught the guy yet,” she said. “Rasheed dead for a stupid two-hundred dollars.”

“They might never catch him,” I said. “And even if they do... I know you still hurtin’, Ayesha. I know you still love him... but...”

“But what, Frankie?”

“I don’t got no right to say this... But you gotta think about Kareem... And you gotta...”

“What, Frankie?”

“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t say it.”

“Say it, Frankie.”

“You gotta start thinkin’ about you.”

“Thanks for caring, Frankie Lawrence,” she said, taking my hand and looking at me with those beautiful eyes. “You’re a real gentleman.”

“No way, nigga!” screamed the naked fifteen-year-old strapped in the chair in the crackhouse basement. “I ain’t talkin’!”

Piss gave him a medium strong backhand cross the face. His nose exploded bloody and the little motherfucker screamed.

“You broke my nose!” he wailed.

“Give your ugly monkey face some character,” I said.

Piss laughed. I didn’t. The little motherfucker and his crew had come at us hard in a Cherokee, spraying our war zone Benz with semi-auto bullets.

We’d followed them, cut them off, taken two out with our 9’s and then pulled this punk from the wreck. The driver was left crunched like a dead candy wrapper in the front seat.

“Now I ain’t fuckin’ around,” I said to the little nigga. “Tell me where Nigger Mortis holed up.”

“I talk I walk?”

“You talk you walk,” I said. “My word is my bond.”

“All right,” he said... And then he broke off an address.

“That wasn’t so hard,” I said, cutting his ropes. “Now get y’ass up.”

“I can go?” he asked, surprised, flexing his wrists, wiping his bloody face.

“Nigga,” I said. “I said you can walk. Now walk.”

He walked over for his clothes. I nodded to Piss. Piss kicked his clothes cross the room.

“Have a nice walk?” I asked. Piss laughed.

“Lyin’-ass nigga!” the kid spat out. “Lyin’-ass nigga in a red dress! Fuckin’ faggot!”

I was over there in one big step, slammed that naked mafocka against the wall, his teeth breaking and tumbling onto the floor like snake-eyes dice. I rammed my Beretta right up where the sun don’t shine.

“Faggot this!” I said, pulling the trigger, the caps barely muffled by his skinny ass.

“Motherfucker,” he said soft, as his insides turned to creamed corn and poured out his smoking ass as he slid down the wall into a broken heap. “Shit...”

“For the last time,” I said, wiping my Beretta in his hair.

“Hello, Mama,” I said. I’d been waiting on whatever-that-motherfucker’s-name-was to leave. Sitting in the ride and waiting. Had a crew staking out Ronny Dewitt cross town. Ronny hanging tight in his fortress. Getting reports about my boys taking out his boys, reports that some of his boys had jumped ship to my side. Old-fashioned street war.

Mama opened the door wider and let me in.

“Mama, you supposed to be over with Ayesha. Helpin’ with the baby.”

“I know, Frankie. I’ll go soon. I’m not feelin’ so good today.”

“Mama,” I said. “You don’t look so good. What’s-his-name treatin’ you bad?”

“Your father’s name is Larry, Frankie.” She sighed.

“Whatever,” I said. “Mama, I want you to move out of here.”

She wandered over to the bathroom. I heard her making pee-pee.

“Frankie,” she called. “You see the TV news? That little white girl Mary whose folks I used to work for? They found her dead in the river. Drugged and raped and beaten to death.”

“That so...? Mama, I’m gonna have to get a place for you and Ayesha away from all this. A nice place. A nice house outside the city. Place with a washer-dryer. You won’t never have to go outside again you don’t want to. You and Ayesha both be safe.”

“Frankie, I can’t move,” she said, coming out. “I can’t leave your father.”

I smelled her breath as she came close and looked me in the eyes. Breath bad. Sour with wine, stanky with...

“Mama, you ain’t smokin’ rock...?”

“Frankie...”

“Mama, say it ain’t so. You know that shit is poison for us.”

“Just a little, baby. Just a little when the blues get me down.”

“What’s-his-name knows?”

“He knows, but he stickin’ by me like I stuck by him. Your father’s a good man.”

“What’d that nigga ever do for you and me, Mama? ‘Cept get his ass locked up and leave us holdin’ a bag of hurt.”

“You don’t know what he did,” she said. “Maybe if I told you...”

“I know all about it, Mama. I know he tried to take down Ronny Dewitt. I know he smoked Ronny’s boy Lucius. I know he took five caps. I know I know I know. And it don’t change a damn thing. He wasn’t there for us.”

“He was there for me, Frankie. You don’t understand. Me and Ronny... See, him and me... I was confused... Your daddy and Ronny was partners back then, best friends, and I was Ronny’s girl first and then I fell for your daddy hard... We got married... But Ronny he had me hooked on the pipe... Your daddy was tryin’ to save me...”

“That’s History Channel shit, Mama. Nigger Mortis goin’ down.”

“Frankie, promise me you won’t mess with Ronny. He don’t take no prisoners.”

Detective Charles was actually whistling. I thought that shit was strictly movie-time macho. But the nigga was whistling and workin’ his fronts with a toothpick as he left the restaurant. I’d bribed the parking lot jockey to let me in his car.

“Have a nice dinner?” I asked, putting my 9 against the motherfucker’s head as he drove.

“Well, what have we got here?” he said looking in the mirror with a smile.

“A situation,” I said. “Keep driving.”

Later, Ayesha and I were eating a simple dinner. Kareem was sleeping a deep peaceful baby sleep. I finished my chicken and greens and wiped my plate clean with an extra slice of white bread.

“You always were generous with the starch, Eesh.”

“You always were a funny man, Frankie.”

Yeah, I thought, funny as a motherfucker. But old Detective Charles wasn’t laughing. Or whistling... Or anything.

Ayesha smiled at me. She still wore black. I still wore red. I helped her wash the dishes. I was whistling as I washed the dishes.

“You want to go to a club, tonight, Eesh? Go somewhere nice?”

She shook her head.

“Frankie, thank your mother again for helping with the baby.”

“It was her pleasure,” I said. “She isn’t workin’ now and it makes her happy.”

“She’s not exactly happy, Frankie. Not with you. Not with what you’re doing these days.”

“What am I doin’ these days?”

“Frankie, we ain’t exactly stupid...”

“I’m clockin’ dollars, Eesh. Bankin’ the clink.”

“You’re playing with fire.”

“I’m wearin’ asbestos. This red dress keep me safe.”

I smiled. Ayesha didn’t.

“She told me about it.”

“About what.”

“About the dress. How you come up... Everything.”

“Ayesha,” I said. “Don’t play psychologist on me. What’s past is past and that’s just the way it is.”

The words came out of my grill, sure, but I didn’t really believe them. The past is a resilient motherfucker. Pop right up like a jack-in-the-crack and hit a mafocka in the face with a shit and whipped cream pie. The History Channel feed into CNN and vice motherfuckin’ versa... They both owned by the same corporation.

“Yeah,” she said. “But new stuff comes along, changes everything.”

“New? Like what.”

“Like...” She came close. “Like this,” she said, kissing me.

I kissed back, tasting love and hope instead of...

“I’m falling in love with you, Frankie.”

I looked in her eyes.

“I’d do anything for you, Ayesha.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Then take off that damn red dress, Frankie Lawrence. Take it off and take me somewhere nice.”

We went somewhere nice. We stayed home and went to heaven.

The cell phone wailing broke a peaceful sleep.

“Talk,” I said.

“Frankie,” said Piss. “Your Mama—”

“Black Jimmy and Little Uzi and Cisco watchin’ Mama.”

“Man, they got jacked by Ronny’s boys. Cisco still alive, but barely. Called in on his cell. Your daddy shot up too. Ambulance took him and Cisco.”

“Mama?”

“Snatched. But she alive.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Where she now?”

“She inside Ronny’s.”

I left Rocco the Wop on guard outside Ayesha’s door. His cell phone on speed dial to me.

“Rocco, anything smells the littlest bit off, you call me.” “You got it, Frankie.”

I took the stairs, careful. Nothing. G waiting in the car. “Ronny’s place, G, and make it now.”

Outside Ronny’s. Quiet.

“Where’s Piss?” I asked Smitty. My 9 in hand, ready to rock.

“Piss gone to pick you up,” Smitty said.

“But I had my ride! What the fuck’s goin’ on? Piss knew G was waitin’ on me...”

My cell phone rang.

“Talk,” I said.

“It’s fallin’ apart on you, boy.”

“Who this?”

“Motherfuckin’ destiny callin’, Red Dress.”

“We can deal, Ronny.”

“I’m callin’ the shots, faggot. Your Mama sure do love to get busy. Freaky little thang. An oldie but goldie.”

I heard the cold laughter.

“Leave her go, Ronny. I give you back your turf plus a hundred grand.”

He laughed.

“You comin’ up, Frankie?”

“Lemme talk to her,” I said.

“Frankie?” Mama.

“Mama, you cool?”

“Frankie, Ayesha in trouble—”

Ronny took the phone from Mama.

“Looking forward to meetin’ you, boy. But sorry about your bitch.” The laughter was cold, man. Cold as the winter wind.

And then he clicked off.

We drove fast back to Ayesha’s. Guns in hand. Took the stairs. In the hall, Rocco the Wop dead, knife in the heart, blade broke off inside. The door was open.

I heard a moan, like a wounded animal, a deep moan... Shit, it came from me.

Ayesha...

Ayesha...

Ayesha... Wearin’ that eternal smile, throat laid open ear to ear, hanging by a thread of spine. Lovely honey lying there still and cold in a pool of blood, holding her baby, his poor little head crushed like an egg...

I laid my fur coat over them, closed my eyes.

“Damn, Frankie,” said G-love. “What you cryin’ about? You seen bodies before.”

“You never been in love, G?”

“Love? Damn, bro, that’s sucker action. Bad muhfukkahs don’t fall for bitches. That some dangerous shit.”

G was right. Love was sucker action, dangerous, bad for the health. Oughta put warning labels on that emotion... I’d loved Ayesha — shit, I love her still — but it had made me a sucker, made me soft. And Mama...? Hell, she was my original bitch. Tried to soften my ass up with the damn dress...

“Yo, G,” I said. “I got the hundred-grand question... Where’s Piss?”

Guns in hand. Ronny’s building was quiet. Not a fucking sound. No Piss, no Smitty. No nobody. Ronny had cleared the motherfuckin’ decks.

I carried the suitcase. Packed with a hundred grand...

We took the stairs. No nobody.

Top floor. One door open. Light pouring into the dark hall like spilt milk.

Me and G...

We approached the door. Me first... Threw the suitcase inside, then I sidestepped, grabbed G by the coat, shoved G through the door in front of me...

POP POP POP.

G hit hit hit, doin’ a herky-jerky dance, blood spurting.

“Motherfuckah!” screamed G as I dived past him into the room gun firing. Julio, Piss, Popeye, Smitty — I saw them all in a flash. Tore off a full clip of caps before they could fire back. I rolled behind a couch... Snapped another clip in...

Looked out: Julio dead, shot in the head. Popeye crawling in circles, shot in the chest, dying. Smitty runnin’ out the door. G damn dead... Piss lying there, holding his gut.

“Double-crossin’ set-up niggaz,” I said, comin’ from behind the couch. “Thanks for fuckin’ up my faith in brotherhood, Piss.”

“Fuck off, Frankie,” he said, groaning, holding his gut.

“Why you do it, Piss? Why you take Ayesha and the baby out? They didn’t do shit to you. Why you cross me?”

“Bottom line, Frankie, you fuckin’ crazy. You out there in some twilight zone... Ronny all about business, you all about... I dunno, crazy red dress shit... You out of control. You don’t respect the limits. Shit, the blonde bitch was bad enough, but you don’t waste a cop, nigga... That shit get us all popped... You and that red dress, crazy...”

“Piss,” I said, stroking his face with my gun. “What happened to loyalty?”

“You ate my mafockin’ eye, bitch. I never forget that.”

“You can forget about it now,” I said, leaning down and screwing my piece into his one eye...

Piss laughed.

“Yeah, go out hard. Adios, motherfucker,” I said, and shot the nigga. His body flopped once and his brains leaked onto the carpet slow out the hole in the back of his head. “See you in hell, Piss, but you won’t see me.”

I called out: “Where you at, Ronny?”

“In the bedroom, boy. If you’re through fuckin’ around, come on in.”

“Mama, you okay?” I called.

“Get out of here, Frankie!” she called.

“I ain’t leavin’ without you. Ronny, I got a hundred grand you let her go.”

“Let’s discuss it like businessmen, Frankie. Come on in.”

I picked up the suitcase. Cautious, low...

In the doorway to the bedroom.

“Gun down,” ordered the baldhead nigga sittin on the bed with a gun at Mama’s head. Mama naked, a string coming out of her snatch. Ronny flicking a Bic up near that string.

“This a stick of dynamite up there, Frankie. This’ll stop her period... Period. Instant menopause.”

Nigger Mortis laughing. Waves of coldness blowin’ cross the room.

“You still an ugly muhfukkah,” I said, remembering a long-ago night, a younger Ronny Dewitt smoking rock naked with Mama in bed...

“Frankie, get out!” Mama ordered. “He won’t do nothin’!”

“Your mama always was a dynamite piece of pussy!”

“You a sick muhfukkah, Ronny. Take you money and gimme my mama.”

“Put the money and the gun down and put your hands up.”

“Untie her.”

“You wanna save your mama, nigga, give up the roscoe.”

“Frankie,” said Mama. “Get out of here!”

Ronny slapped Mama with his 9.

“Shut up, bitch. This between me and the pup... I only wish Larry was here — make it complete... Shit, I could a had old Double L dusted any time I wanted those years he was inside... But I wanted the pleasure of doin’ it myself.”

“Ronny,” Mama said. “You leave them both alone, I stay with you.”

Nigger Mortis laughed.

“You? You think I want an old worthless bitch like you? An old dime-a-dozen crack ho bitch dry like Death Valley? I don’t want you, bitch... They a billion bitches out there for me. Younger, better lookin’, better in the sack, give better head.”

“Enough!” said a voice from behind me...

Old Larry Lawrence, holding Piss’s gun. His shoulder heavy with bloody bandages.

“Welcome, Preacher,” laughed Ronny. “The family that hangs together, dies together.”

“Get out of here!” screamed Mama, the tears rolling down her face.

“Hey, Larry,” said Ronny. “Don’t you think little Frankie looks like me?”

“Let her go, man,” said my old man.

Ronny laughed, raised his pisol, aimed at Double L...

The old man aimed at Ronny.

“Mama,” I said. “Which one of these niggaz my daddy?”

Ronny laughed.

And that’s when the old man fired, bullets tearing Ronny’s grill apart, teeth and lips and cheek and tongue ripped away. A moan coming from the basement of his hellish guts.

“One strike and you’re out,” said the old man, heading for Mama. “It’s over, baby.”

But Ronny Dewitt had one move left.

Nigger Mortis flicked that goddamn Bic and lit the fuse. Sizzle...

The old man bolted across the room, threw himself at Mama, reaching for the source of all our troubles...

VII

It’s just one of those things. A fact of life. I’m naked. Naked and alone. I don’t hold it against Mama for locking me up naked and leaving me alone. Ain’t her fault I’m in a cage on death row, headed for the chair... That’s just the way it is... Being locked up naked and alone is just one of those things...

And the winter wind keeps on blowing... I waived all my appeals. I laughed at the priest. I ate my Big Mac. I’m writing these words... There ain’t no windows here in this coffin, but the winter wind keeps on blowing...

When the SWAT team busted into Ronny’s crib and found me there, sitting on the floor, Mama blown into chunks, Larry Lawrence dead, Ronny dead without a face, me eating that thing I was eating, one of those hard sharpshootin’ armoured robots actually puked behind his Darth Vader mask. Had to take the damn thing off he was puking so hard and heavy.

I laughed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Ain’t you never saw a boy eatin’ his mama’s heart?”

I laughed and laughed and chewed it good, just like Mama always told me...

So here I am, naked and alone. Naked and alone. Naked and alone. Just like the old days, locked up naked and alone. And the winter wind keeps on blowing...

“You done good,” the wind just say in my brain. “You exceeded all my expectations. You gave me value for my entertainment dollar. Frankie, baby, you one bad motherfucker...”

“Shut up, motherfuckin’ devil,” I say. “You push my ass, push my ass, push my ass, and now you got me where you want me, huh? Naked and alone...”

“I love you, Frankie,” say the wind. “I love you. You my own very special little nigga.”

“I don’t love you,” I say. “I love Ayesha. That’s the way it is. Just one of those things. I don’t love you.”

“We’ll see about that,” say the wind, blowing cold. “You’ll love me when you down in hell. You’ll love me. You’ll love me and beg me for some cold wind then... They’re coming...”

I can hear them, the jailers. I can hear them, the other death-row niggaz rattling their cups against their bars. Frankie’s gonna die today, they say. The Cannibal’s going down... But shit, Frankie can’t die... Man ain’t never been alive can’t die... You see, Frankie born dead. Born dead into a dead world... But shit, nigga, I had a helluva run for a dead man in a dead world...

I’m puttin’ on the red dress. Red dress keep me safe. Mafockin’ wind can’t touch me. That devil wind can talk all the shit it wants, but the mafocka can’t touch me...

Yeah, I be seein’ you niggaz around the block. I be seein’ you niggaz in the bank. I be seein’ you down in hell... But remember this: When you start feelin’ all safe and shit and you think the time is ripe and you can let your guard down and have a motherfuckin’ laugh at my expense, that’s when I reach out and teach you sorry-ass niggaz a lesson about respect... One laugh per customer, that’s all you get...

Adios, motherfucker...